On Sun, 1 Dec 1996, Kelly McAllister wrote:

> .... 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:

Jane Hadley has already suggested Richard White's book _Land Use,
Environment, and Social Change_ which is an environmental history of
Whidbey Island and includes a chapter on the use of the Island by the
Salish.

White and other environmental historians have developed a substantial body
of information demonstrating that indigenous people extensively modified
the environment through fire and other methods to produce plants and
animals for subsistence purposes. Camas, for example, was planted and
harvested and camas fields were maintained by burning to keep trees at
bay. It is incorrect to treat pre-European contact landscapes and
"natural" in the sense of "not-manipulated by humans."

A book that examines fire in the Pacific Northwest is James Agee, _Fire
Ecology of Pacific Northwest Forests_ Agee concludes that the fire cycle
in Sitka Spruce, Western Hemlock forestswere very long (400-1,000 years)
and that "[w]ind is a more persistent disturbance factor in these coastal
forests."

dale goble
moscow