RAINFALL AND THE RESETTLEMENT OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST by Corey Lane Rowlett Griffis A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY Bozeman, Montana May 2023 ©COPYRIGHT by Corey Lane Rowlett Griffis 2023 All Rights Reserved ii DEDICATION To the mosses, the muddy paws, and the rain upon the roof iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I do not have space here to thank all of those who have provided me with advice, life lessons, mentorship, practical assistance, and the comforts of good conversation. For their friendship, I particularly thank Carol Chang, Clare Menzel, Jacob Northcutt, Katie Montana, Maryrose Hicko, Micah Chang, Rose Ashley, and Travis Carioscia. For staying on the phone, I thank Ana Imes, Hannah Runyon, and Rachel Boone. For their impactful mentorship and kindness, I thank Charity McAdams, Chris Friday, Chris Hedeen, Daniel Chard, David Barringer, Ed Kline, Jared Hardesty, Kate Fisher, Kelly Springer, Laura Jeffrey, Michael Wolff, Scott Linneman, Tristan Goldman, and all my other teachers. For their occasional time and advice, I thank Coll Thrush, Dale Martin, Janet Ore, and many others. For the books, I thank the archival and ILL staff at Renne Library, the University of Washington, Multnomah County Libraries, the Oregon Historical Society, and the CRMM. For research and travel funding, I thank ASEH, the History & Philosophy Department, the Ivan Doig Center, and the Sid Richardson Memorial Fund. Catherine Dunlop, Mark Fiege, and Tim LeCain have been gracious, kind, constructive, and generous advisors. All three of them have inspired me and have given me much. I thank my late grandfather, Bobby Joe Rowlett, whose work in a carbon black plant in Franklin, Louisiana, is the reason why I was able to pursue further education. I often wonder what conversations we might have if he were still here today. Finally, I thank my parents for the home that they have made beneath the Douglas-firs. I will never see it in the same light, ever again — but home it remains, and such is the power. This project is, after all, the brainchild of homesickness. It has also been, and will yet persist in being, a project of home-making. Distance has made the heart grow fonder still. I will not stay here, and, in returning to the rainforest, I will part from some people for the final time. Others aren’t quite rid of me yet. My memories of all of them, however, will stay with me until the last raindrop falls. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: THE BLUEST SKIES YOU'VE EVER SEEN? .............................................. 1 Recovering the Power of Rainfall............................................................................................... 15 “A lovely hour or two occasionally & then it rains again:” An Argumentative Overview ........ 32 THE PACIFIC NORTHWHERE? A NOTE ON PLACE ............................................................. 40 A PRIMER ON PACIFIC NORTHWEST METEOROLOGY ..................................................... 43 1: CHAPTER ONE: “I ALWAYS WENT TO BED WET FOOTED: RAINFALL AND THE MARITIME NORTHWEST, 1543-c.1805 .................................................................. 58 “Dreary and Inhospitable:” First Approaches to the Northwest Coast ....................................... 61 Broken Health: The Sailor, the Sea, and the Storm in the 1770s ............................................... 78 "Savages," Sea Otters, and Sodden Geographies of Fear in the Maritime Fur Trade ................ 93 Conclusion: Beyond the Sea ..................................................................................................... 118 2: CHAPTER TWO: “NO OTHER CANOPY BUT THE HEAVENS:” ASTORIA, THE CORPS OF DISCOVERY, AND HOW NOT TO PADDLE A CANOE, 1805-c.1821 .... 121 “Wet and Disagreeable," or, How the Rains Haunted Lewis and Clark .................................. 125 “Incessant Rain:” the Sodden Experiences of the Astorians .................................................... 151 Chasing Pigs and Trapping Beavers: The Astorians in Winter ................................................ 167 Conclusion: Fleeting Sunshine ................................................................................................. 178 3: CHAPTER THREE: “I CANNOT SAY THAT I ADMIRE MUCH THIS COUNTRY:” FUR-TRIMMED IMPERIALISM AND DAY-DRINKING IN THE RAIN, 1821-c. 1840 ....................................................................................................... 180 “The Day Has Been Gloomy:” Seasonality, Post Farming, and Servant Life ......................... 183 Cross-Cultural Comfort: Company Men, Indigenous Women, and the French Prairie ........... 206 Methodists, Malaria, and Racialized Rainscapes ..................................................................... 222 Conclusion: Here Come the Americans! .................................................................................. 231 4: CHAPTER FOUR: CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF CIVILIZATION: RAINFALL AND OVERLAND EMIGRATION, c. 1840-1855 ................................................ 233 The Rains of Empire: Boosterism and the Narrative of Climatic Exceptionalism ................... 236 Out of the Pamphlet and Into the Newspaper ........................................................................... 248 Over the Rockies and Into the Rains: Emigrants on the Overland Trails ................................. 257 Arrival, Emigrant Letters, and the Persistence of Promoters ................................................... 271 Conclusion: of Dreams and Disappointments .......................................................................... 285 v TABLE OF CONTENTS – CONTINUED 5: CHAPTER FIVE: TO CIVILIZE THE RAIN: SODDEN SETTLER-COLONIALISM IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST, c. 1840-1900 ......................... 287 Pluvial Geography, Agriculture, and Pioneer (Re)settlement .................................................. 291 Rainfall and Everyday Settler-Colonialism .............................................................................. 312 A Change of Worlds: Rainfall, Native Peoples, and Geographies of Settler Fear ................... 333 The Webfoot, the Mossback, the Ditch and the Smokestack ................................................... 344 Conclusion: "The World and its Shams." ................................................................................. 360 EPILOGUE: "THE VITAL, MUFFLING GIFT." ....................................................................... 363 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................................ 379 vi LIST OF TABLES Table Page P.1. Comparative climatic statistics between Pacific Northwest and U.S. large cities ..... 49 P.2. Comparative climatic statistics between coastal Northwest cities ............................. 50 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page I.1. Brian Brettschneider's Dreariness Index, 2015 ............................................................. 9 P.1. Atmospheric river radar snapshot, 2021..................................................................... 45 P.2. Oregon, Washington, and Idaho precipitation map (in) ............................................. 47 P.3. Alaska precipitation map (in) ..................................................................................... 52 P.4. British Columbia precipitation map (mm) ................................................................. 53 1.1. Sebastian Vizcaino's chart of the California coastline, 1603 ..................................... 77 1.2. James Cook's chart of the North Pacific, published 1784 .......................................... 88 1.3. Aleutian-style animal intestine raincoat, c. 1900 ....................................................... 99 2.1. "Gathering Seaweed," Edward S. Curtis, c. 1915 .................................................... 136 2.2. William Clark's map of the lower Columbia estuary, 1805 ..................................... 143 2.3. W.C. Avery engraving of Fort Astoria ..................................................................... 162 3.1. Map of the Hudson's Bay Company's Columbia District ........................................ 184 3.2. Engraving of Fort Vancouver, by Henry Warre, c. 1848 ......................................... 198 3.3. Map of the French Prairie ......................................................................................... 215 3.4 Jason Lee statuary ...................................................................................................... 225 4.1. Title page of Hall J. Kelley, A Geographical Sketch, 1830...................................... 244 4.2. "Wrecked in the Rapids," from Victor, Eleven Years, 1881 .................................... 262 4.3. Map of the Barlow Road ......................................................................................... 267 4.4. Map of the Oregon Territory, New York Herald, 1848 ............................................ 279 5.1. "A.L. Clark paving company on muddy road," early 1900s .................................... 314 5.2. Map of mean annual rainfall in Oregon and Washington, 1888 .............................. 325 5.3. Haida-style bentwood cedar box, c. 1898................................................................. 343 viii LIST OF FIGURES – CONTINUED Figure Page 5.4. "The Leveling of the Hills to Make Seattle," by Asahel Curtis, c. 1910 .................. 351 E.1. Satellite image of November 15, 2021 floodwaters in Whatcom County, WA ....... 372 ix ABSTRACT The Pacific Northwest has a reputation for rainfall. The region’s relationship with that reputation is not uniform: some love it, some hate it, some deny that it should even exist. But this reputation — and the role of rainfall in regional identity and everyday life — has historical roots. This thesis considers rainfall as a powerful environmental force with profound impacts on the history of the Pacific Northwest. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, diaries, letters, advertisements, promotional pamphlets, newspaper articles, travelogues, and other primary source documents, this thesis reframes the imperial and colonial history of the Pacific Northwest through the lens of rainfall. I cover the period between 1543 and about 1900. My argument is that rainfall has had visceral, embodied impacts on how Euro-Americans encountered, perceived, and experienced the Pacific Northwest for almost five centuries. Rainfall played a key role in discouraging almost all interest in permanent colonial settlement from 1543 through around 1830, and the rainy season profoundly shaped the rhythms of both the maritime and overland fur trade. Throughout this period, Indigenous knowledge of rainfall formed a point of leverage against imperial power. Beginning in the 1830s, American promoters flipped the script, emphasizing rainfall in narratives of the Northwest’s potential as a haven for white agrarianism. Just like early navigators and fur traders, however, settlers struggled to adapt to the rhythms of the rainy season, which created new forms of isolation and inequality. The response of settler society to rainfall’s power has been to terraform the environment to try and control how rainfall manifests upon the landscape. As climate change fundamentally alters human-environment entanglements and reinforces structural inequities in how people experience weather and climate, it is also challenging our senses of place, of home. Rather than seeking new ways to dominate our changing environments and insulate ourselves further from the elements, we need to imagine new ways of living with weather and climate that are resilient, equitable, and grounded in the everyday dignities and indignities of being human. By learning to live with rainfall, we can redefine what it means to call the Northwest home. 1 INTRODUCTION THE BLUEST SKIES YOU'VE EVER SEEN? “The sun is for everyone; the beach is for those who deserve it.” — Rocket, Cidade de Deus (2002) Before anything else, I remember the rain. Its many forms appear in my early memories as an old friend; as a comforting veil of sound and sensation whose presence seems natural, unbidden. Even now, when I close my eyes to sleep or to rest, I can hear the rhythmic sound of pluvial music falling dimly in the dreary darkness, muffled, pervasive beyond any particular moment. A song of water and wind, the rain sings of cold rushing streams, moss-clad logs, and tall-timbered hillsides; of dark-bright hues, a world illumined by shade and shadow; of Great Horned Owls, hooting in the rainforest under skies as starless at night as they so often are at dawn and midday and dusk. Dampened, dripping melodies sing of sunbreaks cracking open the roof of a cloud-cloaked world, dispersing the shaft-splintered light of day across sea stacks in the surf. In winter, in autumn, in spring, the rain comes first, everlasting, from a time outside of time, like a fogbound dream that preceded life itself — and will endure beyond the final dying. In the home that I grew up in, situated in the lowermost foothills of the northern Cascade Mountains of Oregon, the rhythms of rainfall were an essential, recurring note in everyday life. Early on, I learned the difference between a drip and a drizzle and a downpour. When I think of rain, I think of baseball practices and games, so frequently cancelled; I think of the pelting din atop the covered play area at Redland Elementary, drowning out the sounds of children and bouncing rubber wall-balls; and I think of the dogs of my childhood, all smelly and wet, allowed inside the 2 basement on stormy evenings to lay in their beds behind a propped-up trampoline. They were strictly forbidden to step on the carpet with their muddy paws — not that they particularly listened. For close to half the days of the year, I went to sleep and awoke in the morning to the sounds of a gentle drizzle. Sometimes, it was a rain too light to measure in a rain gauge: yet the world was perpetually wet, the atmosphere was humid, and there was always more water coming down from between the treetops. Laying awake at night as a boy, I listened as precipitation pitter- pattered upon the blue metal roof of my childhood home; upon the lodgepole-log sides; upon the composite deck outside my bedroom window. Some of the drips came direct, from the open, foggy sky; an equal measure fell steadily down from the boughs of the soaked second-growth Douglas- firs that dot the downhill slope on the east side of the house, their tall, slender figures sentinels in the mists that sink and linger down in the dell amongst the evergreens. Sometimes, on the stormiest nights, I jolted out of bed, hearing high autumn and winter winds snap branches bigger than most trees, wondering if one of the coniferous giants — still dwarves among their old-growth kin — might give way and topple amidst slanted torrents of water. The physical rhythms of the rainfall were reflected in many of our family conversations about the weather. From September to April, my parents regularly complained either about the rain or about how the overcast skies looked like they were going to rain. As transplants from the Southern United States, they’ve never grown accustomed enough to the rainy season as to go out hiking even in mild showers. Yet from June through August, my parents fretted over how we hadn’t gotten much, if any rain for weeks, perhaps even months towards the tail-end of the summer. It was too dry, they complained, the grass too vomit-yellow and the need for skin lotion too high. For much of the year, then, rain — or the near-total lack thereof — was a mood-setter, a schedule- maker. We divided outside chores seasonally, using the dry summertime to paint, spread dirt and gravel, and (re)apply finish to the porches and railings. The sopping winters, in turn, were a time 3 for cleaning gutters, upgrading home furnishings, and suddenly becoming interested in the (usually dismal) playoff prospects of the Dallas Cowboys. All this west-side rainfall is an oft-taken-for-granted symbol of regional identity in the Pacific Northwest. In the same way that folks think of sunshine when one mentions Phoenix, Arizona, or of hurricane season when one mentions the state of Florida, so too is rainfall the climatic calling-card of the Northwest. A disproportionate number of local businesses in Portland and Seattle and elsewhere west of the Cascades name themselves after the region’s signature weather phenomenon; there’s Rainy Day Games, Rainy Day Records, Rain or Shine Coffee House, Rain City Plumbing, Rain City Striping, Rain City Wines, Rain City Burgers, Rain City Roofers, and so forth on down the storm drain. One of western Canada’s major book distributors, based in lower British Columbia, is called Raincoast Books; the author Peter Mountford has said that the rainy season is partially responsible for giving the region a “bibliophile soul,” and, indeed, the Pacific Northwest has some of the nation’s most voracious book buying habits and disproportionately high public library circulation rates.1 On the obverse, people also like to go outside and get a good helping of muck on their boots: in Viola, a few miles away from where I grew up, the neighbors turned their hay field into an arena for winter and spring mud bog derbies. Rainfall’s gloomy influence is the butt of many local and national jokes about the Pacific Northwest. Charles T. Royer, a former Mayor of Seattle, enjoyed telling one such joke about a 1 Peter Mountford, “Pacific Northwest: bicycles, bookshops, weirdness and coffee,” The Guardian, May 24, 2013, accessed March 30, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2013/may/25/pacific-northwest-seattle-oregon-coffee. On bibliophilia, see data reported in “Amazon.com Announces the Most Well-Read Cities in America,” businesswire, May 24 2016, accessed March 30, 202, https://www.businesswire .com/news/home/20160524005123/en/Amazon.com-Announces-Well-Read-Cities-America; and data in “Library Statistics and Figures: The Nation's Largest Public Libraries,” American Library Association, accessed March 30, 2023. https://libguides.ala.org/librarystatistics/largest-public- libs. Portland and Seattle both have outsized circulation compared to their service populations, although they are not the only large libraries with this honor. https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2013/may/25/pacific-northwest-seattle-oregon-coffee https://www.businesswire/ https://libguides.ala.org/librarystatistics/largest-public-libs https://libguides.ala.org/librarystatistics/largest-public-libs 4 husband and wife who visit the city as tourists and become frustrated by the wet weather. The wife eventually approaches a youngster on the street and asks, “When does it stop raining?” The kid replies, “Don’t ask me,” and shrugs. “I’m only six years old.”2 Similarly, the January 22, 2008, panel of the comic strip B.C. features a caveman asking a friend for “the best sunblock.” His friend hands him a slip of paper with “directions to Portland [Oregon].” Annual flooding in the Skokomish River Valley in Washington state recently caught the attention of the Internet, which latched onto viral images of fish swim-flopping across semi-inundated streets and began asking, “why did the chum salmon cross the road?”3 And the jokes can be old, too. One that has been told in the Pacific Northwest since the late 1800s involves a man who dies and goes to wait in line for judgement in the Christian tradition. He notices that of the souls damned to Hell, Satan throws most directly into a burning pit — except, every now and then, he tosses one aside. The man asks Satan why. “They’re from Oregon,” the devil responds, “They’re much too wet to burn.”4 One great example of rainfall’s pervasive relevance in everyday culture is the modern divide between pro-umbrella and anti-umbrella factions in the Pacific Northwest. Especially among settler families with deep roots in the region, the use of an umbrella is generally frowned upon and considered a sign of weakness, the telltale mark of a tourist — or worse, a Californian emigrant! Because the Northwest’s rainfall is often drizzly and light, the argument goes, one should abstain 2 This joke comes from Jean Godden, “No Country for Big Umbrellas,” Westside Seattle, February 10 2020, accessed March 30, 2023. https://www.westsideseattle.com/ballard-news- tribune/2020/02/10/no-country-big-umbrellas 3 Anna Kusmer, “Why did the Chum Salmon cross the road?” Atlas Obscura, December 4, 2018, accessed March 30, 2023. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-did-the-chum-salmon- cross-the-road 4 Suzi Jones and Jarold Ramsey, eds. The Stories We Tell: An Anthology of Oregon Folk Literature (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1994): 5. Reader’s Digest picked a variation of this joke as their funniest joke about Oregon, see Douglas Perry, “Reader's Digest's 'funniest joke' about Oregon is all wet,” The Oregonian/OregonLive, August 2, 2018, accessed March 30, 2023. https://www.oregonlive .com/life-and-culture/erry-2018/08/35ef7477334109/readers- digests-funniest-joke.html https://www.westsideseattle.com/ballard-news-tribune/2020/02/10/no-country-big-umbrellas https://www.westsideseattle.com/ballard-news-tribune/2020/02/10/no-country-big-umbrellas https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-did-the-chum-salmon-cross-the-road https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-did-the-chum-salmon-cross-the-road https://www.oregonlive/ 5 from taking up sidewalk space with a parasol and opt instead for a rain jacket. When Maxine Builder of New York Magazine reached out to Seattleites for recommendations for an article on the best umbrellas, many declined to speak with her, citing umbrellas as touristy. Many of those who did speak with her were transplants from other parts of the United States, and bemoaned the city's unfriendly attitude towards parasols. 