Category: Olympia history (Page 4 of 9)

No one seems to have noticed, but the state house budget (this one written by Democrats) puts the State Capitol Museum on the chopping block. Neither the senate budget nor the governor’s puts the museum to the ax.

This isn’t what I’d consider to be our local museum, that would be the Bigelow House. But, it is the most prominent museum in our city. And, so at least one part of the state government wants to close it.

But, I’m wondering how much I should care about that.

Mostly because it is for one Olympia and not the other. The museum is for Olympia-as-state-capitol and not as Olympia-as-community.

Obviously there are overlaps. There are people who live here that have had a significant impact on state government simply because they lived here. But, that isn’t what Olympia is, mostly.

And, so, this is whey I expect in Olympia, we’re not going to complain very much if they end up closing the museum down. It simply speaks too narrowly to our history and culture here.

Yes, the Lord Mansion is very pretty. And, it would be a shame to cut off public access to it. I remember biking over there when I was a kid in the summer, just to walk around. But, the museum now doesn’t speak to me much.

The best part of the museum is its small community room, the Carriage House. At least for me it is. Its the only part of the State Capitol Museum I’ve been to in the last 10 years, because it is where local historians hold talks.

But, those talks probably still might take place there. The house budget calls for the building to be passed over to another part of the state government, which leads me to believe it’ll still be available for rent.

The last thing that amazes me is the incredibly low budget line item we’re even talking about here. Apparently, the state provides only $242,000 a year to the state historical society to run the State Capitol Museum.

So really, is there a big reason that I’m missing that I would want to keep this incarnation of the museum open?

We don’t call downtown Olympia “old town,” even though that’s where the city grew from.

I’m not sure to what extent, but at a certain point in our history, the nature of downtown was much more residential than it is now. This is simply because no one in Olympia lived anywhere else. But, now downtown is the hole in Olympia’s population donut.

If you take a look at historic views of the older parts of town, they sure do seem a lot more residential than they currently are. Downright suburban even. Single family homes dotting well laid out streets. But, now those blocks are mostly commercial or retails spaces, with a handful of high density housing.

I suppose now that I think about it, I’m not absolutely sure that if you compared raw numbers, there’d be more people in downtown in 1910 than right now. What residential housing we do have is high density.

But, what we did have back then in terms of residential use downtown was much closer and interwoven with commercial and even industrial uses.

I suppose that’s my point: residential and commercial/industrial uses weren’t terribly separated. We were still pretty far off from the point when an entire street would be dominated by just houses. Or, just stores. You couldn’t drive anywhere, so if you couldn’t walk, it was inconvenient.

I want to take a closer look at this. You can see from the Sanborn overlays I linked to above that this is generally true. I’ve emailed Brian Hovis, who put the maps together, and I want to see if I can play around with a version of his work to see if I can mark residential vs. non-residential and try to compare it to the current day.

A far as my lazy bones are concerned, 1852 is the earliest point you can really go and see what Olympia was all about. The Columbian (between 1852-53) is available online via a searchable database.

And, from that source, we can see what Thanksgiving was like in that early Olympia fall:

If you then scroll back to near where we celebrate Thanksgiving now (the Saturday, November 27, 1852 edition), the Columbian features a letter to the editor that marks a much more important celebration for Olympians. The Monday before had been the first day of school in the city.

Set aside the “idleness of Indians” (because Indians weren’t and aren’t idle), the letter spells out a pretty interesting vision of America, education and civic life.

To a point Thanksgiving has now retreated back into the family. Like that, education is often seen as a benefit to family (if I don’t have kids, why should I pay for schools?) and not the community. This letter seems to point out that there was always that sort of short-minded counter argument to public education:

Think of it ye calculating men on this side of the continent, who let a few dollars (perhaps a single day’s work), stand in the way of educating your children. Do you say there is less need of education now than two hundred years ago? Will there be no need in the future of intelligent men and women?

The letter writer harkens back to the educational standard set by the most New England of New Englanders, the Pilgrims. And, of course, Olympia in 1852 was at the moment being settled by communitarian New Englanders and individualistic Appalachians. This debate on education was part of the friction between the two groups that eventually made us the way we are today around here.

And, yet, we still have the debate. Enshrined in the 1889 state constitution is the paramount duty of education, carried forward by the Pilgrim tradition written about in 1852. Hardly anyone argues that we shouldn’t have schools at all, but we’re working hard to avert our eyes from the promise our state made. And, the pressures that keep us away from that promise certainly are the same ones that talk about low taxes, smaller government and the power of the individual over the community.

