Category: history (Page 1 of 2)

Captured Current

August 15, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

When you walk into Tumwater Falls Park, the Olympia Tumwater Foundation office is on your left and the WDFW hatchery facility on your right, directly ahead of you is the uppermost falls in the park. Google Maps marks it as a waterfall. Of course it does. Any water falling over a ledge looks like a waterfall, and this one photographs like one too.

It isn’t one. What you’re looking at is a dam.

The dam creates the waterfall, so in a narrow sense you’re not wrong to see falling water and call it that. But the structure underneath the water is not a natural feature. It was built, on purpose, by a company that needed it, and it’s worth remembering that before you remember anything else about this park.

The dam went up starting in July 1900, when the Olympia Light & Power Company began work on the upper falls under engineer A.J. Gillis. The goal, in the language of the time, was to “harness the falls” for a bigger hydroelectric operation, replacing an older industrial setup on the middle falls that had produced something like 400 horsepower. The new dam and its flume cost around $13,000, real money in 1900, and by October the company had built stone walls and a flume ten feet square, a wooden pipe carrying three tons of water per foot across 700 feet to the powerhouse. That first structure raised the water level four to six feet above the natural bedrock, enough to back up a slack water pool for roughly a mile upstream. In 1903 the west wing got reinforced in concrete and masonry, built specifically to survive the river’s flood stages.

When the dam reached its full and current height, it inundated flat land that is now part of the Brewery Complex, but was then called the “Chambers Place.”

Then in 1905 things got contentious. The Olympia Brewing Company and the power company both had founding claims to the Deschutes, and a legal fight broke out over who actually controlled its flow. The brewery needed water too, and the power company was starting to realize that its dry-summer turbine problem wasn’t going away on its own.

That fight is old news, but you can still feel its outcome every time you step into the river in July.

Here’s how far the dam’s reach actually extends today. The pool it creates sits at roughly 85 feet above sea level, and the dam itself only accounts for four to six feet of that artificial rise over the natural bedrock lip.

My back-of-the-napkin math says the reason its effect travels so far upstream has nothing to do with the dam’s height and everything to do with the valley above it. Between the dam and Pioneer Park, the river drops only three to four feet per mile, remarkably flat for a stream that’s about to plunge 82 feet through a gorge. A gentle gradient means a small impoundment backs up a long way, and the standard backwater math for this stretch puts the slack water influence at roughly 0.8 to 1.2 miles upstream of the dam.

Walk that distance and you pass through three distinct stretches. From the dam to about 0.3 miles up, past the old brewery complex and under the E Street and I-5 bridges, the current in summer is close to nonexistent, more pond than river, narrow and deep and still. From 0.3 to 0.8 miles, along the lower edge of the golf course, it’s still noticeably slower than a free-flowing river, the kind of water where you drift instead of ride. Past that, from 0.8 to 1.2 miles, the backwater curve finally tapers off, the water gets shallow again, gravel bars reappear, and you start to feel actual current, riffles instead of glass.

This matters most in summer, which is exactly when people are in the water. The Deschutes’ natural flow drops during peak tubing season, low enough that the dam’s slack water effect dominates the entire lower mile of the run. Instead of a current carrying you toward the takeout, you get what amounts to a long bathtub, and tubers spend the last 4,000 feet or so paddling and pushing themselves along by hand. The dam that most people don’t know is there is the reason the last leg of their float feels like work.

The 1905 fight over water didn’t stay a courtroom skirmish. The power company’s problem was simple: the river ran low every summer, right when demand for electricity was climbing, and its solution was to treat Lake Lawrence, up in the watershed, as a kind of savings account. The plan called for a canal a mile and a quarter long, dug to divert winter floodwater into the lake, dammed at its outlet to hold that water back, then metered out over the summer to keep the Tumwater powerhouse running. It required flooding land the company didn’t own and diverting water the brewery believed it had rights to, so the fight dragged through the courts for years, what one account called a monkey wrench in the gears of the whole project. To get the land, the power company pursued eminent domain, arguing in court that because it supplied both electricity and streetcar service to the growing city of Olympia, it had the legal standing to condemn private and public land in the public interest. The argument worked. Lake Lawrence fell under company control, a 25-foot concrete dam rose at its outlet, and the diversion canal got finished. The following summer, with its water supply secured, the company rebuilt the Tumwater Falls dam itself, adding four feet of height and flooding another 30 acres of condemned land along the way. By 1914 the company had what it wanted: a stable, year-round power supply for a city growing at twice its historical rate.

It didn’t get to enjoy that win for long. In 1919, Puget Sound Power & Light bought Olympia Light & Power outright, and as regional transmission grids spread across the Pacific Northwest, a small local operation like the one at Tumwater Falls stopped making much sense. Generation was phased out gradually over the following years. The physical evidence held on longer than the business did. It wasn’t until 1962 that crews finally dismantled the stone powerhouse and the penstock below the falls, clearing the lower river corridor for what came next: the Olympia Tumwater Foundation’s Brewery Park at Tumwater Falls, opened in 1962 on the site of the old plant.

The power company’s old foe for control of the river, the Olympia Brewing Company, ended up owning the old dam site a few decades after the Puget Power sale.

Notice what got removed in that demolition and what didn’t. The powerhouse and the penstock, the parts of the complex that unmistakably read as industrial machinery, came down. The dam, the part that produces a waterfall people like to photograph, stayed exactly where it was. Whether or not that was the intent, the 1962 clearing erased the site’s industrial past and preserved its scenic present in one move.