5 Puget Sound meteorologist Scott Sistek has a technical explanation for Seattle’s umbrella objectors. The size of a given weather system's raindrops is dependent partly on the strength of area updrafts, which are generally weak around the Salish Sea and thus produce light, misty raindrops. This leads many locals to feel that bellyaching is unwarranted. The anti-umbrella prejudice that rests on this premise is sometimes humorous and sometimes oddly nativist, and is perhaps best crystalized by the fate of Bella Umbrella, which operated between 2014 and 2017 as Seattle’s only umbrella store. It closed in part due to declining digital sales and in part due to anti-umbrella hostility; the owner, who had lived in Seattle for many years, remarked that “Every day somebody would come in and tell me it was stupid to have an umbrella store in Seattle because Seattleites 5 Maxine Builder, “The Best Umbrellas, According to Seattles,” New York Magazine, April 13, 2018, accessed March 30, 2023. https://nymag.com/strategist/article/best-umbrellas-according-to- seattleites.html. Seattle Magazine’s staff once wrote an advice column entitled “OK Seattle, if you must use an umbrella let’s a few ground rules,” Seattle Magazine, October 12, 2017, accessed March 30, 2023. https://seattlemag.com/news/ok-seattle-if-you-must-use-umbrella-lets- set-few-ground-rules/ Knute Berger, a Seattle-area writer and journalist, argued against a Seattle Department of Transportation campaign to give out free umbrellas, see Knute Berger, “Seattle's pedestrian-umbrella boondoggle,” Crosscut, December 2, 2010, accessed March 30, 2023, https://crosscut.com/2010/12/seattles-pedestrianumbrella-boondoggle. Berger has expressed an anti-umbrella outlook elsewhere, see Berger “Forget the California Sun, Dark and Drizzly Days Soothe the Northwest Soul,” Seattle Magazine, October 31, 2017, accessed March 30, 2023. https://seattlemag.com/news/forget-california-sun-dark-and-drizzly-days-soothe-northwest- soul/.The subtitle of Berger’s 2009 book also points to this outlook, see Berger, Pugetopolis: A Mossback Takes on Growth Addicts, Weather Wimps, and the Myth of Seattle Nice (Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2009). https://nymag.com/strategist/article/best-umbrellas-according-to-seattleites.html https://nymag.com/strategist/article/best-umbrellas-according-to-seattleites.html https://seattlemag.com/ https://crosscut.com/2010/12/seattles-pedestrianumbrella-boondoggle https://seattlemag.com/news/forget-california-sun-dark-and-drizzly-days-soothe-northwest-soul/ https://seattlemag.com/news/forget-california-sun-dark-and-drizzly-days-soothe-northwest-soul/ 6 don’t use umbrellas. It made me feel bad.”6 She later moved to Louisiana and opened a new shop in New Orleans, which she described as a more umbrella-friendly city. Every resident of the Pacific Northwest has their own relationship with the rain. Sometimes it is one of pride, sometimes one of indifference, sometimes one of distaste. I have met multiple ex-Northwesterners who moved east of the Cascades in part to escape the rainy climate, and even more who are grateful to be in sunnier climes. Even long-time Northwesterners commiserate each winter about the seemingly ceaseless wet weather. Other folks embrace rainfall’s drizzly sounds and sights as part of a cozy aesthetic, and make a pastime out of staring out of coffee shop windows through the pearlescent, pointillist shimmer of rain droplets. During my high school years, I knew a young woman who identified herself in her Instagram profile description as a “pluviophile,” a term for a person who loves rain that became popular on tumblr and other sites in the late 2000s and early 2010s. It is common on social media bios in the Northwest. Recreation enthusiasts share in this ‘cozy’ lifestyle, gearing up on premium thermoses, high-tech gaiters, and the many moisture-shedding fabrics frequently utilized by Northwest- headquartered outdoor brands like REI, Outdoor Research, and Arc’teryx. As Seattle-based insurance firm PEMCO noted in one of their viral Northwest Profiles commercials, “Blue Tarp Camper,” the Northwest’s hikers and weekend warriors harness the hydrophobic petro-power of synthetic fibers and go ‘blue tarp camping’ even in the rainy depths of winter. Some even consider it a rite of passage to go out on specific hiking trails in rainy weather. You may, of course, need to 6 Sarah Anne Lloyd, “Umbrella store closure opens up age-old Seattle debate,” Curbed Seattle, October 17, 2017, accessed March 30, 2023. https://seattle.curbed.com/2017/10/17/16492300/seattle-umbrella-store-closing, and Cara Giaimo, “Seattle’s Last Umbrella Shop Is Closing,” Atlas Obscura, October 20, 2017, accessed March 30, 2023. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/seattle-last-umbrella-shop-closed https://seattle.curbed.com/2017/10/17/16492300/seattle-umbrella-store-closing https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/seattle-last-umbrella-shop-closed 7 bring “an inflatable raft.”7 The Canadian painter Robert Bateman, who lives on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, has echoed other outdoor enthusiasts by adopting a Scandinavian saying: “there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.”8 Many people in the Northwest wear technical and functional outdoor clothing on a daily basis — sometimes out of mere practicality, sometimes as part of a modern fashion trend called Gorpcore. Whether an object of complaint or not, rainfall is an unavoidable part of everyday life in the Pacific Northwest. It’s certainly one of the first things that Northwesterners associate with a sense of home, even though some folks gripe almost daily for two-thirds of the year about wet weather. Whenever I fly into Portland on an airplane, I regularly hear other returning passengers remark on how they're about to come home to the rain.9 But our rainy reputation is also an essentially contested concept: we (mostly) all agree that it rains, yet we cannot agree on what the rain means; on how it marks us. As a result, the Northwest has both a meteorological superiority complex and a meteorological inferiority complex. Some Northwesterners happily tell tourists and Californians that it rains all the time — they’d better stay away! Other Northwesterners become quite prickly when confronted with the region’s widespread reputation for excessive rainfall, and 7 PEMCO’s other weather-related Northwest profiles include “Goosebumped Beach Bum.” On rites of passage, see, for instance, Jeff Antonelis-Lapp’s description of the Carbon River rainforest, in Jeff Antonelis-Lapp, Tahoma and its People: A Natural History of Mount Rainier Park, (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2020): 157-8. On the need for rafts, see Marian Blue, Interpretative Guide to Western-Northwest Weather Forecasts (Clinton: Sunbreak Press, 2018): 5 8 This is according to the geographer Graeme Wynn, in a conversation on March 22, 2023. 9 Notably, Lizzy Acker of the Oregonian did not include negative comments about the weather in her guide to insulting Oregonians, see Lizzy Acker, “12 Ways to Offend an Oregonian,” The Oregonian/OregonLive February 13, 2018, accessed March 30, 2023. https://www.oregonlive.com /trending 2018/02/12_ways_to_offend_an_oregonian.html. Acker is also part of the oft-marginalized pro-umbrella faction, writing that one should not “let the propagandists tell you Oregonians don’t use umbrellas.” See Lizzy Acker, “What is there to do in Portland during rainy weather? Glad you asked, Josh Hart,” The Oregonian/OregonLive January 20, 2023, accessed March 30, 2023. https://www.oregonlive.com/trending/2023/01/what-is-there- to-do-in-portland-during-rainy-weather-glad-you-asked-josh-hart.html https://www.oregonlive/ 8 feel the instinctual need to defend the climate’s supposed advantages to outsiders. No, some insist, insulted by the region’s sodden reputation: it doesn’t really rain all the time here. The rain is usually just a drizzle; just a mere misting — and the summers are divine! The region’s meteorologists and weather observers get particularly persnickety, emphasizing that the region’s largest population centers receive at least five to ten inches less precipitation by volume than much of the country east of the Mississippi River.10 Phoenicians protest: “it’s a dry heat!” Northwesterners protest: “it’s only a sprinkling!” On the other hand, Anchorage-based meteorologist Brian Brettschneider became a target of unappreciative remarks when he pointed out that much of the Northwest’s primary population corridor only ranks in the middle on lists of metropolitan areas by precipitation volume. In response, he admitted that areas west of the Cascades are indisputably the gloomiest region of the United States as measured by a more comprehensive Dreariness Index that accounts for precipitation volume, precipitation days per year, and cloud-cover frequency (Figure I.1). The Dreariness Index reflects the stark climatic dividing line of the Cascades, and ranks only the east side of the Big Island of Hawai’i and the most snow-laden parts of the Appalachians and Great Lakes as similarly dreary to the western Pacific Northwest. Their climes, however, create a different kind of drear. Hilo, Hawai’i is much hotter than the Northwest; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Syracuse, New York are much colder. Their core winter months are not quite as cloudy as 10 Cliff Mass and Joe Boomgard-Zagrodnik are two of the Northwest’s public-facing meteorologists who regularly bring up this fact. Mass makes the point in his excellent book on regional meteorology, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, second edition, 2021). Geographer Daniel Johnson has noted that Oregonians “retort with a certain amount of smugness” that Portland receives less rain than eastern cities by volume. Daniel M. Johnson, “Weather and Climate of Portland,” in Larry W. Price, ed. Portland’s Changing Landscape (Portland: Portland State University Department of Geography, 1987): 20-37. 9 Figure I.1. Brian Brettschneider's Dreariness Index, published in 2015. British Columbia's coast is not included, but, except around Victoria, values would fall between 27 and 30. 10 Seattle's.11 Reporting on the Dreariness Index, one New York City-based journalist cheerfully dubbed the western side of the Pacific Northwest the “Nation's Gloomiest Suck-Pit.”12 We won’t invite him to visit us in the summertime. He probably uses an umbrella, anyway. That we argue over the rain in the Pacific Northwest only goes to show that we cannot ignore it. As for me, I became waterlogged at an early age. In time, the sounds and sensations and sights of rainfall seeped into me, and I carry the damp, drip-dropping spirit of Northwest rainfall with me, wherever I go. It is a friend to me; a holdfast in a world full of so many climes, and so many ways of living in them. Where the rain falls amongst the ferns and the redcedars and the pinnacle-pushing spruces: that is home. But what do we talk about when we talk about the weather? All of the lighthearted jokes and cozy coffee shops and meteorological deflections are endearing. Yet they tend to obfuscate something crucial: the Pacific Northwest’s rainy climate has never been — and still is not — a mere aesthetic backdrop, dreary inconvenience, or risible punchline. Rainfall is, in fact, a powerful agent of history in the Pacific Northwest — no less powerful than people or their prejudices; multinational businesses and industrial machines; and the roaring rivers that it feeds, such as the Columbia and the Fraser. In the 1840s, for instance, one of the primary influences on American emigration to the Oregon Country was promotional rhetoric fanned by idealistic boosters, who hyperbolically described the Pacific Northwest’s climate as Edenic and praised the region’s rainfall 11 See for instance Mark Monmonier, Lake Effect: Tales of Large Lakes, Arctic Winds, and Recurrent Snows (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012) 12 Brian Brettschneider, “Dreary Weather,” Brian B.’s Climate Blog, March 18, 2015, accessed March 30, 2023. http://us-climate.blogspot.com/2015/03/dreary-weather.html. Reporting by Keith Metcalfe, “Where's the 'Dreariest' Place in America?” Bloomberg CityLab, March 23, 2015, accessed March 30, 2023. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-23/this-dreariness- index-shows-which-u-s-cities-have-the-lousiest-weather. http://us-climate.blogspot.com/2015/03/dreary-weather.html https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-23/this-dreariness-index-shows-which-u-s-cities-have-the-lousiest-weather https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-23/this-dreariness-index-shows-which-u-s-cities-have-the-lousiest-weather 11 as ample, mild, and healthful. Few had visited the region, but their rhetoric encouraged American emigrants to stream into the Willamette Valley, where most arrived destitute and exhausted. As the detritus of imperial propaganda, many settlers were left with few possessions in a far country, often just as the winter rains set in. Many families squatted in fields or under the boughs of coniferous trees in the inclement weather, living out of tents for months and working for wealthy landowners and merchants as they scoured the countryside for a place to start their own farms. Homelessness and the violent dispossession of Native peoples became entangled; settlement in the Northwest often began out of a desperate desire for shelter in the throes of disappointment. Some settlers never found financial independence, much less a profitable livelihood. Indebted, some spent their entire lives serving the Pacific Northwest’s wealthy landowners, dredging up the land to create drainage systems that filtered out ‘excess’ rainfall with the aim of streamlining increasingly large- scale agricultural production. In their quest to colonize the Pacific Northwest, poor and rich settlers and federal agents alike fundamentally transformed — and in some cases destroyed — the landscapes and ecologies that Indigenous communities had intensively nurtured since time immemorial. Vast wetlands had ebbed and flowed in flood with the rains, distributing fertile soil, providing rich habitat, and serving as a source of life and rhythmic change for Native peoples — but colonists saw these rain-saturated landscapes as a dangerous impediment to the ordered and controlled environments they deemed necessary to develop a particular vision of proper civilization. In disrupting these landscapes, colonists also disrupted the seasonal migratory patterns of Native peoples, which were rooted in the age-old cycle between the rainy season and the dry summer months. As they transformed Northwest landscapes, settlers subjected the region’s Indigenous peoples to the sodden privations of dispossession, marching many of the peoples of the Willamette Valley by the dozens through the Coast Ranges in ceaseless rainfall and leaving some to die along the wayside of hypothermia 12 or illness exacerbated by exposure to inclement conditions. The same rains that had fed vast fields of cultivated camas and nurtured densely clustered villages for millennia became agents of mortality as colonialism disrupted traditional lifeways and Indigenous relationships with weather. Rainfall, then, is a force of history that, intersecting with racial prejudice and class differences, has often caused more suffering and hardship for some than for others. This historical inequity continues across time and space into the present day; it is particularly visible among the large unhoused populations of Eugene, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, and other urban and rural communities in the Pacific Northwest. Where homelessness in the early period of settler- colonialism was an imperialist practice linked to settler impoverishment and the dispossession of Indigenous land, homelessness in the contemporary Northwest is a byproduct of capitalist modernity and a symptom of precarity in American society. It is terribly ironic that, in Oregon, the housing crisis is structured in part by state land use systems that aim to preserve open spaces for recreation and enjoyment: in order to have places to go to be safely exposed to nature underneath a layer of GORE-TEX clothing, the weather-privileged in American and Northwestern society end up exposing the most vulnerable to the elements. I remember witnessing some of these pluvial inequities. When in high school, I volunteered for a community advocacy organization called Potluck in the Park, which provided free meals to downtown Portland’s unhoused community. The organization’s motto? “Serving the hungry, rain or shine.” It often rained. Many of the unhoused people that I met as a volunteer depended on the limited water-shedding properties of their tent fabrics and clothing to stay healthy and to stay alive through the long winters, when abundant rainwater accumulates on streets and sidewalks and drips down from eaves and drains. Most did not own and could not afford the expensive new GORE- TEX fabrics that serve best at shedding rain; if they had such fabrics at all, they relied on old, tattered versions, worn from everyday use and far less effective. 13 Some of the unhoused people I met used umbrellas, not because they were transplants or wimpy tourists but because their wellbeing depended on it. They spent a good part of many days simply trying to dry their limited supply of clothes, find shade from the rain, and stay warm. Many expressed frustration with how frequently they became sick because of continual exposure to cool, damp weather and crowded camp conditions. Fires of all kinds are heavily discouraged by city authorities because they produce pollution — burn barrels, once a staple of the urban unhoused, were banned statewide in Washington in 2000 — and were difficult to start anyway because most available wood and newspaper was constantly wet. Yet because temperatures in much of the Pacific Northwest remain mild year-round, warming centers are only open during extreme cold spells. As a result, many unhoused people live for most of the year in conditions of continual damp and frequent rain. Such prolonged exposure to moisture and cool air can cause hypothermia even in temperatures significantly above freezing. Between 2012 and the end of 2021, King County, the core jurisdiction of the Seattle metropolitan region, recorded 47 deaths due to environmental exposure among the unhoused. Almost certainly an undercount, forty-three of the deaths occurred during the October-March rainy season.13 These totals do not include the far greater number of overdose deaths, which are influenced by the impact of exposure on body temperatures. Opioid 13 King County Public Health, “Report on Deaths Among Presumed Homeless Individuals Investigated By the King County Medical Examiner January 1, 2012-December 31, 2021.” Some of Portland’s unhoused people, such as Will Osiris, have expressed frustration that warming centers are only open when temperatures drop below freezing, saying that “If it rains and it’s wet, it’s horrible for a lot of people,” see Conrad Wilson et al., “‘Your body feels numb’: Living in Portland without shelter in the frigid cold.” OPB, February 24, 2023, accessed March 30, 2023. https://www.opb.org/article/2023 /02/24/your-body-feels-numb-living-in-portland-without- shelter-in-the-frigid-cold/. For more stories of weather and homelessness, see Josephine Ensign, Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in Seattle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023); and Steven Vanderstaay, Street Lives: An Oral History of Homeless Americans (Gabriola: New Society Publishers, 1992). On inequity and the history of camping in America, see Phoebe S. K. Young, Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). https://www.opb.org/article/2023 14 overdose rates, for instance, may be as much as 30% higher during cold spells. Cold spells in the Pacific Northwest are few, but the damp climate facilitates sharper decreases in body temperature if a person becomes wet and cannot get dry even in mild temperatures.14 These unequal experiences of rainfall are only slated to become more relevant as the climate changes. Climatologists predict that the Pacific Northwest will see more days with intense downpours; greater flooding; and more extreme periods of cold due to the intrusion of Arctic air from the north.15 All of these changes will impact some people more than others, with especially significant consequences for the unhoused, residents of Indigenous reservations, and impoverished communities that rest along heavily terraformed waterways. Already, tribal nations such as the Quinault are experiencing unusually frequent flooding and seeking to relocate entire villages inland, away from the sea on which they have lived for thousands of years.16 2021 and 2022 saw a record number of deaths among the unhoused in both Portland and Seattle, including at least eighteen total that were directly attributed to hypothermia.17 14 William C. Goedel et al., “Increased risk of opioid overdose death following cold weather: A case–crossover study,” Epidemiology 30, no. 5, Sep. 2019: 637-641. 15 Christine Clarridge, “Climate change could turn Seattle into an umbrella city,” Axios, January 31, 2023, accessed March 30, 2023. https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2023/01/31/umbrella- seattle-climate-change-rain. On climate change in the Pacific Northwest more broadly, see Megan M. Dalton, Philip W. Mote and Amy Snover, Climate Change in the Northwest: Implications for Our Landscapes, Waters, and Communities (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2013). 16 See for instance Zoltán Grossman and Alan Parker, eds. Asserting Native Resilience: Pacific Rim Indigenous Nations Face the Climate Crisis (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2012); Corey Griffis, “At the End of the Highway, At the Edge of the Sea: Taholah, the Quinault Indian Nation, and Planned Relocation,” Occam’s Razor 12, (2022): 28-49. 17 On 2022 statistics for Seattle, see Anna Patrick, “More homeless people died in King County in 2022 than ever recorded before,” The Seattle Times, January 18, 2023, accessed March 30, 2023. https://www .seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/more-homeless-people-died-in-king- county-in-2022-than-ever-recorded-before/. On 2021 statistics for Portland, see Sophie Peel, “193 Homeless People Died in Multnomah County in 2021,” Willamette Week, February 15, 2023, accessed March 30, 2023. https: //www.wweek.com/news/city/2023/02/15/193-homeless-people- died-in-multnomah-county-in-2021/ https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2023/01/31/umbrella-seattle-climate-change-rain https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2023/01/31/umbrella-seattle-climate-change-rain https://www/ 15 Yet there is still a vast disconnect between the average Northwesterner’s insulated experience of rainfall and the precarious experience of those most vulnerable to weather’s everyday influences and climate change’s long-term transformations. This thesis seeks to provide historical insight into how such a disconnect developed. By exploring how the relationships between people and rainfall in the Pacific Northwest have developed and changed over time, I show that rainfall — something so mundane and harmless to most of us as to seem an inconsequential backdrop — is at the heart of many human-environment relationships in the Pacific Northwest. Rainfall is not only a force of historical significance and political power, which, though ambivalent as a material agent, has interacted with human beings, nonhuman beings, and biotic and abiotic landscapes to both reinforce existing cultural and economic differences and shape new ones. Over the course of the colonial settlement of the Pacific Northwest — an ongoing process called settler-colonialism — rainfall has become embedded within and (re)generative of structures of unequal power. Rainfall thus frames the historical relationship between culture, technology, capital, and environmental and climate injustice. If we want to understand how to create a more just tomorrow, we might look to the past, and to rainfall's power, to help us understand that climate injustice has its origins deeper in time, in a nexus of class, race, capital, and other factors that created systems of environmental precarity, racialized climate and labor, and encouraged the development of deeply consequential technological solutions to environmental problems. Recovering the Power of Rainfall Rainfall has not been entirely ignored by Northwest historians. In his excellent general history of the region, Carlos Schwantes notes that “much” Northwest rainfall “eventually returns to the Pacific Ocean […] but not before it generates electric power and irrigates arid lands.” Similarly, with reference to climatic boosterism, the eminent Oregon historian William G. Robbins 16 wrote that “No section of the continent was more ballyhooed as the “New Eden” than the Oregon Country in the 1840s and 1850s,” particularly the verdant Willamette Valley (where about three- quarters of Oregon’s growing modern population lives).18 Robbins has also observed that some Oregon newspapers were concerned about the rainy season’s impact on the initial impressions of new emigrants to the Willamette Valley. More recently, Erik Loomis has touched on how the sodden rainforest contributed to the poor living conditions of many logging camps by enabling the spread of diseases.19 Yet these mentions of rainfall are brief, incidental, and disaggregated. Rainfall is addressed only at short length, and only within narrow, specific circumstances; such observations are astute, but they consider rainfall primarily as an environmental background rather than as an important historical agent. It has been much more common for historians to speak of the region’s climate generally than for them to address rainfall specifically. However, when climate has been addressed by 18 Carlos Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: an Interpretive History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989): 11; William G. Robbins, “Introduction,” in William G. Robbins, Robert J. Frank, and Richard E. Ross, eds. Regionalism and the Pacific Northwest (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1983): 5. 