Chapter Two

The picture of a Native paradise in the Pacific Northwest is not the whole story, however, and one only begins to learn of the complexity of pre-Columbian Indian life with an understanding of Indian technology. Unfortunately, except for a few scholarly studies on Indian house-building and fishing techniques (the latter based on a system of twig fences, called weirs, scattered throughout the streams), there has been little investigation of the real technology by which the Puget Sound Indians gained their livelihood.

Imagine, if you will, being placed in a land where a great variety of salmon filled each and every river, where ducks and geese filled the evening sky, where berries literally dripped from the bushes at harvest time, and where crabs, clams, mussels, and oysters abounded. One’s first inclination would be to fish, hunt, and gather as much food as possible, but the real question would be how to gather this food as efficiently as possible and how to preserve it. In developing techniques for catching fish, preserving berries, and cooking shellfish, the Indians of the area were supreme. In order to understand the development of Indian skills, let us examine the great variety of techniques they used to gather food and imagine ourselves carefully observing the clever use of every resource in hunting and fishing.

First, there were at least five different kinds of fishing, distinguished by the nature of the water in which the fish lived. There were freshwater lakes; freshwater streams and creeks that drained into the various inlets and bays on the sound and the straits; the waters of the shallow bays and estuaries, basically the tideland flats; the inlets and the sound itself, which were considerably deeper and broader bodies of water than the shallow bays; and finally there were the ocean and the large straits, virtually boundless in length and depth.

Shellfish such as clams and oysters could be collected in the shallow bays and on the beaches. At the appropriate times, the women and girls of the villages turned out to harvest these shellfish, drying some of them for the winter but generally preparing a gigantic feast of fresh clams or oysters. Crabs were harvested in the same way, but these shellfish tended to be concentrated along the northern end of the Olympic Peninsula. Crabs were usually plentiful in the spring and were difficult to preserve, so they provided only a seasonal treat.

Salmon-fishing techniques varied greatly, according to the nature of the water system. On freshwater lakes, the object would be to catch the fish before they entered deep waters. The Indians would therefore station themselves at the outlet of the lake (i.e., where the river or stream drained it) and either spear or gaff the salmon. (A gaff is an implement about six feet long with a hook at the end.) There was little effort to use baited hooks; the trick was to spear a fish and haul it aboard in one swift, continuous motion. Some people used nets, and when the salmon were arriving at the lake in large quantities, during the spawning season, they might literally herd large numbers of them to the shores, where they could be taken.

The technique of impounding fish was generally used in the tideland areas, however, because of the action of the tides. Fish would come into the secluded and narrow parts of bays during high tide, and the people would build large pens while the water was still high. When the tide went out, the fish would be trapped inside the pens. Sometimes with the smaller varieties, such as smelts or candlefish, impoundment was the only practical way to catch a large number quickly.

The most famous fishing techniques were those developed for use in freshwater streams and creeks that drained into the inlets. The salmon spent an average of three years at sea and returned to their spawning grounds and gravel beds in the freshwater streams in the mountains. Large weirs, usually community property, were built across the rivers to catch the returning salmon. Weirs varied with the width of the stream, but generally they would consist of three tripods embedded in the stream bed with brush fences between the stakes, which trapped the salmon as they swam upstream.

Once the salmon were trapped behind the weirs, the people used dip nets to take the salmon. While the weir was community property, the dip-netting platforms were privately owned by families, and one had to ask permission of the owners to use them. All the facilities for curing the fish were also privately owned. This peculiar distinction between community ownership of the means of catching the fish and family ownership of the means of preserving the fish was misunderstood for decades by lawyers involved in fishing-rights cases. They used to insist that because Indians shared the weirs, they had no concept of individual property rights. But if one had no means to preserve the fish once it was caught, fishing was of little value, and the houses for curing the fish and the drying racks were individually owned.

On freshwater streams and creeks the Indians used gill nets as well. The gill nets were large nets designed to catch fish of a certain size. The openings of the mesh in the net would allow small fish to pass through it with ease, but it would snare the gills of larger fish when they tried to force their way past the net. The nets would be set in a river for hours at a time and then pulled to shore filled with fish. Generally these nets were not placed across the entire river but, rather, on alternating sides of the river every several hundred yards so that some fish could get through the nets and up the river to spawn.