And here’s a theory worth taking seriously: that clearing is probably what started the Deschutes’ recreational floating culture in the first place. The newspaper record doesn’t show organized river floating before the park existed. It shows up within less than a decade of Brewery Park opening, when a group called the Rough Riders started promoting floats down the Deschutes in the early 1970s. That timing reads like cause and effect more than coincidence. People don’t float for fun through a demolished industrial corridor with no public access and no destination. They float through a park with parking, a takeout, and a name.

The Rough Riders called floating “quite relaxing,” while warning newcomers about log jams and waterfalls, a warning that carried real weight given the still-recent memory of five people drowning after being swept over an unmarked falls sometime in the 1960s. They noted that a float from the East Olympia railroad bridge down to the brewery could take about eight hours during high spring flows. In June 1972, police searched for a group of missing juveniles and found them safe, floating on a raft near the brewery. By 1978 the activity had become fully organized, with the Deschutes River Float & Picnic drawing crowds for a run from the Henderson Boulevard bridge down to Tumwater Falls Park. The early 1980s brought a surge in inner tubing specifically, and with it came friction. A 1983 article described complaints from riverfront residents about trespassing and safety, and tubers who ran into trouble often ended up “bedraggled” on someone’s back lawn, looking for help. Thurston County considered putting up warning signs at the popular entry points.

In 1988, the city of Tumwater bought a stretch of pasture along Henderson Boulevard and built Pioneer Park. On paper it’s a sports and nature park, all ballfields and trails. In practice it became the unofficial starting line for the float, several miles downstream of the old East Olympia entry point, with enough parking to make the whole thing genuinely accessible for the first time. What it didn’t do was settle the question the dam raises a mile downstream. Pioneer Park sits at the edge of the slack water zone, near it or inside it depending on the flow that year and depending on exactly where within the park you put in. The 1988 purchase moved the uncertainty upstream rather than resolving it, handing the question to individual people choosing a launch spot, most of whom have no idea the choice even matters.

The dam itself is now well past a century old, built in phases between 1900 and 1913, a concrete gravity structure that at this age almost certainly carries no steel reinforcement inside it. Washington State classifies it as a Category 3, low hazard dam, meaning that if it failed, nobody’s life would be at risk and the resulting damage would be minor. That classification is its own quiet form of forgetting, a bureaucratic note that says this structure doesn’t need anyone’s attention. Structurally, though, it’s in better shape than its age suggests. Because it’s keyed directly into bedrock, it’s largely immune to the foundation scour that kills most aging dams during overtopping. Predating rebar reinforcement by decades, it’s also immune to the internal rusting and spalling that eventually destroys modern concrete. And our mild, wet climate spares it the freeze-thaw cycling that cracks concrete apart in harsher places.

It isn’t invulnerable. Vegetation works its way into old construction joints and slowly wedges them wider. Water percolating through the structure leaches calcium hydroxide out of the cement over time, weakening it. A century of silt has built up behind the dam, adding a steady load against the upstream face. None of that adds up to sudden failure. Left alone, this dam is likely good for another 100 to 200 years, wearing away slowly at its joints and spillways rather than going all at once.

I emailed the Olympia Tumwater Foundation to ask about the dam’s structural condition. That’s the organization that turned the demolished powerhouse site into a park in the first place, the one that, whether they meant to or not, decided sixty years ago which parts of this history would stay visible and which would get hauled away. They’re looking into what they might have and get back to me later. I’ll update this post if they have anything.

So the next time you’re standing in Falls Park facing that uppermost falls, know what you’re actually looking at.

It’s a dam built in 1900 to solve a hydroelectric company’s dry summer problem, expanded in 1913 after a legal war over a lake most people have never heard of, stripped of its machinery in 1962, and left standing, quietly, as the scenic backdrop for a park built on top of its own demolition.

The float culture that treats this river as a summer playground likely exists because that park got built, not despite the dam’s industrial history but because a foundation cleared away the parts of that history that looked too much like a factory. And the ambiguity never really left. Somebody launching a tube from Pioneer Park on an ordinary August afternoon has no way of knowing, without doing the math we just did, whether they’re floating on a free river or drifting through a captured pool behind a hundred-and-twenty-year-old dam. Most of them will never think to ask. The current under them, either way, carries the settled residue of a legal fight, a corporate merger, a demolition crew, and a social structure built on a slack pool and two parks.

Tono, actually

December 6, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 8 Comments

One of the historic rabbit holes I’m prone to falling down is the lost cities in Washington State. I don’t mean ghost towns, because some of them, like Tono in southern Thurston County, don’t exist at all anymore.

Over the years, I’ve tried to pinpoint exactly where Tono was located. Recently, I was looking at the parcel layer (the map showing property boundaries) in southern Thurston County (as I’m sure we all do from time to time), just below Bucoda. And, I noticed a long, skinny parcel that, to me, indicated a road or a railroad was once there.

So, I went back and found a fairly decent map of Tono that included a train line. The train line’s contour matched the parcel’s shape, and it lined up nearly perfectly.

This is the best I’ve been able to produce of how Tono was laid out.

This is significant because the landscape of Tono disappeared when mining techniques changed after the town itself was abandoned.

