In honor of Indigenous People’s Day, I’m republishing this post, which I first published in February of 2022. I put more research and effort into this post than I do for most posts to Vine Maple Farm, and I think it is well worth reading.
America has begun to acknowledge the debt we owe to indigenous peoples after centuries of oppressive colonialism. But the debt has another side: the gifts indigenous people gave to colonists. This side is often forgotten or ignored. American history has been an exchange between European and indigenous American Cultures, as well as African, South Asian, and Far Eastern Cultures. There is no superior or inferior in this exchange. All have benefited, and all have suffered.
We must work to acknowledge and rectify this now.
Someday, I hope and pray, we will be one people built from many cultures.
When my own family arrived in Whatcom county in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, they were transformed by the culture of the indigenous Salish population. I’ve been reflecting on the transformation for a few years now. This January, as board chairman, I had the privilege of delivering the first land acknowledgement statement to the Whatcom County Library System board of trustees. The event prompted me to write this post.
I have written here about the transformation as best as I can from thin evidence: a mixture of family stories, some research, and scant historic documents. Unfortunately, my active imagination also occasionally takes over.
This is not history, not journalism— it’s a story that pulls together an assortment of facts and notions, but not a fantasy.
Melding of Cultures
The transformation and destruction of indigenous culture by Europeans populating North America is a frequent subject now, but less has been written about the reverse phenomenon: the transformation of European culture through its exposure to indigenous American culture. Almost nothing has been said about the influence of Salish culture on European immigrants in Whatcom County.
Both the indigenous American and European culture were transformed as the Europeans migrated to the Americas. An obvious change to European culture was in their diet. Potatoes, maize, squash, tomatoes, chilis, chocolate, and peanuts all are now significant elements of European cuisine, but they all came from the Americas and were cultivated by the indigenous population long before they arrived in Europe. These changes were not trivial.
The arrival of the potato transformed Europe by providing a plentiful source of nutrition that was relatively easy to grow and store. An example of the potato’s social impact was the rapid rise in the population of Ireland after the introduction of potatoes in the sixteenth century and the subsequent disaster of the potato famine in the mid-nineteenth century, which caused mass death and emigration to North America.
Thomas Macaulay, Historian
“Look at North America. Two centuries ago the sites on which now arise mills, and hotels, and banks, and colleges, and churches, and the Senate Houses of flourishing commonwealths, were deserts abandoned to the panther and the bear. What has made the change? Was it the rich mould, or the redundant rivers? No: the prairies were as fertile, the Ohio and the Hudson were as broad and as full then as now. Was the improvement the effect of some great transfer of capital from the old world to the new? No, the emigrants generally carried out with them no more than a pittance; but they carried out the English heart, and head, and arm; and the English heart and head and arm turned the wilderness into cornfield and orchard, and the huge trees of the primeval forest into cities and fleets.”
The Ten Hours Bill. (May 22, 1846) A Speech Delivered In The House Of Commons On The 22d Of May 1846. Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay. Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 4 (Kindle Locations 6132-6137). Project Gutenberg.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, the quote’s author, was a distinguished nineteenth century British statesman and historian, but deeply mistaken about progress and colonialism. He was by no means the only source of colonial attitudes, but his position was characteristic.
His five volume work, The History of England, is among the great accomplishments of English history and literature. There’s much to like about Macaulay. His prose is still sharp and clear. He worked to abolish slavery in the British empire and strove to improve the lot of the poor in Britain. The quote is from a speech arguing for a shorter workday and week for factory workers.
But he also had profoundly destructive ideas. For Macaulay, nineteenth century England was the ultimate in human progress. For indigenous people to thrive under his mistaken notion, he insisted that their children must be taught the English language and culture and pulled from their uncivilized roots. The quicker they forgot their old ways and became English, the faster they would progress.
The treatment of native Americans in the U.S. followed the typical nineteenth century Eurocentric patterns that Macaulay forcefully expressed.
