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Puget's Sound: A Narrative of Early Tacoma and the Southern Sound
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641 pages14 hours
Summary
With the same ability to make personalities and events come alive that characterizes his classic Skid Road, Murray Morgan here tells the colorful story of Tacoma, the City of Destiny, and southern Puget Sound, where many major events of Washington s history took place. Drawing upon original journals and reports, Morgan builds Puget s Sound around individuals, interweaving portraits of well-known historical figures with those who are more obscure but have a special significance: a colorful parade of saloonkeepers, politicians, union organizers, schemers, and swindlers. Morgan begins his account with the landing of Captain Vancouver in Puget Sound in 1792 and ends with the founding of Fort Lewis in 1916, the year the author was born. Between are the arrival of the transcontinental railroad, the boom-and-bust of lumber mills, the anti-Chinese riots of 1885, and more unique Northwest history that will intrigue both new arrivals and longtime residents.
With a new introduction by historian and historic preservationist Michael Sean Sullivan, this redesigned edition of Puget s Sound brings new life to Morgan s landmark history of the South Sound and the early days of Tacoma.
Publisher: University of Washington PressReleased: Nov 7, 2018ISBN: 9780295744629Format: book
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Puget's Sound - Murray Morgan
Index
INTRODUCTION
Murray Morgan marveled at the history of the Pacific Northwest his entire life, and during the second half of the twentieth century he became its best-known and most widely read interpreter. In his writing, classroom lectures, and storytelling, he invoked a past that seemed almost like a form of media. Murray’s prose seemed to both record and project history through a cinematic lens.
Drawing on his thorough research, he could open a scene in his writing or speaking that would provide his audience with a solid establishing shot—the time, setting, and human context for the story to follow. Then he would add a dimension of color with atmospheric details, such as the weather that day (which he would always record during his research) or the landscape view he knew from visiting the location himself. He would target the senses with a comment on the smell of smoked salmon being served or the low lighting of a gas jet in the room. In his presentation of history, sails flap, cigar smoke wafts, and the reader becomes the viewer, an engaged participant.
A journalist by education and by trade, Murray understood how to set up a compelling human episode that begged for investigation and resolution. Murray worked at the level of human experience and exchange that translates easily over time. His journalistic skills were evident as he introduced and defined characters, and he was gifted at finding a storyline or plot to place them in and carry the reader along. He also always knew how to identify an ending—or at least a satisfying place to break.
Murray’s sense of history was also infused with his background in radio and the spoken word. His grounded and thoroughly researched historical narratives have a wonderful way of giving voice to characters without inventing dialogue. At times, reading his work is like watching the action of history with a voiceover track. Murray’s writing unfolds with moments that seem saturated with a sense of reality, with characters and events on one dimension and a narration floating and commenting on another.
• • •
To write a history of his own hometown—Tacoma, Washington—Murray Morgan drew on this breadth of talent to frame a narrative that began and ended before he was born. Puget’s Sound: A Narrative of Early Tacoma and the Southern Sound was his third and final major work on the history of the most northwestern region of the contiguous United States, being preceded in 1951 by Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle and in 1956 by The Last Wilderness, an ambling history of the Olympic Peninsula.
Puget’s Sound came much later, in 1979. It begins at the end of the eighteenth century and follows a story that runs up against the edge of Murray’s own lifetime. This is also his most personal historical narrative, and what makes it his best work, his masterpiece, in my mind, is the element of complete familiarity he brings to the story that he was a part of his entire life.
Murray Morgan was born in Tacoma in 1916, a time when twentieth-century modernity was erasing the physical remnants of an American frontier past. The storytelling and mythologizing ramped up as railroads romanticized the Pacific Northwest in colorful tourism campaigns and dime novels, while pulp magazines turned figures like fur trapper Jim Bridger and missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman into pioneer superheroes and American martyrs. The world around young Murray was saturated in the first-person dramas, sharply drawn characters, and powerful natural settings that would propel the region’s recorded history.
Murray’s father, Henry Victor Morgan, was a celebrated Unitarian pastor and stylish orator who mined the past for his lively, inspirational sermons and thoughtful writing. His mother, Ada Camille Laine Morgan, was a poet, playwright, and naturalist who found a constant sense of marvel in the Pacific Northwest landscape. Together they brought the stories and history of the region into the South Sound home Murray grew up in and, as he recounts often in his writing, introduced him to the witnesses, historians, and participants who populated a not-too-distant local past.
It was as if history was keeping him company. Even when he left home to pursue a life as a journalist, writer, and historian himself, the backstory of the Pacific Northwest seemed to follow him wherever he went.
In 1936, as a journalism major and soon-to-be editor of the student newspaper at the University of Washington, Murray traveled to Germany with his father for the Olympic Games, where the UW eight-man rowing team was representing the United States. Seated in the grandstands and wearing a borrowed letterman’s sweater from UW, Murray watched the Boys in the Boat
win the gold medal and disappoint the onlooking Adolf Hitler in one of the most memorable moments in sports history.