In 1969 coal mining in the fields around the Tono site was revived when the Pacific Power and Light company bought the land and built a new steam plant to produce power. It was during this era that the Tono site saw its largest change. The ground on which the town had sat was scraped up in order to get to the coal beneath it. The coal mining terraforming was so severe that the town site is currently dominated by two massive ponds.

For decades, Tono had been a fairly significant town in Thurston County, on par with Yelm, Tenino, and Tumwater. But because it was a company town, when the resource ran out, the town itself ran out of reasons to exist.

What I keep coming back to is how completely Tono was erased. There was no fight over historic districts, no argument about “character,” no committee meeting where someone insisted their grandfather once lived in a particular house and demanded the coal company spare the building. The ground was literally peeled back; the past scraped away to get at what the land still had left to give. What’s left now are ponds big enough to swallow the entire town grid.

And yet, somehow, Tono survives.

Tono survives in census tables, photos, mining reports, and the stubborn curiosity of anyone who has ever tried, like I have, to find the ghost of a town that isn’t even a ghost.

It’s funny: we spend so much energy today trying to keep the past standing upright. We landmark houses whose only real significance is their ability to slow down a duplex development. We wrap ourselves around “character” as if it were a fragile antique rather than something living communities constantly renegotiate.

Tono is a lesson in impermanence so complete I can’t help but be amazed. An entire town, just gone.

Two ponds where families once lived. You couldn’t “preserve” Tono if you tried; the coal company settled the question half a century ago. And yet, that doesn’t make it any less historical. If anything, it makes it more so. Tono forces you to engage with history as a process, not a museum exhibit. You can’t stand in the middle of a preserved streetscape and pretend the past is still intact, because the flow from the past to today is change. Change even includes the scraping of an entire landscape until there is nothing left.

You have to reconstruct it. You have to work for it. And there’s something freeing in that.

The lesson of Tono, the one that historians, preservationists, and anyone who loves their community ought to sit with, is that losing the physical stuff isn’t the same as losing the history. The built environment is not the memory. The map I matched by lining up an old railroad grade with a weirdly long modern parcel tells me more about Tono’s rise and fall than any building would. The ponds tell a truth the hardware store never could: the town’s existence was always dependent on what lay beneath it.

We forget that history is supposed to breathe. Towns grow, plateau, disappear, reappear in footnotes, and get rediscovered in GIS layers. Some places make it. Some fade. And sometimes the fading is the story.

Tono reminds me that you can lose every house, every street, every trace of a community’s physical presence, and still have history worth knowing. You don’t need to encase it in glass to make it matter. You don’t need to keep a structure standing to let the story breathe.

Exile Ourselves

September 3, 2024 / Emmett O'Connell / 2 Comments

Earlier this year, a county commissioner in Mason County suggested a plan to banish certain residents from the county. Under the proposal, individuals convicted of specific misdemeanor offenses would be required to leave the county for up to a year if they failed to pay fines, complete community service, or seek treatment at their own expense.

In Seattle, a much more serious proposal would restrict people from entering a stretch of a busy road through the northern end of the city. While scaled down in recent proposals, the system would ban people who are part of the sex trade from entering the area.

The idea that we can just send the homeless “somewhere” is something you’ve heard before if you live around here. Pick your favorite not liked place or institution, and someone has argued that we should send the homeless there. Hippy college in that hippy government town? Send the homeless to Evergreen State College. Old island prison that the state closed down because old island prisons are expensive to run? Send those homeless to McNeil Island.

This idea of homeless exile ignores that the homeless came from somewhere already. And, knowing what we know about how homelessness has become endemic in our region, the somewhere is right here. We know homelessness is a housing issue. We made housing in short supply, and since there aren’t enough housing or even shelter beds for everyone, someone in our community is literally left on the street.

And more broadly, we’ve been dealing with this idea for as long as we’ve founded our first colonies on the doorsteps of the indigenous people. The idea that we can keep people from coming to a place, that the place will be better if we just keep some people out, is something that pervades American history in the Pacific Northwest.

Exile is different from prison because in the examples of exile I pointed to above, those exiled are still otherwise citizens or residents. We haven’t taken away their civil rights, taken away their right to vote while in prison. They aren’t wards of the state in the way that would mean where they sleep, when they eat or what they wear is controlled by the Department of Corrections. We expect them to maintain their own home, food supply and clothing. But also, there are places they cannot go that otherwise, but the rest of us can.

Washington State is like a lot of places in that we’ve used laws to exclude people of certain races. For example, we didn’t invent racially restrictive covenants in Washington State, but we seem to be stuck in a constant cycle of surprise and denial that they ever existed or that they still have an impact. We have to keep front and center that the era in which they were enforced, either legally or tacitly, was also the era when your ability to own a home became equal to your ability to maintain wealth and transfer it to your children.

Washington State also didn’t invent using single family zoning after racial housing discrimination became illegal in the 1960s to prevent neighborhoods from integrating. But many cities in Washington State downzoned in order to preserve “neighborhood character” and ensure the wrong kind of people, people that could only afford to live in houses smaller than detached, single family homes, would ever move in.

Where our exile comes from

The American colonialists’ first taste of exclusion in the Pacific Northwest came in the 1840s, as soon as the first permanent white, American settlement touched down west of the Cascades.

Unsurprisingly, early settlers to the Oregon Territory (then included what is now Washington State) brought with them the politics of slavery.