In the northern part of the inland waters near the Straits of Georgia, the Lummi developed a unique kind of fishing aptly called reef netting. They would take two canoes, extend a large net between them, and anchor it on the floor of the bay or passage where the salmon would be coming. As the salmon began to swim into the camouflaged net, they would believe that the floor of the bay was shifting upward. The salmon would swim upward with the incline of the net, and at a certain point the head fisherman would shout—a signal to raise the net, thus trapping the fish.

The head fisherman was vitally important in this type of fishing, because he had to tell from the movement of the water how far into the net the majority of the fish had come. If the net was raised too soon, the salmon would be frightened and swim away. If it was raised too late, the salmon would be able to swim over the net, or they would have been able to detect the net in front of them and rapidly swim around it.

With such split-second timing necessary, the leader of the fishing expedition had to have an almost mystical sense about the salmon, the water, the nets, the current of the water, and his men’s ability to raise the net quickly. Reef-net fishing required an incredible sense of timing and an intimate knowledge of all the factors that affected fish life. Leadership on a reef-netting expedition was so intuitive that those men who had continued success as reef netters were considered to be possessed of a supernatural ability and religious powers over the salmon.

When the white men came to the Straits of Georgia and tried to learn reef netting, they were unable to catch any salmon, and many quit in disgust when the salmon would not come into their nets. Eventually they learned how to camouflage their nets in the Lummi manner, but they never learned that special, mystical sense that the old Lummi fishermen had about the timing of the catch. The salmon never spoke to them as they had spoken to the Lummi reef netters.

Reef-netting sites were the most prized inland fishing grounds because the catch was generally sockeye salmon, considered a delicacy by all the tribes of the region. Catching sockeye meant that the Lummis could trade extensively with the other tribes for desirable goods, especially for the whale and seal oil and the meats of the coastal tribes. Reef net ownership has proved a great aid in scholarly interpretation of the treaties. By comparing the owners of reef-netting locations with signatures on the treaties, it can be determined if the Indians understood that they were giving up fishing rights. No Indian would sign any document that took away his reef-netting site, and so when we see the signatures of reef net site owners on treaties we know that they were promised freedom in their reef netting.

Besides reef netting, the people of the sound and the straits also developed trolling, long-lining, jigging, and set-lining techniques for fishing. In all these methods, the Indians relied upon their cleverness in designing nets and hooks for fishing that would coincide with the manner in which the salmon could most efficiently be taken. Since the salmon, in preparation for spawning, do not eat once they have entered fresh water, it was ridiculous to use hooks in the manner we do today. When the white men came into the area and saw the Indians fishing without bait, it was a great surprise to them, and they were even more shocked when they learned that the Indians had relatively good luck despite the lack of bait.

In the ocean and the large straits, fishing was a wholly different matter. Nets were not as important, because the people were out after larger game—whales, seals, sea otters, and the like—and both skill and technique were much different. The Makahs of Cape Flattery, the whalers of the Northwest, caught few salmon but many halibut in their coastal waters. The whaling canoes would go from twelve to twenty miles offshore to hunt the large mammals with harpoons. The canoes, although very large, were tiny beside the gigantic whales, and so the trick was to harpoon the whale while preventing him from sounding and breaking loose from the harpoon. Seal bladders, used for floats, were attached to the whale once the harpoon had been thrust into it, thus preventing the giant mammal from diving.

The Makahs used a combination of floats to tire the whale. As more and more floats were attached to it, the whale lost some of its agility, since it became increasingly difficult to swim while dragging so many floats. With a number of canoes surrounding the whale, the Indians guided it toward the shore, where they could finish killing it and butcher it. It was a rare occasion when the Makahs lost a whale, because they did not try to kill it immediately but, rather, used its strength to take it back to a more convenient place.

Again, with whaling, like reef netting, the leader of the expedition had to be a very exceptional person in order to lead a successful hunt. Especially among the Makahs, the chief whalers were people of great religious powers who knew the whales and seals and sang songs encouraging them to come and provide food for the people. Songs were highly prized and were passed down in the families from father to son as the most important heirlooms. There could be no greater insult or thievery than to steal a song from a family, and whenever someone tried to do that it created a big crisis in the tribe. One may scoff at the place of religion in the whaling activities of the Makahs, but the fact remains that they were able to beach the giant animals with tools and boats that one would have considered totally inadequate for such activity. We can only conclude that with their songs and equipment, the Makahs had devised an activity that was partially spiritual and partially economic.