Later, after short stints as a reporter in Hoquiam and Seattle, Murray married Emma Rosa Northcutt on March 5, 1939, in his father’s Tacoma church, and the young couple headed back to Germany for their honeymoon and some paddling all their own. Their romantic kayak trip down the Danube was abruptly interrupted by Germany’s invasion of Poland and the start of the Second World War. The Morgans got a taste of wartime uncertainty and intrigue, including a night in a Bucharest jail, before returning to the Pacific Northwest in time for Murray to cover the war and local news as a reporter in Spokane and then Grays Harbor.
In the fall of 1941, Murray and Rosa moved to New York so he could pursue a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University. With the entry of the United States into the war following the December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor, Murray was drawn into the rapidly growing news market for print and radio. While still taking classes at Columbia, he found himself with simultaneous jobs at Time magazine, the New York Herald Tribune, and CBS. Working nights rewriting dispatches for CBS Radio, Murray met and shared stories with another Washington boy—Edward R. Murrow. He was in the company of history, and he knew it. Writing to his friend Otto Goldschmid about the worldly Murrow in late December 1941, Murray quipped, He definitely knows what’s playing.
After Murray graduated with honors in 1942, he received a Pulitzer Fellowship that took him and Rosa to Lake Patzcuaro, Mexico. Murray’s draft notice came in December 1942. He joined the US Army Signal Corps and was sent to the Aleutian Islands. Writing to Rosa from the impossibly isolated station on Adak Island, Murray commented on the acquaintance he made with the editor of the local military newspaper, the Adakian. It was the detective writer Dashiell Hammett, who had a Tacoma connection of his own. He had met his wife, Josie, in Tacoma in 1920 while recovering from tuberculosis at the Cushman Hospital, where she was a nurse. Hammett wrote Tacoma into an important episode in his masterpiece of noir, The Maltese Falcon, but what he and Murray Morgan talked about during their time in Alaska is a mystery.
Murray’s largely idle days stationed in an Aleutian Island Quonset hut inspired his first book-length work of Pacific Northwest history, Bridge to Russia, Those Amazing Aleutians. It necessitated a close but long-distance working partnership with Rosa, who had access to the major libraries and historical records he needed for the book. The harmony of their work, through wartime letters over an extended distance, became a signature of the books, articles, and essays that he wrote.
At the end of the war, Murray and Rosa settled in the South Sound and rented a house on Maury Island where he began making a living as a writer. Murray’s first works of fiction, a mystery novel called Day of the Dead along with a second novel called The Viewless Winds, were published during the year they lived on the island. In 1947 Bridge to Russia was published by E. P. Dutton in New York. It included restored sections that had been removed by wartime censors from the drafts he sent home to Rosa. That same year Murray and Rosa bought a Prohibition-era dance pavilion on deeply forested Trout Lake, about eight miles east of Tacoma. They transformed it into the home where their daughter, Lane, was born in 1949 and where they lived the rest of their lives.
Still a young man in his mid-thirties and dedicated to his first love of writing, Murray was drawn to the radio side of journalism and political commentary. The influences of his soft-toned preacher father and the unforgettable night job at CBS during the war—with the echo of Edward R. Murrow in the background—steered him and his distinctive, precise voice into a daily morning radio program on Tacoma’s KMO radio station with his friend Jim Faber beginning in 1951. He moved to his own show on KTNT in the mid-1950s and began teaching journalism courses at the University of Puget Sound.
For almost twenty years, Murray narrated the news of the city, providing audio clips of politicians and newsmakers he recorded himself and then followed with his own journalistic observations and comments. He was the play-by-play voice over a raucous period in Tacoma’s history with Joseph McCarthy–style corruption hearings, vitriolic city hall recall campaigns, and even flying saucer hoaxes. Murray’s wry sense of humor and gift for details and understatement made him a reasoned institution in regional broadcasting.
While his broadcasting and academic work continued, Murray devoted an immense amount of time and thought to his love of history. He wrote and published The Dam in 1954, a history that reads like an eco-thriller about the building of Grand Coulee Dam. That was followed by The Northwest Corner: The Pacific Northwest, Its Past and Present in 1962 and One Man’s Gold Rush: A Klondike Album in 1967, about Eric A. Hegg’s photographs and journeys to the goldfields. Mixed in were books on Seattle World’s Fair, the World Health Organization (which took him, Rosa, and Lane on a United Nations–sponsored international tour), and Oakland, California’s children’s hospital.
Puget’s Sound is Murray’s most intensely researched work, and its narrative closely follows the documents and records that he and Rosa explored in putting it together. Rosa was a perfect complement to Murray—a resourceful tracker of events and people, an innate judge of character and human interest, and a relentless mystery solver. She knew how to find and follow a good story and knew when her source was wandering away from the storyline or veracity.
It was Rosa who also contended most directly with the absence of women in the public records and research materials needed to document the early period in the book’s narrative. Her influence on Puget’s Sound becomes evident in the details that come from the letters, diaries, and family papers of Tacoma’s pioneer women, including Rachel Kindred, Rebecca Carr, and Alice Blackwell. It was Rosa’s secret source for just the kind of fine-grained detail and social equity that Murray’s writing depended on.