Overland settlers to Oregon were most likely to be non-slave holding farmers from Appalachian border areas around Kentucky, Ohio and Missouri. These settlers were not pro-slavery. They were also not New England human rights activists or abolitionists. They didn’t like slavery because they saw it as unfair competition in the form of cheap labor.

Appalachians came to the Willamette Valley to establish a territory of “free soil, free labor,” where smaller farmers would pay for their labor. The black exclusion laws passed in the Oregon Territory before the Civil War were technically also “anti-slavery” laws, as the Free Soil activists that settled the region would have seen them.

They were fine with slavery existing somewhere, just as we’re totally okay with criminals, poor people, people of color and homelessness existing. They didn’t want to solve slavery, just in the same way we’re agnostic to homelessness and crime. As long as it exists outside my own neighborhood, on the Evergreen State College campus, not in Mason County or not along one particular street in Seattle, we’re not concerned.

An Oregon territorial judge, in a case regarding a fugitive slave, put to words what would seem to become the regional perception of slavery. It was incompatible with what he described as the nature of the Oregon community. “Establish slavery here, and (y)ou will turn aside that tide of free white labor which has poured itself like a fertilizing flood across the great States of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.”

When Oregon was putting together its constitution, one of the points that all could agree were “…in absolute agreement about (was) the need to preserve homogeneous populations, and that was race.”

So, when Black people (or at least, non-white people) came across the mountains, they were not welcome in Oregon and told to leave. George Washington Bush was raised a Quaker in Pennsylvania, the son of an African from Indian and an Irish-American. He had already reached the Pacific Coast once in his young adulthood as a fur trapper. He set out again in his 40s from Missouri, putting a successful life as a cattle rancher behind him. George Washington Bush, as far as we know, never lived in the antebellum South. He was never subject to chattel slavery. He lived in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Illinois and traveled the Rocky Mountain West more than once. But when he showed up in the Willamette Valley, surrounded by four other white Appalachian families, he was asked to leave for fear he would bring slavery and threaten the economic order of the community.

So, while north of the Columbia was still technically part of the Oregon Territory, Bush took his party to the Puget Sound, exiling himself to a place where the racial exclusion laws could not touch.

The racial exclusion laws did not address the issues, economic or otherwise, around slavery. They did just enough to create the illusion of safety, but probably did more harm than good for a growing colonial community on the edge of the continent. There aren’t many ways to see exiling a rich rancher from the Willamette was economically beneficial.

But we see the Pacific Northwest repeat the mistake of the Oregon black codes throughout our history.

Right after the Civil War, we taxed Asian migrant workers a “police tax” to allow them to work.

We used mob violence to drive Asian families out. On November 3, 1885, a mob of white residents forcibly expelled the Chinese population from Tacoma. This event is often referred to as the “Tacoma Method” because it was seen as a methodical and organized expulsion.

The anti-Chinese riots in Puget Sound during the 1880s were part of a broader wave of anti-Chinese sentiment and violence across the United States, particularly in the Western states. These events were driven by economic competition, racism, and xenophobia, as Chinese immigrants were often blamed for taking jobs and driving down wages.

This violence was tied directly to labor organizations such as the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which were influential in the Progressive movement, often excluded Asian and Black workers. In the Pacific Northwest, labor leaders blamed immigrants for driving down wages and advocated for restrictions on Asian immigration. The Asiatic Exclusion League, founded in 1905, was a powerful force in Washington and Oregon, campaigning for further immigration restrictions.

The keystone to the wave of anti-immigrant exclusion actions in the Pacific Northwest was the Johnson-Reed Act, which banned immigration from Asia into the United States in 1924. The “Johnson” in Johnson-Reed was Albert Johnson, an Aberdeen Congressman and a prominent nativist and eugenicist. His work in Congress reflected the racial and anti-immigrant sentiments prevalent in the Pacific Northwest.

This wasn’t a sideshow in our region’s politics, this was the show.

Excluding people economically, geographically and socially within a place has hurts everyone. It keeps us from solving the problem, from addressing what is really going on. For farmers in the Willamette Valley or labor unionists in Tacoma, the issue wasn’t members of a certain race working, it was a broader system that allowed anyone at all to be exploited.

If slavery exists, we all suffer. If we exclude anyone, we all suffer.

If someone is spending the money to bring over Chinese citizens to work, it is the system that allows Chinese citizens to be underpaid is the problem.

If you hear a policy that seeks to address a social ill by keeping someone out of a particular part of town, be sure that the issue really at stake isn’t being addressed.

How we all suffer exile

Lisa Daugaard is a criminal justice reformer and co-created the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program, which diverts low-level offenders into community services instead of jail.

Daugaard argues that reintroducing banishment measures in Seattle is ineffective and counterproductive. Drawing on research, she explains that exclusion fails because people return to the areas due to personal ties or access to services, leading to repeated jail stays and further destabilization. Instead of addressing underlying issues like homelessness and addiction, banishment shifts the problem to other neighborhoods without offering real solutions.

LEAD addresses the root causes by diverting individuals from the criminal justice system and connecting them to essential support services. Rather than arresting people for minor offenses, LEAD provides access to substance abuse treatment, mental health care, housing, and job training. This approach targets underlying problems and aims to reduce recidivism by offering holistic, coordinated support, ultimately helping individuals stabilize their lives and reintegrate into society more effectively.