Even in his own day, Macaulay was criticized for his Anglocentrism, but his opinions predominated well into the twentieth century. Until WWII, Macaulay’s history was commonly the basis for teaching English history in the United Kingdom. U.S. history followed the same theme of colonial progress. Today, European superiority and colonialism are widely repudiated, but unexamined Macaulay-like thoughts are deeply embedded in North American and European culture.
Waschke History
Members of the Waschke family were nowhere near the first Europeans to arrive in Whatcom County. After early explorers, Hudson’s Bay Company fur traders were first. Roeder and Peabody’s sawmill on Whatcom Creek was built in the 1850s.
The first Waschke to arrive in Whatcom County was my great-great uncle, John Waschke, around 1890. His older brother, Gottlieb, my great-grandfather, arrived with his family a few years later, and my grandmother’s family arrived a few years later yet. They all were from northeastern Europe around the shores of the German Baltic Sea.
Their story is nothing like The Little House On The Prairie tale of thrifty homesteading farmers moving west to acquire cheap land.
Gottlieb and John Waschke were orphans trained in the progressive Prussian state vocational schools. Gottlieb acquired enough capital in Germany to pay his way to America. He arrived at New Orleans and traveled north to Chicago where he found work building railroad cars, perhaps in the Pullman yards. Eventually, he brought his younger brother and a wife over from Germany. Later, he bought a farm in Blue Earth, Minnesota, near the Iowa border, where my grandfather and several of his siblings were born.
John stuck with railroad car building until he was recruited by the Bellingham Bay Improvement Company, a real estate investment syndicate, at the height of their push to promote Bellingham as the western terminus for the Great Northern Railway. The company moved John to Bellingham and used his cabinetmaking and joinery skills to embellish hotels and other facilities to impress eastern railroad magnates and promote the Whatcom community. The improvement company’s western terminus campaign failed, but John continued to work for them for a decade. Like his brother in Minnesota, he bought farmland on what is now known as Northwest Drive, north of Bellingham in Whatcom County.
Gottlieb’s Minnesota farm struggled in the face of frigid Minnesota winters, scorching summer drought, crop-flattening hailstorms, and, I suspect, lack of farming skills and instincts.
When his brother wrote praising the mild climate and fertility of Whatcom County, Gottlieb sold the Minnesota farm. He had the means to put his farm machinery and animals in a cattle car, travel with his family to New Whatcom, later called Bellingham, and buy eighty acres of logged off land in the North Bellingham area at the corner of the Aldrich and Smith roads, a few miles from his brother John’s farm.
In Germany, my grandmother’s grandfather was a mill builder who traveled frequently. I like to think he built windmills, which were common on the shores of the Baltic. He was Gottlieb’s father-in-law. Later, with Gottlieb’s sponsorship, he emigrated to Whatcom County, bringing along his wife, son, daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren, including my then twelve-year-old grandmother. A young man whose occupation was designated “miller,” was also in their party.
My grandmother said they boarded the ship as steerage passengers, but when they saw their quarters, her grandfather declared they could not travel like that and secured cabins for his party. They ate in a dining room with junior officers, but, oddly, they also received their daily steerage rations, which they tossed into the ocean.
They arrived at Ellis Island on the steamship Rhein on January 3, 1904. The arrival manifest lists the amount of cash each steerage passenger carried. Most had only five or six dollars. My great-great-grandfather had one hundred-seventy-five dollars. They crossed the country by rail, and purchased logged-off land on the other side of Aldrich Road from my great-grandfather Gottlieb’s farm.
1904 completed the Waschke migration from Prussia to Whatcom County.
Not Farmers
About the time I began to think more about Salish culture, a fact occurred me: my German ancestors who landed in Whatcom County were not farmers. They were skilled workers with some capital, but they had little experience working the land or tending cattle. I often wonder what compelled this little band to become farmers and dairymen. Perhaps they were aspiring to the Prussian landowning class.
