On Sat, 30 Nov 1996, Kelly Cassidy wrote:

> I'll hazard a guess that the photos you saw were of the native prairies
> and woodlands in the vicinity of Tacoma.

Well no, I would have immediately recognized that possibility. My memory is
imperfect. I took in a lot of information in one afternoon and I fear that
some of it has cross-pollinated with others of it. I am quite certain,
however, that the best photo was of a site on the Pacific Ocean, a summer
fishing encampment for the Quinaults or the Makahs. I would have expected a
forest background dominated by large Sitka Spruce but what I saw was simply
a mess. The trees were all trunk and limbs, hardly any foliage. You could
see far more sky between the trunks than foliage. It was clearly a
coniferous forest. The size of the trees was difficult to judge but they
seemed small. I'll offer my two best guesses about why it didn't look the
way the Olympic National Park strip does today:

1. Perhaps fire had killed most of the trees and removed almost all of the
shrubs and other low-growing plants and small trees. The trees looked small
because they were in the distant background but were actually very large.

2. Perhaps logging had taken all of the large spruce which could be easily
slid into the ocean and towed to a mill or a port. The main problem with
this explanation is I couldn't see any large stumps sawed off nice and flat
above a spring-board hole.

I have seen pictures of similar vintage of the Denny regrade in Seattle and the
hillside on the west side of Budd Inlet where west Olympia is today. In these
photos there was also the ragged and messy look of former forest reduced to its
most spindly and defective components (with a few buildings here and there).

I'd like to hear about other people's observations of photos of Pacific
Northwest forested landscapes from pre-1920. It may seem way off the subject
of birds but it offers a great deal of insight into some of the historical
changes in bird fauna in western Washington.

> The Woodland/Prairies were the first areas to be settled by Europeans,
> since they had good grazing and weren't as dank, wet, and gloomy as the
> adjacent forests. The Woodland/Prairies only occupied a small part of
> the west side, however, so they were quickly covered by farms and ranches.

My ancestors were among those who settled near the mouth of the Nisqually.
James McAllister housed his family in the hollowed stump of a Western Red
Cedar tree. They fenced some very fertile ground nearby. Many Nisqually
indians (Leschi among them) were not pleased to see these changes. James
McAllister was the first white man to die in the wars that ensued.

It took incredible brashness (and racism I suppose) to move in and take over
without regard for the native people. The indians had well-established
patterns. They often moved from place to place seasonally to take advantage
of fish and other natural resources. They were experts at utilizing Western
Red Cedar and salmon and hundreds of other plants and animals.

When I looked at that picture of the summer fishing village, I wondered how
those indians felt to come to their summer home one year and find that the
big trees in the forest had been sawed down and taken away, incredible
numbers of trees I'm sure (when compared to the number the indians used for
their subsistence). Maybe they didn't care, I don't know.

In any case, the newly arrived white people helped themselves to lots of
things in the backyards of the natives. Now, most of us descendents of
these early resource extractors have perfected the art of NIMBYism and we
use it to good advantage.

Kelly McAllister