Joshua Leavitt argued 20 years before the Civil War that slavery was an economic drain on the entire country. It may have been good for southern landowners, but for banks and northern workers and anyone else, it was a major economic drain. Today, new research Richard Hornbeck and Trevon D. Logan point out the inefficiencies of slavery were far greater than previously understood. While abolitionists made economic arguments, their research shows how emancipation generated economic gains worth between 4 and 35 percent of the American economy. This growth was at least as important as railroads.

Slavery cost the economy, cost us all. Slavery took $40 out of the economy for each slave, about four percent of the gross national product in 1860.

When some of are excluded (from a place, from the economy) it costs everyone.

The most effective way to exclude people is through zoning. One of the best examples of how we’ve exiled people in our communities has been the expansion of single family zoning since the Fair Housing Act was passed in the 1960s. Prior to the late 1970s, Olympia had a balanced approach to housing, with a significant portion of new developments consisting of multi-family units such as duplexes and quadplexes.

Driven by about barely coded concerns about “ghettos” and racial segregation, the Olympia City Council downzoned neighborhoods, drastically reducing the construction of multi-family housing. This shift led to a preference for single-family homes, resulting in car-dependent, less walkable neighborhoods. The transition to single-family zoning has contributed to increased urban sprawl, diminished walkability, and greater economic and racial segregation. The areas with more single-family homes tend to be whiter and more affluent.

While the downzones may not have been intentionally racist, they are classically institutional racism in that they have perpetuated segregation and inequity in housing. The exclusionary nature of single-family zoning has had long-lasting negative effects on community diversity and equity.

What we also know is that keeping Olympia economically (and racially) segregated ended up punishing kids at the bottom end of our community. Research by economists Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence Katz shows children from low-income families who move to better neighborhoods show significant improvements in long-term outcomes. These include lower teenage birth rates, higher college attendance, and increased earnings as adults. Their study showed that children who moved to lower-poverty neighborhoods earned 31% more and had better life outcomes compared to those who stayed in higher-poverty areas.

A broader study of 5 million families also confirmed these findings, showing that children in better neighborhoods had higher college attendance rates, lower teenage pregnancy rates, and greater incomes. The benefits increased with longer residence in improved areas. Zoning to allow a broader use across the city will lead to less expensive housing among more expensive housing, meaning better outcomes for kids from less wealthy families. All the while, kids from wealthy families are not harmed.

Where we go after exile

I think it is important that I made this entire argument without citing the exclusion built into our colonial Pacific Northwest DNA. The treatment of treaty tribes in Western Washington (that I am most familiar with) and the Pacific Northwest broadly, is the first and largest “you don’t belong here” we ever committed. Now it is baked into a legal treaty relationship that, while we’ve gotten better at, is something we still stumble through more than we should.

We are going to continue proposing exile as a solution. This persistent practice underscores a troubling historic trend of shifting societal issues rather than addressing our root causes.

Historical patterns of exclusion, from the racial black codes of the Oregon Territory to modern-day zoning policies, are a longstanding attempt in the Pacific Northwest to manage societal problems by isolating certain people rather than integrating and addressing their needs.

Happy Presidents Day. By the way, Jospeph Lane did not go quietly into that good night

February 16, 2015 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Joseph Lane is one of the most regrettable characters of Cascadian history. During the debates on how slavery should be treated in Oregon during that state’s founding days, Lane was on the hard pro-slavery side. There were a few hard anti-slavery sorts to balance him out. But, most of the state had a pox on both their houses sort of sentiment. They neither liked slaves nor the sort of economics that slavery represented.

But, there sat Lane, one of the state’s original U.S. Senators. During the presidential election leading up to the Civil War, Lane was the vice presidential candidate for the Democratic Party ticket that represented the South. His ticket of course lost, which according to a 30,000 foot reading of history, shot Lane quickly out of politics.

Even if that didn’t, his debate with Andrew Johnson on the Senate floor in 1861 certainly should have.

Here:

On that day, Jo. Lane, made a traitorous speech in favor of secession, in which he was personally abusive of Senator Johnson of Tennessee. Mr. Johnson replied. The galleries were crowded to excess. Mr. Johnson opened up by a dissertation on personalities—withering and caustic to his assailant. Johnson turned and looking him in the eye, said, “no gentleman would insult me, and no other person can, and without making any boast of personal courage, I say here that this eye never looked upon the man that this heart feared.” The galleries burst into applause, which was promptly suppressed with an intimation from the Chairman, Mr. Polk, that a repetition would be followed by an order to clear the gentlemen’s gallery.

But, even if Lane did not join the rebel cause, didn’t migrate to the south, he kept the fight going on his return to Oregon.

He campaigned for Democratic candidates, he campaigned for his son who was running for Congress. Lane was criticized loudly by Republican newspapers, but he stood firm publicly to his convictions:

Once again in 1866 the aging politician campaigned for the Democratic ticket. Personal abuse from the press and threat of punishment had not dampened his adore for the southern cause, which he championed when he could. During the campaign he declared that if Jefferson Davis were elected to Congress by the people of Mississippi, that body would have no choice but to admit him.

Being ignored and made fun of by the political establishment, carving out a hole for yourself as a loud political crank, is not the same as retiring quietly from public life.

At one point, he even talked about how Lincoln had offered him a generalship in the Union Army. And, that if he’d taken that position (instead of coming back to Oregon), he would have beaten General Grant to the top of Army of the Potomac, and then there would’ve been no President Grant.