Consider my great-great grandfather, my grandmother’s grandfather. How did he learn to wrest a living from acres of brush and stumps? He was a specialized building contractor, not a farmer.
My great-grandfather Gottlieb might have gained a slight advantage from the experience of failing at Minnesota plains farming, but that still could not have been much help. Whatcom wetlands are nothing like the dry upper Midwest prairie. The weather is different. The soil is different. The plantings and tillage that will yield good crops are not the same. Yet, twenty years later, this little band who scarcely spoke English, had all become successful farmers.
What was their secret? Was it genius? Not likely. The German flavor of Macaulay’s “heart and head and arm”? The grace of a German Lutheran God? Maybe, but I’m disinclined to place my family on pedestals. My ancestors were hard workers, like most people, but probably not exceptional. And yet, somehow, they learned.
Rejecting Macaulay
Macaulay, like most western Europeans, thought that the strength of his culture was self-evident and eventually the entire world would adopt English or Western European culture. In North America, whites assumed that indigenous American Indian culture would inevitably disappear and be replaced by Western Europeans; the faster, the better for everyone.
I do not know precisely when I quit thinking that way.
Whatcom County is the extreme northwest corner of the contiguous United States, one of the last areas to be taken over by Europeans. I used to say, “one of the last areas settled,” but I have quit using the word “settled.” Before my grandparents, the Lummi People had already settled what became our farm.
I have tried to research and study the transition from the Lummi land to Waschke farms. I have discovered something quite different from Macaulay’s “the English heart and head and arm turned the wilderness into cornfield and orchard…”
My story is not a tale of valiant farmers moving west to homestead untamed land. To begin, my ancestors were not English; they were Prussian carpenters from the coast of the Baltic Sea.
Salish Agriculture
Unlike the standard Macaulay narrative, Whatcom County was not untamed. It had been “cornfield and orchard” for centuries.
The Salish Sea is renowned for its plentiful salmon, shellfish, and other seafood. Until recently, anthropologists— like Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber, and Claude Levi-Strauss— said that while the tribes of the Salish Sea were among the wealthiest ever on the planet with their abundance of fish, game, and shellfish, they had no agriculture.
The mid-twentieth century anthropologists were wrong. The traditional Salish people are still regarded as immensely wealthy, but anthropologists now recognize that their wealth included vigorous agriculture.
Both the Lummi and the Nooksack tribes, like many indigenous groups in the Great Basin and Pacific Northwest, cultivated camas bulbs. In their traditional diet, over half the calories has been estimated to have come from camas bulbs.
Early explorers, such as Captain George Vancouver in 1792, saw large, cleared tracts of blue flowering camas. These meadows were meticulously organized and cultivated. In other areas, fern roots were grown and improved. The onion-like camas bulbs were harvested by the women of the tribes. Dismissing Salish agriculture as “women’s work,” may have been a factor in downplaying the role of agriculture in Salish culture.
Some of the camas bulbs were baked and consumed immediately, others were dried and preserved for winter. This was laborious and time-consuming work.
In addition to camas and other bulbs, the Coast Salish bred and raised long-haired dogs. They sheared the dogs for wool, which they made into clothing and blankets. They also tended clam beds, which were terraced and protected to foster abundant yields. When I was a kid, I heard rumors of secret Lummi clam beds that were loaded with clams. These could have been cultured beds.
Potatoes
All potatoes originated in the Andes of South America. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, potatoes were widely adopted as food crops. Astonishingly, the adoption occurred both in Europe and among the Salish people at about the same time.
Potatoes produce abundant and nutritious crops that are easy to cultivate and harvest. They do not require grinding, drying, or other processing. Heavy fall rains do not ruin the crop. Protected from freezing, kept dry and in the dark, potatoes last through the winter until spring.
Exact comparisons are difficult, but potatoes yield more nutrition per acre and are easier to store than almost any other crop. Introduction of easily harvested and stored food is a powerful force that changed societies, both in Europe and North America.