19 Williams Robbins, Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story, 1800-1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999): 92; and Erik Loomis, Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 1-100. Another example of this is David Sarasohn, “Regionalism, Tending Towards Sectionalism,” in Robbins et al.., eds. Regionalism and the Pacific Northwest (223-236. Here Sarasohn, suggests that the Northwest be considered a regionalist/sectionalist “Rain Belt” alongside the Sun Belt and Frost Belt, but does not discuss any of the realities of rain in the region — his vision of regional identity reflects a popular association of the Northwest with rainfall, but only deploys it as a symbolic backdrop. Other Northwest historians that touch on rainfall but largely leave it as a background include William Lang, “Beavers, firs, salmon, and falling water: Pacific Northwest regionalism and the environment,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 104, no. 2 (2003) 150-165, in which falling water refers to dammed reservoirs rather than rainfall; and Kent Richards, “In Search of the Pacific Northwest: the Historiography of Oregon and Washington,” Pacific Historical Review 50 no. 4 (1981): 415–443, wherein he writes that rainfall is “an important subtheme” in regional literature but offers no further analysis. Jean Barman briefly mentions weather challenges in her general history of British Columbia, but largely omits climate as an agent. See Jean Barman, The West Beyond the West: A History of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, revised edition, 1996): 6-11. 17 historians, it has largely been firmly in the context of the long tradition of climatic exceptionalism and environmental determinism that exists in the historiography of the Pacific Northwest. This tradition generally portrays the climate of the region as mild, healthful, and ideal for the prosperity of white yeoman agrarianism. Rather than acknowledging rainfall’s power by exploring how it shapes the everyday and seasonal rhythms of life, these portrayals paint the climate more broadly — inclusive of rainfall — as a gentle, benevolent, benign force of nature that worked in the background to make the life of settlers easier without causing significant hardships. Such portrayals originated with boosters in the 1840s as part of an effort to encourage emigration to the Oregon Country, and were subsequently adopted by settler historians in the late 1800s in an effort to retrospectively naturalize the region’s colonization as the result of environmental destiny. Disproportionately pushed by literate citizen promoters and societal elites, such unambiguously positive portrayals of the Northwest’s climate and environment had many detractors from the vey beginning and perpetuated a deceptive, incomplete picture of regional culture and history. Yet because the early promoters of this exceptionalist, deterministic narrative were some of the most productive writers and diarists of the 19th century Pacific Northwest and form an integral part of historical sources, their assertions have often been taken at face value even by modern historians, who, focusing on other subjects and usually addressing climate tangentially if at all, have not dug deeply into the complexities of rainfall’s role in regional history.20 Another 20 Examples of 20th century and contemporary Northwest historians who have largely accepted this narrative include most major region-wide histories and environmental and early settler histories of the west side of the Cascades, such as Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest; Robbins, Landscapes of Promise; Peter Boag, Environment and Experience: Settlement Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oregon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), William Bowen, The Willamette Valley: Migration and Settlement on the Oregon Frontier (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978); Richard Somerset Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains: The British Fur Trade on the Pacific, 1793-1843 (Vancouver: UBC Press 1997); Melinda Marie Jetté, At the Hearth of the Crossed Races: A French-Indian Community in Nineteenth-Century Oregon, 1812- 1859 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2015); James R. Gibson, Farming the Frontier: 18 element of this, perhaps, is the insulation from the elements afforded to many historians and scholars by modern conveniences — most historians of the Pacific Northwest have been white, male, and upper-middle to upper class, and, unlike blue-collar workers such as loggers, fishermen, and disproportionately non-white farm laborers, experience little in the way of sustained, intense bodily exposure to the weather. The Agricultural Opening of the Oregon Country, 1786-1846 (Seattle: University of Washington Press: 1986); Dorothy O. Johansen and Charles M. Gates, Empire of the Columbia: A History of the Pacific Northwest (New York: Harper & Row, 1957); Gray Whaley, Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee: U.S. Empire and the Transformation of An Indigenous World, 1792-1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010): 20, 77; Dale D. Goble and Paul W. Hirt, eds. Northwest Lands, Northwest Peoples: Readings in Environmental History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999); Anne Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); Robert Bunting, The Pacific Raincoast: Environment and Culture in an American Eden (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997); and Richard White, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: the Shaping of Island County, Washington (Seattle: University of Washington Press, first paperback edition, 1987); Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Robbins, Boag, Bowen, Gibson, and others have very briefly touched on rainfall as a challenge in some fashion, but their comments are subsumed beneath a larger narrative of positive settler perceptions of the climate and environment. White, Island County addressed the challenges of settlement on logged-off lands, but largely accepted settler praise of the climate. Authors addressing the pre-1820 period have often had more observations on rainfall as a challenging agent, but still largely address its’ influence in backdrop fashion. See for instance Warren Cook, Flood Tide of Empire: Spain and the Pacific Northwest, 1543-1819 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); Leandra Zim Holland, Feasting and Fasting with Lewis and Clark: a Food and Social History of the Early 1800s (Emigrant: Old Yellowstone Publishing, 2003); Jean Barman and Bruce McIntyre Watson, Leaving Paradise: Indigenous Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest, 1787–1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006); Dick Pintarich, “The Whining and Dining of Lewis and Clark,” in Dick Pintarich, ed. Great and Minor Moments in Oregon History (Portland: New Oregon Publishers, second edition, 2008); James R. Gibson, Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785-1841 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, first paperback edition, 1999); Samuel N. Dicken and Emily F. Dicken, The Making of Oregon: a Study in Historical Geography (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1979): 1-14. In some cases, authors of popularly-oriented history deploy rainfall as a (often successful) literary device to emphasize travail and hardship rather than addressing weather seriously as a historical agent, see for instance Peter Stark, Astoria: Astor and Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Tale of Ambition and Survival on the Early American Frontier (New York: Ecco Press, 2014); or Stephen Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). 19 There are exceptions to this — several historians of the Pacific Northwest have had backgrounds as commercial fishermen, for instance. But most have not: like so many of the Pacific Northwest’s modern residents, the historian’s perspective on rainfall is shaped largely by comfortable observation through a window or from underneath a GORE-TEX jacket. The eminent American West historian Peter Boag, for instance, has written about doing gloomy archival research in Oregon as it rained outside; the B.C.-based geographer Graeme Wynn, similarly, once said that “The rain is the price we pay for our wine and daffodils.”21 Such sentiments are not uncommon —I certainly share in some of them — but they perhaps help explain why the Northwest’s environmental historians have largely accepted the narrative of climatic exceptionalism, even as they have produced excellent work critiquing the impacts of settler- colonialism on Northwest environments and ecologies.22 Only three authors have attempted to address rainfall in the context of Pacific Northwest history at any considerable length. The first was Steve Mierzejewski, who wrote a c.1960 manuscript, still unpublished, surveying major weather events and climate change in the Pacific Northwest. Ahead of its time in using primary sources and climatological research to consider past climate in the context of history, it has languished in regional archives for sixty years. However, Mierzejewski’s focus is primarily on superlative weather and disasters; his focus also extends far 21 Peter Boag, “The Hauntings of Local History: Peter Boag on ‘Pioneering Death.’” University of Washington Press Blog, May 18, 2022, https://uwpressblog.com/2022/05/18/the-hauntings-of- local-history/ Accessed March 30, 2023. Graeme Wynn was quoted to me by Mark Fiege. 22 Examples of this excellent work include Robbins, Landscapes of Promise; Bunting, The Pacific Raincoast; Boag, Environment and Experience; White, Island County; Chad Reimer, Before We Lost the Lake: A Natural and Human History of Sumas Valley (Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2019); Klingle, Emerald City; and former commercial fisherman Joseph E. Taylor III’s Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001). These critiques, however, have rarely identified the Pacific Northwest’s environments as obstacles to settlement, instead framing them as places of extraction and foci of settler admiration — landscapes that settlers moulded, and were moulded by largely in terms of coming to love their alterations. https://uwpressblog.com/2022/05/18/the-hauntings-of-local-history/ https://uwpressblog.com/2022/05/18/the-hauntings-of-local-history/ 20 beyond rainfall and the west side of the Cascades, with much of the text focused on the frigid winters of the early 19th century east-side Northwest. The manuscript is also analytically thin, with a focus on compiling various primary source accounts.23 More explicitly focused on rainfall is a 1986 essay the late Richard Maxwell Brown, “Rainfall and History: Perspectives on the Pacific Northwest.” Brown sought to “focus on the way in which northwesterners have reacted to the [region’s] pervasive rainfall in terms of ideas, images, attitudes, and emotions.”24 With a particular focus on Western Oregon, Brown argues that the state government of Oregon established a meteorological bureau in the late nineteenth century in part to facilitate the collection and organization of climatic statistics, which were used to provide empirical backing for what Brown calls “regional self-defense” against national perceptions of undesirable climate. He concludes that, since the 1890s, Northwesterners have developed an “ideology of 23 Steve Mierzejewski, “Footprints on the Rivers: Weather and the Early Northwest Pioneer: Being an Account of the Greatest Storms, the Deepest Snows, the Coldest Winters, the Highest Floods, Etc., and their Effects on the Settlers of the Pacific Northwest,” unpublished manuscript, c. 1960, Washington State Library, Olympia, MS 0317. 24 Richard Maxwell Brown, “Rainfall and History: Perspectives on the Pacific Northwest,” in G. Thomas Edwards and Carlos A. Schwantes, eds. Experiences in a Promised Land: Essays in Pacific Northwest History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986): 13. Brown more briefly discusses rain and the Northwest in “The Great Raincoast: Toward a New Regional History of the Pacific Northwest,” in David H. Stratton and George A. Frykman, eds. The Changing Pacific Northwest: Interpreting the Past (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1988), but this essay contains no new argumentation. He adapted his first essay for a more popular audience with “Bless the Rain,” in Dick Pintarich, ed. Great and Minor Moments in Oregon History 8-13. Brown was primarily a historian of American vigilantism and violence, and, like Earl Pomeroy, held the Beekman Chair in Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon. Among his other interests in life was regional climatology; this essay on rainfall is, to my knowledge, the only essay he authored on regional history. See Jeffrey Ostler, “Richard Maxwell Brown (1927–2014),” Western Historical Quarterly 46, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 131–132. 21 climate” that emphasizes the region’s rainfall as gentle, moderate, and reliable, and that claims the region’s broader climate to be healthful and of world-class temperate envy.25 Although he makes many valuable observations, Brown’s essay largely hews to an exceptionalist narrative informed by top-down sources interested in promoting the Pacific Northwest’s virtues and dispelling the region’s rainy reputation. His analysis is social and cultural, does not address environmental change or engage with what was then the emerging field of environmental history, and does critically consider the myriad ways in which rainfall challenged and disappointed many settlers, pervaded the lives of colonists, and formed a crucial aspect of environmental experience and adjustment. Brown also slips into climatic determinism by relating his proposed ‘ideology of climate’ to broader Northwestern psychological and cultural character, arguing that the presence of ample rainfall — which he narrowly portrays as regular, life-giving, and usually gentle — contributed to what he characterizes as the region’s relative tendency towards “a cultural consensus whose result has been both moderation in both social and political life.”26 Complaints about the rainfall, Brown claims, tend to be specific to personal preferences and psychologies and in denial of rainfall's true nature. While Brown notes that his essay does not attempt to provide a comprehensive overview of rainfall in Northwest history, his sweeping arguments relegate rainfall to an aesthetic backdrop, obfuscating the power of weather in shaping landscapes, human lives, and the material culture and rhythms of society.27 25 Brown, “Rainfall and History,” 19. Historiographical visions of the Northwest as a promised land have been summarized by Carl Abbott, Imagined Frontiers: Contemporary America and Beyond (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015): 112-114. 26 Brown, “Rainfall and History,” 24. 27 Many regional scholars quickly took issue with Brown’s portrayal of the Northwest’s past as one of consensus and moderation. This somewhat rosy portrayal has aged quite poorly with the influx of recent scholarship addressing racial and class conflict in the Northwest. Brown’s portrayal of rainfall itself as largely a source of praise and contentment amidst regional tumult, however, has been cited favorably by other authors. See for instance Boag, Environment and Experience, and Johnson, “Weather and Climate of Portland.” 22 Brown’s work was followed in 1996 by the Seattle-based journalist David Laskin’s slim, cheekily-titled book, Rains All the Time: A Connoisseur's History of Weather in the Pacific Northwest. Filled with both anecdotal observations on the social and cultural history of rainfall in the region and engaging personal musings, Laskin’s book builds on Brown’s work by showing that individual opinions about the region's rain have always been diverse. They are fickle, much like Northwest weather often is: a drizzle here, clouds there, a spot of breaking sunshine, no day the same, no locale identical to the next town over. Laskin broadly identifies rainfall as a source of disagreement among early agrarian colonists and touches on how oceanic storms impeded the movement of early European maritime explorations, but does not engage in a deep or thorough analysis of rainfall’s historical power.28 Intentionally setting out to refute his book’s own ironically chosen title, Laskin argues that the Northwest’s rainy reputation is a myth which has persisted both among residents and “outsiders.” Laskin expands on this argument in a 2001 essay entitled “Northwest Climate and Culture: Damp Myths and Dry Truths,” in a volume edited by Oregon’s most eminent environmental historian, William Robbins. In trying to put the “damp myth” of a rainy climate out to dry, Laskin deploys standard meteorological arguments about precipitation volume, in addition to data indicating that most of the Northwest’s rainfall falls as a gentle drizzle.29 His statistics are trustworthy, his arguments are well-meant, and he recognizes that he is fighting an uphill battle against the region’s sodden image. Laskin himself certainly understands what it is like to live through the drear of Northwest winters. But Laskin's argumentation is narrowly centered on the 28 David Laskin, Rains All the Time: a Connoisseur’s History of Weather in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 1996). 29 David Laskin, “Northwest Climate and Culture: Damp Myths and Dry Truths,” in William Robbins, ed. The Great Northwest: the Search for Regional Identity (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2001): 107-120. 23 intermontane lowlands, glosses over significant short-distance variability in precipitation volume, and, ultimately, misses the point. Precipitation volume and rainfall intensity certainly matter, but they do not and cannot tell the entire story. Furthermore, attempts to represent the decontextualized numeracy of precipitation statistics as fully descriptive of reality have been part and parcel of regional boosterism since the 1840s. In trying to refute the Northwest’s rainy reputation as a “damp myth,” Laskin's perspective thus ends up dovetailing with the region’s long historiographical tradition of climatic exceptionalism. This tradition fails to seriously acknowledge rainfall’s role in shaping the diverse on-the-ground realities of regional life and lived experience. The numbers are the numbers — though objective precipitation measurement is not as straightforward as one might expect — but efforts to pose them as representative of holistic historical and present lived experience fall into a broader tradition, noted by the late environmental historian Linda Nash, of modern attempts prove that nature has been conquered through quantification. Similarly, Bruno Latour has written about the attempts of modern forecasters to define what weather is primarily through statistical databases and scientific modeling. Latour wrote that, from the perspective of most contemporary meteorologists, “No matter how many things are said about the weather, no matter how many jokes are made about the weathermen, the weather of the weathermen is strong enough to discount all the other weathers… People who still hold [other] beliefs about the climate are simply unlearned.” But weather cannot be fully quantified, nor does weather end when the rain gauge measurement has been recorded and inputted. Modern meteorology, for instance, links with hydrological stations to monitor real-time flooding risks for rivers when storm systems move through the Pacific Northwest.30 30 Linda Nash, “The Changing Experience of Nature: Historical Encounters with a Northwest River,” The Journal of American History 86 no. 4 (Mar. 2000): 1600-1629; Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987): 180-182. 24 This thesis commits to a more thorough examination of why Northwesterners and other Americans typically conceptualize and often experience the Pacific Northwest as a very rainy place. In doing so, I take rainfall seriously as an agent of history with pervasive and evolving influences on human-environment relations, regional culture, and the emplaced rhythms of seasonal and everyday life in the Pacific Northwest. Previous efforts to address rainfall’s place in Pacific Northwest history and culture have emphasized rainfall as something that is influential because it is perceived; because it has been seen as benign, or healthful, or mild; or, on some occasions, an annoyance. While the evocative nature of rainfall and its flows is certainly a core aspect of their historicity and the psychology of weather phenomena deserves deeper consideration, this emotionality is only a fragmented aspect of a broader precipitative creativity. I hold that rainfall is a creative, dynamic, and materially affective phenomenon that exerts — and always has exerted — a much broader and more significant power over Northwest landscapes and the lives of the people and nonhuman beings that live on them.31 This power ranges widely in scale. Rainfall has historical agency because it supports the growth and ecological dominance of the region’s vast coniferous forests, and it has also such power 31 My thinking on the agency of rainfall and its intersections with human life, nonhuman life, and landscape has been particularly informed by Timothy J. LeCain, The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900- 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, second edition, 2009); Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: an Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019); Raymond Pierotti and Brandy R. Fogg, The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Jason M. Colby, Orca: How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean’s Greatest Predator (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); David Howes, ed. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004); and Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 25 because it has historically influenced people’s clothing choices, transportation options, and everyday routines.32 Rainfall’s power is also integrated with that of the global water cycle, which has no neat beginning or end but exists in complex perpetuity; as such, rainfall is impossible to isolate, and indeed impossible to entirely separate from other global cycles. I thus include in my analysis fog — which is technically not precipitation — and the clouds that rainfall comes from; the darkness and dim, dark-bright colors that such cloud-cover creates; water as it descends through the atmosphere as rain; and the rainfall as it meets terrene surfaces and creates puddles, mud, and runoff. These effects are the accompaniments and afterlives of rain.33 Similarly, I find it relevant to include observations about other parts of the water cycle, such as riverine flows, given that they emerge dependent upon climatic and geographical variances in rainfall — if we are to holistically understand phenomena like rainfall, we have to understand the ways in which their influences echo outwards in ways that are not always immediately obvious to historians. In service of exploring rainfall’s power, I employ the concept of a rainscape. By rainscape, I mean to describe how a landscape gives certain form and flow to rainfall based upon atmospheric physics and topography, yet is also in turn shaped by that rainfall, which pervades both the biotic and abiotic aspects of place. A rainscape is a defined not only by the geography of rainfall, but also by how human and nonhuman beings have altered the environment to capture that rain; divert runoff; and redistribute rainwater. Beaver dams and concrete dams, impermeable urban surfaces, and irrigation canals are just as much a part of a rainscape as are wetlands, mass wasting flows, and 32 On coniferous forests, see James P. Lassoie et al., “Coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest,” in Brian F. Chabot and Harold A. Mooney, eds. Physiological Ecology of North American Plant Communities (London: Chapman and Hall, 1985): 127-161 33 My consideration of light and dark in historical context has been influenced by Tim Edensor, From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination, and Gloom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); and A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005) 26 rainforests. A rainscape is not quite solid, not quite fully fluid — it is malleable, like the soggy ground of a rain-soaked farm field or the puddled pockmarks of a city street.34 Exploring rainfall’s power has several purposes. In some ways, this thesis aims to be the first climate history of the Pacific Northwest, a region of the United States — and the world as a whole — that has received little attention from climate historians and been largely understudied even by paleoclimatologists.35 By challenging the teflon-like narratives of climatic exceptionalism and environmental determinism that continue to persist throughout much of the region’s historiography, I clarify human-environment relations and ideologies in the Northwest and show how climate and weather have both enabled and challenged the regional intrusion and historical development of settler-colonialism and capitalism. In doing so, I embrace rainfall as a possibilistic 34 My thinking regarding water has been influenced by, for instance, Jamie Linton and Jessica Budds, “The Hydrosocial Cycle: Defining and Mobilizing a Relational-Dialectical Approach to Water,” Geoforum 57 (Nov. 2014): 170-180; Jeremy J. Schmidt, “Historicising the Hydrosocial Cycle,” Water Alternatives 7 no. 1 (2014): 220-234; Jamie Linton, What Is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010); Sara B. Pritchard, Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); and Lowell Duckert, For All Waters: Finding Ourselves in Early Modern Wetscapes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017) 35 One reason why the Pacific Northwest has been neglected by climate historians is simple data availability. Paleoclimatological reconstruction is a difficult task that has become exponentially more prominent in the last three decades, but many gaps in coverage remain. The cultural dominance of California on the West Coast and the Northwest’s relatively small population may also play a role. Many helpful works exist that cover regional meteorology, hydrology, and water geography, but even scholarship that centers on precipitation and/or rainfall tends to be heavily quantitative; technical; or focused on general descriptions of punctuative weather events, rather than on the general historicization of the region’s rainfall. See for instance George H. Taylor and Chris Hannah, The Climate of Oregon: From Rain Forest to Desert (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1999), and George H. Taylor and Raymond R. Hatton, The Oregon Weather Book: A State of Extremes (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1999); and John Dodge, A Deadly Wind: The 1962 Columbus Day Storm (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2018). The most comprehensive published volume on the everyday and seasonal weather of the Pacific Northwest in historical context is Raymond R. Hatton, Portland, Oregon Weather and Climate: A Historical Perspective (Bend: Geographical Books, 2005). I have found this volume tremendously useful, but most of it is a narrative summary of Portland’s weather mixed with newspaper accounts, cartoons, and other cultural expressions relating to weather. It offers little analysis of weather and climate as historical agents, but ample primary source evidence. 27 agent — as a force that has both opened and constrained certain avenues of historical possibility but has not determined outcomes in the absence of human choice. This is what some scholars have called ‘distributed agency.’36 However, in many ways this thesis also differs from traditional climate history, in part because it does not emphasize climate change. The historicization of climate continues to largely be oriented towards superlative disasters or periods of disruption and significant climate change, often in global contexts.37 Tropical and subtropical climates have also been favored with a wider array of focused analyses.38 Historians have written about the general meteorological and 36 For an interdisciplinary summation of recent thinking on this topic, see N.J. Enfield and Paul Kockelman, eds. Distributed Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) 37 See, for instance, Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (Basic Books: 2002); Louis A. Perez Jr., Winds of Change: Hurricanes and the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Andy Horowitz, Katrina: a History, 1915-2015 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020); Ling Zhang, The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048–1128 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York: Verso, 2000); Sunil Amrith, Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia’s History (New York: Basic Books, 2018); Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); John L. Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); William C. Foster, Climate and Culture Change in North America AD 900–1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012); César N. Caviedes, El Niño in History: Storming Through the Ages (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2001); Julia Miller, La Niña and the Making of Climate Optimism: Remembering Rain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). One reason for global and punctuative emphases may be that disasters or major changes make it easier to grasp climate, which is a physically massive concept. See Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 38 For instance, Felix Driver and Lucaiana Martins, eds. Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Nicolas Wey Gomez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Boston: The MIT Press, 2008); Michael A. Osborne, The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 28 environmental character of particular places and regions, even entire continents, but the basic phenomena of weather — the shorter-term conditions of the atmosphere —are often overshadowed in favor of approaches centering punctuative events or the longer-term behavior and variability of the climate.39 These longer-term and wider-scale approaches, while crucial, can sometimes omit, gloss over, or simplify the emplaced, embodied, everyday elemental phenomena that compose climate and weather, like heat, cold, wind, rain, snow, and sun.40 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Exceptions to the dominance of tropical climates in the literature include Anya Zilberstein, A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Vladimir Jankovic, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650-1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and Alexandra Harris, Weatherland: Writers & Artists Under English Skies (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2016). British climate and weather, especially in the context of the development of meteorological science, have received much of the temperate-oriented attention. 39 Two exceptions are Thomas M. Wickman, Snowshoe Country: An Environmental and Cultural History of Winter in the Early American Northeast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); and Christine L. Corton, London Fog: The Biography (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2015). Essays that have addressed more everyday weather include Catherine Dunlop, “Losing an Archive: Doing Place-Based History in the Age of the Anthropocene,” The American Historical Review 126, no. 3 (Sept. 2021): 1143-1153; Sky Michael Johnston, “Accounting for a Fruitful Little Ice Age: Overlapping Scales of Climate and Culture in Württemberg, 1560–1590,” Environmental History 27, no. 4 (Oct. 2022): 722-746; Grace Karskens, “Floods and Flood- mindedness in Early Colonial Australia,” Environmental History 21, no. 2 (April 2016): 315-342; Kara Murphy Schlichting, “Hot Town: Sensing Heat in Summertime Manhattan,” Environmental History 27 no. 2 (April 2022): 354-368; William B. Meyer, “The Perfectionists and the Weather: The Oneida Community’s Quest for Meteorological Utopia, 1848-1879,” Environmental History 7, no. 4 (Oct. 2002): 589-610; and Jeremy Vetter “Knowing the Great Plains Weather: Field Life and Lay Participation on the American Frontier during the Railroad Era,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society 13, no. 2 (2019): 195-213. Molly P. Rozum, Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021) has addressed climate with a deeply emplaced focus. Christian Pfister, in 2005, made a distinction between micro-weather and macro-climate histories, and urged the need for both, see Pfister, “Weeping in the Snow: The Second Period of Little Ice Age-type Impacts, 1570-1630,” in Wolfgang Behringer, Hartmut Lehmann, and Christian Pfister, eds. Cultural Consequences of the Little Ice Age (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005): 31-86. 40 Scholars in disciplines outside of or adjacent to history have generally looked at micro-scale weather and seasonality more deeply, see Sarah Strauss, “An ill wind: the Foehn in Leukerbad and beyond,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (2007): 165-181; Zeke Baker, “Anticipatory Culture in the Bering Sea: Weather, Climate, and Temporal Dissonance,” Weather, Climate and Society 13 no. 4 (2021): 783-795; ; Toby Pillatt, “Experiencing Climate: Finding Weather in Eighteenth Century Cumbria,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 19 29 These mundane phenomena are the inseparable but distinct constituents of climate, and they are important for many reasons. While the longer-term behavior of the climate helps people form expectations and baselines over decades or centuries, the shorter-term behavior of the weather and the annual cycle of the seasons are how we experience that climate on a daily basis. The daily realities of weather influence our everyday sensorial and emotional experiences, inform how we build our homes and communities, and help us formulate our sense of place. Our lives are embedded in what the anthropologist Timothy Ingold calls the “weather-world,” where the elements frolic, surround us, and flow into and out of us with each breath, fundamentally shaping our individual and collective lived experiences.41 There is a reason why we deploy the term ‘atmosphere ’to describe the irreducible mood and measure of moments and locales: weather is not generic. It is always emplaced by physical geographies, and always pervades human geographies in this context. (2012): 564-581; Eliza de Vet, “Exploring weather-related experiences and practices: examining methodological approaches,” Area 45 no. 2 (2013); 198-206; Elizabeth Meze-Hausken, “Seasons in the sun - weather and climate front-page news stories in Europe’s rainiest city, Bergen, Norway,” International Journal of Biometeorology 52 (2007): 17-31; Luke Fischer and David Macauley, eds. The Seasons: Philosophical, Literary, and Environmental Perspectives (Binghamton: State University of New York Press, 2022); David Macauley, Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas (Binghamton: State University of New York Press, 2010); Michael Kammen, A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Kaya Berry, Maria Borovnik, and Tim Edensor, eds. Weather: Spaces, Mobilities and Affects (London: Routledge, 2020); and Mike Hulme, Weathered: Cultures of Climate (London: SAGE Publications, 2017). Phillip Vannini, Dennis Waskul, Simon Gottschalk, and Toby Ellis-Newstead offer perhaps the only local cultural examination of rainfall and weather in the Northwest from a modern lens, but their analysis is not historical in nature. Vannini et al., “Making Sense of the Weather: Dwelling and Weathering on Canada’s Rain Coast,” Space and Culture 15, no. 4 (Nov. 2012): 361-380. 41 Timothy Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, second edition, 2022); Timothy Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, second edition, 2022); Timothy Ingold, “Footprints through the weather-world: walking, breathing, knowing,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16 (May 2010): 121-139; Timothy Ingold, “Earth, sky, wind, and weather,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (2007): 19-38. 30 History is more than place alone, but it cannot be separated from place, and a place is, in part, its weather and climate. Understanding these emplaced rhythms of weather and everyday life is essential. They provide a baseline from which to judge the impacts of punctuative events and longitudinal climatic changes, and thus can help scholars distinguish truly significant climatic disruptions from the everyday and seasonal impacts of weather and climate. Examining how weather is entangled with the establishment and evolution of rhythms of human relation with landscapes and nonhuman beings can elucidate how attempts to grapple with weather and climate are ingrained within everyday materialities, sometimes in ways that are relatively benign and sometimes in ways that have deeply consequential implications. This thesis also differs from traditional climate history in that it emphasizes the development of emplaced rhythms of life in a settler-colonial context. While many climate historians have examined the reactions and adaptations of people across the world to historical periods of climate change, these studies are largely focused on how people already living in a given place under established rhythms of life have understood and responded to significant climatic disruptions, particularly during the Little Ice Age.42 But the embodied experience of weather is a necessary component of exploration and encounter histories, because the materiality of climate physically shapes people’s bodily perceptions of place. This has broader impacts on the colonial imagination ideal, and on the structures, cultures, and goals of settler societies. As one of the last temperate areas of the world to be colonized by Euro-Americans, the Pacific Northwest is uniquely suited for such an approach. Building on the work of historians who 42 One study that combines a focus on encounter with a focus on the Little Ice Age is Sam White, A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017). 31 have historicized climate change and large-scale climate regimes and utilized climate to broadly contextualize human-environment relations in particular places, I work to foreground the day-to- day and seasonal realities of weather phenomena by engaging in a regionally-focused treatment of rainfall as a suffusive history-making force rooted in place and matter. I bring together molecular and meteorological universalities with geographical and sociocultural particularities, rooting rainfall in place, showing how the Northwest’s particular geographies have channeled and given form to the agency of rain, and exploring how humans in the Northwest have interacted with and been shaped by that agency. Drawing on Timothy J. LeCain’s observation that “We do not use matter so much as cooperate with it in ways that form and define us,” I show how rainfall’s materiality has enabled, encouraged, and shaped Northwest history and society in dynamic ways, and explore how regional history and culture have been made through attempts to circumvent, control, protect against, or harness rainfall.43 I explore how European and American imperialists and settlers came to perceive and understand the climate and the weather of a place that had previously been unknown to them, and how they established life rhythms in the context of rapidly burgeoning industrialization and the spread of global capitalism. I examine how weather and climate influenced early imperial understandings and interacted with imperial ideologies, including at the interface of Indigenous- white contact and at the interface of human-nonhuman relationships. The historicization of rainfall in this context illuminates the role of weather and climate in shaping settler-colonial encounter, settlement patterns and problems, and emplaced identity formation. I also frame rainfall as a force that bends people to its own time, encouraging the development of seasonal rhythms of life or adaptive ways, human and nonhuman, to push back 43 LeCain, The Matter of History, 183. 32 against or harmonize with its power. As environmental forces, the Northwest weather and climate engendered both societal agreement and disagreement over their material and moral character. Some settlers focused on adapting to rainfall’s temporality; others emphasized attempts to detach human activities from the cycle of the seasons. Differing understandings and visions of what rainfall brought to the Northwest’s landscapes illuminate contrasts between settler-colonial and Indigenous ways of life. I explore how settlers have resisted and attempted to control the realities of a new climate, opting to transform many of the rainscapes of the Pacific Northwest to suit particular visions of progress and civilization. The choices that imperialists and settlers made in response to rainfall’s power offer an example of how the daily realities of weather influence and shape the broader structures of society. I do not intend to portray the Pacific Northwest as a region that is unique in being shaped by rainfall — quite the contrary, many of the issues and problems and relations examined are relevant to other parts of the world. Rather, I aim to explore how rainfall manifests in this particularly wet part of the world, and how it interfaces with human activities and ideas over time. It is my hope that exploring rainfall as an agent of history in the Pacific Northwest can serve as an accessible framework for residents of the region to learn more about their own history. This study might also serve as an example of how historians can develop new approaches to weather and climate phenomena in all parts of the world: a deeper sense of the historical agency of weather can help us further understand how broader climate variations and changes challenge the emplaced rhythms of life. “A lovely hour or two occasionally & then it rains again:” Chapter Overview I begin my examination of human-rainfall relationships in the 1540s, following the initial development of imperial interest in maritime exploration of the Northwest Coast. Chapter 1 33 investigates the numerous ways in which rainfall impeded imperial legibility, frustrated navigators, and immiserated sailors from multiple empires, discouraging further European approaches for a century and a half. I look at how rainfall contextualized and mediated initial contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples along the coast; how navigators in 1770s utilized new sailing and cartographic technologies to begin to map the coast; and provide a sense of how the Northwest Coast’s seasonal rhythms influenced the structure of the maritime trade in sea otter furs, creating a global network of commerce dependent upon Indigenous participation and emplaced knowledge of how to paddle and hunt in the rain. I root my analysis in the understanding that imperial and Indigenous forms of labor were connected to the material environments in which they took place: the rainscape is also a workscape.44 In Chapter 2, I follow the development of overland exploration and the overland fur trade in beaver skins, first tracking rainfall’s dismal influence on the Lewis and Clark expedition’s journey down the Columbia and wintering at Fort Clatsop. I explore how the rainy coastal climate pervaded the everyday lives of the expedition, making mundane tasks difficult and at times threatening their lives in the context of an unfamiliar landscape and climate. Even as fur traders from across the globe began to establish permanent outposts such as Fort Astoria to facilitate the collection and export of beaver pelts, a clear divide emerged between the experiences of impoverished laborers and the well-provisioned fur trade managers. The unpleasant realities of life as an average trader in the rainy coastal weather-world embedded negative impressions of the Northwest as a region and reinforced a fortress mindset, wherein the Northwest was a place to be 44 On workscapes, see Richard White,‘“ Are You an Environmentalist or Do Your Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996): 171-185; Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 34 endured for a time and then left behind. The brief days of summertime in the intermontane zone and the sharing of music and dance were rare sources of respite. Beginning in the 1830s, the Hudson’s Bay Company began establishing the first fur trade forts in the intermontane zone, and ordered the commencement of agricultural operations to provision the trade. In Chapter 3, I examine how rainfall and the seasonal rhythms of the Northwest weather-world challenged post farming operations, perpetuating the region’s poor reputation among fur traders even as the HBC’s elites provided much rosier portrayals of the climate to their shareholders. I note the development of relationships and marriages between fur traders and Indigenous groups, particularly the widespread intermarriage of traders and Indigenous women, and argue that marriage created kinship ties that influenced the decision of many French-Canadian traders to settle in the Willamette Valley, becoming the first people of European descent to indicate a desire to stay in the Northwest permanently. Though they conducted small-scale farming and began to alter the region’s environments in oft-unintentional ways, these French-Indian communities remained dependent on Indigenous kinship networks and formulated what James C. Scott has called metis ways of living in the rainy weather-world. As American promoters— most of whom had never been to the Northwest — began to tout the region’s climate as a boon to settlement, American emigrants began traveling across the country in large numbers in search of an Edenic promised land. In Chapter 4, I track the promotional and political discourses that initiated such emigration, showing how such dialogues were insular, rooted largely in the self-interest of politicians, boosters, and lonesome emigrants, and plagued by willful ignorance and misrepresentation. Even as a small audience was receptive to the image of the Pacific Northwest as a region whose climate was healthy and whose rains were invigorating, most of the American public considered the region as a rainswept land that was not worth much thought. I show that emigrants who travelled across the continent to Oregon usually arrived in the Northwest at the 35 start of the rainy season, facing sickness and sodden misery on the last stretches of the overland trails and destitute homelessness as they arrived in the Willamette Valley. A great many left, never to return. Settlers who did stay in the Northwest often did so because they could not afford to leave. I argue in Chapter 5 that many fell into debt, struggled to find viable land claims, and became dependent on an emerging landowning elite. The Northwest’s unfamiliar climate proved confusing to many farmers, who struggled to adapt their existing agricultural strategies and frequently found the rains oppressive and gloomy. Rainfall was, at best, seen as a begrudging friend; at worst, a fierce enemy. I argue that rainfall and the long wet season contributed to poverty, rural isolation, and deep disappointment among many settlers, even as elites and citizen promoters continued to try and perpetuate a narrative of climatic exceptionalism to the outside world in an effort to attract further emigration and develop Northwest society. As settlers increasingly dispossessed the region’s Indigenous people of their lands, they also began to more radically alter Northwest landscapes to control the manifestation of rainfall, implementing drainage systems and destroying native ecologies and rainscapes in an effort to bend the environment to their vision of an ideal agricultural society. In their quest