56 Pacific Northwest Quarterly

The Environments of Seattle’s History

linda nash

things are more important to one’s survival than those highlighted by the “Where You At?” quiz: how to ride a bus, how to operate the parking me-ters, or where to find free internet ser-vice. The fact of the matter is that knowledge of the deer-rutting season is of far less practical use than knowing where to find a good latte. And yet the quiz still underscores an undeniable truth: that modern urban dwellers are profoundly disconnected from their local natural environments.

That is the issue I want to take up here. Our histories of cities would seem to be a case in point. My colleagues in this series have thus far offered you out-standing lectures. Yet they have told the story of Seattle as the story of a dis-embedded and isolated species: Homo sapiens. Their approach reflects their training and our shared discipline. In history, we trace the movement of hu-man bodies, human ideas, human in-stitutions, human inventions. The places, regions, environments, and

species with which human history takes shape have typically been seen as palimpsests, as frozen scenes for hu-man activity, or else as foils for human conquest and human ingenuity. In this talk, I offer a different way of looking at Seattle’s history—as a history in which other species and nonhuman environments, both local and distant, have played a vital role.

When the Cordilleran ice sheet pulled back from the area we

know as Seattle some 16,000 years ago, it left behind a series of parallel valleys and ridges set within a watery land-scape. The key features of this region were the fingers of salt water that reached inland, connected to yet dis-tinct from the Pacific Ocean, stretching around thousands of islands and pen-insulas. In the native language of the region, this water is called XWulch, which means simply “Salt Water.”2

People arrived in this area at least 10,000 years ago, and over millennia those who remained here developed intricate systems for prospering from the region’s natural flows of energy. Salmon were the key. These fish cap-tured the energy available from a vast swath of plants and animals in hun-dreds of square miles of ocean and re-turned it regularly and predictably to all the streams and rivers of Puget Sound. By the time Europeans first ar-

In 1981, the CoEvolution Quar-terly—a left-wing, environmental-ist publication based in Marin

County, California—dedicated its spring issue to the subject of biore-gionalism. The issue featured a 20-ques-tion quiz, a sort of bioregionalist IQ test entitled “Where You At?” The first question asked you to “trace the water you drink from precipitation to tap.” Things quickly got harder. Question 7 asked for the names of five edible plants in your region and their seasons of availability. Others asked about the directionality of winter storms, the name of the regional soil series, and the time of year in which the local deer rut. If you harbored any question about the attitude of the authors, that was quickly clarified by the rather harsh scoring system. While a score of 8 indicated “a firm grasp of the obvi-ous,” anything less than 4 fell into the category of “hav[ing] your head up your ***.”1

In today’s Seattle, any number of

Ice Age glaciers are responsible for the distinctive geography of Puget Sound, which houses an abundance of marine life while providing numerous protected harbors. (Bert W. Huntoon, Special Collections, University of Washington [UW] Libraries, UW 29583)

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rived in the region in the late 1700s, the Native peoples here—the Coast Salish—had organized their life around the harvest of resources from the wa-ter: flounder, herring, clams, mussels, kelp, eel grass, and, of course, salmon. They had, moreover, developed so-phisticated techniques for gathering large quantities of salmon. Native reef netters in the 19th century could cap-ture as many as four thousand fish in a single day. Early European observers consistently remarked on both the abundance of fish and the size of Na-tive harvests.

Native groups recognized the power of salmon. How could they not? That species’ importance was reflected throughout the spiritual, political, and cultural life of the region. Abundance, however, was not taken for granted. Native people drew social, spatial, and temporal boundaries around salmon,

and thus ensured the survival of both the fish and themselves. Power within Native societies could be read from the control of fishing sites. Key sites were held and managed by family groups, and typically passed down through in-heritance; fishing at such sites was re-stricted to certain people and to cer-tain times of the season. Coast Salish people would not eat female salmon or their eggs during the first half of the run—thus guaranteeing that a sub-stantial percentage of the female fish

would survive to spawn. Fishing gear was typically constructed to allow for some escapement, as when people re-moved portions of a fish weir at cer-tain times of the day so that fish could proceed easily upstream.3

Although salmon were the primary en-ergy source for coastal peoples, they tapped other flows as well. They capi-talized on the energy stored in animal flesh, in other marine species, and in wild and domesticated plants. In order to efficiently capture the various ener-gies within the local ecosystem, Native people moved seasonally, typically along watersheds. Their main settle-ments, usually downriver, were occu-pied in winter, with smaller seasonal summer camps scattered further up-stream and in surrounding prairies and forests. Winter settlements func-tioned as fulcrums of trade and cul-ture—small towns, if you will, drawing together people and resources from various places and then redistributing them. The area we know as Seattle was one such center and was occupied by

A group of Native men use a weir to guide fish into traps, circa 1889. (Boyd and Braas, Special Collections, UW Libraries, UW 22170)

The Salmon Bay area was home to a large Native American village that was gradually displaced by American colonists. This photo, taken circa 1905, shows the last remaining Native home, which would be destroyed in 1916 in preparation for the construction of the Ballard Locks. (Webster and Stevens, Museum of History and Industry, 1983.10.9067)

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three principal groups: the Duwamish, whose major settlement lay near the mouth of the Duwamish River; the Lake people, whose winter homes were along the shores of Lake Washington; and the Shilshole, who inhabited the area of Salmon Bay. Trade and kinship ties connected these groups to one an-other and to a much wider Pacific Northwest population, extending north to Vancouver Island, east to the Co-lumbia Plateau, and south to the Co-lumbia River.