So, happy Thanksgiving. Be thankful some New Englanders opened a school in late November 1852. Otherwise we’d wouldn’t be “a people too enlightened to be enslaved, too virtuous to be bought.”

This is a more things change, more they say the same sort of thing for the week coming into election day.

 

Is is not true that many of your leaders were also sponsors of the dictatorial scheme for Zoning Thurston County.

Is it not true that your program is fundamentally socialistic to take over private business? With more taxes?

Is is not true that some of your politicians aspire to offices under a socialistic dictatorship?

The first question in that list seems to echo to our current debates (at least over the last 20 years in the era of growth management and endangered species) over land use. I don’t know enough about what was going on in Thurston County in 1938 over zoning. But, it smacks of a rural control by urban interest sort of thing.

And, after all this huffing and puffing, the Republicans were smacked down in Thurston County in 1938. Only winning a close race for clerk, the Republicans failed to capitalize on what was a fairly good year for Republicans nationwide. Not in Washington though. Or in Thurston County.

Heather Lockman does a great job sketching out the Indian Shirt Story in Olympia (the actual story) and how it changed over the years.

If you don’t end up watching the video (but you should), the gist of it is that the details in the story get more sinister and anti-Indian as the years go on. So, why over time, did people telling the story of an Indian who wants a shirt change details to make them more scary?

It probably has to do with how we related to Indians when the story actually took place (1850s) and when the final details of the Indian Shirt story were finally added (in the early 1900s).

In those initial years, the relationship with Indians and non-Indians was certainly and violently one sided. Most of the murder victims between 1854 and 1857 were Indians being killed by white people. Yes, we now have stories of farmers abandoning their homesteads for towns and blockhouses, but when you look at the details of the Puget Sound War, you find the Mashel Massacre, Quiemuth and Leschi. You also have the internment of hundreds of other non-combatant Indians during the war.

There were certainly victims of the war on the non-Indian side, but in those years, you could hardly imagine the majority of whites (especially pre-Puget Sound War) being afraid of an Indian asking for a shirt.

The rest of this post will be a long log roll for my own book “Oyster Light,” (here or here) so I apologize. I do suggest you buy Heather’s book. Its a good one.

Even after the war, roving bands of whites walked into Indian reservations and murdered people, seemingly without punishment. From Oyster Light’s “All the Bunting Trails”:

George McCallister (the late James’ 21 year old son) headed the group to bring in Too-a-pi-ti. The young McAllister, between the murder of Quiemuth and going out to track down Too-a-pi-ti, had also reportedly killed another Nisqually Indian on the tribe’s reservation, who had bore some guilt for his father’s death.

The era of the original telling of the Indian Shirt Story was a violent time, mostly for Indians. But, as the years go along, the relationship changes. Mostly to an attitude of glorifying the past and bringing to light actual fears whites had of being murdered themselves, and ignoring their own violence.

In her talk, Heather points out the phenomena locally in the early 1900s of beginning to worry about the imminent deaths of that original pioneer generation. Many of our first historical monuments date from the first two decades of the last century.

Looking at those years deeper, it also shows how the Indian/non-Indian relationship had changed. Mostly, the concern was “why didn’t these Indians just go away?”

From Oyster Light’s “E.N. Steele”:

The local anti-Indian sentiment surrounding the cases is encapsulated in an editorial in the Olympia Recorder that ran the same day as the Kennedy v. Becker news.

Coverage of Peters’ and James’ case was typically sprinkled with terms like “squaw,” “pow wow,” and “Papooses.” While Steele himself wasn’t immune to language like this, the Recorder editorial shows that defending Indians for fishing and hunting was not a popular task:

The Indian thinks his ancient treaty rights give him the authority to shoot a deer or spear a salmon at any time he contends that the game laws do not affect him. He declares that the white man is trying to go back on his bargain… Of course the supreme court, in holding that the game laws abrogate the treaty, is ruling that the laws were passed to govern all the people, white, red, black and yellow, and that the treaty is superseded just as all former laws that conflict with new ones are repealed.

If it is non-Indian history, it is a vital cultural heritage to be preserved. If its a treaty with Indians, it is “ancient” or in contrast to modern living.

Non-tribal society at this point had moved on. It remembered the blockhouses and their own telling of the Puget Sound War, so naturally, the Indians in the shirt story would be violent and scary, approaching at night, threatening a young mother. The implied context in the early 1900s is that the non-Indians in the 1850s heroically defeated the violent Indians. They forget about George McCallister and others like Josepth Bunting and Jim Riley.

Hoo boy. You should read about Jim Riley. He’s a piece of work.

On Independence Day in 1861, the Steilacoom paper mentioned that the soon to be ex-acting governor of the territory would make his own person independence in Walla Walla.