Puget’s Sound was published in 1979 and was followed by more collaborative works, many of them richly illustrated, including a book on Seattle’s pictorial history with Lane and historian Paul Dorpat, the story of the massive St. Paul and Tacoma Lumber Company on the Commencement Bay tide flats, Seattle’s Pike Place Market, and the photographic revisiting of his early Tacoma history called South on the Sound: An Illustrated History of Tacoma and Pierce County that was co-written with Rosa (and the only book on which she shares the byline). Murray wrote more than twenty books and an uncounted and uncatalogued number of articles, newspaper columns, radio commentaries, and lectures. His work ended with his passing in June 2000.
• • •
When Puget’s Sound appeared, Murray Morgan was the region’s best-known historian and storyteller due in no small part to the popularity of Skid Road, his book on the early history of Seattle. The wait for a similar work on Tacoma was long for locals in the South Sound, but it was something he was known to be working on while teaching his popular Pacific Northwest history course at Tacoma Community College from 1969 to 1981.
In 1976 the United States celebrated the bicentennial of American independence, and Tacoma, like many other cities in the country, was rediscovering its own history and connection with the colonial period. Three years later, when Puget’s Sound appeared, its abrupt narrative start on May 19, 1792—with British characters sailing into the first scene—was right in tune with lingering bicentennial interest and the current public infatuation with history in general.
At the same time, urban renewal policies that placed little value on the past and favored the replacement of historic buildings and neighborhoods were ending in Murray’s closely watched Tacoma. The departure of the Fortune 500 Weyerhaeuser Corporation offices, along with the withering of downtown retail businesses due to the Tacoma Mall just off the freeway, raised awareness and activism directed toward historic preservation. Beginning in 1977, the National Park Service conducted an ambitious survey of the city’s potential landmarks and historic districts that resulted in newfound attention directed at the commercial districts around Union Station, the elaborate old city hall building, and the residential neighborhoods around Stadium High School. Politically popular municipal ordinances were passed that protected Tacoma’s historic places, and several local history books, pamphlets, and articles were published by small presses, governments, and nonprofit organizations. It was in this context, surrounded by the community’s reinvigorated interest in history, that Murray finally published Puget’s Sound.
The early chapters in Puget’s Sound reflect Murry’s fascination with the period of European exploration in the North Pacific, a time when scientific curiosity and cultural encounter were the driving forces behind recorded historic events. It gave him a chance to research and write about distinct foreign characters in a locale he knew intimately and to explore for himself the fine details of their scientific and cartographic discoveries rather than their sweeping military and political objectives. He could tap into what he knew best: the way the South Sound tide could turn against an oarsman or the way the mood could change between Native and visitor over the taking of shellfish on a beach.
It was also a chance to tour the geography of the inland waters, conifer forests, and coastal mountains that captivated the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mapmakers as much as they did the author. The narrative pace of the early Eyes of
chapters smartly mimics the suddenness with which Europeans moved from explorers to occupiers of the inland waters.
Puget’s Sound takes an important departure from virtually all prior Pacific Northwest histories by waiting to fully introduce the Indigenous people and their values until the arrival of Governor Isaac Stevens when Washington Territory separated from Oregon Territory in 1853. Instead of compartmentalizing the established culture and presence of Native people in the chronological foreground of the book, where conventional histories of his time discussed them within the context of flora and fauna, Murray brings them into the story as a contrasting force to—and distinct cultural voice from—Stevens, the engineer, soldier, and frontier diplomat. The conflicts and injustices that result are framed and described in an impartial journalistic style animated by the author’s gift for converting written records back into real life and believable settings.
Some of the fairest historical observations in Puget’s Sound surface in the treatment of events surrounding the 1854 Medicine Creek Treaty discussed in the chapter The Engineer and the Indians.
Murray’s facts and the described cultural framework around the treaty period hold up well for a work written nearly forty years ago and just after the Boldt decision on Native fishing rights was handed down by the federal court in Tacoma. That landmark 1974 decision, which affirmed tribal rights to 50 percent of salmon and steelhead fisheries and comanagement responsibilities for the fisheries’ natural resources, drew heavily on the Medicine Creek Treaty and would have been in the minds of many readers. Demonstrating the continuing relevance and influence of the historic episodes he explores, Murray points out in his Notes on Sources
:
The best summary of the [Medicine Creek] treaty making is to be found not in a book, but, rather, in Judge George H. Boldt’s lengthy decision in the case of United States of America v. State of Washington filed in U.S. District Court, Western District of Washington at Tacoma, January 11, 1974. The Boldt decision, along with the exhibits by plaintiff and defendant, constitute an exceptionally detailed picture of conditions in Washington Territory shortly after its separation from Oregon.
Murray moves through the complicated context of the treaties, subsequent war, and cruel judicial consequences. He makes a concerted effort to represent the Native experience but, perhaps limited by his era and the sources traditionally available to historians like him, the Native story is often anonymized or filtered through the voices of sympathetic white men. For example, he uses the words of pioneer jurist James Wickersham to summarize the injustice of the Medicine Creek Treaty: a contract obtained through over-persuasion and deceit; through promises not in the record; by imposition upon minds unaccustomed to written contracts; a contract obtained from the weak by the strong … unfair, unjust, ungenerous and illegal.