Into this complicated world wandered Arthur Denny and his companions in 1851. We often call them pioneers, but a more accurate term might be govern-ment-backed speculators. The United States had unilaterally laid claim to the lands of the Duwamish and other Na-tive peoples in the region, sealing it with a treaty agreed to with the British in 1846. Settlers like Denny served the colonial purposes of the government by solidifying American claims to ter-ritory and by providing a forward fighting force if needed. With the pas-sage of the Oregon Donation Land Act in 1850, the American government promised to uphold the land claims of early white settlers; the legislation ig-

nited a small-scale rush to Puget Sound. Having served as a surveyor for the better part of a decade back in Illi-nois, Arthur Denny was well aware of the money that could be made in land. Though he had not managed to do much in Illinois, he, like many others, saw the Oregon Territory as his oppor-tunity to get in early. Denny was but one of many who, as one local observer noted, shared “the common idea in this country that they can get rich in a few years.”4

The Americans who landed at Alki Point in present-day West Seattle

had no intention of farming or making a life directly from the energies of the local environment, at least not if they could avoid it. Their raison d’etre was to re-create the customs and lifeways that they had known in the Midwest. The Dennys brought with them a year’s worth of supplies and immediately looked to the Pacific maritime trade to supply the rest. They were the forward edge of an American empire on the Pa-cific coast. The little power that Denny and his companions had in 1851 ema-nated from their connection to this ex-panding empire and its markets. Within a month of their arrival, one

member of the group, Lee Terry, had opened a store in his log cabin to facili-tate trade with the other pioneers and local Indians. Arthur Denny would quickly stake a large claim on Elliott Bay, in the hope of later subdividing it and selling high, as well as two near Snoqualmie Pass, in the hope of strik-ing minerals. He too would open a store.5

Although it is difficult for many Seat-tleites to accept, it is fair to say that they owe their city’s existence to Cali-fornia. Although Native groups had traded along the Pacific coast of North America for centuries, trade expanded rapidly in the 18th century as the de-mand for whales and maritime furs drew in Russian, American, and British vessels. But by the early 1800s, both whales and otters had been nearly wiped out, and the Pacific trade was in decline. It was the fortuitous discovery of gold in California in 1848 that re-ignited interest in the region. The rush to California created an instant city—San Francisco—while stimulating trade up and down the coast. The surge of humanity into San Francisco pulled a diverse set of landscapes into that city’s orbit and a seemingly nonstop stream

The California gold rush spurred a boom in trade along the Pacific coast. The harbor of San Francisco, shown here circa 1850 with a sea of ships’ masts in the background, became a destination for Pacific Northwest timber. (Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, banc PIC 1905.17500 v.1:17—ALB)

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of supplies: bricks from New Zealand and Tasmania; coal and tools from the East Coast; granite from Hong Kong; flour and potatoes from Oregon; crockery, spices, and luxury items from China. For wood—a crucial resource—San Franciscans looked to Maine, Nor-way, Chile, and Australia. But mostly they looked north, to the redwoods on California’s coast, to the Columbia River, and to the much more accessible Douglas firs of Puget Sound.

It was this world of commodities and international markets to which Arthur Denny was attached, and which he hoped to expand. Coming most re-cently from Portland—then booming as it sent flour and timber to San Fran-cisco—Denny envisioned something similar in the Puget Sound region. The immediate basis for his participation in that market were the immense trees that grew all around Salt Water, and which San Francisco capitalists were already tapping into. Douglas firs—

with their strength, resiliency, and long, straight trunks—made nearly ideal timbers, and the demand in Cali-fornia was seemingly insatiable. Within a month of arriving, these pioneer-speculators had sold a load of rough-chopped logs to a ship’s captain bound for San Francisco. At the time, wood piles purchased on the sound for eight cents a foot sold in California for one dollar, making for profits of more than 1,000 percent.6 Denny and his like were transforming trees into commodities and the forested landscapes of Salt Wa-ter into a hinterland of San Francisco.

Yet despite the location’s advantages for trade, this was a bad place to build a city—as more than one historian and countless engineers have observed. The original settlement that Arthur Denny and his colleague Carson Boren laid out was surrounded by steep, ero-sion-prone hills, cut off from the mainland at the highest tides, and bor-dered on the south by extensive tide

flats. All in all, the area encompassed surprisingly little flat, stable land. Moreover, the lakes, hills, and moun-tains that lay to the east limited the prospects for an extensive hinterland on whose resources the settlement could easily draw. The only way to get things in and out of Seattle was via the sound, so Denny was careful to look for a deep harbor where large ships could anchor. The steep, heavily wooded hillsides had the benefit of making it relatively easy for poorly capitalized settlers to get logs into the water. Denny and Boren then wel-comed the arrival of Henry Yesler, who promised to build a sawmill on the site.

From the moment of their arrival, these people and those that joined them looked elsewhere to meet their own needs. While using the energy and material stored in Pacific Northwest forests to supply the voracious appetite of San Francisco, the new Seattleites

The site of modern-day Seattle, shown here in 1866, was chosen by Arthur Denny and Carson Boren for its harbor; however, the land itself was hilly and unstable and difficult to build on. (Frederick Dally, Toronto Public Library, K 45)

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imported flour from Oregon and Chile, sugar from China, pork and but-ter from the East Coast. But imports in the 1850s were erratic and dependent on the weather, and prices were high; Arthur Denny complained in an early letter of having to pay $20 for a barrel of flour.7 Thus, the settlers turned to the land around them. They built rough wooden houses, slept on mat-tresses of cedar boughs and moss, and worked by the light of dogfish-oil lamps. Yet with little concept of how to live in this landscape, the newcomers relied heavily on those who did. As one settler wrote, “The Indians do most of the fishing.”8 But Indians did far more than the fishing. Settlers traded with Natives not only for salmon, but also for potatoes, meat, clams, baskets, and canoes. They learned from Natives which berries to eat, which to avoid, and where to find them. They followed Native trails, mimicked Native mate-rial practices, learned from them the better fishing spots and edible plants, and relied on Natives to canoe them up rivers.

