"The Great Raincoast": The Legacy of European Settlement
Loggers near Saddle Mountain. Clatsop County, Oregon, August, 1909 (Photo courtesy of Oregon Historical Society, #OrHi 27346)
To understand the relationship between culture and the natural world along America's North Pacific slope one must consider a broader geography of human activity, especially the social, economic, and political enterprises beyond the region. For the last 200 years larger global forces, especially those associated with an expanding world capitalist system, have increasingly influenced the course and direction of change along the "Great Raincoast of North America," a term coined by Richard Maxwell Brown.
In contrast to the Native American inhabitants, the European newcomers, who gradually extended their control over the Pacific slope as the nineteenth century advanced, brought with them a strikingly different cultural vision. It embraced a social imagination and core of beliefs — an "economic culture," Donald Worster called it — that viewed the natural world as capital, obliged humankind to use that capital for self-advancement, and insisted that the social order should promote the accumulation of personal wealth. My point is not to argue for or against the Native American land ethic and environmental relations, but to underscore the influence of marketplace and then industrial capitalism in reshaping the ecology and landscape of the North Pacific coast for the last 200 years.
All economic systems, Worster reminds us, are first of all systems of ideas. The cultural values of what we have come to know as the modem industrial marketplace first took root among the rising European bourgeoisie of the 1600s and 1700s and expanded until industrial capitalism emerged in modern times as the most influential voice in global affairs. In the process it created a new cultural consciousness, habits of thought and perception, that make its functioning seem entirely rational and reasonable.
For the North Pacific slope the story begins with the early Spaniards who sailed the western seas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and eventually leads to Captain James Cook and the publication of his Voyages in 1784. Passing northward from the mouth of the Columbia River a few years later, British sea captain George Vancouver wrote:
The country now before us ... had the appearance of a continued forest extending as far north as the eye could reach, which made me very solicitous to find a port in the vicinity of a country presenting so delightful a prospect of fertility.
While the land-based newcomers to the region shared similar perceptions about the potential meaning of the region's natural abundance, these first narrative descriptions are grudging and ambivalent. Two American explorers and empire makers, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, expressed the difficulties and discomfort of their winter season at the mouth of the Columbia River:
November 12, 1805. "Send out men to hunt they found the woods So thick with Pine & [decayed] timber and under groth that they could not get through."
November 13. "I walked to the top of the first part of the mountain with much fatigue as the distance was about 3 miles thro' intolerable thickets of Small Pine, arrow wood a groth much resembling arrow wood with briers, growing to 10 & 15 feet high interlocking with each other & Furn, aded to this difficulty."
The first commercial effort to exploit and profit from the great stands of Douglas-fir, cedar, spruce, and hemlock must be attributed to the acquisitive abilities and instincts of the Hudson's Bay Company. With a water-powered sawmill upriver from Fort Vancouver, the company established a modest but profitable lumber export trade with Honolulu and with Spanish missions in California by the 1830s.
The pace of cultural and physical change in the region remained modest during those first few decades of the nineteenth century - that is, until the formal agreement between England and the United States in 1846 to extend their common boundary westward along the forty-ninth parallel to the waters of the Pacific. A swelling tide of EuroAmericans - most of them trekking overland, others coming by sea to the Willamette and Puget lowlands - overran and pushed aside an already decimated native population from the most valuable agricultural lands during the 1840s and 1850s.
The California gold rush was a momentous event for the fledgling settler communities at the far northwestern edge of the continent. San Francisco developed a voracious appetite for a great variety of agricultural foodstuffs and especially large quantities of timber. For lumber entrepreneurs, the coastal rain forest was an environment lush with promise; it required only capital, technical expertise, and labor to set up operation along one of the region's extensive timbered waterways to mill the lumber for sale in distant markets.
Driven by human and animal power, these first commercial inroads on the coastal forests probably did not appreciably diminish the individual's sense of powerlessness in the forest environment. Logging with ax and crosscut saw, with human energy and teams of oxen, was slow and laborious — nearly super human in terms of the labor required — and few in that time or place questioned the essential rightness of it. With their limited technology, those who worked in the forest environment remained in awe of the majestic trees, taking only the best timber and leaving numerous culls that inadvertently provided abundant cover for animal life and seed for regeneration.
But then a revolutionary force — steam power — entered the forest environment. Although steam-powered sawmills had operated along the North Pacific slope since the 1850s, it was not until the 1880s that operators began adapting steam-driven machines to the task of hauling felled timber. The increasing use of the steam engine or "donkey" to yard and load logs vastly stepped up both the pace of activity in the woods and disturbance to the ecology of coastal forests.
From the perspective of a century later, we can say that the steam donkey offered mixed blessings for the future: it greatly increased log production and it dramatically expanded cultural influences in forest ecosystems. As such, the steam donkey would appear to be an appropriate fit for one of Henry David Thoreau's 1854 aphorisms: "Our inventions are improved means to unimproved ends."
The most visible symbol of the industrial world — the railroad — had an even greater and more dramatic influence in altering the landscape of the coastal temperate rain forest. The mechanical harbinger of the new age first appeared in the woods around Puget Sound in the early 1880s and then in southern British Columbia the following decade. Railroads liberated the transport of logs from the restrictions of natural geography.
The race to gain access to timberland peaked in 1903 when the British Columbia provincial government, in an effort to increase revenue, made Crown lands available to Canadian and foreign interests through a generous timber leasing system. When the worst of the abuses ended at about the time of World War 1, more than 11 million acres — 80 percent of all Crown forestland in British Columbia — was leased, most of it in the hands of large syndicates.
Similar conditions prevailed in Washington and Oregon. The Weyerhaeuser interests led the way in 1900 with the purchase of 900,000 acres of magnificent timber from the Northern Pacific Railroad, itself one of the largest owners of forestland. The Weyerhaeuser purchase established a precedent: ownership and control of timberland, not the operation of sawmills, would be the wave of the future.
Since the coming of the Europeans to the Pacific Northwest, the dominant culture has played out a production-driven endgame based on the assumption that more fish could be pumped from the rivers, more kilowatt-hours could be generated from the darns, and more board-feet of timber could be grown in the forests - if only rational engineering and scientific approaches were brought to the task. It has not worked.
We would do well to heed the wisdom of forester Edward I. Kotok, who cautioned nearly fifty years ago that too much emphasis was being placed on end product rather than "the maintenance or creation of a healthy, well-balanced biological complex that by its nature is conducive to favorable vegetative growth, water relations, and the support of animal life."
William G. Robbins is Distinguished Professor of History at Oregon State University. This essay is adapted from The Rain Forests of Home: Profile of a North American Bioregion.