to eke out a living, settlers by and large endorsed the civilizing mission with regard to rainfall. Access to the labor necessary to terraform landscapes and attempt to ‘civilize’ the Northwest’s rainfall was unequal, however, and material divisions widened between societal elites and a pluvial precariat more vulnerable to the weather-world. I argue that these inequities were obscured by promoters, both elite and lay, who began to mock older, impoverished settlers as uncivilized in part because they remained more exposed to the region’s rainfall. Outsiders mocked Oregon as the Webfoot state, and newcomers from the eastern United States accused pioneer settlers of “mossbackism” — obstructing the advancement of civilization. Many settlers contested 36 these claims, wrote that the region’s climate allowed them to subsist well enough, and adopted such pejoratives as labels of pride and identity; other colonists shared in critiquing their neighbors, claiming that they lacked ambition and were too content with the climate. Almost everyone viewed the Northwest’s rains with annoyance to some degree, and celebrated the region’s increasing connections to national and global capital and markets as helpful for transforming Northwest landscapes and assisting efforts to civilize the region’s rainfall. As the nineteenth century came to a close, the Northwest’s rainy reputation endured nationally and locally, and rainfall’s impedimentary nature continued to be a source of regional contention. In addition to chapter and period specific claims, I also utilize rainfall and climate as a materially pervasive lens through which to reevaluate the historiographical portrayal of settler- environment relationships in the Pacific Northwest in general. Although many contemporary works of Northwest environmental history are critical of settler-colonial impacts on the environment and point out ways in which attempted mastery or transformation over nature are incomplete or have had terrible consequences, they tend to remain convinced that settlers found the Northwest’s landscapes and environments — and climates — as idyllic, edenic, and highly desirable. Scholars have tended to address the environments of the Pacific Northwest in terms of what settlers did to them, rather than in terms of what those environments did to settlers. But Northwest environments, climates, and weather shaped settler-colonial ideas, lives, livelihoods, and structures of power and transformation, and were often seen as impediments to civilizational progress. The settler-colonial dream of the Pacific Northwest as paradise was framed by rainfall, but rain did not make it come true. Where other scholars have utilized lenses of race, class, gender, and environmental transformation to disrupt older, rosier views of Pacific Northwest history, I layer climate onto this socio-economic picture, showing that human relationships with rainfall have been a source of debate, conflict, and colonial failure and precarity in the Pacific 37 Northwest as least as often as they have been sources of sublimity, contentment, and colonial success. I hope to help “dislodge Oregon’s history from its mythical mooring.”45 An examination of rainfall’s historical agency in the Northwest also has relevance within the broader historiography of the American West, which has long tended to amplify the importance of aridity and struggles for water in shaping human-environment relations.46 The prominence of aridity — doubtlessly an important aspect of environmental experience in the American West — persists in the historiographical and popular imaginary despite various past refutations of its usefulness as an organizing concept, and will likely become even more prominent as the region becomes drier and experiences ever starker struggles over water rights and material livelihoods.47 45 Melinda Marie Jetté, “Dislodging Oregon's History from its Mythical Mooring: Reflections on Death and the Settling and Unsettling of Oregon,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 115, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 444-447. 46 This literature is vast, but see for instance Albert Perry Brigham, Geographic Influences in American History (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1903); Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, second edition, 2022); Peter Wiley and Robert Gottlieb, Empires in the Sun: The Rise of the New American West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985); Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of American West (New York: Pantheon Press, 1986); Allan G. Bogue, “An Agricultural Empire,” in Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, eds. The Oxford History of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994): 275-314; Mark Fiege, Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000); Norris Hundley, Jr., The Great Thirst: Californians and Water: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, revised edition, 2001); John Martin Campbell, Magnificent Failure: A Portrait of the Western Homestead Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Diana K. Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge (Boston: The MIT Press, 2016); Hugh T. Lovin, Complexity in a Ditch. Bringing Water to the Idaho Desert (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2017); Eric Perramond, Unsettled Waters. Rights, Law, and Identity in the American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018); Lucas Bessire, Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021); and Natalie Koch, Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia (New York: Verso, 2023). 47 On critiques of aridity as an organizing concept, see for instance Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own:” A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, first paperback edition, 1993): 3; Norris Hundley, Jr., “Water and the West in Historical Imagination,” in Gordon Morris Bakken and Brenda Farrington, eds. The American West: Environmental Problems in America’s Garden of Eden (New York: Routledge, 2013): 63- 38 In part because of its focus on aridity, the historiography of the American West has largely accepted at face value the narrative of climatic exceptionalism with regard to the narrow, well-watered west- side of the Cascade Range. Even historians of agriculture and water in the Pacific Northwest have largely focused on the dry, eastern side of the Cascades, and on the dilemmas of irrigation and reclamation. The western side has been assumed as a place where agriculture and water were not especially problematic, except when settlers meddled in ecological and geological realms.48 By turning a critical eye towards the Pacific Northwest's rainfall and reaching beyond well-worn narratives of the raincoast as an “American Eden,” I hope to encourage more consideration of how both the lack of water and the abundance of water provoke challenges to settler-colonialism and meaningfully shape human society in particular places in the American West, the United States, and beyond. Beyond historiographical debates, I utilize the frame of rainfall to reevaluate the roots of the Northwest’s regional identity and environmental consciousness. This identity has always been enmeshed with rainfall, but that relationship has never been straightforward. The narrative of regional climatic exceptionalism that developed in the 1830s and onwards was always divorced from the messier complexities of lived reality. The Northwest’s rainscapes were never universally 89. On aridity and climate change, see for instance William deBuys, A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 48 Historians of Pacific Northwest agriculture have focused disproportionately on the arid eastern side of the Cascades, and on the dilemmas of irrigation and reclamation, see for instance D.W. Meinig, The Great Columbia Plain: A Historical Geography, 1805-1910 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968); John Fahey, The Inland Empire: Unfolding Years 1879-1929 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986); Nancy Langston, Where Land and Water Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Andrew P. Duffin, Plowed Under: Agriculture and Environment in the Palouse (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). A consultation of back issues of the Pacific Northwest Quarterly reveals that most articles on water and/or agriculture focus on the eastern side of the Cascades. 39 loved, and Euro-American settlers who did love these rainscapes usually loved not what they were, but their potential to be reordered and managed according to a particular civilizational vision. Our relationships with weather — with rainfall — are not what they once were. I claim neither that this is simply for better or simply for worse. Rather, I believe that a historical examination of these changing relationships between people and rainfall in the Northwest can offer insights into how we have transformed our landscapes in order to alter our relationships with weather, to control it or insulate ourselves from it or redirect it for our own means. Our lives are formulated around particular ways of perceiving and experiencing weather — but are these linkages sustainable, equitable, rooted in knowledge of place? Or are they rooted in attempts to flatten the world, to pretend that we can somehow supersede the emplaced realities of climate, weather, and the elemental everyday? What are the cultural and environmental consequences of our current relationships with rainfall in the Northwest, and what might be better ways of coexisting with rainfall in the future, as the climate changes, the disaster recovery and prevention efforts of the past in some cases become future risks, and we begin to realize anew that we live in a weather-world? 40 THE PACIFIC NORTHWHERE? A NOTE ON PLACE The Pacific Northwest eludes simple definition as a transnational region. The most expansive visions of the region cover a swathe of territory including the landlocked U.S. states of Montana and Idaho, in addition to the core states of Oregon and Washington, the Canadian province of British Columbia, and parts of northern California and southeastern Alaska; narrower definitions exclude Idaho and/or Montana, or the arid eastern sides of Washington and Oregon. Differing definitions are deployed for purposes such as international cooperation, hydroelectric planning, bioregional argumentation, conservation, and census tallies.49 Residents of Oregon and Washington identify most strongly with the Pacific Northwest, and a significant portion of Americans include Idaho in the region despite lower levels of self-identification in Idaho itself.50 Climatically, the region is clearly divided along the crest of the Cascade Mountains, but political jurisdictions, though consequential in shaping human-environment relations, sprawl across such boundaries and often obfuscate enduring cultural differences and disparities in how the Pacific Northwest is pictured by non-residents and imagined even by those who live there. Because the overwhelming majority of the populations of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia live in the temperate, well-watered intermontane corridor between the Coast Range and Cascade Mountains, popular portrayals and perceptions of the region are skewed towards the rainy valleys, hills, and major cities that lay west of the Cascades. For instance, a representative sample of 1,818 students at twenty-one universities across the United States — asked in 2008 to offer words to 49 For an overview of some competing definitions, see Abbott, Imagined Frontiers, 111-139. 50 Wilbur Zelinsky, “North America’s Vernacular Regions,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70, no. 1 (1980): 1-16; and James Lowry, Mark Patterson and William Forbes, “The Perceptual Northwest,” Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers 70 (2008):112- 126. 41 describe the Pacific Northwest — deployed terms that overwhelmingly matched the western side of the Cascades. A full 1,049 of them offered the descriptor “rainy,” by far the most common term.51 At times, popular emphasis on the Northwest’s rainfall has culturally marginalized the semiarid-to-arid interior, producing a simplified image of the region’s diverse landscapes enabled by the west-side gravitas of the region’s major metropolitan centers. Representative of this is a tchotchke fridge magnet outline of Washington state — the kind sold at roadside attractions and park gift shops — that reads: “Washington: still raining.”52 Half of Washington’s land area, however, consists of a semiarid to arid interior basin; Oregon, two-thirds. Many of these arid areas east of the Cascades are encompassed by the Columbia River drainage and are thus highly dependent on the heavy rainfall and snowpack of the river’s upper reaches for irrigation and municipal water; during the autumn and spring, they can be quite rainy and prone to heavy cloud- cover. It would be a mistake to assume that rain only matters where it falls and not where it flows. However, the east-side’s annual precipitation totals and placement on Brettschneider’s Dreariness Index are significantly lower compared to coastal and intermontane areas, and there are clear environmental and cultural divides between the coast and the interior. While I do address rainfall’s impact on travel between the westside and eastside of the Pacific Northwest, this thesis focuses on the clearly sodden stretch of land extending from the redwood groves of northern California upwards to southeastern Alaska, hewing west of the Cascade Mountains and encompassing the coast and Coast Ranges of British Columbia.53 Historian Robert Bunting has referred to this area as the Pacific Raincoast; this term has also been adopted by 51 Lowry et al.., “The Perceptual Northwest.” 52 This magnet was collected by Mark Fiege, one of my graduate advisors at Montana State University. 53 A thorough integration of the east side of the Cascades into an analysis of rainfall’s historical agency would require a greater focus on artificial, if consequential political jurisdictions that is beyond the scope of this thesis. 42 environmentalists and Cascadia activists.54 The Pacific Raincoast is broadly united by a temperate, rainy climate; because climate deeply shapes the distribution of biomes and ecologies, this area is also somewhat bioregional, and common species and landscapes — both past and present — are important to this thesis, although not central. Regarding terminology, I sometimes use the Pacific Northwest to refer to a broad region encompassing Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Idaho, and parts of southeast Alaska and northern California. I also make specific, descriptive references to locales or subregions, and make inclusive use of ‘raincoast’ to define the climatic area examined in this thesis, including the intermontane zone. When referring only to the coastal portion of the Pacific Northwest, running roughly from San Francisco Bay to Kodiak Island, I use the term Northwest Coast. 54 Bunting, The Pacific Raincoast. One of the major guides to place names in British Columbia is Andrew Scott’s Encyclopedia of Raincoast Place Names: A Complete Reference to Coastal British Columbia (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2009). Harbour Publishing itself was founded in 1972, when the editors published a collection of stories about life on the B.C. coast called Raincoast Chronicles. They claim this is the origin of the term. There are now twenty-four volumes of the Raincoast Chronicles. 43 A PRIMER ON PACIFIC NORTHWEST METEOROLOGY Most rainfall comes to the Pacific Northwest from far across the sea, a thalassic traveler winding its watery way through the upper reaches of the Earth’s tropospheric shell. The region’s rainfall originates primarily in the western Pacific, where the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool forms a source of reliably warm water; or around the Hawaiian islands, which are similarly toasty compared to the storms and violent waves of the North Pacific. These tropical waters continually evaporate and are picked up by the North Pacific Jet Stream (NPJS), one of several undulating conveyor belts of moisture and wind that rise high into the atmosphere and shape climate and weather all around the world.55 Only three miles tall but hundreds of miles wide and driven by stratospheric wind speeds of up to two hundred miles per hour, the jet stream carries these vast quantities of tropical moisture thousands and thousands of miles east-northeast across the Pacific Ocean, picking up further moisture along the way. From roughly October through March, the North Pacific Jet Stream culminates head-on offshore of the Northwest Coast. When the jet stream’s tropical air currents collide with the cooler air and seawater of the North Pacific, they begin to drop in temperature; this also results in a decreased capacity to hold moisture, creating rainfall. Oceanic storms ensue over the North Pacific, lashing sea and shoreline; the waters offshore of the Northwest receive significant rainfall for most of the year, even when high pressure systems deter moisture from making landfall during the summer.56 As these storms pass over the ocean, the powerful jet stream continues to travel east- northeast, drifting over the edge of the North American continent and ascending up the coastal 55 Climatologists refer to these global linkages as teleconnections. 56 For a helpful visualization of this, see the interactive Total Rainfall map maintained by NASA Earth Observatory, https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/global-maps/GPM_3IMERGM. NASA also maintains a more detailed interactive of this data here: https://neo.gsfc.nasa.gov /view.php?datasetId=GPM_3IMERGM https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/global-maps/GPM_3IMERGM 44 mountain ranges that run from northern California to southern Alaska. Forced to rise higher above the mountains, the humid oceanic air, still relatively warm, cools further and must release more moisture, resulting in heavy rainfall along the coast and some snowfall in the Coast Ranges, especially north of Vancouver, B.C (Figure P.1).57 Along the Fraser River delta and southward, however, marine air descends into the intermontane lowlands of the Salish Sea and the Willamette Valley. The intermontane zone includes low-lying areas on the shores of the Salish Sea, a number of small prairies in southwest Washington state, and the Willamette Valley. These areas rest between the Coast and Cascade ranges, thus making them intermontane — between mountains. As moisture-laden air descends into this zone it warms, delivers lesser but still significant amounts of rainfall, and then ascends once more, this time up the Cascades, leaving heavy rain and snowfall before finally dropping into the continental interior and depositing what moisture it has left. This creates a stark climatic divide along the Cascades, which split a sodden west-side from an semi-arid to arid east-side. As autumn cedes to winter, precipitation totals reach their peak, dipping somewhat in springtime; the jet stream gradually shifts northward as summer advances, and the southern portion of the Pacific Northwest dries out significantly. Most of the northern portion remains sodden year-round. The jet stream’s 57 The Coast Ranges extend from southeastern Alaska south to California, inclusive of the highlands of Vancouver Island. Almost all precipitation along the coastal lowlands of Oregon, Washington, and California falls as rain; snowfall is rare and light except at upper elevations, which rarely exceed 4,000-5,000 feet. The Olympic Mountains and the Vancouver Island Ranges rise higher, between 7,000-8,000 feet at their highest, and are subject to heavy snowfall; Mount Olympus, in the Olympics, receives over five hundred inches of snow each year, which contributes to annual precipitation totals of two hundred inches or more. (One inch of snow equates, depending on conditions, to about thirteen inches of rainfall. Precipitation totals for a given location are based on rainfall equivalents). The highest snowfall totals, however, are generally concentrated in the steep-sloped coastal mountains of Alaska and British Columbia, which rise from the Inside Passage fjordland to significantly higher elevations than any southerly coastal peaks. Along the shoreline of the northern coast, ample precipitation still generally falls as rain, but occasional snow is more common and cold snaps more frequent. 4 5 Figure P1. Screenshot of a Northwest atmospheric river on CNN radar, higher moisture levels in darker blue. Note the thick trail of moisture from the tropics to the southeast. 46 regional influence results in long, very wet winters west of the Cascades, which become wetter at higher latitudes and with increased proximity to the ocean. Towards the coast, summers experience a clear drying trend but continue to experience cloudy weather, frequent coastal fog, and one to two inches of rainfall each month even in June and August. Summer precipitation generally increases farther north, with Forks, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula, usually receiving about four inches each month even in August; meanwhile, in Ketchikan, Alaska, a coastal city that ranks among the rainiest in the world, there are an average of seven and a half inches of rainfall in June and July, and eleven in August! Summer drying trends are most pronounced in the intermontane zone between the Coast and Cascade ranges, which is, as meteorologists are fond of pointing out, a rain shadow. It is also home to the region’s main population centers — Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; and Vancouver, B.C. — and yet still receives, on average, between thirty-seven and fifty inches of rainfall annually. Summers are generally short and very dry: contrary to what many may expect, these portions of western Washington and Oregon are generally drier in the summer than much of the state of Arizona (Figure P.2).58 If you visit only the population centers of the Northwest and visit only in the summer, you’ll most likely wonder what the dreary fuss is all about. Humidity is low, the skies are open and mostly blue, and the temperatures are mild much of the time, rarely cracking 85F on the hottest days except during heat waves. In an even starker rain shadow are the lowlands of Whidbey Island and the eastern Olympic Peninsula. The latter portion of Washington 58 Mass, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, 19; Kirien Whan and Francis Zwiers, “The impact of ENSO and the NAO on extreme winter precipitation in North America in observations and regional climate models,” Climate Dynamics 48 (2017): 1401-1411. 