Native networks in the region were not destroyed by this new network of trade; they were necessary to it and supplemented by it. Indians helped settlers harvest and load logs. They sold fish and food in return for metal

pots, knives, cloth, and other worth-while supplies. In the settler period, the energies of northwestern nature were harvested and directed by these dual systems: settler-capitalist and Na-tive. And the survival of the commu-nity that the settlers came to call Seat-tle depended on both. But settlement, as every settler understood, was ulti-mately about conquest. Settlers saw their reliance on Natives, their trade with Natives, and indeed the very pres-ence of Natives as a temporary condi-tion. In 1855, the newcomers wel-comed a hastily conducted set of treaty negotiations in which Natives supposedly ceded the vast majority of the region to the U.S. government. Ten years later, when Seattle officially incorporated, the town’s leaders passed an ordinance forbidding any “Indian” from residing within the new city’s limits. Settlers continued to expand their search for marketable resources further afield, claiming an ever-greater portion of the landscape as as-sets to be mobilized and exchanged for other things. For Natives, on the other hand, basic necessities—includ-ing food, building materials, and med-icine—were becoming scarce. To put it simply, resource appropriation was it-self the primary mode of conquest. Settlers then assured themselves that the resulting impoverishment of Na-

tives was a mark of the latter’s inferi-ority and a justification for their marginalization.9

Although much ink has been spilled about Henry Yesler’s sawmill, the fact is that Seattle was never more than a bit player in the early Puget Sound timber trade. The export of logs and boards was dominated by heavily cap-italized mills scattered about the sound—in places like Port Blakely, Port Gamble, and Port Ludlow. Yesler’s mill served mostly local needs, and his attempts at expansion were under-mined by his lack of capital and poor business practices. Although he ob-tained some backing from San Fran-cisco investors, they soon pulled out, with one observing, “Yesler has disap-pointed us in nearly everything.”10 Yet the existence of more successful mills ultimately redounded to the benefit of Seattle. With a single-minded focus on resource extraction, the major timber capitalists had no interest in town building or community development. They imported workers, paid them as little as possible, built company hous-ing, and provisioned their employees from a company store. Small-time merchants in Seattle seized the oppor-tunity to act as suppliers. Soon a fleet of ships plied the sound, delivering merchandise to mills and small settle-ments and ferrying passengers to Seat-tle seeking goods and entertainment of various kinds. In other words, the ex-port of resources out of Seattle was only half the story. Crucial to the town’s success was the fact that it be-came the nexus for imports—of food, but also clothes, tools, mining and milling equipment, and luxury goods.

Seattle’s position in the Pacific mari-time trade improved with the discov-

A group of Native workers standing in front of Henry Yesler’s sawmill in downtown Seattle. Native knowledge and Native labor were essential to the survival of early Seattle. (Special Collections, UW Libraries, UW 5695)

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ery of a new resource: high-grade coal, which occurred throughout the hills of eastern Puget Sound. In the 19th cen-tury, coal was king. It was the fuel of an industrializing America, feeding steam-powered machinery in mills and facto-ries, powering railroads and steam-ships, as well as providing heat in thousands of homes and businesses. As fate would have it, there was little coal in California, and the ever-growing San Francisco was desperate for en-ergy. Here lay the origins of several early Pacific Northwest communities, such as Newcastle, Renton, Black Dia-mond, Carbonado—most of which

were soon controlled by San Francisco investors. Nonetheless, much of that coal passed through Seattle before heading south. By 1880, the town shipped nearly 140,000 tons annually, enabling the small community to re-

main afloat.

Whereas Native people wielded the power of salmon, settlers attached themselves to the power of Douglas fir and coal. They looked to trees and

By the late 1870s, when this map was drawn, a fleet of ships plied the sound, delivering merchandise to mills and small settlements and ferrying passengers seeking goods and entertainment to Seattle. (E. S. Glover, “Bird’s-Eye View of the City of Seattle, Puget Sound, Washington Territory, 1878” [1878])

Seattle was a major exporter of coal in the late 19th century. Photographed here is the Carbon Hill Coal Company mine in Carbonado, Washington, 1915. (Special Collections, UW Libraries, UW 5759)

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minerals not for their immediate util-ity so much as for the fact that they could be traded for something else. They never really tried to learn the in-tricacies of this landscape. Flour, meat, tools, medicines—even cultural sym-bols—might be procured from some-where else and brought in on a boat. Thus, early Seattleites took the capital-ist market and its imperative of growth for granted. Resource exploitation, even over-exploitation, was not neces-sarily a problem because they—unlike the people they were seeking to dis-place—were not dependent solely or even primarily upon the landscapes of Salt Water for their survival. As they saw it, their personal success and hap-piness hinged on the flow of goods through the town, which depended upon the exploitation of various Northwest resources and their export out of town.

Connections were obviously crucial. To expand their markets, Seattle boost-ers looked to the railroads. With the arrival of the Northern Pacific in 1884 and especially with the Great Northern a decade later, Seattle had access to midwestern markets for the first time and far better access to the East Coast. Pacific Northwest lumber now shipped out to the plains and to Chicago, offer-ing a substitute for the depleted white pine forests of the Great Lakes region. More significant, however, the exis-tence of railroad connections encour-aged the immigration of new people and greater investments by eastern capitalists. As lumber barons in the Great Lakes region knew all too well, those forests were all but used up; their businesses and their own power de-pended upon finding more trees. It was this fact that brought to the Pacific Northwest men like Chauncey Griggs—

who opened the St. Paul and Tacoma mill with $1.5 million after purchasing 80,000 acres from the Northern Pacific Railway. Or Frederick Weyerhaeuser, who famously made a deal with his neighbor in Saint Paul, Minnesota—the railroad baron James J. Hill—to buy nearly one million acres of forest land in Washington State. These oper-ations—with the money to hire thou-sands of workers and to invest in mod-ern machinery—would open up the interior forests to large-scale logging, radically increasing the speed with which the forests of Salt Water were consumed.