As Puget’s Sound works its way into one of the most mythologized periods in the history of the Northwest, the era of fur trappers and Oregon-bound wagon trains, Murray provides both an unromantic political framework for immigration and a well-chosen album of journey stories and character studies. The Eyes of Exploitation
chapter is a layered adventure into the lives of legendary Pacific Northwest figures like John McLoughlin and his complicated ties to British diplomacy and empire building. Murray combs through the tightly knotted interplay between the Hudson’s Bay Company fur traders and newly arrived overland settlers who challenged British claims in Oregon Country by being American. Murray’s ear for a good quote is obvious. He cites the United States’ underdog strategy in the geopolitical contest, as stated on the floor of Congress about whole families immigrating over the Oregon Trail: We will outbreed them.
As Murray fills in the backstory of the Americanization of the Pacific Northwest before the Civil War, he singles out the remarkable journey of the George Washington Bush–Mike Simmons wagon party, the first Americans to settle in the South Sound. Bush was of African descent, and his family’s arrival in Oregon Country was a divisive issue in the days of slave states and free states. The choice of the entire party—a group of about forty men, women, and children—to follow the Bush family out of Oregon and into the unresolved joint occupation country north of the Columbia River is a study in personal loyalty and collective risk. The episode was also a prophetic example of how Washington and Oregon would differ after the boundary with the British empire was set at the forty-ninth parallel and American empire builders cast their gaze on the Pacific Northwest.
Murray had a decades-long fascination with the North Pacific fur trade and left boxes of research materials and an unfinished manuscript on the subject. His interest started with his Aleutian Island book during the Second World War, but it was certainly energized by the luminous Journal of Occurrences at Nisqually House kept by the Hudson’s Bay Company doctor William Fraser Tolmie. Tolmie had an inquisitive mind and was a scientist spellbound by empirical knowledge and the natural world around him. He made the first recorded attempt to summit Mount Rainier, learned to speak several Native languages, and supplied provisions on credit to the first Americans to settle in Washington Territory. His daily record of events at Fort Nisqually, including the operation of the British-owned Puget Sound Agricultural Company long after Puget Sound became American territory, created a window into just the kind of person Murray was fascinated by.
And the fur trade was certainly not the last fascinating industry that Murray would encounter in his research. The big story from Tacoma’s early history was the arrival of the Northern Pacific transcontinental railroad following the Civil War and the selection of Commencement Bay as its West Coast terminal. Whole libraries about the western railroads have been written before and since Puget’s Sound was published, but Murray’s journalistic skills that allowed him to sort out the human stories and tense episodes that shaped the era from a Pacific Northwest perspective are perhaps the most compelling and best-researched sections of the book.
In a city born with the coming of the railroad and infused with its social, technological, and economic influences well into the twentieth century, writing about railroads has always been risky business. Seemingly every family, business, and social organization had ties and stories and versions of stories connected to the railroad and its client enterprises in Tacoma (e.g., the Weyerhaeuser Corporation’s origins in the Northern Pacific Railroad land grants). Murray and Rosa dove right in and immersed themselves in the complicated subject matter—not just the monumental saga of constructing the transportation system but its political, environmental, ethical, and ethnic consequences.
Maintaining a storyteller’s footing while unscrambling the many sidetracks in Pacific Northwest railroad history is one of the treasures that is easily overlooked in Puget’s Sound. Without steering too sharply into well-marked digressions, the narrative presents a wide-screen exploration of how the building of the Northern Pacific Railroad brought immigrants and investment to the Puget Sound region, along with aspirations of statehood, modern communication and technology, and winners and losers.
Tacoma’s nineteenth-century encounters with winning and losing are smartly explored and described in the middle chapters where Murray fleshes out many colorful and sometimes painful biographies of the best-known names in Tacoma’s past—figures like Charles B. Wright, Thea Foss, Nelson Bennett, and Frederick Law Olmsted. One of the darkest and most cited incidents in Tacoma’s early history is recounted in the chapter The Chinese Must Go.
It reads like a modern minute-by-minute news account of intolerance and mob mentality, chillingly played out by some of the city’s most prominent citizens.
Murray’s knack for writing biography is on full display during the railroad era, and he humanizes the clash between technology and environment that came with the iron age of steam. The story of Thea Foss and her Norwegian immigrant family coming to Tacoma in 1889 is a fascinating sketch of a character who built a legendary maritime company in the early 1900s and was transformed into the magazine folk hero and movie character Tugboat Annie.
Puget’s Sound draws to a close with the arrival of the twentieth century, and as Tacoma’s population and skyline grow, the scale of the story Murray is telling begins to taper off and fade into a place of familiar landmarks and recent memories. The final chapters provide an inclusive scan of Tacoma’s physical and political shape during the century’s early decades, but the intimacy and well-studied fine detail of the earlier story become blurred by the velocity of Tacoma’s change. It seems to be outrunning its own history, and Murray feels it in his words.
The last chapter is titled One Man’s Tacoma,
and in the first sentence it shifts from past tense into present with a first-person perspective.
I was born in Tacoma in 1916 …
And from there Murray moves in his own voice, back and forth between the events and people in his historical narrative and the Tacoma he observed during his own lifetime. It is a remarkable and very personal report on the time he remembered interwoven with the characters, places, and episodes from a Tacoma past that he studied so ardently and wrote about with such care.
