Learning the stories of a new place

The history of our people is in part a history of place. The intensity with which our stories are remembered and passed on from generation to generation are, is affected by the places where our parent and grandparents lived. My mother was born and raised in Fort Benton, Montana. My father grew up in Minnewaukan, North Dakota. I heard a lot of stories from them, from aunts and uncles, and from my paternal grandparents about the Great Depression. Their stories clearly reported of the effects of the times from the perspective of those who lived in rural places in the upper midwest. I knew about the stock market crash, mass unemployment and Hoovervilles from school and text books. I knew bout the farm crisis from the stories of my family.

A little more than a month before my father’s 13th birthday, on November 11, 1933, the family on the farm in North Dakota woke after a windy night to black skies in the day. The topsoil from their farms and from the farms to the west was being carried aloft by the winds. The dry land, starved of water by too many months of drought and a summer when the crops didn’t produce, took flight and abandoned them. It was blowing away. The next day the skies over Minneapolis and Chicago were rust colored with the dust. A few days later, the dust could be seen in upstate New York. The “black blizzard” was the first of what grew into a longer tragedy. As the topsoil of the American plains disappeared, the people began to abandon the land. Although my parents’ families were able to hang on to their land, the winds of November, 1933 were a dark foreshadowing of a major decline in population for rural midwestern counties. Counties in North Dakota lost more than a third of their population. Other states also had similar declines. Hundreds of thousands of refugees streamed westward across the mountains towards Washington, Oregon and California, adrift and homeless. One of my great uncles on my mother’s side and one of my father’s brothers ended up in California. Their stories were part of my growing up.

There are other stories about the Great Depression that I never heard, however. It wasn’t the same in every part of the nation. In the Pacific Northwest, where I now live, there was no drought and there was no Dust Bowl. There was, however, depression and tragedy. It is a long story that began way before the 1930’s.

When we look at Mount Baker, we imagine that the mountain always looked as it does today. There is something so permanent about a majestic mountain, thrust up among the clouds and topped with snow. But Mount Baker is one of the most active volcanoes in the Cascade Mountains. Historians now know that the mountain had a huge eruption in 1792 and another in 1846. The eruption at the end of the 18th century wasn’t widely observed by European settlers, though exporters certainly saw part of its aftermath. A lot more is know about the 1846 eruption that occurred after many settlers had joined the indigenous people of the region, whose name for the mountain was Kushlan.

Here in Mount Vernon the Skagit River, the largest river to flow into the Salish Sea, also known as the Puget Sound, takes a series of dramatic bends, widening and slowing on two nearly horseshoe corners. When Mount Baker experienced its 1846 eruption, millions of trees were blown down across the mountains to the south and east of Mount Baker. The Skagit river was filled with logs and mud and other debris. The debris formed gigantic log jams at the Mount Vernon curves in the river. The floating jams eventually consolidated into one floating mass, with trees becoming water logged and floating at various depths. The water passing underneath was wild and swirling and the river began to make sounds of groaning and sighing that could be heard for miles. For years river travel on the Skagit was separated into two parts - the upper river and the lower river with a portage between. Coal mined up river was transported by boat on the river to a spot above the log jam, unloaded and transported by wagon around the log jam, and loaded back on boats for the remainder of the journey. Logs cut for wood had to make a similar trip. Countless logs were lost to the jam when they went too far before being snaked from the river. It was 1876 - thirty years after the eruption when the jam was finally cleared. By then the locals had gotten used to using it as a bridge to get from one side of the river to the other. Those who cleared the jam had to cut through five to eight tiers of trees. Some trees were four feet and more in diameter and over 100 feet long. Clearing the jam was a dangerous job that cost the lives of several.

The log jam, however, protected the upper Skagit from floods that periodically resulted in salt water intrusion, leaving behind some of the most fertile soil in the entire United States.

On the second day of December, 1933, shortly after the dust bowl had begun in the Dakotas, it began to rain in northwest Washington. By the end of the month fifteen inches of rain had fallen in some places. Rivers all across western Washington - the Chehalis, the Snoqualmie, the Duwamish, the Skykomih, the Stillaguamish, the Skokomish, the Snohomish - washed away houses and swept millions of tons of topsoil into the ocean. The Skagit sliced through the remaining log jam and man-made earthen dikes and twenty thousand acres of farmland were covered with tidal saltwater. At the same time the drought was crushing the farm economy of the midwest, torrential rains and rising seas were destroying the profitability of farms in this area.

The stories those who have lived here a long time tell are different from the ones I heard growing up.

Now we know that there is an atmospheric river flowing over the northern United States that carries more water than the Mississippi. Where that water falls varies year by year and season by season, Sometimes it yields great crops from fertile fields. Sometimes it results in tragedy and hard times.

Always it leaves behind stories to tell.

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