In the spring of 1898, a man named O. S. Johnson entered the Stetson

Brothers store in downtown Seattle and spent a tidy sum of money: $517.16. With that he purchased ba-con, flour, rice, evaporated potatoes, a rip saw, a claw hammer, a shovel, a camp stove, needles and yarn, rubber boots, suspenders, blankets, a rifle, and—last but not least—a gold pan. Johnson was headed to the Klondike goldfields.11

One of the American West’s last great

mineral rushes had begun a little over a year earlier when a small group of prospectors in a remote part of Alaska happened upon a stunningly rich pocket of gold at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers. As the purchases of Johnson and hundreds of others like him suggest, the Klondike gold rush was a bonanza for Seattle. It signaled, in the words of John Findlay, Seattle’s first “pandemonium mo-ment.”12 On a single day in 1898, 1,800 new people arrived in the town. East-ern railroad connections had encour-aged the growth of Seattle’s wholesal-ing and retailing businesses, and merchants poised themselves to take advantage of the mass migration of miners. Through the concerted efforts of local businesspeople, Seattle emerged as an entrepôt for the gold rush. The city morphed into a kind of giant warehouse, gathering mass quantities of food and manufactured goods from around the region and across the coun-try, which would-be miners then pur-chased on their way to Alaska.

Two things were significant here. First, the origins of the goods that miners bought were becoming ever more ob-

During the Klondike gold rush, Seattle boomed as outfitters such as Cooper and Levy supplied the thousands of miners heading north. (Frank LaRoche, Special Collections, UW Libraries, UW 1617)

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scure. While salmon were caught and canned locally and woolen clothes were woven and sewn in the region, Se-attle was also importing thousands of pounds of goods from the East Coast to resell to people like O. S. Johnson. As systems of mass production were tak-ing shape in the East, the railroads made it possible to transport innumer-able factory-produced goods to Seattle on a regular basis. Local merchants now routinely traveled to Chicago and New York to place their orders. Yet for the gold seeker heading north, his food, clothing, and tools came not from distant farms and factories, not from nature and human labor, but simply “from Seattle.”

Second, with the Klondike gold rush, Seattle businessmen and boosters suc-ceeded in making their town—rather than San Francisco or Portland—the major node in the American migration to the goldfields and mining camps. Before the gold rush, Seattle sat at the periphery of the American empire, a small town only loosely and erratically connected to larger networks of capital and power. Now Alaska quickly be-came a resource hinterland of Seattle, sending its fish and minerals south and receiving people, processed food, live-stock, machinery, tools, and clothing in return. Moreover, contemporane-ous with the Alaska gold rush was the American annexation of the Philip-pines in the wake of the Spanish-American War. Seattle’s sheltered loca-tion on the Pacific made it not merely a gold rush entrepôt but also a key lo-cation from which a Pacific-facing em-pire could resupply itself and spread.

We can read this as an instance of capi-tal expansion, which it was, but the

term I think is too abstract and only obscures what was actually happening. Capital expansion was underwritten by material conditions, by the produc-tions of nature and the labor of human bodies.13 The Alaska-Seattle trade was spurred by a mineral in the Alaskan in-terior—gold—underwritten by a min-eral in the Cascade mountains—coal (which powered the steamships that took men and supplies north and brought men and gold back)—and sustained by the massive harvesting of fish all along the Pacific coast. More-over, it was not simply merchants and railroads that were essential to this ex-pansion, but farmers who grew grain in eastern Washington and raised cat-tle on the plains; people who canned corn on Long Island, packed salmon in Alaska, and manufactured steel in Pittsburgh; miners who dug coal in the hills and mountains of Washington and Colorado; loggers who cut timber throughout the Pacific Northwest. The combination of industrial mass pro-duction and American geographic ex-pansion made the linkages between nature and consumption increasingly complex and easy to forget. The link-

ages, however, were always there.

To celebrate their new role in an expanding network of exchange,

members of Seattle’s business class threw themselves a party. When the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition opened on June 1, 1909, the editors of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer gushed with local pride: “Against the sullen low hanging clouds, a great blaze of light in the north proclaimed to the city last night that the Exposition was open. Seen from afar over the tree tops, the great fair appeared a fairy city wrought by some magician’s wand.”14 Putting aside magicians, fairies, and local boosterism, the newspaper was describing an important development: electric lighting had arrived in Seattle.

In the last decades of the 19th century, electrification began to rapidly pene-trate and fundamentally alter urban life across the United States. Electricity lit up dark city streets and encouraged people to stay up later; electric motors replaced bulky and inefficient steam engines in manufacturing; electric trolleys replaced horse-drawn street-

The arrival of electric lighting at the turn of the last century revolutionized urban life. Here lights dramatize the grounds and extend the hours of Seattle’s Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909. (Frank H. Nowell, Special Collections, UW Libraries, Nowell x2246)

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cars; electric irons, ranges, and clothes washers became standard features of the middle-class home, lightening the labor of many women. Electricity also hastened the growth of modern con-sumer culture. Electric lights extended shopping hours and opened up new advertising possibilities. Merchants erected illuminated signs, built escala-tors, and used lighting to entice people into their stores and highlight the ap-peal of their merchandise.