In the eighteenth century, the Salish people began to grow potatoes in addition to camas bulbs. DNA shows that Salish potatoes are closer to South American species than European potatoes. Whether Salish potatoes came from the Spanish explorers who were the first Europeans to visit the Pacific Northwest or through indigenous trade is unknown, but by the nineteenth century, the Salish were potato farmers.
Potatoes appear to have gradually supplanted camas bulbs as a staple food supply, but the preserved bulbs were high in fructose and remained a delicacy and sweetener.
Roth’s History of Whatcom County
In 1926, The History of Whatcom County was published. If you know about county histories, you are aware they are not history in the usual sense. A typical county history, the History of Whatcom County was impressively bound in two volumes with a fake leather cover and marbled endpapers. The first volume is usually described as a history of the county attributed to a prominent citizen. In Whatcom County’s case, Lottie Roeder Roth is listed on the title page as “Supervising Editor.” The second volume of the history is a collection of biographies.
The Whatcom County History volume is a montage of fragments in roughly chronological order, not a coherent and reasoned narrative, and nothing like Macaulay’s History of England. Some sections are quotes from various kinds of reports, others read like short newspaper items. The quality of the writing is erratic, ranging from clear and concise to rambling and vague.
Individuals who subscribed to the history, got a write-up in the biography volume. Photographs and longer write-ups were for premium subscribers.
All this was popular and good fun in late nineteenth and early twentieth century U.S., but county histories have to be read for what they are: strokes to the vanity of their subscribers.
Fact checking was scant. They seldom contain outright fabrications, but truth was not paramount. For myself, I regard the Roth history as raw source material, like collections of letters or old diaries that have to be evaluated, not a historical narrative that can be read to find out what happened.
My grandfather, Gustav Waschke; great-grandfather, Gottlieb Waschke; and his brother, John Waschke, my great-great-uncle, all subscribed and have biographies in the second volume of the 1926 history.
The Point Elliot Treaty
The Point Elliot Treaty of 1855 set compensation for lands and designated reservations for most of the Salish tribes. Lummi signatures appear on the treaty but Nooksack signatures do not. The treaty addressed hunting and fishing rights and the right to gather roots and berries on unclaimed land, but makes no sustaining provision for preserving Salish potato and camas bulb agriculture.
The treaty lumped together several tribes around Bellingham Bay and the Nooksack River that did not get along well. This was later changed and the Lummi reservation was shrunk to its current size. Little if any of the traditional potato and camas lands were included in the reserved areas. Being cut off from the source of half their nutrition must have been hard on the tribes.
Europeans and Salish Warfare
Documents in the Roth history frequently describe the Lummis and Nooksacks as friendly and kind. In the early days, almost all newcomers to Whatcom County were men. They frequently took Indian wives. Some of these marriages were genuine partnerships, others appear closer to concubinage.
In the Roth history, references to “good” Indians and “bad” Indians as well as “good” and “bad” whites both appear. “Good” Indians and “good” whites were said to get along well. Exactly what this meant is not clear to me, but there were conflicts. Also, some Whatcom County residents from the confederate states treated the Indians as a slave class.
The traditional economy of the tribes from the Columbia River to the Gulf of Alaska included war raids, plunder, and slave-taking. Aggressive marauding Indian bands, especially from the north, attacked vulnerable Salish groups for slaves and plunder. The Salish retaliated with their own raids, but the northern tribes had better fortified villages and launched fiercer attacks. Raids from the north were a continuing danger to the Salish into the 1850s, perhaps later.
These intertribal conflicts confused and strained relationships with the Europeans. Sometimes intertribal raids were seen as attacks on Europeans and retaliation from the newcomers brought more attacks. Other times, the military stationed in Whatcom County defended the local tribes, which intensified the conflict with the northern bands. A consequence of the Point Elliot treaty was to place the Salish tribes under the protection of the federal military. Although this protection was sometimes used unfairly, outright intertribal warfare eventually ceased.