4 7 Figure P.2, precipitation map of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, based on 1991-2020 normals. Courtesy USDA. 48 state is home to both the rainiest rainforests in the contiguous United States, with upwards of one hundred twenty inches annually, and the seaside town of Sequim, where there are only fifteen to twenty inches of rainfall in a typical year — about the same as Los Angeles. These climate zones are separated only by twenty miles and a few hundred feet of elevation. Rainfall in the Pacific Northwest is thus distributed unevenly, with significant variations over short distances. These variations are determined by latitude, elevation, and the location of mountain ranges.59 Some years are much wetter than others, as the region’s rainfall is subject to significant inter-annual fluctuations based on the trans-hemispheric El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle. El Nino years tend to be drier and warmer, and La Nina years tend to be cooler and wetter. The periodic wintertime development of extratropical cyclones in the Bering Sea sends significant amounts of moisture to the Northwest Coast, sometimes also slamming North America with a cold wave. In this sense, Northwest rains themselves are global phenomena — they manifest regionally, and are enabled by the particular and variable orography of the Northwest Coast, but they flow beyond borders and across atmospheric gradients.60 Imbued in every epiphyte and hanging scarf of moss in the rainforest and in every swollen sidewalk crack is the drizzly heartbeat of an interwoven planetary climate. What gives the Pacific Northwest such a rainy reputation, then, is not necessarily the volume of precipitation — although along the less-populated outer coast, it certainly does fall in superlative quantities — but how rainfall is dispersed throughout the year. In the eastern United States, precipitation falls relatively evenly throughout the year, with the hotter, humid summer 59 For instance, the Portland, Oregon weather service forecast office near PDX/Government Island receives about 37 inches of rain per year, while an average measurement in Oregon City, an outer metro-area city, captures 46.35. The straight distance between these two precipitation gauges is only 14.5 miles. See the “SOD USA Climate Archive,” Western Regional Climate Center, https://wrcc.dri.edu/summary/sodusa.html. 60 See Mass, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest. 49 months generally receiving higher rainfall totals. As many of the Northwest’s meteorologists and weather buffs are fond of pointing out, as if to defend their homeland from unjust attack, most of eastern North America receives at least ten more inches of precipitation annually than the intermontane lowlands of Oregon and Washington. There is, however, a fairly clear seasonal divide between rain and snow; lowland areas in the Midwest and New England in particular receive significant portions of their precipitation as snowfall. Thus, although cities such as Boston, Buffalo, or Cleveland have one hundred and thirty to one hundred and sixty days of precipitation annually, between thirty and sixty of those days record snowfall instead of rainfall; this snow then sits frozen on the ground for significant portions of the year. Outside of tropical and near-tropical Gulf Coast cities such as Miami and Biloxi, differentiated from the Northwest Coast by their muggy climate, no major American city east of the Cascades receives any amount of rainfall on more than one hundred days of the year. Rain in much of the country tends to come heavy and warm (Table P.1). Annual rainy days (>.01 inches) Annual sunshine hours Aug. daily mean temp Dec. daily mean temp % rainy days falling between Oct. and March Annual precip. (rain and snow) Portland 153 2340 70.6 41.6 65% 36.91 Seattle 152 2169 67.4 42 65% 39.34 Vancouver 165 1937 64.4 43.3 63% 45.38 Boston 105 2633 72.7 35.7 41% 43.59 Buffalo 106 2206 70.4 31.4 38% 40.68 St. Louis 98 2593 80.4 36.5 41% 41.70 Miami 141 3154 84.2 71.2 36% 67.4 Table P.1, comparing relevant climatological statistics between the transnational Northwest’s three largest cities and selected American cities. All data gathered from NOAA and MSC, average annual normals for 1991-2020. Temperatures in Fahrenheit, precipitation in inches. 50 In contrast, the Pacific Raincoast’s mild temperatures and the steady weather conveyance of the jet stream ensure that areas outside of the mountains receive almost all of their precipitation as drizzly, cool-to-cold rainfall. In the southern parts of the region, the stark divide between the rainy season and the dry season concentrates this rainfall into only part of the year: about 50-60 percent of the intermontane zone’s precipitation by volume falls in the months between November and February, and about 75 percent falls in the wider window between October and March. With very few deviations, the waters of the North Pacific churn at a moderate 45-55F year-round, meaning that evaporative pressures over regional seawaters are generally too weak to produce abundant moisture during the summer in the absence of the jet stream.61 Only farther north, on the outer coast of British Columbia and southeastern Alaska, does the jet stream continue to direct large amounts of moisture towards the continental shelf even in summertime. Here, winter and the rainy season are not the same thing: almost the entire year is rainy (Table P.2). Annual rainy days (>.01 inches) Average annual sunshine hours Aug. daily mean temp Dec. daily mean temp. % rainy days falling between Oct. and March Annual precip. (rain and snow) Ketchikan 233 No data 59 36.4 55.3% 149.54 Prince Rupert 236 1242 56.8 36.9 53.5% 99.62 Ucluelet 205 No data 49 41.9 61.3% 130.66 Forks 213 No data 62.3 39.8 62% 120.94 Astoria 194 No data 61.3 43.2 61.7% 70.26 Crescent City 141 No data 64.2 48.3 66.5% 57.98 61 Mass, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest. Table P.2, comparing relevant climatological statistics between selected coastal Northwest cities. All data gathered from NOAA and MSC, average annual normals for 1991-2020. Cities listed from northerly to southerly. Percent rainy days between October and March decreases farther north, as the rainy season covers more of the year. Winters are colder farther north despite oceanic moderation. Sunshine hours are not recorded at most smaller stations, in contrast to major cities. Temperatures in Fahrenheit, precipitation in inches. 51 As a result of the clear seasonal divide in the intermontane zone, cities like Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver experience an average of one hundred sixty to one hundred and seventy rainy days annually — sixty to seventy more than any major North American cities outside of Canada’s storm-swept maritime provinces. On the Northwest Coast, the situation is far wetter: towns such as Astoria, Oregon; Forks, Washington; and Ketchikan, Alaska receive, respectively, an average of seventy, one-hundred twenty, and one-hundred fifty inches of rainfall each year, distributed across an average window of two hundred to two hundred twenty-five days. The northern California coast is not as sodden, but shares a prolonged winter rainy season and mild temperatures, and is prone to especially heavy fog in summer (Figures P.3, P.4). Regardless of where you are in the Northwest, rain is usually accompanied by persistent cloud cover, sometimes lasting for weeks at a time. There is frequent fog, which often signals short afternoon sunbreaks in the intermontane zone but can also stagnate for days. Evaporation rates are low because of consistent cloud cover; this helps temperatures moderate, because less heat escapes the atmosphere, but contributes to a general sense of utter saturation, reflected in the world’s slipperiness, lighting, and humidity. Even the mushrooms rot.62 Between October and March, the region is drenched by dozens of atmospheric rivers — concentrated systems of tropical moisture brought by the jet stream — which are usually separated from each other not by sunshine but by periods of continual drizzle.63 The climate thus operates like a fire hose alternating between spurts of rainfall, which steadily level off to a trickle before accelerating into the next downpour. 62 Mass, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest. 63 Paul J. Neiman et al., “Meteorological Characteristics and Overland Precipitation Impacts of Atmospheric Rivers Affecting the West Coast of North America Based on Eight Years of SSM/I Satellite Observations,” Journal of Hydrometeorology, 9, no. 1 (Feb. 2008): 22-47. 5 2 Figure P.3, c. 2000 precipitation normals for Alaska. Courtesy Oregon State University. 5 3 Figure P.4, precipitation normals for British Columbia, 1981-2010. Note that the measurements are in mm, not inches. Courtesy Terra Spheres. 54 On most days, precipitation volume is measured in hundreds of an inch; it is rare for any given day in the intermontane zone to see more than an inch of rainfall, although this is a very different scenario on the coast. The meteorologist Phil Church calculated in 1974 that 72.5% of Seattle’s rainfall came in the form of a light drizzle, falling at a rate less than .01 inches per hour, and that only 1.5% came in the form of heavy rain. In a fashion common among the members of the Northwest’s meteorological self-defense squad, Church further asserted that “one might truthfully say that it rarely ‘rains’ in Seattle.”64 But, because these drizzly days are strung together and stretch on for months with little reprieve and no drying-out, weather service staff in Seattle call the core of winter and the shoulders of spring and fall the “Big Dark.” About two hundred ninety days each year are cloudy in Seattle; another ninety, partly cloudy. Forecasters also suggest that October is “a great time to adopt a local storm drain and spend a little time clearing fallen leaves out of it to prevent flooding.”65 Daniel M. Johnson has noted that an average of 88% of all daylight hours in December in Portland are overcast — the city’s winter dreariness is “irrefutable.”66 One popularly-oriented guide to regional meteorology emphasizes the prolonged nature of the rainy 64 Phil Church was a former chair of the University of Washington Department of Atmospheric Sciences. His departmental obituary noted that he “could marshal impressive statistics to show [that the Northwest has the] most salubrious of climates, even including just the right amount of rain to nourish the worthy and to discourage the faint of heart.” He made this argument in an article titled “Some Precipitation Characteristics of Seattle,” Weatherwise 27, no. 6 (1974): 244- 251. His obituary can be accessed at “Phil E. Church,” https://atmos.uw.edu/about/history/in- memoriam/phil-e-church/ 65 Christine Clarridge, “‘The Big Dark’: Satellite image shows future rain clouds stretching from China to Puget Sound,” The Seattle Times, October 16, 2017, accessed April 1, 2023. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/weather/the-big-dark-weather-service-shares-satellite- image-of-future-rain-clouds-stretching-from-china-to-puget-sound/. This rainy drear has been blamed by local psychiatrists for messing up circadian rhythms and influencing high rates of SAD, see Christine Clarridge, “First of six weather systems rolls into Seattle area; at least a week of rain ahead,” The Seattle Times, October 15, 2019, accessed April 1, 2023. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/weather/brace-yourselves-seattle-the-big-dark-is- coming/. 66 Johnson, “Weather and Climate of Portland.” https://atmos.uw.edu/about/history/in-memoriam/phil-e-church/ https://atmos.uw.edu/about/history/in-memoriam/phil-e-church/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/weather/the-big-dark-weather-service-shares-satellite-image-of-future-rain-clouds-stretching-from-china-to-puget-sound/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/weather/the-big-dark-weather-service-shares-satellite-image-of-future-rain-clouds-stretching-from-china-to-puget-sound/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/weather/brace-yourselves-seattle-the-big-dark-is-coming/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/weather/brace-yourselves-seattle-the-big-dark-is-coming/ 55 season and the everyday experience of living in a world with no dry spots, jokingly calling the region the Northwet.67 In globally comparative terms, the major cities of the Pacific Northwest are quite cloudy, although their relatively low latitude in comparison to cities in northern Europe, such as Paris or London, means that the latter still see significantly fewer sunshine hours year-round. Cities along the upper Northwest Coast, however, like Prince Rupert, British Columbia, see sunshine hours comparable to much of northern Europe. Many tropical parts of the globe, such as eastern China and the interior of the Congo basin, are cloudier than the Pacific Northwest, but are differentiated by a muggy, hot climate and often by even starker wet/dry seasons. In terms of rainy days per year, the Pacific Raincoast is matched in the temperate zones of the world only by parts of maritime Canada, the western side of the South Island of New Zealand, very small portions of the Australian coast southwest and southeast of Melbourne, the little- populated western coast of Tasmania, parts of Valdivia in southern Chile, the western coast of Norway; and several islands in the North Atlantic, such as Jersey, Guernsey, parts of northwest Great Britain and southwestern Ireland, and the Shetland archipelago. Many of these areas support transplanted Douglas-fir, Sitka Spruce, and Redwood saplings. Many also receive more rainfall by volume than the intermontane Northwest, but, by land area, the Pacific Raincoast — intermontane and coastal zones combined — is one of the largest temperate areas of the world with 150+ rainy days per year. In the tropical zones, the Pacific Northwest is matched in number of rainy days by parts of the Amazon basin and the Indonesian archipelago; isolated mountainous regions of Japan and southwestern China; and the windward sides of some tropical and subtropical islands, such as 67 Blue, Interpretative Guide. 56 the eastern side of the island of Hawai’i, although many of these zones receive more rainfall by volume than the intermontane Northwest.68 In terms of past climate and climate change over time, there is some evidence that the Pacific Northwest was drier and colder during the Little Ice Age — through about 1850. There is also evidence that the coldest period of the Little Ice Age in the Pacific Northwest fell in the 1400s, prior to Euro-American contact. The persistence of colder temperatures relative to contemporary measures appears to have persisted into the early 1800 and is supported by data in early maritime weather charts and accounts from fur traders and missionaries. These records are shaped by the process of encounter with an unfamiliar climate and contextualized by the variable individual points of origin of observers, but clearly indicate unusually cold temperatures, the frequent freezing over of major rivers, and unusually frequent snow in the intermontane lowlands.69 There is also, however, evidence that La Nina periods, during which the Pacific Northwest tends to be wetter, were more common in the early 1800s.70 This suggests that Euro-Americans who encountered the climate of the Pacific Northwest prior to 1850 experienced, on average, drier 68 Data gathered from NOAA and various national weather agencies. One significant ambiguity of data on the number of rainy days in a given location is that different gauge systems have different minimum measurements, e.g. most gauges used by NOAA have a minimum measurement of .01 inches, but gauges used by the Met Office in Scotland have a minimum measurement of 1 mm, which is equal to 0.0394 inches. Estimates of the number of rainy days in the American portions of the Pacific Northwest are thus more precise than measurements made in some other parts of the world. The impact of this variance is of most consequence when comparing the temperate zones where oceanic climates often produce many days of sprinkling precipitation. 69 See Byron A. Steinman et al., “1,500 year quantitative reconstruction of winter precipitation in the Pacific Northwest,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109 no. 29 (Jul. 2012): 11619-11623; Raphael Neukom et al.., “No evidence for globally coherent warm and cold periods over the preindustrial Common Era,” Nature 571 (Jul. 2019): 550-554. On unusual cold in early Euro-American accounts of the Pacific Northwest, see Mierzejewski, “Footprints on the Rivers.” An investigation of Indigenous oral traditions may uncover further evidence. 70 Ellen R.M. Druffel et al., “Identification of frequent La Niña events during the early 1800s in the east equatorial Pacific,” Geophysical Research Letters 42 no. 5 (March 2015): 1512-1519. 57 and colder conditions, which were punctuated by especially rainy years. A lack of formal, standardized meteorological data prior to the 1870s makes exact data on rainfall volume and rainy days difficult to come by. The likely presence of a drier historical climate during the crucial period between 1774 and 1850 highlights the historical agency of rainfall: even though initial Euro- American encounters with the Northwest’s climates perhaps involved less frequent or voluminous rainfall in the average year compared to the present, rainfall nonetheless made powerful impressions and shaped everyday life in profound ways. In terms of post-1850 developments, climatological evidence indicates that temperature and precipitation increased significantly in the Pacific Northwest throughout the late 1800s, and especially in the first half of the twentieth century. Temperature trends indicate an average annual increase of between .8F and 1.6F between 1900 and 2000; precipitation trends indicate an average annual increase of between 13% and 38% depending on location, with the east side of the Cascades becoming somewhat wetter. Precipitation has increased most during spring, indicating less snowfall and more rainfall, and across the Pacific Northwest increased by an average of about 2-4 inches. This suggests that settlers began encountering warmer and wetter weather as the turn of the twentieth century approached; some of this warming was anthropogenic, and some of it represented the recession of cooler conditions that predominated during the Little Ice Age.71 71 Philip W. Mote, “Trends in Temperature and Precipitation in the Pacific Northwest During the Twentieth Century,” Northwest Science 77 no. 4 (2003): 271-282. 58 CHAPTER ONE “I ALWAYS WENT TO BED WET FOOTED:” RAINFALL AND THE EARLY MARITIME NORTHWEST, 1543-c. 1805 Waters hued dark blue by overcast skies, the Columbia River sprawls wide as it opens to meet the Pacific Ocean. Having carved its way for hundreds of miles down the continental slope through hard flood basalt strata, the Columbia broadens about twenty miles from the sea and opens into a long estuary. In contrast to most major rivers, it does not branch out into a delta that flows in a calm gradient out to saltwater; instead, the river yawns westward and pours its waters forth with great tumult. Swift currents proceed to deposit vast quantities of sediment, which sink and form a series of sandy shoals collectively known as the Columbia Bar. This treacherous stretch of shifting shoreline is blanketed by dense fog for 120 days annually and doused with rain for 20-25% of all hours in a year.72 Winds from the continental interior are funneled through a lowland gap three to seven miles wide, resulting in heavy blusters over the water. Since time immemorial, the Columbia River has been a special gathering-place, dwelling- place, and source of livelihood for many of the Northwest Coast’s Indigenous peoples, who still know the river by many other, older names. Nowadays, in very different ways, the river also forms a crucial part of the region’s settler-colonial identity: the might of the rushing waters powers significant portions of the region through hydroelectricity, and the (dwindling) wealth of the river’s beloved salmon runs are an enduring source of political contention.73 Yet the Columbia River was 72 William P. Elliott and R.K. Reed, “Oceanic rainfall off the Pacific Northwest Coast,” Journal of Geophysical Research 78 no. 6 (Feb. 1973): 941-948; Ronald Keith Reed, “Rainfall Over Coastal Waters of the Pacific Northwest,” M.S. Thesis, Oregon State University School of Oceanography, June 1973. 73 On Indigenous connections, see Andrew Fisher, Shadow Tribe: The Making of Columbia River Indian Identity (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010); Katrine Barber, Death of Celilo 59 also one of the last temperate water bodies globally to be entered and mapped by Euro-Americans, and until the 1780s the Northwest Coast as a whole was the longest unexplored non-polar coastline in the entire world.74 The idea of a trans-continental passage or a great river along the Northwest Coast’s shoreline had become popular among Europeans and American colonists in the early 1500s as a figment of geographical imagination, but Northwest Coast rainstorms and fogbound coastlines usually forced vessels far enough away from land to where they missed any chance of sighting the Columbia river mouth. When the Spaniard Bruno Heceta became the first European to sight the river in 1775, he found the current too strong and his men far too sick to attempt entry.75 Over the next seventeen years, fog, rushing meltwater from rain-on-snow freshets, strong outflow currents, and coastal rainstorms deterred and fooled dozens of other expeditions into believing no river existed. British fur trader John Meares came tantalizingly close to rounding the bend of the river mouth on July 5th and 6th of 1788, described the area’s weather as “unfavorable” to discovery, noted clouds and a rain squall that obscured his sightline, and renamed the adjacent headland Cape Disappointment.76 Only in early May of 1792, after numerous aborted attempts of his own in the preceding years, did an American fur trader named Robert Gray become the first Euro-American Falls (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005). On the role of the Columbia in settler- colonial construction of regional identity, see for instance Eve Vogel, “Defining one Pacific Northwest among Many Possibilities: The Political Construction of a Region and Its River during the New Deal,” Western Historical Quarterly 42, no. 1 (2011): 28-53; William L. Lang, “Creating the Columbia: Historians and the Great River of the West, 1890-1935,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 93, no. 3 (1992): 234-261); Richard White, The Organic Machine; William Dietrich, Northwest Passage: The Great Columbia River; Robert Ficken, Rufus Woods, the Columbia River, & the Building of Modern Washington; William Lang et al., Great River of the West: Essays on the Columbia River; and Lang, “Beavers, firs, salmon, and falling water.” 74 Glyndr Williams, Voyages of Delusion: The Quest for the Northwest Passage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004): 239-240 75 Cook, Flood Tide of Empire 78-79 76 John Meares, Voyages of 1788 and 1789, 166-168. See Appendix Table VII for weather observations. 60 to actually enter the Columbia River.77 Two-hundred and fifty years had passed since the first European voyage set sail towards the Northwest Coast, ending in a rained-out failure. This chapter explores how rainfall and its accompaniments, particularly fog, shaped the maritime history of the Northwest Coast in the period between 1542 and 1795, a period during which mariners like Robert Gray traveled up and down the coast and attempted to render it legible to imperial powers. Because the mariners who left behind journals and logbooks usually did not stay in one place along the coast for extended periods of time, this chapter predominantly focuses on the ship as a precarious, mobile site of living and embodied experience, and examines how various mariners operating along the same coastline encountered and perceived rainfall. This chapter argues that the Northwest Coast’s rainy climate and saturated environments dampened maritime experiences of the region and deterred prolonged visitation or settlement from the 1500s to the early 1800s, forming a significant barrier to imperial visions and ventures. Drawing on the written accounts of Spanish, British, and American mariners, I show that rainfall constrained imperial activity and intimately shaped European and American perceptions of the Northwest Coast’s landscapes, resource wealth, and habitability. It did so in ways that reduced the region's palatability for settlement in the eyes of imperial governments for centuries. On more intimtae scales, this chapter also examins how rainfall interacted with shipborne environments and the bodies of sailors to both produce and deepen physiological illness and psychological discomforts. As the agents of an emerging system of global capitalism made their 77 Gray’s entry into the river became a retroactive, if ultimately little-consequential American talking point in the 1840s boundary dispute between Britain and the United States. Gray was shortly followed by a British officer from Vancouver’s expedition, William Broughton. See Andrew David, “John Sherriff on the Columbia, 1792: An Account of William Broughton's Exploration of the Columbia River,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 83 no. 2 (Apr. 1992): 53- 59, and Jim Mockford, “Before Lewis and Clark, Lt. Broughton's River of Names: The Columbia River Exploration of 1792,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 106, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 542-567. 