The Forest That Fish Built: Salmon, Timber, and People in Willapa Bay
Richard Manning
An Excerpt
Willapa has so many blessings it would be hard to rank them, but toward the top would be the accidental blessing that was James Swan. He had a particular gift for observation and left a record of the people he found and befriended around Willapa, mostly Chinook Indians.
He called the place, an "Indians' paradise," not 19th century romanticism, but rather a hard-eyed assessment of the position of the Chinooks relative to neighboring tribes. By the time Swan met the Chinooks, their numbers had already been decimated by diseases introduced by whites, but those remaining, like their ancestors, were richer than their neighbors, well-fed, peaceful, and leisurely, largely because of overwhelming natural abundance. Central to this wealth was salmon-lavish runs of chinook, coho, and especially chum.
Salmon and oysters still figure in Willapa's well-being, but one can ramble the fishing villages like Chinook, Ilwaco, and South Bend, and wealth is not what comes to mind. Per capita income runs well below the average for Washington state, and the gap is widening. As of 1990, 17.2 percent of the families in the county that accounts for most of the watershed lived below the poverty line.
There has been a correspondingly decline in the wealth of the natural community. Salmon runs have been greatly diminished; most of the remaining runs are sustained by the artificial life support system of hatcheries. This is a reflection of another form of poverty. There is enough in this shared fate of human and natural communities to suggest a link between economic and natural wealth, as of course there must be in a place so closely coupled to the land.
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The Forest That Fish Built: Salmon, Timber, and People in Willapa Bay
22 pages
© 1996 Ecotrust
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