He was more interested in writing about Tacoma than changing it,
Lane Morgan once told me about her father. It was her way of separating his profession as a journalist from his passion as a historian and teacher. As a reporter and professional narrator of daily events and news stories, Murray was forthright, scrupulous, and sometimes impatient, but with friends and students he seemed most comfortable just waiting to see what would happen.
With Rosa and an expansive circle of friends and students (myself gratefully among them), Murray closely followed the events of the day, the unfolding of news, and the shifting behavior of people and society. It was fuel for living room conversation and wit, the source of modern comparisons in his lectures, and the raw material for his many friends in the arts and literary world. Murray usually chose to not judge the present too severely. To me he always seemed to be putting the present and recent past aside for a while, with his gaze over yesterday’s shoulder, drawn by the more distant past in greater risk of being lost or forgotten.
• • •
During the early 1990s, when the University of Washington Tacoma was just getting started by offering classes in the Perkins Building at Eleventh and A Streets, I was teaching a course on Pacific Northwest history. Once a student of Murray’s, I used Puget’s Sound as one of the textbooks and for a couple years had the unique opportunity to have him talk to my class. The first year he and Rosa visited I expected him to discuss episodes and themes from the book, but, instead, he started out by talking about the building we were in and a parade of events that had unfolded in and around it.
Sam Perkins, who built and self-named the landmark building between 1907 and 1909, owned and operated two of the city’s daily newspapers from the eight-story structure. It was surrounded by the federal courthouse, the Tacoma Building that formerly served as headquarters for the Weyerhaeuser Company, and the monumental steel bridge that connects the city with the port and tide flats.
Murray started with stories about the penthouse apartment the politically connected Perkins kept for his powerful and colorful guests on the floor just above us, moved down through the newsrooms and news stories that were written on the middle floors below my classroom, and ran out of time talking about the bloody clash between waterfront workers and the National Guard that played out in the street just in front of the building in July of 1935. He tied the whole hour of storytelling together by calling the building a lazy reporter’s dream
because the news seemed to come to the paper and happen just outside the windows.
Then, like a footnote, he said, That was the first time in my life I smelled tear gas.
Murray was downtown and downwind that July 12 in 1935, and when he walked over to that classroom window almost sixty years later, there wasn’t a student in the room who didn’t look out with him. Murray brought an immediacy to history in that moment, something he had a wonderful gift for doing in his writing and storytelling. He made the sound of footsteps over our heads and the views framed by the century-old oak windows in the room seem like part of Tacoma’s history and the ongoing story he was telling. He was sharing his cinematic view, and we were in the shot.
From a cultural standpoint, most people believe that where they live matters, that their shared history is important, and that their collective wisdom is drawn from a well of human experience that has been played out over time within their own sense of place. They share a common story and feel like participants in its continuation. And if they are fortunate, that story is well remembered, carefully protected, and thoughtfully retold. And if they are really fortunate, they have in their midst a storyteller like Murray Morgan, and he writes a history like Puget’s Sound.
• • •
MICHAEL SEAN SULLIVAN is a public historian, writer, and historic preservationist. He has taught Pacific Northwest history at the University of Washington Tacoma for more than twenty years and, as a graduate student, studied with Murray Morgan.
PUGET’S
SOUND
The Eyes of Discovery …
LATE ON THE SUNNY AFTERNOON OF SATURDAY, MAY 19, 1792, His Britannic Majesty’s sloop-of-war Discovery dropped anchor in 210 feet of water over sandy bottom in mid-channel between Blake and Bainbridge islands three miles west of Alki Point. Three hundred years after the European discovery of America, white men had reached the area of Tacoma and Seattle.
From the deck of the three-year-old ship, George Vancouver studied his surroundings. He was a dour man of Dutch descent, little given to poetic expression, but he was moved by the splendor of the sea in the forest, which he was first to describe. The waterway lay cradled between mountain ranges. To the east, the Cascades in various rugged and grotesque shapes rear their heads above the lofty pine trees that appear to compose one uninterrupted forest between us and the snow range.
To the west lay the ridge of mountains on which mount Olympus is situated, whose rugged summits are seen no less fancifully towering over the forest.
The land nearest the Discovery was a finger of sandstone pointing eastward, its surface a beautiful meadow covered with luxurient herbage.
Indian women were digging bulbs with fire-hardened sticks. At the far edge of the meadow, against the dark forest, dimly seen from the ship, were scattered make-shift shelters formed by covering a loose frame of poles with rush mats.
This was a summer encampment. The Indians—Suquamish—had come to gather food. They paid remarkably little attention to the Discovery, the first ship to visit their area. Although several canoes were drawn up on the rocky beach below a low bluff, only one was launched. Two naked men paddled the blunt-nosed dugout as it circled the hundred-foot-long, copper-sheathed warship, slowly and at a most respectful distance. For a long time the paddlers ignored the calls of greeting, the beckoning gestures, and the displays of trinkets by the English sailors. Then, suddenly, they turned toward the warship paddling swiftly, threw on deck the pelt of a small animal, and dug hard for shore.