Just a couple of months after shots were fired to open the Civil War on the opposite coast, in his capacity as acting governor, Henry McGill had called out the troops. McGill issued a proclamation bringing the Washington territorial militia back into existence.

McGill was just waiting out the time until he (the territorial secretary) and his Democratic Buchanan appointed territorial governor were replaced by Lincoln Republicans. Before coming west, Ireland born McGill has been Buchanan’s personal secretary. Buchanan president under whose presidency the nation began to fracture.

McGill visited the office of the Puget Sound Herald (reported on July 4, 1861) and gave an impression about his own search for freedom. Clearly looking past the time when Lincoln would appoint his replacement, McGill said that maybe Walla Walla (in the growing eastern portion of the territory) might be the place for him.

McGill was put in charge of the territory on an acting basis because his governor, Richard Gholson, made his way back to Kentucky, in an effort to get that state to join the Confederacy.

But, McGill mentioning Walla Walla in the summer of 1861 was an interesting dream. Secession had tossed McGill’s career. Walla Walla was the center of its own local secession movement that Olympia and the rest of Puget Sound played to their benefit in the era of national fracture.

McGill’s stay in Washington was only a few months old when the territorial assembly shot down the idea of letting eastern Washington and much of what is now Idaho seceded from the territory. In a 18-12 vote, the assembly voted down a memorial to Congress to create the massive inland and economically powerful territory.

Between the rising agricultural territory around Walla Walla and the mines upriver, Walla Walla was a community on the rise and it wanted to the center of its own territory. Puget Sound and Olympia obviously didn’t want this at all. They were able to hold off the 1861 memorial, but people were streaming into the east. Eventually, the population and the votes over the mountains would end up drawing a line unfriendly to Puget Sound.

The question remained, how do the Puget Sounders keep at least a portion the economically vital region in the fold? As miners flooded into the east in the fall of 1861 and into 1862, the solution became dividing the farms from the mines.

Thus, Idaho:

Thousands of gold-seekers rushed to the Salmon River mines as soon as travel became practical in the spring of 1862. At the height of the excitement, a new boundary suggestion came from Olympia. There, on April 5, 1862, the Washington Standard indicated that Washington territory should be divided, but not on the Cascades. In order to keep Washington as big as possible and yet get rid of the mining area with its controlling majority of Washington’s population, a new territory was advocated foe the miners only. After all, there was no need to cut off anything more: if just the mines were detached, the danger that political control of Washington would shift east across the Cascades would end suddenly. Walla Walla and the potential farming section of the Palouse, therefore, might stay in Washington without endangering Olympia’s future. A boundary much farther east than the Cascades would leave Olympia with a Washington territory of respectable size to preside over. To accomplish this, Washington’s eastern boundary might properly be made a northern extension of Oregon’s eastern boundary. Dr. A. G. Henry – surveyor general of Washington, and an exceedingly able and influential agent for Olympia – selected the exact line that would meet these new Olympia requirements. His choice was a meridian running due north from the new town of Lewiston, which had been established the season before at the mouth of the Clearwater. From that time on, that was the line that Olympia partisans worked for.

War and death raged in the east, but Olympia civic leaders and bureaucrats quickly and coolly dispatched with the secessionists on the Snake River.

I’m not sure if McGill ever made a stop in Walla Walla. He did some lawyer work around Puget Sound in the 1870s, by 1870 he was lawyering and getting elected to local office in San Francisco.

Fifty years after the last battle of the Civil War (the battle of Columbus, Georgia) McGill died in San Francisco. 

February 1861

After the treaties were signed around here, settling outstanding tribal land claims, and legally opening settlement in our region, we went to war. The terms of the treaties didn’t match up with the expectations of the tribes. The small non-native communities contracted into bunkhouses. Hundreds formed units to both defend their farms and towns and to seek out Indians to kill.

Eventually, the Puget Sound War petered out, Indian leaders were tried, hung and murdered.

But, most importantly to the civil leaders here, we had spent money. Someone needed to pay.

The debate over the war debt of the Puget Sound War is an interesting one that gets to the nature of our early settlement here.

If it was a war, then Indian leaders like Leschi should not have been hung for murder in the years after the conflict. You can’t commit murder if you’re a soldier in a war.

Also, if it was a war, roving bands of whites should not have spent the years following the war looking for Indians to kill, carrying writs from local courts. Certain judges apparently thought the Puget Sound War wasn’t a war, or else there wouldn’t be murderers. Just veterans.

But, the instructions given to our congressional delegate Issac Stevens (who as governor led the war effort) in the late 1850s was to get federal repayment for our war debts. It was a war.