61 way across the sea to and along the Northwest Coast, rainfall frustrated, alienated, and often killed mariners — yet not all were exposed equally to the storms, and this inequity reinforced preexisting socioeconomic divisions between rank-and-file sailors and their better-provisioned officers.78 In spite of this unequal exposure to the elements, however, officers' and sailors' views of the Northwest Coast were profoundly shaped by their bodily and everyday experiences on the easternmost waters of the North Pacific or huddled in timbered shelters alongside the ocean. This chapter also argues that rainfall was a powerful force in shaping the era of the maritime fur trade, interfacing with Euro-American sailors, Indigenous groups, and sea otters in ways that shaped and seasonally mediated multi-species relationships. Indigenous peoples parlayed their emplaced knowledge of rainfall, sea otter behavior, and navigation into commercial advantages, even as white traders found themselves frustrated and immiserated by the difficulties of foggy coastlines, damp gunpowder, wet clothing, and sodden firewood. I further show that the physical and mental challenges posed by rainfall and its accompaniments exacerbated sailors’ preconceived ideas about uncivilized environments and savage Native peoples, reinforcing their unfavorable portrayals of of the Northwest Coast’s landscapes and original inhabitants. “Dreary and Inhospitable:” First Approaches to the Northwest Coast The Pacific Northwest, wrote the historian Carlos Schwantes, remained isolated from European and American colonialism for “far longer than most temperate areas of the world.”79 Sheltered along the eastern bend of the North Pacific, the coastal Northwest is bounded by vast 78 Few lay sailors left behind written accounts of their voyages, as most of what remains comes from logbooks and narratives written by captains and officers. However, there are hints even in these sources of significant differences in clothing, daily duties, and provisioning that impacted exposure and experience. 79 Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest, 19. 62 stretches of cold, stormy ocean on the west, and a towering trans-continental cordillera on the northern, eastern, and southern edges. Even as Euro-Americans integrated the Eastern United States and the Old Northwest into the imperial-capitalist world, the Northwest Coast was at first buffered by thousands and thousands of arduous miles from many of the ecological and cultural transformations that characterized Indigenous genocide and massive terraformation.80 Here, at the damp and verdant edge of many worlds, Northwest Coast Indigenous societies have mapped and coexisted with their environments in myriad ways for millennia, and engaged in vigorous cooperative and conflictive contestations of space and resources with one another well into the mid- 1800s. These contestations were often facilitated through complex kinship networks and long- distance trading relations, from the Rockies to Alaska to the Southwest and beyond. Only in the 1770s did the imperial powers of Russia, Spain, Great Britain, and the United States successfully join this contestation, at first from the sea and coast and later, in the British and American cases, from the continental interior. Their involvement transformed and overturned many worlds and ways of being, with consequences that remain thoroughly embossed upon the geographies, peoples, and cultures of the region even today. The relatively late arrival of temperate empire in the Northwest was not for lack of earlier attempts. However, because the Pacific Northwest was dispossessed from Indigenous peoples and incorporated primarily into the United States, the predominant narratives of early exploration and 80 Some anthropologists argue that Northwest Coast Native populations first encountered some Old World epidemic diseases prior to the 1770s. Two routes have been proposed: overland transmission through trade with the Plains Indians, or contact through European shipwrecks. In general, however, the region was isolated from significant Euro-American encounter until the 1770s. See Robert Boyd, The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, second edition, 2021). On overland Indigenous trade networks, see for instance Scott Byram and David G. Lewis, “Ourigan: Wealth of the Northwest Coast,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 102, no. 2 (2001): 126-157 63 settler-colonialism are those of overland expeditions arriving from the eastern half of the country. Classic school classroom framings of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Oregon Trail, and Manifest Destiny emphasize westward movement towards an unspoiled Eden ripe for cultivation and civilization. But these overland, west-from-east framings are incomplete and elide important precursors: the first expeditions to the Northwest Coast were maritime voyages, and an examination of the earliest approaches reveals that regardless of national banner or port of origin, every voyage looked upon the region from the stormy seas that lie to the west of North America. The first whites to visit the Northwest faced east, and Euro-Americans did not consider the region an American periphery but, rather, an isolated continental margin open to global, multipolar imperial interests. These approaches from the west were not missions of immigration or colonization, but, rather, probing ventures of imperial surveillance, rooted in the maritime mercantilism and emerging capitalism of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Imperial governments were curious about whether the Northwest Coast had valuable natural resources; safe anchorages for trans-Pacific shipping; or sites suitable for imperial outposts. In many ways, the prospect of a Northwest Passage — a route through the Northwest Coast that would supposedly allow ships to bypass Cape Horn, connecting the already valued markets of China and India back east to Europe through the interior of North America — motivated these ventures.81 The Spanish were additionally motivated by a desire to facilitate safer travels for the Manila Galleons, which carried immense wealth twice annually between the Philippines and Mexico, operated on reliable Pacific trade winds, and generally arrived in misery far off the coast of southern California in early autumn.82 81 Williams, Voyages of Delusion, esp. 270-272. 82 The Manila Galleon route constituted the only regular commercial crossing of the Pacific Ocean between the 1500s and the 1770s. They were interested in business, not discovery, and did their best to arrive eastward in the dry east-central Pacific. They avoided the northern coast of California due to inclement weather, and because higher latitudes were believed to exacerbate scurvy (which is true). At least one Manila Galleon is known to have become trapped by gales 64 The common and varying interests of imperial power and commerce thus provided the frame through which imperial agents judged the climate of the Northwest Coast. These political judgements were refracted through the experiences of sailors — and, because they faced east, the very first impressions and experiences that Europeans and Americans had of the Northwest Coast were of inclement oceanic weather. The region is subject to serious winter rainstorms that have traveled thousands of miles from the tropics, picking up vast amounts of moisture and carrying it northeast across the Pacific. Precipitation volume over near-shore waters is not as high as that experienced on the coast or inland, ranging from around 47 to 62 inches annually, but mean wind speeds offshore of the Northwest Coast range between 17 and 22 miles per hour. Thus, even when rainfall is low-intensity in terms of volume, it does not fall down gently in drips and drizzles, as is usually the case on land, but blows sideways. Especially in the core months of winter, fierce gusts from thirty to fifty miles per hour exacerbate the matter. 83 Squalls, which combine rain and unpredictable winds — and sometimes hail or sleet — can arrive suddenly and without much warning: a docile, cloudy sky can turn life-threatening in a matter of minutes, and just as quickly revert back to an unassuming overcast. Swift turns in conditions were a common source of anxiety for even highly experienced and cautious captains, and the possibility offshore of California, blown northeast towards the Oregon coast, sucked in by north-flowing coastal currents, and dashed on the rocks near Nehalem Bay. The wreck became a source of valuable beeswax among the Indigenous peoples of the region; the castaways survived and intermarried with natives; and the wreck became an enduring mystery among local beachcombers. More Galleon shipwrecks are possible but have not been located. Maritime Archaeological Society, Shipwrecks of the Pacific Northwest (London: Globe Pequot, 2020); and Volume 119, Issue 2 (2018) of the Oregon Historical Quarterly. On latitude and scurvy beliefs, see Cook, Flood Tide of Empire, 31; on the miseries of eastward Manila Galleons, see Cook, 5-6. 83 Elliott and Reed, “Oceanic rainfall off the Pacific Northwest Coast;” V. Ya. Sharova, “Precipitation Map’s for the World’s Ocean Surface,” Mapping Sciences and Remote Sensing 27, no. 4 (1990): 280-294; Jeff Renner, Northwest Marine Weather (Seattle: Mountaineers Books, 1993). 65 of sudden disaster often forced expeditions to haul out to sea and sail northward without following the shoreline.84 Maritime imperialism in the Pacific Northwest began in 1542 with the Spanish voyage of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo and Bartoleme Ferrer, which was followed by two further disastrous ventures — one by the Englishman Francis Drake in 1579, and one commanded by the Spaniard Sebastian Vizcaino in 1602-1603. These initial voyages were defined by their ignorance. Because the Northwest Coast was previously uncharted by Euro-Americans, early sailors had little to no knowledge regarding the oceanic climate, winds, weather; where and how to find harbor and restock provisions; how far apart landmasses or anchorages were; and so forth. Whereas maritime knowledge of many other parts of the world ocean had accrued over decades to centuries of regular observation and sailing, the Northwest Coast was an aqua rasa for European explorers. They were encountering rainstorms in a deeply unfamiliar and unpredictable sea. From the very beginning of these voyages, the limits of contemporary maritime technology made it difficult to navigate the Northwest Coast and render it legible. Ship rigging at this time produced vessels which were virtually useless against prevailing winds and required reliable seasonal patterns to travel long distances. Although the Northwest Coast has some reliable seasonal climatic patterns, the day-to-day weather for much of the year is highly unpredictable. What macro- scale climatic patterns do exist along the coast were entirely unknown to imperial voyagers at the time; furthermore, detailed maritime cartography in uncharted waters required extended periods of calm weather — conditions largely absent along the Northwest Coast for much of the year.85 As a 84 Not all captains were cautious. Robert Gray, among other captains, was often reckless. See Robert Haswell, and John Box Hoskins, and John Boit, Voyages of the “Columbia” to the Northwest Coast, 1787-1790 and 1790-1793 (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1990), edited by F.W. Howay, 72-73, 232. 85 Renner, Northwest Marine Weather; Mass, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest; George R. Miller, Pacific Northwest Weather: But My Barometer Says Fair!!! A Look at Those Changing 66 result, foggy weather or rapid wind shifts required vessels to largely stay put or work hard to minimize how far they were blown off course; recalculating one’s latitude was then dependent on clear skies and the visibility of the stars, which was especially rare at night because the weather was commonly rainy at the late hours. Calculating longitude was also necessary for mariners to determine their location, especially in unknown waters where the hazards of the coastline might make a sudden appearance. Until the late 1700s, however, European and American mariners had to rely upon a method known as dead reckoning, which involved attaching a buoyant object — usually a piece of dead wood — to a rope, which was then thrown overboard. Sailors tracked the speed and distance of the object in order to estimate the speed of their ship; then, after correcting for winds and currents, they could estimate how far their vessel had traveled from a given point on shore. This was a tedious and unreliable methodology, made more difficult by stormy weather and an initial lack of cartographic or meteorological knowledge of the Northwest Coast.86 Unfamiliarity with the Northwest Coast is a significant reason why detailed first-hand accounts of early voyages exist in the first place. Until the mid-1780s, all voyages to the Northwest Coast were sanctioned by imperial governments and managed by naval officers, who were tasked with gathering information about this unfamiliar stretch of coastline. Captains needed to keep track of weather, winds, landmarks, and the passage of time both for logistical purposes — such data and Peculiar Weather Patterns in the Pacific Northwest, Large and Small (Portland: Frank Amato Publications, 2002). On ship rigging, see John Kendrick, “The Evolution of Shipbuilding in the Eighteenth Century,” in Enlightenment and Exploration in the North Pacific, 1741-180, ed. Stephen Haycox et al (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997): 91. On Northwest Coast wind patterns, see Mass, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest. On early maritime cartography, see Roger M. McCoy, On the Edge: Mapping North America’s Coasts, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); 57-64. 86 For an overview of the historical development of longitude methodologies, see Michael Reidy, Gary Kroll, and Erik M. Conway, Exploration and Science: Social Impact and Interaction (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2007): 25-28 67 would in theory help them learn to navigate the coast — and as a matter of imperial record-keeping. As a result of this record-keeping, early voyages to the Northwest Coast produced many logbooks containing extensive narrative accounts of their journeys; the obstacles they encountered; and assessments of the Northwest Coast’s geography and potential usefulness as a site of settlement or resource extraction. These logbooks were largely for the private use of government agents or future voyages, and, until the late 1700s, remained state secrets. Only beginning with James Cook’s voyage in the 1770s were some logbooks adapted as exploration narratives and published for popular audiences as travelogues. A lack of prior knowledge regarding the Northwest Coast intersected with the power of rainfall to produce disastrous results for early voyages. Cabrillo and Ferrer’s 1542-3 venture, for instance, ended in humiliation. Seventy miles offshore of northern California on a ship with slippery decks, wearing clothes that were soaked through with the interminable chill of both sky and sea, Ferrer founding himself praying to the Virgin of Guadalupe — to Mother Mary — that he and his crew would be spared from a watery grave. They were helpless. If not for the fact that a terrible rainstorm blew in from the north-northwest, Ferrer’s expedition would have been dashed on the rocks or swept out to sea. Instead, the rainstorm from up north battered them to drenched shivers and sent the voyage back to Mexico; Ferrer attributed the storm’s fortunate orientation to God. Most of the crew died of scurvy, and by the end of their ordeal all they had left for provisions was soggy hardtack.87 It was a poor first impression. 87 Herbert Eugene Bolton, “The Cabrillo-Ferrelo Expedition, 1542-1543,” in Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706, ed. Herbert Eugene Bolton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916): 36-38; Henry R. Wagner, “Spanish Voyages to the Northwest Coast in the Sixteenth Century. Chapter VI […]” California Historical Society Quarterly, 7 no. 3, Sep. 1928: 229. As part of a tendency to romanticize explorers and ignore their miserable experiences, California SR 1 — the major north-south highway along much of the California coast — was designated in 1959 as the Cabrillo Highway, in honor of Juan Rodriguez. 68 Early Spanish voyages to the Northwest Coast suffered in part because they were crewed mostly by inexperienced men from New Spain, who were forced into service. Cabrillo and Ferrer set out in 1542 with ships manned by “conscripts and natives [of New Spain],” who had no history of managing large sailing vessels or living in cold, rainy climates.88 If Spanish conscription practices in other colonial spheres are instructive, it is likely that many of those forcibly enlisted to serve on voyages to the Pacific Northwest were Indigenous men from New Spain.89 Voyages to the Northwest Coast were seen as dangerous missions with deeply uncertain value, and it made crude financial sense that ventures to such an unknown and foreboding coast would be staffed by vagrants, convicts, and peasants — people deemed expendable to the elements, to illness, and to the harsh punishments meted out by captains. In 1541, for instance, the Governor of New Spain instructed an exploratory voyage elsewhere along the west coast of the Americas that “even although your people get sick, they must suffer, for the advantage to be gained, and to avoid the inconveniences which usually occur when they do the contrary.”90 This practice of impressment persisted into the 1770s; the historian Warren Cook notes that the voyage of Juan Perez in 1774 relied mostly on peasants “little accustomed to the cold of higher latitudes, and after several months at sea, more and more of the crew fell ill.”91 The primary concern for these sailors was probably surviving the stormy coast long enough to make it home — glory was not foremost on their minds. 88 Bolton, “The Cabrillo-Ferrelo-Expedition,” 6 89 Linda Carlson, “Convicts or Conquistadores? Spanish Soldiers in the Seventeenth-Century Pacific,” Past and Present no. 232, Aug 2016: 87-125 90 The Governor of New Spain at this time was Don Antonio de Mendoza, quoted in Henry R. Wagner, “Spanish Voyages to the Northwest Coast in the Sixteenth Century: Introduction and Chapter on ‘Alvarado and Mendoza, Partners’,” California Historical Society Quarterly, 6, no. 4 (Dec. 1927): 326. 91 Cook, Flood Tide of Empire 68. In contrast to the North Pacific, the doldrum waters of the east- Central Pacific — from offshore of Baja California, south to around Ecuador, and west almost all the way to Hawai’i — are fairly dry year-round. Even Spanish conscripts with maritime experience in vicinity of Mexico would not have known cold, rainy waters before. 69 In considering rainfall’s power over Cabrillo and Ferrer’s voyage and the many others to follow, it is necessary to examine the ship as a physical space of embodied living and sensing that framed how mariners experienced inclement weather at sea. Unlike modern vessels, ships in the Age of Sail usually offered little in the way of shelter from rainstorms. They were in constant motion even when anchored; were composed of damp, slippery, and leaky surfaces; and they required constant manning, a duty disproportionately borne by the rank-and-file members of the crew and made all the more arduous in rough, unpredictable waters.92 Especially along a coast with few visible and/or safe harbors and aboard ships that, in the British and American cases, had been stocked with (oft-insufficient) provisions for long voyages around Cape Horn, vessels were quite claustrophobic and isolated spaces. Vessels and sailors were interminably wet. The British naval historian N.A.M. Rodger, for instance, notes that “If the weather were too severe to light the galley fire there was no means of drying anything, so men would have to work and sleep in wet clothes. Since there was often no fresh water to spare to rinse out clothes which had been soaked in salt water, and salt naturally absorbs moisture, seamen’s clothes must have been permanently slightly damp.”93 Constantly wet clothing was also a breeding ground for mildew and bacteria, not to mention a sinkhole for various unpleasant bodily odors.94 On many ships, especially smaller vessels, rain and seawater would continually leak through to the cramped sleeping berths, wetting seamen’s hammocks and denying them the comfort of a dry sleep. While ships at anchor in a safe harbor were sometimes preferred 92 Captains usually had better quarters, better provisions, and better clothing. A recurring theme in Northwest Coast voyages is the deterioration of ship conditions to the point where officers and even the captain are forced to share warm clothing and participate in menial manual labor. On some general dangers of seafaring, see N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1996), esp. 46-48, 60-71. 93 Rodger, The Wooden World, 62 94 This was also exacerbated by generally poor hygiene standards. See Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 70 as sleeping berths over terrestrial shelters because they provided better protection from winter rains, a ship was also the worst place to be during inclement oceanic weather.95 Because sailing ships required continual management and monitoring, waking sailors were almost always above deck and fully exposed to inclement weather. This included not just cold rain and humid air but violent sea spray. One had to labor while touching wet rigging, walking on wet decks with wet shoes and leggings, handling wet tools, and wearing wet clothing. Even in subtropical and tropical climes, some men went barefoot to avoid slipping on the decks. Storms required men to work overtime pumping accumulated water out of the bottom of the ship — even with regular caulking and sealing, which was necessary but not always feasible or prioritized, seawater and rainwater inevitably leaked in. Rigging required adjustment with each new wind direction, and in poor weather had to be conducted in the middle of the night by manual memory alone.96 When seas were foggy, men had to keep constant watch to protect against the risk of a sudden grounding or strong shift in wind. Most men ate their rations above deck in whatever weather prevailed at the time, as there was little room below for anything but supplies and sleeping quarters. Warm food was scarce, especially during storms. This would all be unpleasant enough in warm climes, but the wet-cold climate of the Northwest Coast made intractable dampness a serious health hazard for a large portion of the year. When it was not stormy, it usually drizzled, keeping things in a state of constant saturation. Air temperatures alone were usually between 35 and 50F, rarely dropping below freezing, but frostbite 95 Rodger, The Wooden World, 62-63. 96 Rodger, The Wooden World, 62-63; McCoy, On the Edge, 53-54. On one voyage, that of Bodega y Quadra and Heceta in 1775, Heceta continually threatened his men with transferal to the expedition’s smaller and even-more-poorly-built ship; meanwhile, Bodega y Quadra’s men pretended to be sick so they could be transferred to the larger ship. The smaller ship’s deck was so tiny that, according to an officer, it “did not allow the convenience of a walk.” See Freeman Tovell, At the Far Reaches of Empire: the Life of Juan Francisco de le Bodega y Quadra (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008): 28-30; officer quoted on 19. 