I’m most intrigued by Lane’s run for State Senate in 1880. Only one year before his death, an apparently with the furor of secession finally dying down, Lane ran one last time for office. I found some old newspaper stories about his continued involvement in Democratic politics. How he was elected chair of the party convention that year. But, no story of a race or election involving him. I wonder if its really true, and if so, why he ran.

John Rambo, John Tornow and Appalachians in Cascadia

December 15, 2014 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

The very first Rambo movie (First Blood) is set in Washington State, in a fake town called Hope. Filmed in the actual Hope, British Columbia, the setting is descended from a fictional town in Kentucky in the original First Blood book, which in turn is based on a Pennsylvania town.

Both the fictional Kentucky town and actual Pennsylvania town are deep in Appalachia. Which, given the deep Appalachian roots in rural western Washington, Hope fits.

It also fits in the parallel I draw between the Rambo character and John Tornow. There is so much written about Tornow (some very recently), I’ve always wondered what the fascination was. Tornow, at least on the surface, doesn’t reveal any greater truth. Unbalanced man either murders or is accused of murder. People chase him down, a few deaths later, he gets killed.

But, if you look at Tornow through the lens of Rambo, you see something deeper. It lets you look back on the society that is turning its violence onto these men. For Rambo, he’s a recently returned Vietnam veteran targeted as a vagrant by an evil small town cop.

I’ve heard enough from small town cops to know that giving a vagrant a ride to the county line or a bus ticket out of town is at least within the realm of reality. And, Tornow shows us that a massive manhunt against Rambo was also in the realm of reality.

For the Appalachians in Grays Harbor in the early 1900s, for the Appalachians at every step in First Blood, the wild men are too far gone from society to live. They murdered, they are outside the bounds of even the libertarian Appalachian societal rules. Every man has liberty, but there is only so much liberty.

Both Tornow and Rambo are also both experts. Rambo is a highly trained commando, the cops that come after him are hopeless against his killing skills. He seeks to come back into society, but he falls back onto his training and the war.

Tornow was an actual outdoorsman, more at home (according to biographers) than in a town or among society. He was able to live off the land while being hunted for over a year and a half, feeding himself with what he had around him in the deep woods.

And, that is what I think is the larger truth about Tornow. If the Scots-Irish, the genetic base of the Appalachian DNA had finally run out of new territory to conquer in Cascadia (also explored in Sometimes a Great Notion), then they were almost ready to run down the last Wilderness. Tornow was a representative of that wilderness.

Sure, Appalachians are much more libertarian, every-man-for-himself than other sorts of North American society. Rules don’t necessarily work for them, but they are also the shock troops of a larger society against the wilderness, or agains the native inhabitants.

So, in dramatic stories about Appalachian outcasts, John Tornow and John Rambo must be hunted down.

This is not a waterfall, but a dam. All about Thurston County Dams

May 15, 2013 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

By Waponigirl on Flickr.

Now, I’m sure you see it clearly now. But, what a lot of people call the upper waterfalls on the Deschutes in Tumwater is actually a derelict dam. It is also (according to my list) the oldest dam in Thurston County by nearly 40 years.

There are a surprising number of dams in Thurston County (35 total), now that I think of it. All but one were built in the last 100 years. The busiest decade for dam building was the 1960s (with eight built). I’m also surprised by the number built in the 1980s and 90s (five each).

The stormwater pond dam over at SPSCC has a surprisingly high risk rate, “From 7 to 30 lives at risk.”

Most of the dams — 15 out of 35 — are both earth fill and were built to create recreational reservoirs. Three of these actually have “ski” in their names.

There are also dams in surprising places, Grass Lake for example. This is a small lake surrounded by a City of Olympia park. The dam was built in 1966 for the original purpose (I assume) of irrigation.

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Grass Lake dam illustrates what I take away from the list of Thurston County Dams. Most of us read the word dam and see the Elwha dams, the Grand Coulee or even our own La Grande Dam. Something big, blocking a big river. But, most of these dams are smallish, practically fading into the landscape. You don’t even know a dam is there.

What I left unsaid about baseball, ambition and community

April 17, 2013 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

I recently submitted a rough outline of Olympia’s minor league baseball history to the local historical society newsletter. It was based on a longer piece that I really hadn’t put finishing touches on, so I took out some thoughts that strayed off the historically cite-able path. They were mostly thoughts on the communities that made up the well defunct Southwest Washington League.

Here’s the piece in the Olympia Historical Society Newsletter: Olympia in Minor League Baseball.

Here are my extended editorial thoughts, in rough form:

(League organizer John P.) Fink first reached out to organizers of local teams in the timber towns early in 1903, asking them if their communities had it in them to step up to professional baseball. First on his list were Olympia, Chehalis, Centralia, Montesano, Aberdeen and Hoquiam.

These six cities were at the time very similar. Today, they stand apart culturally and demographically, Olympia in particular. In more than a century, Olympia has gone from a timber town in the same classification as Aberdeen and Chehalis (with a state capitol) to a city on the southern edge of the Puget Sound metroplex. Olympia grew from just under 4,000 to more than 10 times that size. Today, you can put Olympia together with neighboring Lacey and Tumwater and get more than 100,000 people living in and around Olympia. This is more people in either of the individual county’s that also made up the Southwest Washington League in 1903.

