"A Breadbasket" - Notes from Class #1 of "The Ecological History of the Methow Valley" Conservation Course

The 8th annual Methow Conservation Course on the “Ecological History of the Methow Valley” began Monday, January 31st with guest speakers Elaine Timentwa Emerson & Jack Nisbet.  There will be five more classes and we'll post notes from each class on this blog.  Mary Kiesau prepared this summary of the first class with notes from class participants Leah Swayze and Joyce Bergen.  For more information about the course click here.

(A quick history note on the timing of things...  Prior to 1886, there were very few white people living in the Methow, just a small handful of men.  Still, the local Indian population, which traveled in and out of the Methow Valley seasonally, had been drastically reduced by disease - there were probably about 300 people in the Methow band in 1886 according to historians.  A crucial period of change began with the opening of the Methow to homesteading (1886), which was primarily due to the potential for gold and other mining-related minerals.  In a very quick period of time, 15-20 years, 1000 plus white people moved into the valley.  There was no easy transportation into the valley for decades so food had to be grown, creating a big increase in cultivated land.  For more information on what happened to native populations in the region see the “History of the Colvilles” page on the Colville Confederate Tribes website)

Elaine, a Native American whose mother was from the Methow band and whose father was from the Okanogan band, started things off by speaking to us in her native language.  Elaine grew up on a cattle ranch in Monse, WA (just northeast of Brewster), but would come up the Methow 10-12 times a year with her mother and other “old ladies,” first on horseback and then by car.  Elaine said even before the Methow was opened to homesteading and Indians were moved, most Methows were nomadic, wintering in the Okanogan, or further east and south, and coming to the Methow the rest of the year, though some probably did live here year-round.  The Methow Valley was a “bread-basket” Elaine said, “every native food type grew here, except for camas.”  People would fish, hunt (deer for meat, big horn sheep for wool), collect roots, berries, and other native food, even basket materials and rocks (for pipes, bowls and implements).  Elaine remembers collected cedar bark by Goat Wall and wild cherry bark in Lost River.  She said that over time (through the 1900s) it became harder to collect things - farms expanded and the number of people and homesteads increased; the use of sprays killed many native plants, including one of their favorites, Indian Celery (what we call chocolate tips); and native families were getting more split up, losing parts of their culture, language and sense of place.  For example, her mother’s grandfather specialized in canoe-making but his apprentices died of disease brought by settlers.  After the Methow was opened to homesteading and throughout the first half of the 1900s, families either moved to the Colville Reservation or took homestead allotments in the Okanogan.  The Okanogan Valley was far too dry and low for many of the native foods that grew in the Methow however.

Elaine says there are very few descendents of the

A basket made by Elaine Timentwa Emerson

Methow band left - the culture has been in danger of dying out.  She and others are trying to change that and teach the younger people that “they came from a place,” and “how to live in tandem with the land.”  Her elders taught her the language when she was young and for the last 17 plus years, she has worked with the Okanogan Language Preservation Program as a fluent speaker in documenting and teaching Okanogan native language and culture. Elaine also comes from a long line of accomplished basket makers.  When she was just six years old she began being taught basketery skills.  By her mid 20s she noticed that no one was making them anymore.  Now and for the last 25 years Elaine has taught her own people how to make traditional cedar baskets.  Elaine showed us several baskets including a very large one for berry collecting that took her many months to make.  Elaine’s sister Tillie was also with us on the 31st.  Tillie is a beader and she shared some of her work as well. 

Author, naturalist and teacher, Jack Nisbet spoke after Elaine, giving us a brief human and natural history lesson about the “period of contact” time in and around the Methow.
Jack started off with the first known white person to not just come into contact with Methow natives, but stay with them, observe them and write about them in some detail.  It was July 1811, and the person was David Thompson, who was traveling by boat from Kettle Falls down the Columbia for the North West Fur Company.  David Thompson wrote that the natives pronounced the name of the area as “Smeethhowe.”  He also noted that they were used fish nets made of Indian Hemp (Apocynum cannabinum).  Indian Hemp is a fibrous

Indian Hemp (Apocynum cannabinum)

plant like nettles but it can get wet and dry over and over without rotting.  David Thompson made the first notes of the Methow River on maps.

This business of trapping and trading fur from beavers, muskrats and numerous other animals continued on in earnest for several decades and it’s the reason white europeans and native americans interacted with each other.  In exchange for furs, natives were given meat and grease, saddles and saddle blankets, hides and skins, snowshoes and many other products. 

The Methow people were some of the many regional tribal people who traded goods at Fort Okanogan.  Alexandar Ross a Scottish fur trader working at Fort Okanogan, attempted to travel up the Methow Valley and over the Cascades to the Skagit with the help of some native guides in 1814.  They never made it but Ross was the first known European to try.  Ross kept journals but they’ve all been lost.  Historians and archeologists now know that Indians throughout the region traveled from the lower Methow to the Skagit River over a few different routes, generally ascending the Twisp Pass to the Stehekin valley and then over Cascade Pass.

David Douglas, a British botanist/naturalist, arrived at Fort Vancouver on the Washington coast in 1825.  He explored the northwest, including the “big bend” area of the Columbia River in northcentral Washington, in three trips, spending a total of four years in the Northwest (1825 - 1827 and 1830 - 1832), and it’s from these excursions that we have the first bits of expanded information on what plants natives ate, how they cooked and used plants, and how they “managed” land such as encouraging root crops to grow and burning patches of land.

Jack Nisbet noted that tribal names for plants described the food part of the plant (often the root), not the flowers -- for example, Indian Potato for what we call Spring Beauty; Indian Celery for what we call Chocolate Tips; Biscuitroot, Bitterroot, Balsamroot and so on. 

a very large spring beauty root

Spring Beauty (Claytonia lanceolata)

 









David Douglas also noted “weeds” or european plant species that were already present in the early 1800s, such as pigweed and reed canary grass.  John Richardson, who wrote the first fauna book of the american west in 1829, noted that sage grouse nested in reed canary grass.  Now, sage grouse have decreased from numbers in the hundreds to nothing, locally, whereas reed canary grass is everywhere.  While some things like this are out of balance, Jack Nisbet reminded us that some things are the same, such as the fact the pocket gophers have been stealing food and pestering people for many generations, even eating the Indian’s camas roots.  :-)