Late in the afternoon Vancouver had himself rowed ashore. He landed in a small cove about half a mile in width, encircled by compact shores, with a cluster of rocks nearly in its center, little worthy of further notice.
No Indians approached the landing party, nor did the Englishmen climb the low bluff to visit the natives. The setting sun haloed the crest of the Olympics and washed the Cascades with afterglow as Vancouver returned to his ship.
The thirty-four-year-old captain retired to his cabin at the stern of the vessel to plan the next day’s activities. The general mission of his expedition was to fill in the blank spaces in the chart of the coast of Northwest America begun by Captain James Cook in 1778, a voyage Vancouver had accompanied as a midshipman. The formal instructions given him by the Office of the High Admiral of Great Britain and Ireland defined Vancouver’s first task as acquiring accurate information with respect to the nature & extent of water communication which may tend in any considerable degree to facilitate an intercourse, for the purpose of commerce, between the North West Coast of America and the country on the opposite side of the continent occupied by his Majesty’s subjects.
This was the last flicker of Europe’s centuries-old vision of a Northwest Passage, a navigable waterway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific through the inconvenient bulk of North America. The Admiralty had long since despaired of discovering such a route for ships south of Bering Strait but still hoped to find a system of rivers and lakes by which the canoe fleets of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company could carry trade goods and furs across the continent.
British merchant captains who visited Northwest America in the sea otter trade that commenced after Cook’s voyage had reported the existence of the Strait of Juan de Fuca leading toward the interior. The Admiralty instructed Vancouver to explore it, reminding him that the discovery of a new communication between any such sea or strait and any river running into or from the Lake of the Woods [in northern Minnesota] would be particularly useful.
These orders had brought Vancouver to the Sound. His hope was that this inland sea might swing eastward through the Cascades or at least be fed by a river that did. But there were complications to exploring it. The waterway just ahead was split by a headland: a broad channel to port slanting southeast, a narrow arm to starboard leading south. These were constricted waters and the 330-ton Discovery drew fifteen feet. Vancouver decided it would be prudent to leave the ship at anchor awaiting the arrival of its small consort, the Chatham, which was making a reconnaissance along the eastern shore. He would send a party to explore the southern Sound in small boats although the execution of such a service in open boats would necessarily be extremely laborious, and expose those so employed to numerous dangerous and unpleasant situations.
Having made his decision, Vancouver seated himself on a chest that doubled as chair, laid paper on the slanted surface of his writing box, and took up a quill pen. I like to imagine the scene: the ship rocking gently, rigging creaking, small waves slapping, gulls mewing as they wheeled on steady wings. Somewhere out in the darkness a loon laughed. In the cabin, the soft light of the whale oil lamp; ashore, the flare of the Indian fires.
Memo (to Lieutenant Peter Puget)
Concerning a further Examination of the Inlet we are in Necessary and capable of being executed by the Boats. You are at 4 o’Clock tomorrow Morning to proceed with the Launch accompanied by Mr. Whidbey in the Cutter (whose Directions You will follow in such points as appertain to the Surveying of the Shore etc) being provided with a Weeks Provision you will proceed up the said Inlet keeping the Starboard or Continental shore on board. Having proceeded three Days up the Inlet, should it then appear to you of that Extent that you cannot finally determine its limits and return to the Ship by Thursday next, You are then to return on board, reporting to me an account of your Proceedings and also noticing the appearance of the country, its Productions and Inhabitants, if varying from what we have already seen.
Given on board his Britannic Majesty’s Sloop Discovery
GEO VANCOUVER
In the pre-dawn darkness of Sunday, May 20, the longboats were stowed with muskets, pistols, cutlasses, powder and ball, presents and trading goods, tents, navigating equipment, survey equipment, food, and wine for the officers. The launch was clinker built, twenty feet long and broad enough to seat five pairs of oarsmen, two abreast; it had two demountable masts which, when in place, carried lug-sails. The cutter was smaller, eighteen feet, with six oars and a single mast. Neither had cabin or decking, though a canvas awning astern gave the officers some protection from the weather.
They were a young lot, accustomed to hardship. Nearly all of the enlisted men were in their teens or early twenties. Second Lieutenant Peter Puget was twenty-seven or twenty-eight—his exact birthday is unknown—and had spent half his life in the Navy, having entered service as a midshipman in 1778. Puget had attracted Vancouver’s attention while serving under Captain James Vashon in the West Indies after the Revolutionary War. Joseph Whidbey, master on the Discovery, was about Puget’s age, had served under Vancouver in the West Indies, and was the best man with instruments on the expedition. A fine mathematician, Whidbey had perfected the method of surveying from small boats. His system was to land on conspicuous points, take compass bearings of other prominent landmarks, and, whenever possible, make observations of the sun at noon to determine latitude. As the boats cruised between landings, the officers sketched and took notes. On return to the Discovery, the data were put down on a smooth map and tied into the charts already drawn.
