Category: Olympia history (Page 4 of 9)

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.

One little detail. But, I can admit when I’m wrong. Here’s one passage in a history I wrote of the formation of Capitol Lake:

Depending on the source, one of two things then happened. Either the state capitol committee rejected a lake altogether or they accepted the Olmsted’s earlier limited version.

In the late 20s, Wilder and White and the Olmsted firm participated in a back and forth over the landscaping plan, with the state capitol committee in the middle. In one telling, the result was that all waterfront improvements (including Capitol Lake) were written out of the landscaping plan (Johnston, 91).

According to another Capitol Campus historian, Mark Epstein, Capitol Lake was retained in the 1920s landscaping plan, but in the form of Olmsted’s modest saltwater tidal pond rather than an aggressively dammed estuary (Epstein, 67).

Also, ten years after he first proposed it, damming the Deschutes apparently was not in the front of Carlyon’s mind. As Wilder, White and the Olmsted firm debated landscaping plans that could have included a lake, Carlyon wrote an essay about the vision and construction of the capitol group. Lacking from the essay is a single mention of a lake (Carylon, 1928).

Even though it was rejected in 1916 and was an afterthought in Carlyon’s mind by 1928, the lake project did not go away.

This passage had to do with the late 1920s when the capitol builders were putting the finishing touches on the original capitol group. It was also just about 10 years before the successful (and locally originated) effort to build Capitol Lake.

From what I  found in a 1929 Seattle Times piece, I wasn’t totally correct:

A small difference I suppose. But, a big enough difference to add another sentence to that section in the piece I linked to above. It was a proposed lake. It had been proposed in 1911 as part of a locally funded package of civic improvements. Again in 1915 by local politicians as a solution to transportation problems. It was also proposed in 1897 as a grand freshwater port scheme:

It was proposed a lot, but it wasn’t the centerpiece of a grand plan for the capitol campus. It was an old idea by 1911 that had been kicked around and recycled several times in various forms of urban renewal and natural resources destruction.

Shanna Stevenson’s chapter in “The River Remembers” (edited by Gayle Palmer) is a thorough history of transportation through Tumwater. Most of it is a lead in to Tumwater’s most notable historic wound, the construction of Interstate 5 through the historic center of the city.

Stevenson’s history includes an interesting footnote on what could have happened if Olympia had gotten its way. Instead of going straight through the old Tumwater historic neighborhood down by the former Budd Inlet waterfront, the Olympia city leaders wanted the highway through their city.

The proposed route was to loop the interestate through the town coming from the west through the Percival Creek canyon. Then, it would go through downtown in a tunnel under 10th or an elevated roadway over 7th.

So, the two options both included a highway at the foot of the capitol campus. Option one was a new tunnel. Option two was a viaduct running just south Sylvester Park.

This overlay of Olympia in 1941 with our current roads shows exactly why this was feasible. Even though the old Swantown Slough was filled for decades by this era, very little of the south end had been developed.

After finding a way through downtown, it would have been easy to route the interstate through the rest of town.

I also find it interesting that when this plan was seriously being considered (1952 through 1954), it was the early days of Capitol Lake. The city was advocating for a major interstate to loop through a place that they’d just spent more than a decade pushing to become a lake. Hardly fitting the Wilder and White vision of Capitol Lake creation, I’d say.

Of course, Capitol Lake then was hardly the park rimmed area it is now. In the 1950s, the first lake park was still ten years off. There was still a major rail yard on the south bank under the capitol and industrial buildings were still on other banks.

So, in the mind of the city leaders, in the early 1950s, the lake being the setting of a major downtown park was hardly in the plans.

Going through Tumwater ended up being cheaper, so the state highway commission chose that route. But, it wasn’t because Olympia didn’t want it.

Seattle Times, 1983

We all mourn the closure of the Olympia brewery. We all hope it comes back, at least the territory of the brewery, to become a new heart for our oldest non-native community.

Decades before our latest mourning, we mourned the sale of the company and brand to non-local owners. I wrote a bit about this history over at Thurston Talk recently. The story centered on a phenomena originating in the prohibition of tobacco advertizing in the late 1960s:

The true factor leading to the Schmidt family’s sale, in the early 80s, where market forces dating back to the ban on tobacco
advertising on television in 1971. Phillip Morris, one of the largest tobacco purveyors, decided to diversify a few years before the ban and bought Miller in 1969.

The Miller sale sounded off like a shot to the once traditional and staid brewing industry. “Budweiser met the challenge,”
Knight said. “The two companies started buying up every market in the U.S., rolling over smaller breweries.”

While it might seem like the tobacco giants were buying beer companies, what they were really buying was geography.  The
quickest way to break into new beer markets was to buy existing beer companies, gaining loyal beer buyers and their preferences, along with beer distribution arrangements.