The 1903 cities of the old league almost seems like ghosts now. Olympia has grown outside its 1903 version, practically leaving nothing behind of its former self. The other cities have grown, seeing high times after World War II. Through the 1930s and World War II Olympia lagged behind cities like Aberdeen and Hoquiam. It wasn’t until 1960 that Olympia was the largest in population. It was the 1980s that Olympia started putting real distance between itself and its former league-mates.

While state government grew and Olympia took advantage of its connection to the urban centers of Washington, the other cities in the old Southwest League suffered from the decline of the timber and other resource industries.

Olympia became even more distant as it got more liberal relative to its neighbors. Being the home of state government and the politically and culturally liberal Evergreen State College, the old Southwest League towns turn their ire at Olympia. The infamous “Uncle Sam” highway billboard in Chehalis has included many anti-Olympia messages over the years, including “Evergreen State College – Home of Environmental Terrorists and Homos?”

But, as Fink sent out his inquiries in early 1903, these really were cities of the same league.

How much contemporary knowledge of the Mashel Massacre was there?

February 18, 2013 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

I’ve reread Stephen B. Emerson’s essay at Historylink.org about the Mashel Massacre about five times. Each time I’m fascinated by his treatment of otherwise respected historic figures, most prominently Ezra Meeker.

Meeker’s description of the Mashel Massacre, in which up to 30 Nisqually tribal members were slaughtered by Washington territorial volunteers, is one of the popularly cited resources of the event. But, Emerson questions the honest of Meeker and another historian in the late 19th century James Wickersham. He calls them “men of questionable integrity.”

Emerson goes into detail taking apart Wickersham’s admittedly shaky proof and Meeker’s less questionable motives. He also does a pretty good job presenting the tribal oral histories about the massacre.

Where Emerson falls short is other references to the massacre in contemporary media. While he cites this April 11, 1856 story on volunteer maneuvers in the upper Nisqually around the Mashel, he misses this one from April 25.

That sounds like a very polite, not talking about the bodies reference to what we call the Mashel Massacre today. Without warning a group of volunteers storm an Indian camp in the upper Nisqually filled with “a large number” of women and children.

Then, we find a very reference to 30 dead Indians on March 10, 1856 three years later in a much larger story in the Puget Sound Herald about a rash of white on Indian revenge killings.

Granted, the article doesn’t say “Maxon’s troops on the Mashel in March 10, 1856,” but the passing reference makes you assume that it was pretty well known what happened in the upper Nisqually.

The Los Angeles Sonics and the lies of legacy

February 9, 2013 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

When the Supersonics first came to Seattle in the late 1960s expansion of high level basketball, they were the first major professional team in Seattle. Sure, I suppose the Seattle Metropolitans count, as they won the Stanley Cup in 1917. But, for the growth of modern Seattle, the Sonics are the first team that really matters.

Soon after the the Sonics came the Pilots (which quickly moved to Milwaukee) and then ten years later the Mariners and Seahawks. But, by the time professional baseball and football were getting their feet set in Seattle, the Sonics had already built a championship team by 1979.

As seems to be tradition in Seattle sports, a rich Californian was behind it all. Sam Schulman bought into the NBA in the late 60s and ended up with the Seattle franchise. Schulman made most of his money making movies (though he himself was rarely listed in credits). He was also part of a group that bought the San Diego Chargers in 1966. When you look for him now, he’s most well known for his early ownership and stewardship of the Sonics and his impact on professional basketball.

And, it was Schulman, not Clay Bennett, that first threatened the move the Sonics out of Seattle.

While Schulman was eager to buy into the NBA, he seemingly had no particular love for the institution. His early years as a professional basketball executive were spent trying to reform the game. His struggle to bring together the NBA and the rival American Basketball Association and change how player contracts were handled.

Schulman’s primary battle with the NBA (over player contracts) culminated in the 1971 Supreme Court decision in Haywood vs. National Basketball Association, which ended up allowing teams to sign players with less than two years of college experience. Schulman had signed Spencer Haywood, who had left college after less than two years. The NBA sanctioned the Sonics, and Schulman took it to court.

Schulman’s primary antagonist throughout the Haywood saga and the effort to bring ABA teams into the NBA fold was Jack Kent Cooke, who owned the Los Angeles Lakers. it was in this context in the early 70s that Schulman threatened to move the Sonics.

Steve Pluto quoted Dick Tinkham’s telling of the threat in his history of the ABA:

There were a lot of crazy things going on. (Seattle owners) Sam Schulman and I were on a merger committee and Sam told me that if the NBA teams wouldn’t support our merger agreement, he was going to sign Haywood, move his franchise to Los Angeles and join the ABA! He told Jack Kent Cooke that his was what he planned to do. He said he would move right into Cooke’s backyard if Cooke didn’t back him. But, like everything else that was talked about and threatened, nothing came of it.

This threat was made in private as it was not reported in the Seattle media, as far as I can tell. But, if Tinkham’s retelling is correct, it says a lot about Schulman, who has been remembered as one of Seattle’s most important and loyal sports executives. We can’t doubt his California roots, he had already had interest in the Chargers before he came up to Seattle.

The story also fits the geography of sports at the times. The ABA’s franchise in Southern California, the Los Angeles Stars, had moved to Utah in 1970. Their new San Diego team wasn’t established until 1972. The NBA’s San Diego Rockets has also moved to Houston in 1971. And the Buffalo Braves wouldn’t move to San Diego as the Clippers until 1978 and Los Angeles until 1984.