The oldest man in the longboat party was Archibald Menzies, thirty-eight, a spare, craggy Scot who had visited the Northwest Coast in 1787 as physician aboard the sea otter vessel Prince of Wales and now represented the Royal Society, Britain’s leading scientific organization, as botanist. He had asked to accompany the Puget party though their mode of procedure in surveying Cruizes was not very favorable for my pursuits as it afforded me so little time on shore … yet it was the most eligible I could at this time adopt in obtaining a general knowledge of the Country.
It was still dark when the longboats pulled away from the Discovery, heading south. A small island (Blake) loomed dim, ragged with fir, against the eastern sky. By the time they entered the chute of Colvos Passage, the Cascades were silhouetted black against an orange sunrise. The tide was against the oarsmen. Squadrons of coots flipped below the surface as the boats approached with thrashing oars. Gulls circled, crying warnings to their nesting young. Seals surveyed them with round, blank eyes, leaned back, and disappeared, the memory of their closing nostrils lingering like the smile of the Cheshire. Herons lifted from the surf-line on somber wings and, with cries like tearing canvas, settled into the tree tops.
The English were not alone. A small, dark dugout followed them, its two paddlers holding close to the western shore, responding neither to waved handkerchiefs nor to the flourish of fir branches, a sign of peace among Indians farther north.
About eight o’clock the canoe spurted ahead and turned into a narrow cove (Olalla, the place of many berries
). It was time for breakfast. Perhaps the natives would join them. Puget gave orders to enter the inlet. They found the canoe hauled up close to the trees
among the salal and huckleberry, but the Indians had disappeared. Some Beads, Medals and Trinkets were put among their other articles in the Canoe as a Proof that our Intentions were Friendly.
The tide was slack when they again took to the water, but a fair north wind helped them down a channel two miles wide and so deep that though soundings were frequently tried no Bottom could be reached with 40 fthms of line.
The sky was clear, the sun hot. About noon, the shore on their left curved away to the east. They found themselves looking up Dalco Passage into Commencement Bay where Tacoma now stands.
Ah, to have been with those first Europeans to see the bay, see it unimproved, the cone of the slumbering volcano heavy with winter’s snow sweeping up from green tideflat and dark forest to dominate the Cascade barrier. They had sighted the Mountain before—Vancouver first noted it from Marrowstone Point up by Port Townsend on May 8 and named it in honor of an old friend, the myopic Rear Admiral Peter Rainier—but no view of Mount Rainier surpasses this one.
A most charming prospect,
wrote the scientist Menzies. The Mountain appeared close to us though at least 10 to 12 leagues off. The low land at the head of the Bay swelled out very gradually to form a most beautiful and Majestic Mountain of great elevation whose line of ascent appeared equally smooth & gradual on every side with a round obtuse summit covered two thirds of its height down with perpetual Snow as were also the summits of a rugged ridge of Mountains that proceed from it to the Northward.
From the poor vantage of sea level, they puzzled out the pattern of waterways and guessed correctly that the land they had coasted on the port side was an island (which Vancouver later named for Puget’s old commanding officer, James Vashon). Their instructions were clear; they were to follow the shore to starboard, so they did not inspect Commencement Bay, instead entering the Narrows where a most Rapid Tide from the northward hurried us so fast past the shore that we could scarce land.
For five miles the rowboat flotilla rode the tidal stream south. Then an arm opened to westward, Hale Passage, and they entered it only to find to their surprise the current so strong against them they could make little progress. (It sweeps clockwise around Fox Island, the southern shore of the passage.) So Puget’s party put ashore on Point Fosdick to take their noon meal and wait a change of tide. As they dined, two canoes which had followed them through the Narrows passed the picnic spot and disappeared into an inlet farther west.
The Puget party reached the inlet about three in the afternoon. Wollochet Bay, the place of squirting clams, is narrow but about two miles in length. The evergreen forest was interspersed with the cinnamon boles of madronas and the rounded crowns of mountain ash, the first ash they had seen on the Sound. The Soil appeared good & produced a quantity of Gooseberry, Raspberry and Current Berries now highly in Blossom which intermixed with Roses, exhibited a Strange Varigation of Flowers but by no Means unpleasant to the Eye.
Just inside the eastern entrance they detected the house frames of a deserted village, but not until they were leaving the cove did they see Indians. Then they heard a shout from the western shore and saw a party digging clams. When it became clear the English intended to land, the women and children gathered their baskets and scudded into the woods loaded with parcels.
The men came out in two canoes to meet the strangers. They were all naked. In their Persons these People are slenderly made. They wear their Hair long which is quite Black and exceeding Dirty. Both Nose and Ears are perforated, to which were affixed Copper Ornaments & Beads.
This first meeting of the Puyallup-Nisqually people with the whites went well.
We made them some little presents to convince them of our amicable intentions, on which they invited us by signs to land,
says Menzies. The only one we found remaining on the Beach was an old woman without either hut or shelter, setting near their baskets of provisions & stores. The former consisted chiefly of Clams, some of which were dried and smoaked and strung up for the convenience of carrying them about their Necks, but a great number of them were still fresh in the shell, which they readily parted with to our people for buttons, beads & bits of Copper.
The women and children who had hidden in the forest were lured from the woods and were also presented with beads and bits of metal.