Potato King
My grandfather’s biography called him “the potato king of Whatcom County.” I used to shake my head at that. I wondered if the publisher was having a little fun with my grandpa. The renowned king of Prussia, Frederik the Great, was called “the potato king” for promoting potatoes as a food crop in Prussia for the same reasons and about the same time the Salish people adopted the potato as a staple.
I’ve read the 1926 Whatcom County biographies carefully. My grandfather is the only potato king, although potatoes are mentioned frequently as a crop that grew well on Whatcom County soil. Potatoes were often the first crop planted among the stumps on land that was beginning to be cleared.
According to documents recorded in the Roth history, in the mid-nineteenth century, the Lummis and the Nooksacks traded quantities of potatoes to early white settlers and the military stationed in Whatcom County. Their agriculture was efficient enough to produce a surplus for sale.
I suspect tribal potato production was interrupted by the Point Elliott treaty which separated the tribes from their agricultural lands because references to supplying potatoes disappear after the treaty.
Robert Emmett Hawley, author of Skqee Mus or Pioneer Days on the Nooksack, was among the first Europeans in the Nooksack valley. He describes sharing in meals prepared by Lummis and Nooksacks. The meals were were fish or game cooked with potatoes. According to Hawley, in the early days, Indians were allowed to claim lands outside the reservation in the same manner as newcomers. Many claimed their traditional agricultural lands and prospered. Later, as the incoming population increased, the practice was ended, and more Salish were forced onto the reservations.
Waschke Salish Relations
Perhaps to regain access to accustomed food and certainly out of kindness, the Lummis and the Nooksacks taught my ancestors and other Europeans how to farm in Whatcom County. Instead of my ancestors enlightening the poor Indians, as Macaulay would have it, the Indians revealed to my poor ancestors the ways of their flourishing agriculture.
I believe my grandfather’s potato kingship was inspired by the Lummis and Nooksacks who had been farming potatoes for close to a century in Whatcom County. A potato patch, a vegetable garden, a cow, a pig, and a few chickens were enough to keep a family alive among the stumps in those days. According to my grandmother, my grandfather started his family in that way.
My grandparents had a good relationship with the Lummis. As I remember my grandpa, he was the sort of person who would have asked for advice from the people who knew the land best, the Lummis, who probably recommended growing potatoes and began trading salmon for potatoes with my potato king grandpa.
I see another clue in my grandfather’s potato storage methods. When his potato crop exceeded his basement storage bins, he would select a sheltered spot in the woods, dig a pit, line it with cedar slabs, and store potatoes in the pit covered with straw, moss, and leaves. Storage in this way used Salish technology and was likely how the Lummis and Nooksacks stored their potatoes. My dad pointed out several of these potato storage pits in the woods to me when I was a kid.
I am also tempted to think that my own father’s approach to agriculture was influenced by the Salish. He was a contrarian dairy farmer. Unlike our neighbors and against the advice of the county extension agent, he minimized chemical fertilizer and grew as much of his own cattle feed as could rather than buy supplements at the feedstore. He limited the size of his dairy herd to the number of cows his acreage could support rather than increase the herd by bringing in more outside feed and fertilizer. He told me that as the years went by, the farm became more fertile, requiring less supplemental feed and fertilizer and thus more profitable. Was that contrarian attitude derived from what his parents and grandparents had learned from the Lummis and Nooksacks? It is possible.
Midwives and Fish Fries
I never heard a word against Lummis from my grandparents. My grandmother told me that my father was delivered by a Lummi midwife. Whatcom County roads were often little more than trails in those days. Doctors from town were often late or hesitant to venture out into the woods, but she said her Lummi midwife was reliable. My grandmother had some experience. She lost two babies before my father was born.
When I was a kid, my grandfather traded pigs and potatoes for salmon with the Lummis. I still remember Lummis coming up Waschke Road with salmon to trade for potatoes, which could become an occasion for a big party.