What surprised the white men when they came to understand the Makah whalers was the fact that they had portioned off areas of the ocean into exclusive family plots. These areas were owned as property, passed down from father to son. People had heard of dividing the lands by constructing fences and setting up boundaries but no one had even dreamed it possible to divide the ocean. But the Makahs did it. They would sight from the various landmarks on the shore and establish where lines would intersect if drawn on a map. A Makah could take his canoe almost out of sight of land, and by sighting to the different outstanding landmarks such as points of land, high mountains, or river entrances, he could tell exactly where his family’s whaling area was. No one used a compass or other device to mark out the areas, because from the time each boy was old enough to ride in the canoes he was taught where the fishing areas were and who owned them.

The Chinooks who lived along the Columbia River had a unique manner of catching fish in the large river. They would construct a net some five hundred feet long and nearly fifteen feet in depth that would be placed in the river, going nearly all the way across in some places. As the salmon run began, they would gradually pull the net around to catch the fish and then ease it toward the shore. When they reached shallow water, the fishermen would go into the net with mallets and clubs, killing the fish and throwing them up on the shore. This technique involved many men and was useful only when there was a large run of salmon on the river, but in the Columbia especially the salmon runs in the old days were incredibly large, and so the device worked very well.

Perhaps the most exciting type of fishing done by the Indians of the region was flounder fishing. The flounder, a flat fish that tends to rest on the bottom of mudflats, loved those along the sound. The Indian fishermen would simply wade into the mudflats until they stepped on a flounder, and then they would stand on the fish long enough to spear it with a sharp stick. The method sounds simple, but the sight of a hundred Indians all standing in mudflats jabbing sharp sticks at their feet was enough to frighten the whites who watched them. It was difficult to believe that the Indians rarely speared their own feet with all this frenzied activity, since the spectacle was one of continuous motion amid the muddiest water in the region.

With such an intimate relationship between the people and the fish, it is not surprising that the chief religious ceremony of the Indians of the area was the first-salmon ceremony, at the beginning of a salmon run. During congressional hearings on fishing in 1964, Frank Wright, then chairman of the Puyallup tribe, described the first-salmon ceremony of his tribe:

Since salmon was 80 to 90 percent of their diet the Puyallup Indians held a cultural festival or religious ceremony in honor of the salmon. At this ceremony they barbecued the first salmon of the run over an open fire. It was then parceled out to all, in small morsels or portions so all could participate. Doing this, all bones were saved intact. Then, in a torchbearing, dancing, chanting, and singing procession they proceeded to the river, where they cast the skeleton of the salmon into the stream with its head pointing upstream, symbolic of a spawning salmon, so the run of salmon would return a thousandfold.

The various tribal ceremonies were variations of this basic ceremony. The Indians universally cut the salmon lengthwise and not crosswise, for fear that the salmon would get insulted and never return to the stream. Perhaps there was some wisdom in this belief, since the cut lengthwise of a large salmon is much cleaner and easier than a crosswise cut.

Barbecuing the salmon was almost universal among the tribes also. Even when the whites came into the region, the Indians refused to sell the first run of salmon to them for fear that they would boil the fish rather than barbecue or broil it. The religious nature of this ceremony is well defined, because the usual manner of preparing the salmon was by boiling in a large box using heated stones to provide the heat for cooking. But by barbecuing, the spirit of the salmon was allowed to rise with the smoke of the fire and observe the thankfulness of the people.

When the first white men came to the Puget Sound area, they saw at certain points along the shore a series of tall poles and wondered what purpose they served. They were greatly surprised when they were told that the Indians used them to hunt ducks and other waterfowl. At night, the Indians would spread large nets across these poles, and at a given signal they would come out of the darkness along the shore carrying lighted torches and yelling. The birds, frightened by the noise and lights, would fly off, enmeshing themselves in the net and falling to the ground. Quickly the Indians would gather them as they lay stunned by their encounter with the net, and the harvest would be complete. It was a unique way to hunt birds and depended, of course, upon a perennial surplus of birds.