When the explorers set out, the Indian men followed in their canoes. Puget made camp about eight o’clock on Green Point, where Hale Passage merges into Carr Inlet. As the seamen erected the marquee, a large field tent, for the officers and smaller shelters for themselves, the Indians lay on their Paddles about one Hundred Yards from the Beach attentively viewing our operations.
The presence of the Indians presented Puget with a bit of a problem. It was customary when making camp to discharge the firearms that had been carried primed and shotted in the boats during the day. But Puget was afraid the shots would alarm the natives. "Finding however they kept hovering about the Boats & being apprehensive they would be endeavouring to commit Depredations during the night, I ordered a Musquet fired but so far was it from intimidating or alarming them they remained stationary, only exclaiming Poh at every report, in way of Derision." Whether the Indians were mocking the whites or merely mimicking the sound remains in doubt. No matter. They soon withdrew and made camp on Fox Island. The night passed without incident.
Peter Puget’s route (circled numbers mark where each night was spent)
The Englishmen awoke Monday morning in light rain and set off without breakfast. The tide ran against them but the rain soon stopped. Flocks of pigeon guillemots cruised the heavy green waters; some dived as the longboats approached but most skittered across the surface in long take-off runs, trailing hoarse whispers of protest as they curved toward land to fire themselves point blank into nest holes in the clay cliffs.
When the English landed on a small island off the mouth of Horsehead Bay (the journals do not make clear whether it was Raft Island or tiny Cutts), a host of crows voiced objection. In vain: the explorers shot some fledglings and breakfasted on young crow cooked on spits over a beach fire. Puget was pleased. He jotted a note that his men’s willingness to eat crow meant the provender in the boats could, if necessary, be stretched across extra days of exploration.
Puget thought the inlet led nowhere, but
… more clearly to ascertain what appeared almost a Certainty, we continued pulling up for its head till near Eleven, when the Beach was close to the Boats. [They were in Burley Lagoon.] In the SW Corner of the Cove was a Small Village among the Pines, and beyond the termination the country had the appearance of a Level Forest, but close to the water it was covered with small Green Bushes. We pulled in toward the Village but seeing a Canoe paddling from it towards us induced us to lay on our Oars to wait their Approach, but neither Copper nor any Article in our Possession had sufficient allurement to get them close to the Boats.
They lay about twenty yards from us and kept continually pointing to the Eastward, expressing of a Wish that our Departure would be more agreeable than our Visit. Knowing all our Solicitations would not bring on a Reciprocal Friendship, & we were only losing time, therefore we left Those Surly Gentlemen and Kept along the Opposite or Southern Shore of this Western Branch. However I did not like to quit these Indians altogether without giving some evident Proof that our Intention was perfectly friendly, & an Expedient was hit on that soon answered our Purpose. Some Copper, Medals, Looking Glasses & other Articles were tied on a Peece of Wood & left floating on the water. We then pulled away to a Small Distance. The Indians immediately Picked them up. Eventually they ventured alongside the Boat but not with that Confidence I could have wished.
These Indians were more Stout than any we have hitherto seen,
and two of the three in the canoe had lost their right eyes and were pitted with smallpox. During the time they were alongside the Boats they appeared exceeding shy and distrustful, notwithstanding our Liberality towards them…. Though they wanted Copper from us they would not part with their Bows or Arrows in Exchange.
The English rowed southward along the western shore of the inlet. The day had cleared; it was hot and muggy, Puget’s thermometer registering 90 degrees, very warm for May. Early in the afternoon they put into a small cove, probably the lagoon at the mouth of Minter Creek, to dine. Here,
says Menzies’ journal, we found two or three small runs of water & was going to haul a small Seine we had in the Launch, but the appearance of six Canoes with about 20 people in them which our shy followers had collected by their voiciferous noise prevented it.
The first confrontation between whites and Indians on Puget Sound occurred in a dispute over fishing. The Salish peoples were not greatly concerned with material possessions but were jealous of songs, prayers, insignia of rank and kinship, and of places where a man had the right to hunt or fish, first or exclusively. Such rights were sacred possessions passed between generations; they could not be sold or traded, though they might in desperation be risked in gambling. Their protection was integral to the Indians’ web of culture, a basic strand in the fabric of society. For someone to violate such rights was stealing; worse than stealing, it was insult, implying a master-slave relationship: I am so much above you I need not even ask.
And here were these
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Reviews
Puget's Sound tells the history of Tacoma, Washington and the surrounding area from first contact with George Vancouver's expedition in 1792 through the start of the 20th century.In grade school, I lived just down the street from Morgan and once interviewed him for a school project. During the interview, me and my partner quickly forgot the questions we had and ended up just listening fascinated as Morgan wove a story of the early history of Puyallup, a nearby Tacoma suburb. I brought along my dad's copy of Puget's Sound for an autograph, but hadn't gotten around to reading it until now, more than twenty years later.Morgan is a great story teller and his history of Tacoma is a series of interwoven stories of the people, both locally and from distant Railroad and Wall Street board rooms, who shaped the city from a marshy rival to Seattle for the terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad to a thriving industrial city.Much has changed in Pierce County in the thirty years since the book was written, but the stories of the early settlement are still fascinating and I'd recommend this for anyone who is interested in the early history of Tacoma.