For many, electricity promised a revo-lution in human life. The writer and architectural critic Lewis Mumford—one of 20th-century America’s most influential intellectuals—believed that the advent of electricity marked the beginning of an entirely new and be-neficent phase of western civilization. According to Mumford, the “neotech-nic era” would be marked by organic cities, the decentralization of indus-try, the independence of labor, new possibilities of communication, and the restoration of an ecological bal-ance that the Industrial Revolution had disrupted.15

Central to this transition was a new form of power: hydropower. What

Mumford called “white coal” promised all the benefits of electricity without the costs of coal.16 It did not require the dangerous work of mining; it did not create horrific air pollution that darkened the skies of industrial cities and sickened urban residents; its sup-ply was unlimited and inexhaustible. As Seattle leaders came to recognize the crucial role of energy in urban growth, they began to think seriously about hydropower.

Cities, however, do not typically have raging streams with large vertical drops running straight through them. Thus, the growing interest in hydro-power sent urban emissaries into their hinterlands. In Seattle’s case, “white coal” came first from a power plant constructed with investment capital 30 miles to the east, at Snoqualmie Falls. In 1905, the city would build its own small hydro plant as part of a larger project to tap the Cedar River for its water supply. But these were small-scale ventures. With the appointment of the charismatic James Delmage Ross (or J. D., as he was known) as superin-tendent of the new City Lighting De-partment, the radical expansion of electrical services—specifically, pub-

licly owned electricity—became a cru-sade in Seattle. Although the issue of private versus public power launched a heated political debate in the first dec-ades of the 20th century, everyone agreed that electricity was essential to attracting more industry and more capital to the region, and thus to Seat-tle’s future. Electricity use surged dur-ing World War I as the city’s industrial output exploded. Immediately follow-ing the war, Ross set to work to expand Seattle’s electrical supply with an am-bitious plan to build three dams on the Skagit River.

The upper Skagit was a beautiful but remote landscape. The river had carved a deep narrow canyon through the high northern Cascades before de-scending into a gentle glacial valley. As rangers in North Cascades National Park are eager to tell you, this is one of the most biologically diverse land-scapes in the northern hemisphere. To-day it is home to dozens of rare and threatened animals and birds, includ-ing grizzly bears, gray wolves, wolver-ines, bald eagles, and spotted owls. Na-tive people knew the Skagit as a particularly rich river that sustained all five species of salmon, as well as trout, sturgeon, and several other native fish. For engineers, the river and canyon of-fered a near-perfect setting for a dam. The steep drop promised lots of power, the glacier-fed river, a reliable flow. En-gineers saw the river not in terms of salmon but in terms of cubic feet per second and kilowatt-hours; J. D. Ross referred to it simply as “the river of a million horsepower.” With the arrival of City Light crews in 1919, this land-scape was pulled into the orbit of the growing city one hundred miles to the south.17

Engineers captured the kinetic energy

Native people viewed the Skagit as a rich river that sustained all five species of salmon; engineers saw it as a near-perfect setting for a dam. (Special Collections, UW Libraries, UW 37845)

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of the river by impounding it behind a dam at Newhalem (they later built two more further upstream), and then re-leasing water through a metal gate at a controlled rate where it flowed across a set of steel turbines, setting them in motion; the spinning turbines gener-ated an electrical current, which was sent along wires strung from the power plant on the river south to Seattle.

It was J. D. Ross and his engineers who planned the electrical lines that flowed away from the Skagit; those lines made no stopovers in towns or at farms along the way. Yet there were impacts along the river. A beautiful canyon lay submerged beneath a lake, as did key fishing sites belonging to the Upper Skagit tribe. Although Seattle’s engi-neers claimed that no salmon ever mi-grated above the dam site, in retro-spect, that claim seems dubious. In any case, as engineers stored and then re-leased water to meet Seattle’s electric-

ity needs, it played havoc with the river downstream. When power demand was light or repairs were needed, engi-neers held water behind the dam, sometimes leaving thousands of fish stranded in a dry streambed. At other times rapidly rising water flushed out eggs and juvenile fish while drowning local cows caught grazing too close to the river. As one writer editorialized, “Seattle’s domineering City Light” and other power corporations were re-sponsible for the “ruination of 500 miles of unsurpassed fishing streams” throughout the state.18

But other, more distant landscapes were affected by the push for electrifi-cation. Though the paths of connec-tion are more difficult to trace, they were no less consequential. The wires through which electricity flowed were made of copper—an element perfectly suited to the task because each copper atom contains a single, weakly attached

electron, which makes this metal an excellent conductor. Moreover, copper has a high tensile strength, which al-lows copper wire to be strung over long distances. As electricity became a standard feature of modern urban life, the demand for copper skyrocketed. However, substantial concentrations of copper are not widespread in the earth’s crust. Thus, the search for cop-per began to rival that for gold and silver, and the methods for obtaining it became increasingly destructive.19 Large capitalists, such as the Rockefel-lers and the Guggenheims, sought out more-distant deposits. They found a particularly rich mine along the Cop-per River in Alaska. Again, Native peo-ple—in this case the Ahtnas—were quickly pushed aside, as white workers were brought in and the massive Ken-necott mine complex was built. Hun-dreds of men labored and lived in this remote landscape, digging ore from the mountain, which was then shipped

The Skagit River Hydroelectric Project captured the energy of the river and brought it to Seattle, an example of how urban areas extended their control over resource hinterlands. (Seattle City Light, Skagit Hydroelectric Project [1956])

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by rail and boat more than two thou-sand miles south to a Guggenheim-owned smelter on Puget Sound. In just four months in 1915, the Kennecott mine shipped 31 million pounds of copper to the American Smelting and Refining Company in Ruston—a com-pany town carved out of the city of Ta-coma—for profits of over four million dollars. Along with shipments from Alaska, boatloads of ore were arriving from the Philippines, where the Amer-ican-owned Lepanto mine was worked by indigenous Igorot laborers. The Guggenheims were wielding the power of Alaskan and Philippine copper, and in less than three decades they would wring $100 million in profits out of the Kennecott mines alone. By 1927, the smelter in Ruston produced 12 percent of the nation’s copper.