A few years later, the Schmidt family reacted by buying Hamms (1974) and then later Lone Star (1977). “Olympia was a little late
getting into the game,” Knight said.

“They had to get bigger or get a lot smaller,” Knight said.
“Each time Olympia bought a new brand, it would give them a boost.”
Olympia’s attempt to appeal to the drinkers in the newly acquired
territories included the Artesians campaign.

But, in trying to keep up in a race of quickly nationalizing brands, the Schmidts eventually ran out of family talent and stock. In 1983 Paul Kalmanovitz (who owned Pabst and had also bought other Washington brands like Lucky Lager) bought Olympia Brewing
Company.

This is a totally plausible and realistic story that is backed up by other histories of the era, which additionally cite legal troubles brought on by the mergers. But, this business-centered history runs counter to the local knowledge of why Olympia was sold. Because the then president of the company was caught having sex with another man in the Capitol Lake bathrooms.


This did happen. In early 1980, in the twilight of locally-owned Olympia Beer, Rick Schmidt and two other men (a state legislator and a state agency director) were arrested for lewd conduct. The three non-out-of-the-closet men quickly faded from their public lives. All three quit their jobs and disappeared for awhile. Eric Rohrbach (the former state legislator) is back involved in local politics.

Both Schmidt and Joseph “Dean” Gregorius (as far as I can tell) never reentered public life.

The question is, whether Schmidt resigning had much to do with the eventual sale of the family firm. I’d say very little. The Schmidt family was doomed by nation-wide forces, not by the fall of the scion.

Research has pointed out that family-led companies have a particularly bad time reacting to industry-wide change:

The cultural view of family firms implies that these firms might be less willing to make changes to their overall strategy even when market pressures ask for such changes. Out of a sense of duty and respect for their elders, younger generations might find it difficult to change decisions such as where to locate, what to produce, or which customers to serve.

Just being a family-owned company is bad in the long run:

This paper provides strong evidence that promoting family CEOs in publicly traded corporations significantly hurts performance even after controlling for firm and industry characteristics, and aggregate trends.

I find that, consistent with wasteful nepotism,declines in performance are prominent in firms that appoint family CEOs who did not attend a selective undergraduate institution. In contrast, comparable firms that promote non-family CEOs do not experience negative changes in performance, even when incoming unrelated CEOs did not attend selective colleges.

So, what is the tragedy here? Sure, its bad that Rick Scmidt left the company. And, its bad that Olympia Beer had to be sold, instead of surviving as one of the few family owned breweries.

But, the real tragedy is that Schmidt, Rohrbach and Gregorius were arrested and publicly outed in the first place.

Let’s go back to Olympia in 1980. According to this history, the “Capitol Lake Bathroom Bust” followed “a period of harassment and police targeting of Gay men.” This also isn’t a time when men with public profiles could live out of the closet.

The reason the arrests of these three men was news was because they had public profiles, but also because the arrests were of gay men.

And, let’s put into perspective the operation that brought them in. The Olympia Police Department spent two weeks looking into the bathrooms before coming up with anything.

These type of operations, where police would stakeout homosexuals, hoping to come up with an arrest, has been called harassment by activists. The time spent by OPD in 1980 to come up with a few lewd conduct arrests certainly makes it seem that way.

Arrests like this also had deep social wounds. From a San Antonio library blog (of all places):

“I am primarily concerned with this grieving family in my parish, with
the fact that we have lost such a wonderful man, and the news media
played such an important part in driving him to suicide. There is no
question but that his learning that his name had been published was the
direct cause of his jumping off a bridge. . . .I also would say very
strongly that a society that pays its policemen to spend hours on their
haunches or lying prostrate on the top of a building peering through a
hole to spy on men is a very sick society.”

This excerpt from an
anonymous letter that appeared in a 1966 issue of Christianity and Crisis  captured
the devastation exacted on men who were caught having sex in public
restrooms and had their names published in the newspaper after being
arrested. Sting operations by law enforcement officials against
homosexuals in public places were nothing new. In San Antonio, police
had been ferreting out gay cruisers in Travis Park–located in the heart
of the city–since the 1940s. But were undercover operations
and demonization of those caught in the web of such actions indicative
only of the era that predated Stonewall in which homosexual harassment
was part and parcel of urban life?

We are a different town now. Our police are much more honorable. We are much more fair. But, we have to get our stories right.

The Olympia Brewing Company was caught in an economic storm that was swamping family breweries. That Olympia went down is nothing special. Rick Schmidt wouldn’t have saved them.

Blaming the loss of the brewery on him is unfair. It also takes blame off of us, the way our community was not at all accepting of homosexuals. The sting operation, the public castigation, the disappearance from public life of these men. That’s the sad story we should tell, the cautionary tale.