My grandpa would build a smoky fire from dry maple and alder covered with green vine maple wood in a pit and roast the salmon in the smoke, inviting relatives and neighbors from all around for a salmon feast, which they called a “fish fry,” although nothing was fried. The method Grandpa used for roasting the salmon was very close to the Indian method James G. Swan described in 1857.
Thirty or forty years ago, I used to occasionally talk to old folks from all over the county who remembered Waschke fish fries, as they called these salmon roasting events hosted by my great grandfather and grandfather.
Salish potlatches were great ceremonial events that brought tribes together, redistributed the wealth, and maintained social ties of a wealthy and contentious traditional society. Waschke fish fries were far different, but both potlatches and fish fries shared the salmon bounty and both reinforced social bonds through generosity and goodwill.
Closing
When two cultures come together, both change. When Macaulay was carrying on about the conquest of indigenous cultures in America, Europeans were arriving in Whatcom County. They encountered a complex economic and social system of seafood gathering, hunting, and agriculture that was both sustainable and startlingly effective at exploiting the natural resources of the region.
Blinded by Eurocentric notions of progress, the federal government and eastern centers of political and social power did not see the complexity and efficiency of Salish culture. However, the virtues of Salish life were seen by newcomers on the ground, like my ancestors, who confronted the land directly.
Although phenomena like the Whatcom County Library System land acknowledgment may signal changing tides in attitudes toward the Salish, the century and a half from 1850 to 2000 was harsh. A wealthy and vibrant culture became an impoverished second class while the newcomers became prosperous on the resources that once were cherished and cultivated by the Salish people.
In the twenty-first century, we now know that Macaulay’s dramatic triumph of European ways is a myth, if not outright delusion.
When the Europeans arrived in the Pacific Northwest, they had many apparent advantages: firearms, manufactured steel tools, and steam engines, to name a few. Steel blades, for example, were readily incorporated into Salish woodcarving technology. Newcomers with steel plows were able to till land faster and eventually exceed Salish levels of farm productivity, perhaps neglecting sustainability.
However, in a short time when measured against the millennia of Salish culture, those advantages have come at a cost, to Salish and Europeans alike. We all face climate change, global resource depletion, instability in the face of technological change, and inequitable distribution of wealth. These are partially the consequence of Eurocentrism, but they are also the result of shortsighted greed and failure to anticipate all the consequences of actions, which are among the most frequent of human failings.
When I read accounts of early meetings of Salish and European culture, such as that of Robert Emmett Hawley, the newcomers were at a disadvantage. The Lummis and the Nooksacks were knowledgeable and well adapted to living in the mild and rainy marine climate of Whatcom County. The Indians supplied the newcomers with game and potatoes and showed them how to live among the western red cedars that dominated the lowland forests.
The tables turned in the intervening century. In the 1960s, I went to high school with Lummis. I saw poverty and abuse that now makes me cringe. At the time, I was not aware of the debt I owed the Lummis. I was too tied up in my piddling adolescent struggles to act. I regret that I did not stand up when I heard them casually and mindlessly ridiculed and their unique virtues and arts ignored or patronized.
I will not try to explain why or how the offenses occurred. I know it is a story that must be told, but today I am not prepared to tell it. But I will add this: I do not see life as a zero sum game, a scrabble over limited resources in which one side’s gain is another side’s loss. I believe one faction’s gain can become everyone’s gain, and inevitably any loss eventually becomes everyone’s loss.
Today, I both hope and perceive that the melding of Salish and European culture has not ended. Perhaps, by further combining the two cultures, we, the human family, can build a better future for all of us.
My German family was the beneficiary of the strength of the Salish culture and their kindness. For this, the Lummi and Nooksack people will always have my profound thanks.
I must mention my WCLS friend, Neil McKay, and my law student daughter, Athena Waschke. Both contributed to my thinking and clarity with notes on this post.