The Senate acknowledged the existence of a war, when they eventually passed $3 million appropriate in 1861. Obviously, that money was needed for another war.

Its funny that that war, had a similar post war debate. Should the leader of the confederacy be tried? Was the Civil War a real war? If they were leaders of a real nation, then of course not. You can’t put a national executive on trial for leading his country in war. But, if they were merely terrorist leaders, taking charge illegally of a portion of a whole country, then of course, put them on trial.

Obviously, if we zero in on the case of Jefferson Davis (the President of the apparent Confederate States) we see a lot of nuance. If he’s on trial, what happens if the federal government gets a bad result? He’s found innocent? The constitutionality of secession is secured? In the end, it was better to just release him and leave the questions unanswered.

But, because Jefferson Davis didn’t join Leschi at the gallows, the Civil War was a war. Leschi was the Indian symbol to white Americans of the tribal cause. He was hung because there were enough people in charge in the territory that couldn’t fathom him being anything other than a murderer. But, in their own split minds, they saw their service as soldiers. So, they sent Stevens to congress to get money for war debts.

It wasn’t until 1875 that the federal government really got around to putting the war stamp on the Puget Sound War, when they spent a much smaller sum ($50,000) to put the war debts to bed.

We really did have a war it. It was asymmetrical. It wasn’t pretty. We don’t have battlefield sites, instead we have gallows and blockhouse sites. And, for years people here and far away didn’t agree it really existed.

And, ten years ago, during the trial in which the historical court exonerated Leschi, lawyers asked Captain Paul Robson why the U.S. Army thought Leschi shouldn’t have been hung. Because, we don’t hang soldiers.

Local arts activists lobbied for and built the Washington Center for the Performing Arts.

Local athletic boosters brought arguably the largest sporting event ever to Olympia.

Local political activists changed the government at city hall.

The first part of the 1980s was a big time in Olympia. Things were happening, people were getting things done. But, why?

I might just be cherry picking historical events, pointing to them and saying “hey look, something was different here,” so correct me if I’m wrong. But, it really does seem that those years in the early 1980s were a time when things changed around here.

One simple reason could have been the influx of new residents in Thurston County. If you look at Olympia’s population alone, the early 1980s was a time of steady growth. But, in broader Thurston County, population took off in the 1970s.

This population increase must have had an impact on our local culture. I wouldn’t assume a fundamental change, but certainly making people and organizations more active, more open to change and new projects.

Now, I’m just spit-balling, but I’d assume that a bunch of these new residents came to take state jobs. I’ve read that state government (during the Dan Evans administration) expanded greatly in the 1970s, taking on more roles. And, because of a 1950s era lawsuit, much of this growth took place in Thurston County.

These are mostly notes to a new inquiry. But, if someone were to write a new history of Thurston County, focusing on the 1970s and 80s might be a nice time to highlight.

To struggle to protect treaty rights has been heavy on my mind this week. It is worth pointing out how long this struggle actually is.

This letter to the Puget Sound Courier (Steilacoom’s paper) is a pointed attack at Governor Stevens during the Puget Sound War. The anonymous writer points out that the execution of the war and the removal of Indians to internment camps violated the terms of the treaties that were just signed. Like newspapers of that era, the Courier was picking sides in a political battle against Gov. Stevens.

But, the letter also marks the beginning of the treaty rights struggle that continued, sometimes in secret, through to today.

…let it be remembered that the Indian Department in Washignton territory, negogiated a treaty, forwarded it to Washington city for ratification, received that ratification, and violated, all within the short space of a year.

I wrote about one episode in Oyster Light (here’s just that chapter), in which the Boldt Decision almost happened 50 years early when a young Olympia lawyer joined a coordinated legal effort to try treaty rights in court.

The treaty rights struggle, the tense relationship between these governments and our communities, goes back throughout our history. Its is impossible to understand the history of our region without thinking hard about it.

To that end, I would highly suggest the Katie Gale. I’ve read a lot of pieces, books and essays about treaty rights, tribal history and natural resources management. And, obviously Cecelia Svinth Carpenter is the original gold standard.

But, Katie Gale takes a perpendicular track to other things I’ve read. It tracks the life of of a women literally of the first post-treaty Indian generation. She was raised knowing only the world Scorpion described the launch of.

The book can sometimes slog down into details that don’t move the narrative forward. We set the scene so long, it seems like we’re taking in the scenery rather than listening to a story. But, those details really only remind us that our history is really complicated.

And, it is very local. This all happened right here. Someone who was central to these stories walked the same place you walked. Scorpion, Issac Stevens and Katie Gale have all been on the same streets as you.