But the Guggenheims were producing

more than copper. Once the copper was extracted from the ore, workers piled the waste slag into the adjacent tidal bay, where it formed a toxic pen-insula extending to a depth of 125 feet. The iconic Ruston smokestack, the tallest in the world, belched out arsenic and sulfur dioxide, which combined with water in the foggy Northwest at-mosphere to create an acid rain. Resi-

dents complained of pets dying, yards where nothing would grow, and chil-dren who developed asthma. But Rus-ton was a company town; working people depended on the smelter for their wages and their homes. When the acid rain was particularly bad, the “smelter man” went door-to-door pay-ing people on the spot for damaged plants and property while discourag-ing persistent complaints.20 Over the course of the 20th century, industrial-scale copper smelting in places like Ruston and Butte, Montana, left a leg-acy of sickened people and landscapes. Today many of these places, including Ruston, are Superfund sites.

Electricity, however, was here to stay. With the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the arrival of the New Deal, the federal government threw its weight behind the development of hy-dropower, making unprecedented in-

Ruston was home to the once highly profitable American Smelting and Refining Company, pictured here circa 1905; it was declared a Superfund site in 1983. (Richards Studio, Tacoma Public Library, 94\26824)

The Grand Coulee Dam is the centerpiece of the Columbia River’s hydropower system, and it, along with other large federal dams, made possible the development of the Pacific Northwest’s aluminum industry. (Lawrence Denny Lindsley, Special Collections, UW Libraries, Lindsley 4366)

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vestments in massive dams along the Columbia River. President Roosevelt hired Seattle’s own J. D. Ross to head a new agency, the Bonneville Power Ad-ministration (BPA), which would over-see the distribution of the river’s elec-tricity. The largest dam in the world, Grand Coulee, would anchor an ambi-tious irrigation scheme on the Colum-bia Plateau while also producing as-tounding amounts of power. Roosevelt then authorized a second large dam downstream at Bonneville. Together these dams promised to triple the elec-tricity supply of the region. Echoing Lewis Mumford’s vision of the neo-technic era, New Dealers saw electric-ity as revolutionary—capable of pro-ducing higher standards of living, reducing inequality, and enabling a cultural fluorescence among the work-ing classes. In keeping with the New Deal’s democratic political goals, the power lines from Grand Coulee ran in many directions. By 1945, the Bonne-ville Power Administration controlled 4,400 miles of power lines amidst a grid that wove together Seattle, Spo-kane, Portland, and most of the small towns and communities in between, while offering the cheapest electricity rates in the country.

Again, it was Native Americans who paid the highest and most immediate price. The Grand Coulee project cre-ated a gigantic reservoir in the midst of the Colville and Spokane Indian reser-vations. Kettle Falls—one of the North-west’s most magnificent inland fishing sites, where Indians had dipnetted salmon for centuries—was flooded. In addition, the reservations lost their best remaining lands—those along the river, where most people lived—as well as their access to traditional hunting

and gathering grounds on the river’s south side. Towns, both Native and white, were flooded; thousands of In-dian burial sites were inundated; places of spiritual and cultural significance were submerged beneath the new res-ervoir. As the Colville member Jim De-Sautel recalled decades later,

To add insult to injury, electricity ser-vice on the reservations has been and remains far more costly than in the rest of the region served by the federal projects. Years later, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation sued and eventually won financial compen-sation for some of their losses; efforts of the Spokane Tribe to do the same have yet to succeed.

Aluminum, by all accounts, was a thoroughly modern material. Cit-

ing its combination of lightness and strength, Lewis Mumford called it a distinctly “neotechnic” metal. Although aluminum was first produced in 1825, it was during World War I that its value

Kettle Falls, ancestral fishing grounds for the region’s Native Americans, was flooded in 1940 during the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam. (Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture/Eastern Washington State Historical Society, L93-75.31)

The river was the central and most powerful element in the . . . life of my people. Suddenly, all of this was wiped out. The river was blocked, the land was flooded. . . . Our homesites were gone. The fordings were made impossible. . . . The root-digging prairies were cut off. The salmon came no more, and with the disappearance of the salmon, our traditional economy was lost forever.21

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in military applications was recog-nized. It played a still more crucial role during World War II. In 1940, FDR called for the production of 50,000 air-planes, which required what was at the time a staggering amount of alumi-num. In 1943, he called for the produc-tion of 125,000 planes. Between 1930 and 1943, U.S. aluminum production rose 600 percent.

Almost overnight, aluminum captured the Columbia River, and it would not release its hold for more than half a century. Aluminum production is no-torious for its energy demands. To manufacture just one pound of the metal from raw material requires more than 30 kilowatt-hours of electricity. With the Bonneville Power Adminis-tration flush with excess hydropower and aluminum a strategic metal in short supply, aluminum manufactur-ers Alcoa and Reynolds moved into the Pacific Northwest. To support the war effort, the U.S. government located several additional aluminum smelter plants across the region—in smaller towns such as Tacoma and Mead, Washington, and Troutdale, Oregon. Part of the government’s rationale was the proximity of the Boeing Compa-ny’s manufacturing facility, which, by 1944, was employing 50,000 workers to build aluminum-bodied airplanes at its Seattle plant. With the onset of the Cold War, the federal government con-tinued to support the synergistic growth of aluminum smelting and the Boeing Company—which even today remains Seattle’s major employer. By the 1950s, there were 10 aluminum plants in the region providing 40 per-cent of the nation’s supply and con-suming half of the BPA’s electricity.