If Haywood had lost in the Supreme Court and Cooke had worked successfully to keep the ABA at arm’s length, Schulman moving the Sonics to Los Angeles seems much more likely. But, history turned out differently. Haywood won his case and most of the ABA came into the NBA in 1976.

And, three years later, the Sonics beat the Washington Bullets in five games and the commuting owner of the Sonics enshrined into Seattle sports history.

Wrote Steve Kelly of the Seattle Times:

For the 16 years he owned the Sonics, Schulman turned sports ownership into a thrilling high-wire act.

He took chances. He made headlines. When he failed, it was colossal. But when he succeeded, it stirred this city like nothing Seattle sports has seen.

Schulman was a showman. He came to Seattle with all the elan and marketing chutzpah of a Hollywood pitchman. He knew how to win games, win hearts and fill seats.

Sam Schulman was also the first person to threaten to take the Sonics away, if only in private. If he’d been driven to it, the Sonics would’ve been the second professional team to leave in a few years. After only one season on Major League Baseball, the Seattle Pilots left to become the Brewers. Losing the Sonics would have been a major sporting crisis in Seattle.

With the Sonics seemingly secure in Seattle, civic leaders battled with professional baseball to eventually bring the Mariners. They also brought together the community to fund a multi purpose stadium for football and baseball before a major league franchise was secured in either sport.

It certainly wasn’t easy going for sports boosters during the Boeing Bust era:

By 1971, many people had had enough. Although community activists like Frank Ruano continued to lob complaints at the County Council, bids for the new stadium on the King Street site went out. Despite disapproval and concerns from International District groups, the commissioners stuck to the findings of an environmental impact study which claimed minimal damage to the Asian enclave lying to the east of the proposed site.

During the Kingdome’s official groundbreaking ceremonies on November 2, 1972, some 25 young Asian protesters hurled mudballs at the dignitaries in attendance. Several hundred spectators watched as County Executive Spellman’s speech drew chants — “Stop the Stadium!” — from agitators. Dissenters booed other speakers, including a Seattle Kings representative seeking to attract a professional football franchise. Spellman hastily planted the gold home plate on the field, but the ceremony was a bust.

In this climate, jobs walking out of Seattle as Boeing shrank for seemingly the first time ever, and vocal opposition to a new stadium, the Sonics skipping town would’ve been a death blow. It isn’t likely we would have ever ended up with the King Dome, the Mariners, Seahawks or the modern Sounders.

Where Sacramento sits now — about to lose their only major league sports franchise in their history — is almost a perfect bookend to the history of Seattle sports and the city’s self image. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Seattle was ten years off the World’s Fair when city leaders made a strong argument to the world that Seattle mattered. Sports teams are a major part of that argument. Simply put, towns with teams matter.

In the 40 years since Schulman made the threat in private to move the sonics and mudballs were launched at people for suggesting even more major league sports, Seattle is well established. Sacramento is hanging on by a thread. If we end up getting the Sacramento Kings and turning them back into the Sonics, we’ll put Sacremento back in the place Seattle was in 1966.

The hopes for Sacramento in 2014 would be a lot less bright than for Seattle in 1966. The sports scene is a lot less fluid now. Rival national leagues just aren’t founded anymore and the current leagues don’t expand all that often. And, its not often you can beat a city like Seattle in a struggle for a team.

Clay Bennett and the OKC Thunder notwithstanding, Seattle has come a long way since 1966. The Sonics leaving hurts so much maybe because it has been one of the city’s’ few civic failures in recent years. The Pilots leaving certainly hurt the city’s pride, but it wasn’t treated like the mortal sin like the creation of the Thunder.

The fact is, Seattle has become a city secure with major league sports. If Seattle’s civic leaders want a NBA team enough, they’ll get it. Seattle has become that kind of city. If not Sacramento, then maybe New Orleans. Some other lesser city will give up its franchise to us eventually. And, in doing so, we’ll drop that other city back into the sports franchise oblivion Seattle last saw almost 50 years ago.

McCleary, you already had your canal

April 25, 2012 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Its not my fault they were around 14,000 years ago.

This is very close detail of a map of the spillways of the Puget Lobe from this amazing document:

Sarah from McCleary Chronicles brings us the backup pipe dream of a shipping canal that would’ve passed through McCleary. The problem with the Puget Sound to Grays Harbor/Columbia River canals was always a lack of water and a lack of a good reason. Railroads and then highways sufficed.

In 1907 the Corps of Engineers pointed out that there just isn’t enough water (sans glacier) for such a canal system to be realistic:

The quantity of water required at the summit would probably be nto less than 300 cubic feet per second, if the canal were used at all, and the problem of finding that quantity of water during the dry season would be a rather serious one. There is no stream of sufficient capacity in the neighborhood and a feeder would have to be brought many miles. While the percipitation in tehis section of the country is large, there is annually a dry season of two or three months, during which the streams become very low, and ample provision for water, either by storage or by a long feeder, would be required.

But, if you add one ice age with spillway rivers flowing through the Black River, Chehalis and Moxlie Creek basins, you suddenly have three entire waterways connecting Puget Sound (now as a glacial lake) with the Pacific Ocean. And, McCleary sitting almost dead center as a axis of trade. In this case, sight sears to the big glacier.