The upland tribes who lived in the foothills of the Cascades employed a similar method to hunt deer and elk. They would hunt at night using torches of pine heavily daubed with pitch. Coming on a deer or elk, the sudden light of the torch would startle the animal, causing it to freeze long enough for the hunters to get a clear shot at it. It seems ironic that the Indians were the first jacklighters of deer, in view of the discredit that the practice receives today among hunters.

The Indian technology extended to woodworking also, and in this art the Indians of the Pacific Northwest may have been unsurpassed. The lands of the Puget Sound area have a great deal of western red cedar, a unique type of wood that, though easily split, has great tensile strength. The bark of the tree consists of two distinct layers, and the soft, downy inner layer was used instead of cotton or wool for pillows, weaving materials, and other domestic purposes. Indian women were very skillful in shredding the bark into thread-size strips for weaving and sewing, and many of the clothes they wore were of woven cedar bark.

Much of the wood used in houses and for domestic utensils was of cedar, although other species of trees were often used for their specific, desirable properties. Cooking vessels were generally cedar boxes made watertight. The cedar would be split into an appropriate shape, steamed until it was somewhat flexible, shaped, fastened with wooden pegs, and then allowed to dry. In drying, the wood would contract and close together, making the pot or kettle entirely waterproof.

The bows used by hunters were taken from living trees, and expert bowmakers would spend hours walking in the forest looking for a tree with the proper bend in its grain to make a good bow. Usually the yew or another hardwood was chosen for the bow because of its great flexibility and strength. A glue was made from the skin of the dog salmon, and decorations were attached to the bow, making it not only a very powerful weapon but a work of art. This glue, one of the greatest natural adhesives known, could also be used to mend split or broken weapons.

Canoes varied in length from five or six feet for a river canoe used for ferrying to fifty or more feet for a large oceangoing canoe for whaling. The whaling canoes were very sleek and designed for fast, silent travel over the waves. They were made of hollowed cedar logs with the outsides burned to eliminate the splinters. They were then sanded down, using the skin of the dogfish, or shark, if available; a series of curved grooves were made along the length of the canoe outside. These were designed to turn aside waves in a sequence and were considered an engineering triumph by everyone who saw them.

Cargo canoes were somewhat shorter and much broader than oceangoing canoes. As the canoe was being hollowed out, boiling water was placed in it and the whole frame was stretched out to a width of nearly six feet. The finished canoe could carry a great deal of material, and wooden boxes for carrying goods were made with slanting sides to enable them to fit almost exactly into the canoe bottoms. Indian canoes were probably the first container ships in the world.

When I was teaching at Western Washington State College, I encouraged students to visit the reservations and learn what they could from the old Indians. One student became very well acquainted with an old Yakima man, and the old man told him a story about the making of the large canoes.

It seems that in some of the tribes, ownership of a canoe was a religious responsibility, and in order to become a canoe owner a young man would have to fast and meditate in the wilderness for many days. He was taught to sing a certain song as he walked through the woods, asking a tree to bless him with the ownership of a canoe.

If the prayers of the young man were answered, a tree would choose him to be a canoe owner and it would sing back to him. Then the young man would make a camp at the bottom of the tree and stay there to learn all the responsibilities of canoe ownership. When the tree was satisfied that the young man was worthy of having a canoe, it would teach him how to fell it and how to trim its branches. Then the tree would teach the young man a special song, and as the young man returned to his village singing the song, the tree would follow him down the mountainside to the village, where it would be made into a canoe.

The legend seems hard to believe, but the technique of making a fifty-foot canoe lends credence to it. A lot of the western red cedar of which the canoes were made grew miles from the shores where the villages were. The Indians did not have saws or axes or indeed any metal tools whatsoever. They also lacked horses or oxen to drag the large tree from the mountains to the beach and roads over which a tree fifty feet long could be brought. When one considers today that modern loggers sometimes have to use helicopters to get the same cedar logs out of the mountains, the story of how Indians got their canoes takes on added significance. I am still not sure about the actual process of getting the large trees to the beach, but it seems to me that the Indian story is as viable an explanation as any other I have heard.