Materials, as any engineer will tell you, are essential to design. Part of alumi-num’s appeal lies in its high electron valence and consequent ability to alloy with numerous other metals: zinc, copper, silicon, lithium, magnesium. There are literally hundreds of differ-ent alloys of aluminum, each with dif-ferent properties. In different forms, aluminum can be shaped, drawn, stamped, spun, welded, brazed, or sol-dered. Each alloy offered Boeing’s en-gineers and machinists different pos-sibilities. The results were often novel, efficient, and sometimes wildly cre-ative. During World War II, Boeing earned international fame for its mass production of the B-17 bomber. In

later years, Boeing engineers employed new aluminum alloys in the design of not only standard-setting passenger planes, but also the first American lu-nar orbiter, the iconic moon buggy driven by the astronauts of Apollo 15, and the Minuteman nuclear missiles.

Beyond its military and aerospace ap-plications, aluminum became a sym-bol of a new kind of modernity—a lighter, faster, consumer-driven mo-dernity. Not only the stuff of airplanes and spacecraft, aluminum was the ma-terial of streamlined automobiles, Air-stream trailers, kitchen foil, and mod-ernist architecture. It encapsulated modern hopes for a faster, cleaner, and

The Washington State Pavilion, at the lower right of the photo, was designed by the architect Paul Thiry for the 1962 Seattle world’s fair. The lightweight aluminum roof allowed for an open interior, unblocked by columns or supporting walls. (Special Collections, UW Libraries, UW 18607)

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brighter future.22 This was nowhere more evident than at Seattle’s 1962 world’s fair, which proudly showcased both the Northwest’s hydropower re-sources and its aluminum production. Paul Thiry, the architect for the fair, designed the striking Washington State Pavilion, a 130,000-square-foot struc-ture with a stunning open plan. Topped by a lightweight aluminum panel roof, the pavilion required no interior roof supports. Inside, visitors delighted in the unobstructed space while riding the bubble-shaped glass elevator up through an artistic constellation of 3,500 aluminum cubes. This was, in the words of the fair’s organizers, “the world of tomorrow.”

But, as with all technologies, there is a darker side. The story of salmon versus dams on the Columbia is well known in this region. While dams are not nec-essarily inimical to fish, it is at best a difficult coexistence. By the late 1960s, there were 11 dams on the Columbia’s main stem, and this complex system was managed primarily for power and aluminum production, not fish. A river that once held more than 15 million salmon in a year, more than any other river in the world, now holds 2 mil-lion—and that has come only after bil-lions of dollars have been spent on res-toration and management. During the 1990s, the runs reached their nadir and 12 separate populations of Columbia River salmon were listed for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Less well known is the story of baux-ite—the key input for aluminum pro-duction. As demand for the metal soared, so did the demand for bauxite. At one point, all of the United States’

bauxite had come from Arkansas and Georgia, but, as wartime needs in-creased, it became clear to military planners that America would have to seek bauxite supplies abroad. Through a convoluted reasoning, funding in-tended for the postwar European re-covery—the Marshall Plan—provided money to American corporations to develop bauxite mines in Jamaica. The first Jamaican bauxite was shipped to the United States in 1952; five years later, this small Caribbean island led the world in bauxite production. Dense forest, pasture land, and the mixed cropping systems of peasant farmers gave way to pit mines and an intensely alkaline liquid waste known in the in-dustry as “red mud.” One ton of alumi-num produced in the Northwest pro-duced 10 tons of red mud in Jamaica, Suriname, or elsewhere. Bauxite re-gions in Jamaica are marked by exten-sive deforestation and damaged land; environmental restoration came only later and has proven difficult. Mean-while, local residents have suffered the effects of caustic air and polluted groundwater; asthma and respiratory problems are common. As in Ruston, industry representatives reportedly wrote checks to the most persistent complainers.23 This small island na-tion has remained dependent on this extractive industry ever since, subject to both the fluctuating prices of alumi-num in the global market and the seri-ous environmental impacts of bauxite production.

The intertwined stories of the Colum-bia River, the aluminum industry, and the Boeing corporation in the postwar period are indicative of modern Seat-tle’s privileged position within a set of complicated global networks, net-works that were and are environmen-tal as much as economic. Those net-works have fostered a wide variety of landscapes. In 1960s Seattle, they fos-tered a landscape of innovation at Boeing’s airplane factory and in the architecture of Paul Thiry, as well as a landscape of convenience in the homes of those eating TV dinners and drink-ing cans of Rainier beer. At smelter sites, in towns such as Longview and Mead, aluminum production fostered landscapes of slow contamination in which, over the course of decades, hy-drocarbons, cyanide, and fluoride seeped into soils, groundwater, and the bodies of working people. In Ja-maica, aluminum fostered a landscape of environmental destruction and in-equality, of which we still have far too little understanding.

This talk has wandered through a set of stories—of salmon, of tim-

ber and coal, of railroads, hydroelec-tricity, and aluminum. In the process, it has wandered far afield from Seattle. My goal has been to emphasize that a city is not an isolated entity but is itself a product of connections and, more important, that those connections all lead, eventually, back to nature, some-how, somewhere. A city, and certain

The mining of bauxite, vital to the production of aluminum in the Pacific Northwest, wreaked environmental havoc in places where the ore was found. Shown here is a Reynolds Company bauxite processing plant in Jamaica in the 1950s. (Saturday Evening Post, July 19, 1958)

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people within it, gain their power through their ability to claim and mo-bilize parts of the natural world—whether salmon, rivers, copper, or bauxite. We overlook the environmen-tal basis of that power to the extent that we believe that salmon comes from Whole Foods, electricity from the wall, and aluminum from the hard-ware store. We overlook the environ-mental basis of that power whenever we tell histories of the city as if only people mattered.

As Seattle has grown, it—like other cit-ies—has drawn into its orbit the re-sources of ever-more distant places and peoples. The high-technology in-dustries responsible for our current pandemonium moment rely upon fa-miliar pieces of nature: rivers, gold, copper, aluminum, but also on a host of less well-known things—such as the so-called rare earth minerals, which have names like lanthanum, scandium, yttrium, and lutetium, and most of which are currently mined in remote regions of China. It is the availability of this unprecedented array of things and materials, and the ability to sum-mon more on a moment’s notice, that

makes possible the innovation and ideas for which Seattle prides itself. In the process, our deep reliance on our environment, and on the environ-ments of others, is typically obscured.

What does such a history tell us? Where does it lead? In contrast to the authors of the “Where You At?” quiz, there is no suggestion on my part that we either can or should de-globalize or discon-nect the city. The connections are im-portant; more to the point perhaps, history cannot be undone. Yet if sus-tainability is the key challenge of our human future, we would do well to take note of its full complexity—and to recognize that the sustainability of any place in the modern world is con-nected to the sustainability of many, many others. Knowledge of the deer-rutting season will not help us very much here.

There have been voices, since at least the 1960s, here and elsewhere, trying to make and keep these types of con-nections visible. The historian Jeffrey Sanders calls them “ecotopians.” By this he means those who have recog-nized the deep connections between

environmental sustainability and so-cial justice, and then worked toward both.24 As the connections grow much more complex, the task of making them visible grows harder and more urgent. Contemporary struggles for urban sustainability, environmental restoration, and landscape preserva-tion are surely evidence that Seattleites recognize that our lives and those of our children are ineluctably tied to the future of the natural world. Yet the vi-sion of a “green city” will remain a chi-mera unless we see it as part of a much larger struggle to empower working people and marginalized communi-ties, both within the city and beyond.

Linda Nash is the John Calhoun Smith Memorial Endowed Professor in the University of Washington Department of History and director of the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest. She has authored one book and nu-merous articles on American environ-mental and public health history. She is currently completing a manuscript on American engineers and the arid landscapes of the Columbia Basin and southwestern Afghanistan.

1. “Where You At? A Bioregional Quiz,” CoEvolution Quarterly, Vol. 32 (Winter 1981), 1.

2. David B. Williams, Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography (Seattle, 2015); Coll Thrush, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Seattle, 2007).

3. Lissa K. Wadewitz, The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits on the Salish Sea (Seattle, 2012); Richard White, The Organic Machine (New York, 1995).

4. Observer quoted in Alexandra Harmon, Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound (Berkeley, Calif., 1998), 58.

5. William C. Speidel, Sons of the Profits; or,

There’s No Business like Grow Business: The Seattle Story, 1851-1901 (Seattle, 1967), 27-28.

6. Thomas R. Cox, Mills and Markets: A History of the Pacific Coast Lumber Industry to 1900 (Seattle, 1974).

7. Arthur Armstrong Denny, Pioneer Days on Puget Sound (Fairfield, Wash., 1979), 35.

8. David E. Blaine quoted in Clarence Bagley, History of Seattle from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1916), 1:33.

9. Harmon; Thrush.10. Investor quoted in Cox, 102.11. Kathryn Morse, The Nature of Gold: An

Environmental History of the Klondike Gold

Rush (Seattle, 2003), 166-90.12. John M. Findlay, “Pioneers and

Pandemonium: Stability and Change in Seattle History,” PNQ, Vol. 107 (Winter 2015/2016), 4.

13. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1992); White.

14. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 2, 1909, quoted in Tyler S. Sprague, “‘Lighted Fair Is Magic Landscape’: The AYP at Night,” PNQ, Vol. 100 (2009), 70.

15. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1934).

16. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York, 1938), 324.

Spring 2016 71

17. Linda Nash, “The Changing Experience of Nature: Historical Encounters with a Northwest River,” Journal of American History, Vol. 86 (2000), 1600-29; City of Seattle, Lighting Department, Annual Report for Year Ending December 31, 1927 (Seattle, [1928]), 31 (qtn.).

18. “The Real Issue,” Washington Sportsman, May 1937, p. 9.

19. Timothy J. LeCain, Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet (New Brunswick, N.J., 2009).

20. Marianne Sullivan, Tainted Earth: Smelters, Public Health, and the Environment (New Brunswick, N.J., 2014); Daniel Jack Chasan, “Memories of Toxic Rain in Ruston, and the Smelter That Shaped a City,” Crosscut, Oct. 7, 2010, http://crosscut.com/2010/10/memories-toxic-rain-in-ruston-smelter-that-shaped/ (accessed Dec. 1, 2016) (qtn.).

21. DeSautel quoted in Kathryn L. McKay and Nancy F. Renk, Currents and Undercurrents: An Administrative History of Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area (Washington, D.C., 2002), 34, https://www.nps.gov/

parkhistory/online_books/laro/adhi/adhit.htm (accessed Sept. 29, 2016).

22. Mimi Sheller, Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 2014).

23. “Dust-up Swirls around Key Jamaica Industry,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 14, 2004, A5.

24. Jeffrey C. Sanders, Seattle and the Roots of Urban Sustainability: Inventing Ecotopia (Pittsburgh, Pa., 2010).

Pacific Northwest Quarterly gratefully acknowledges the generosity of the following donors for 2015-16.

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