71 was entirely possible in combination with wind chill and wet. Clothing certainly did not provide all-encompassing protection. Sailors in the British Navy in the late 1700s generally wore heavy woolen garments, but often had to provide some of their own, including spare sets, and earlier Spanish naval expeditions were comparatively poorly equipped. Clothing had to be washed and dried regularly in the open air of the ship deck, but on the Northwest Coast the interminable drizzle and humidity meant there were few opportunities to do this. Woolens can continue to insulate the body when saturated, but their effectiveness declines, they are pervious to sea breezes, and their remarkable absorptive capacity also makes them exceptionally hard to dry in wet conditions.97 Modern studies of human thermal responses show that exposure to steady rainfall in a 40F environment “dramatically increases body heat loss through evaporation and reduced clothing insulation,” and wind further magnifies this effect.98 During rainstorms, when ships needed to be managed most intensively and carefully, inclement weather would have induced significant cold stress and hypothermia within around five hours of continual rain despite sustained physical activity. After even a short time exposed to wet-cold conditions, sailors would have suffered decreased strength and manual dexterity, which could prove injurious or fatal in a volatile, ever- evolving seaborne weather-world.99 Periods of mild drizzle and calm winds were often little more than wet, monotonous lulls between heavier winds and rainstorms, offering minimal respite. The power of rainfall in the context of cramped ship quarters, poor provisioning, and subpar hygiene standards helped render physiological sickness rampant on voyages to the 97 John M. Naish, “The Health of Mariners: George Vancouver’s Achievement,” in Enlightenment and Exploration in the North Pacific, 79-80; McCoy, On the Edge, 33-38. 98 Yamane et al., “Effects of wind and rain on thermal responses of humans in a mildly cold environment,” European Journal of Applied Physiology 109 (2010): 117. 99 Robert L. Thompson and John S. Hayward, “Wet-cold exposure and hypothermia: thermal and metabolic responses to prolonged exercise in rain,” Journal of Applied Physiology 81, no. 3 (Sept. 1996): 1128-37. 72 Northwest Coast. For example, cold exposure reduces human immunological responses by, among other methods, impairing the antiviral secretions of the human nose; this increases the likelihood that pathogens might infiltrate the body.100 Illness, exacerbated by prolonged exposure to rainfall, immiserated and alienated imperial agents on a deep, bodily basis. Detailed reports and diagnoses of ailments made by on-ship physicians are either nonexistent or unavailable, but ship logs commonly identified and reported scurvy, which is the result of a Vitamin C insufficiency rather than a virus of bacterial infection. Scurvy was prevalent worldwide on prolonged ventures where fresh provisions lasted only a short time and men sometimes went without anchorage for months on end, although scurvy’s cause remained unknown to medicine until the late 1700s. Even after the cause was determined, it took many decades for the Vitamin C hypothesis to become scientific and public consensus. The earliest voyages to the Northwest were especially prone to outbreaks of scurvy, as they were usually poorly provisioned and rarely made landfall — the myriad berries that grow in the Northwest and remain on the bush even in early winter would have provided plentiful Vitamin C.101 Scurvy’s direct cause is a nutrient deficiency. However, rainfall served as a proximate factor because Vitamin C is burned faster and less efficiently during cold and damp conditions.102 The wet and rainy winter climate of the Northwest Coast thus exacerbated scurvy in ways that 100 Di Huang et al., “Cold exposure impairs extracellular vesicle swarm–mediated nasal antiviral immunity,” Mechanisms of Allergy/Immunology 151, no. 2 (Feb. 2023): 509-525. 101 See Mark Harrison, “Scurvy on sea and land: political economy and natural history, c. 1780–c. 1850,” Journal of Maritime Research, 15, no. 1 (2013): 7–25. In terms of provisioning, Juan Perez’s voyage at least had “a medicine chest for the prompt treatment of illness.” Antonio Maria Bucareli y Ursua, quoted in Manuel P. Servin, ed. “The Instructions of Viceroy Bucareli to Ensign Juan Perez,” California Historical Society Quarterly, 40 no. 3 Sep. 1961: 239. Most of these medicines, however, were probably ineffective, if not actually harmful. 102 Stephen R. Bown, Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentlemen Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004): 43; and Anitra C. Carr and Sam Rowe, “Factors Affecting Vitamin C Status and Prevalence of Deficiency: A Global Health Perspective,” Nutrients, 12, no. 7 (June 2020): 5. 73 warmer tropical climates would not have (although tropical climates hosted many nasty infectious diseases). The voyage of Sebastian Vizcaino and Martin de Aguilar in 1602-1603, for instance, suffered from scurvy with special intensity. Instructed to survey the coast for bays that might shelter the Manila Galleons from rainstorms, they departed northward from San Blas, Mexico, in the heart of the rainy season. They were prevented by said rainstorms from ever landing along the Northwest Coast.103 Vizcaino wrote of his crew that “Most of them were boys, miserable fellows, and poorly disciplined,” likely impressed into service. Fifty of the enlisted had fled before departure because they considered the food and supplies insufficient — either a brazen act of bold disobedience, or a signal that they doubted the Spanish government’s willingness or ability to reprise.104 Several months after departing, Vizcaino and Aguilar were separated by a rainstorm in January of 1603 offshore of northern California. As the historian Warren Cook put it, they were “accompanied by such dense rain and fog that days seemed night.” Scurvy had not yet broken out, but so many men were ill that “only two sailors were able to go aloft and reef the sails.” After Vizcaino attempted to flee back south, a rainstorm denied him, blew him threateningly towards the rocky coast, nearly sank his flagship, and broke his ribs in an onboard accident. By the time that Vizcaino and Aguilar rejoined, Aguilar having made it no farther north than southern Oregon due 103 On San Blas as “a small and mosquito-infested outpost,” see Tovell, At the Far Reaches of Empire, 163-166. On Vizcaino’s instructions see Bolton, “Diary of Sebastian Vizcaino, 1602- 1603,” in Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 43-103, esp. 43-51. 104 Sebastian Vizcaino, “Vizcainos’s Narrative,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 10, no. 2 (May 1930): 205; Torquemada quoted on 204, n31. Early maritime historians sometimes ignored evidence of impressment and poor provisioning; Charles E. Chapman, for instance, asserted against Vizcaino’s own words that “No expense had been spared in providing for this expedition,” and that the sailors were “carefully selected,” see Chapman, “Sebastian Vizcaino: Exploration of California,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 23 no. 4 April 1920: 291. Henry R. Wagner, however, did note that Vizcaino’s voyage was provided with six “old experienced soldiers” put in place to “keep up to their obligations the rest of the men,” see Wagner, “Spanish Voyages to the Northwest Coast in the Sixteenth Century. Chapter VI: […], 262. 74 to poor weather, the wet, cold weather and an outbreak of scurvy had made both of their vessels “a floating infirmary; so acute was the situation that officers had to perform such menial tasks as manning the wheel, climbing to the yardarm to furl sails, and toiling in the galley to prepare meals.”105 The ship leaked heavily in multiple places, so much that, Vizcaino wrote, “all of us had to serve the pump eight times a day and still the water was never emptied.”106 That commissioned officers were reduced to performing these tasks is representative of how rainstorms could both broaden and collapse class divides: officers were generally better clothed and were insulated from having to constantly labor outside, but, when conditions worsened and crew health deteriorated, the dangers of the weather required them to engage in rank-and-file tasks lest they risk dying alongside the rest of the men. Thwarted by stormy, foggy weather, Vizcaino and Aguilar neither made landfall or located a safe northerly harbor for the Manila Galleons. In total, 48 crew members, including Aguilar, died of various ailments – scurvy, certainly, but likely also hypothermia related to the wet-cold — by the time that they returned to port in muggy San Blas, Mexico. Vizcaino, an experienced naval officer not prone to exaggeration, described the voyage as a “greater hardship and misery than could be imagined.”107 It took months for the few surviving sailors to recover. Beginning with the voyage of James Cook in 1778, many ships bound for the Northwest Coast carried spruce beer — an effective cure for scurvy on long voyages — and, since landfalls were more common and knowledge of the coast less poor, Vitamin C could be readily obtained from local berries or coniferous needle tea.108 105 Cook, Flood Tide of Empire, 12-13 106 Vizcaino, “Vizcaino’s Narrative,” 216 107 Vizcaino, “Vizcaino’s Narrative,” 216 108 Martyn Connell, “A short history of spruce beer in Britain,” Brewery History 165 (2015): 2- 14; and Don J. Durzan, “Arginine, scurvy and Cartier's ‘tree of life’,” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 5, no. 5 (2009). 75 Because early voyages such as Vizcaino and Aguilar’s severely lacked emplaced knowledge of weather and topography, historians have found it difficult to determine their exact routing. It is generally agreed that Cabrillo and Ferrer made it no farther north than Point Reyes, California; sighted little of the shoreline; and missed the entrance to what is now San Francisco Bay because of thick fogs. Francis Drake’s voyage made a brief landfall somewhere between San Francisco Bay and Cape Arago, but the exact location has always been a controversial subject and is the subject of ongoing debate. Many fringe theories exist suggesting a more northerly location, initially perpetuated in the late 1700s to assert a British claim to the region.109 Vizcaino and Aguilar, for their part, failed to advance farther north than Cape Blanco, in southern Oregon. Not knowing any better, all three voyages sailed in the heart of the rainy season; suffered heavily from exposure to the elements; and sighted little of the Northwest coastline as a result of heavy fog and rain. Even when persistent fogs lifted, winds becalmed, and the land itself became visible and safe to follow along, mariners such as Cabrillo and Ferrer crystalized their earliest understandings and perceptions of North America’s western coastal margins from vantage points aboard sailing ships and on cold water beaches. They found that the littoral interface between land and sea was rarely inviting.110 Even on a clear and sunny day, much of the ragged coastline of northern California and southern Oregon presented rocky islets, sea stacks, and high cliff-faces blanketed in enormous conifers and backgrounded by coastal mountain ranges. The cliff-faced character of the coastline meant few safe harbors existed, usually at the outflow of rivers, but expeditions often 109 For an overview of some of these fringe theories and historical debates about Drake’s landing spot, see Melissa Darby, Thunder Go North: The Hunt for Sir Francis Drake's Fair and Good Bay (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019). 110 On shifting views of the seashore and littoral zone in human history, see Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), trans. Jocelyn Phelps; and John R. Gillis, The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 76 missed these harbors due to fog or rain. Missing a harbor was especially common during poor weather, ironically the time of greatest need. Early mariners, working without cartographic knowledge, were especially prone to this mistake. Consider, for instance, the official chart of the central California coast that Vizcaino produced following the conclusion of his voyage (Figure 1.1). Although Aguilar’s ship ventured as far north as Cape Blanco before turning around in a rainstorm, the details of Vizcaino’s chart end at Cape Mendocino, about one-hundred eighty miles south. A notation indicates that Cape Blanco vaguely rests somewhere to the north, but the shoreline itself is described as a “blank.” This suggests that Aguilar sighted little of the more northerly coast, his views either obscured by fog and inclement weather or too far from shore to be of any value. Vizcaino’s notations near Cape Mendocino describe rugged coastal canyons, and other notations indicate hills and thick forests — terrain that offered little appeal. The lengthiest notations rest around bays and rivers, with Vizcaino making comparisons to rumor and the reports of Cabrillo and Ferrer; this shows that the primary mission of the expedition was to find safe harbors for passing trans-Pacific trade vessels. Early charts such as Vizcaino’s were hidden in Spanish state archives and not unearthed until the mid-1800s.111 In response to the disastrous voyage of Vizcaino and Aguilar, Spain adopted a policy of willful neglect, doubtful that the soggy Northwest Coast would be a target of imperial rivals. They viewed the rainswept and fogbound region as “unpromising,” with a “dominant impression of steeply forested slopes plunging abruptly into the surf,” and concluded it was only a source of trouble and burdensome financial expense.112 As for the English, they had little interest to begin with. Francis Drake’s original mission had been to enter the Pacific through the Strait of Magellan, scout the coast of South America, and 111 Williams, Voyages of Delusion, 270-272; Cook, Flood Tide of Empire, 4. 112 Cook, Flood Tide of Empire, 9-19. 77 Figure 1.1. Sebastian Vizcaino’s 1603 chart of the central California coast. At top left, Cape Mendocino is labeled. 78 irritate the Spanish. After a bout of piracy against the Spanish in the southeast Pacific, however, he detoured thousands of miles along the western American coastline in search of the Northwest Passage. This excursion towards the Northwest Coast may have been made against orders, either the result of overconfidence in the existence of the Northwest Passage or fear of poor weather conditions in the Strait of Magellan. Ironically, rather than finding a safer route, Drake was confronted by terrible rainstorms and cold weather offshore of northern California and forced to flee back southward. The Strait of Magellan, long renowned for terribly stormy weather, no longer seemed so unpleasant. This poor first impression of the Northwest Coast discouraged further investigation by the English, and, while Drake was praised by the British Crown for his piracy, he was sworn to secrecy regarding his experiences. His initial entry into the Pacific through the Strait Magellan did, however, alarm the Spanish, who attempted to settle land along the Strait to monopolize access — but were deterred in part because of a rainy, windy, cold temperate climate, not unlike that of the Northwest Coast. To this day, one of the sites that the Spanish attempted to settle along the Strait is known as Puerto del Hambre — Port Famine.113 Broken Health: The Sailor, the Sea, and the Storm in the 1770s Because of English and Spanish disinterest in the Northwest Coast, the failure of Vizcaino and Aguilar was followed by a 171-year gap between expeditions to the region, running from 1603 to 1773. This long chronological gap can be explained in large part because early encounters of the 113 On Drake and British piracy in the south Pacific, see Barry M. Gough, The Northwest Coast: British Navigation, Trade, and Discoveries to 1812 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1992): 18-24; and Glyndwr Williams, The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters, 1570-1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). On Drake’s orders and intentions, se K.R. Andrews, “The Aims of Drake's Expedition of 1577-1580,” The American Historical Review, 73, no. 3 (Feb. 1968): 724-741. Gough, in The Northwest Coast, asserts based on earlier interpretations that Drake had been ordered to seek the Northwest Passage. I find Andrews’ argument to the contrary more convincing. 79 Northwest Coast created unfavorable climatic and environmental perceptions that outweighed any imperial inclinations.114 Put bluntly, the coast was viewed as unattractive and inaccessible; voyages were expensive, valuable supplies were often lost, sailors brought back reports of utter misery both psychological and physical, and the coast seemed to offer no resources worth the trouble. Rainstorms, experienced in the context of a largely illegible aqua rasa, were a primary impetus for this view, and thus for an almost two-century gap in imperial interest. As a result of the stormy failure of early voyages, the Northwest Coast became a source of intrigue and fearful mystery throughout the Euro-American world and remained virtually unmapped well into the 1770s. Authors and pamphleteers, including Jonathan Swift, operated off of rumor and the occasional leak of state secrets to perpetuate a not-inaccurate image of the Northwest Coast as a stormy, mist-shrouded zone of shipwrecks and rugged, inhospitable coastlines.115 These portrayals played into the popularity of shipwreck narratives and entertaining tales about adventure in unknown, far-off lands.116 Sometimes, grandiose depictions of gold and an interior seaway abounded, and mapmakers, in the absence of readily available or reliable 114 For an overview of Spanish presence in the Americas, see David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). For a sense of how Spain and Britain competed against one another and an overview of some of the factors that contextualized Spain’s weakening influence, see J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); and J.H. Elliott, Spain and Its World, 1500-1700: Selected Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 115 Swift, skeptical of many travel narratives written about other parts of the world, jokingly portrayed the Northwest Coast in Gulliver’s Travels as a land called Brobdingnag that was populated by giants and covered in grasses taller than trees. One might note, however, that this image of colossal vegetation may have some roots in real descriptions of the Northwest Coast’s massive rainforests, even if Swift’s intention was satirical. 116 On shipwreck narratives, see Reidy et al., Science and Exploration, 12; Steve Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); C.R. Boxer, ed., The Tragic History of the Sea (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); James V. Morrison, Shipwrecked: Disaster and Transformation in Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe, and the Modern World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014). 80 cartographic knowledge, often filled in the region on their maps using unverified accounts for the sake of “completion.”117 Later voyages saw intensifying imperial contestation of the Northwest Coast and efforts to plot and quantify the region’s geography and climate. These voyages began when the Spanish became concerned in the late 1760s about the rumored presence of Russian expeditions on the coast of southern Alaska.118 Having claimed an area encompassing the entire west coast of North America under the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, Spain remained determined to head off any intrusions on the Northwest Coast despite a lack of regional cartographic knowledge or occupation. Having heard rumors beginning in 1764 that the Russians were establishing a presence in the North Pacific, Spain sent a voyage northward in the late spring of 1774 under Juan Perez in order to ascertain the extent of that presence, which, at this time, extended only to the Aleutians.119 As evidence of ongoing ignorance of the coast, Perez’s voyage was outfitted with tropical spices such as cloves and nutmeg to “serve as samples to be shown to the Indians,” and instructed to ascertain if such spices grew in the region. Perez was also instructed not to attempt settlement, but to mark any spots that had appeal.120 117 See Williams, Voyages of Delusion, 239-286; also Cook, Flood Tide of Empire, 28-29, 30. 118 Cook, Flood Tide of Empire, 47-49. These concerns originated from the voyage of Vitus Bering in 1741, and from subsequent Russian operations in the Aleutians. Russian activity in southeastern Alaska did not pick up until the mid 1770s, and the first Russian outposts were only established in the 1790s. Russian expeditions in the North Pacific and Alaska encountered their fair share of weather-world obstacles, with many vessels sinking in fog or rainstorms. Vitus Bering, namesake of the Bering Strait, died of scurvy during a prolonged stint of cold, rainy weather. For a general overview of Russian maritime losses, see Andrei V. Grinev and Richard L. Bland, “Russian Maritime Catastrophes during the Colonization of Alaska, 1741-1867,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 102, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 178-194l and Kenneth N. Owens, ed. The Wreck of the Sv. Nikolai: Two Narratives of the First Russian Expedition to the Oregon Country, 1808-1810 (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1985), translated by Alton S. Donnelly. On the failure of Fort Ross, see Cook, Flood Tide of Empire, 504 119 Richard Ravalli, Sea Otters: a History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018): 30 120 Servin, “The Instructions of Viceroy Bucareli to Ensign Juan Perez,” 241. 81 Pushed out to sea by rainstorms and frustrated by thick oceanic fogs despite the summer season, Perez was unable to venture inwards towards the land, never sighted the coast of North America, and was unable to make it north beyond the exterior island chain known as Haida Gwaii. Perez’s expedition produced no new cartographic insights: an accurate survey would have required the ship to track close to shore to detail its contours by dead reckoning, and as a result of heavy fog, bad weather, and a poorly-chosen ship, Perez was unable to follow explicit instructions to do this.121 The voyage obtained a number of sea otter pelts from local Indigenous groups, but “cited no unusual interest,” used them as personal bedding, and complained that they were full of lice: their incredible market value in China was yet-unknown to anyone but the Russians.122 Perez was unable to mark Spain’s claim to possession of the coast, and reported back that the region had no evident utility or appeal. After Perez was turned back by rainstorms, the Spanish nonetheless sent two further expeditions north with the same mission, the first led by Bruno Heceta and Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra and the second by Bodega y Quadra alone. The first of these voyages, in 1775, was an utter failure. Bodega y Quadra and Heceta alike were domineering captains. Bodega y Quadra, who captained the smaller Sonora, was especially cruel, often took undue risks in inclement weather, and wrote that he told his rank-and-file crew “of the glory they would have… and the esteem they would merit” if they pushed on to higher and more dangerous latitudes. Mourelle, the Sonora’s pilot, similarly commented: “As to what is said of the condition of the schooner with all its futtocks split and totally useless, unable to hold a nail, and that this damage can have disastrous results because of the continuous and strong winds, none of this appears to me 121 McCoy, On the Edge, 64; Herbert Beals, ed. Juan Perez on the Northwest Coast: Six Documents of His Expedition in 1774 (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1989): 36-39. 122 Cook, Flood Tide of Empire, 42-44; on Perez and sea otter pelts, 61 82 to be a sufficient reason to delay the expedition.”123 Morale among the crew was resigned, and most of them were farmhands who had never been to sea. Rain fell almost daily despite a summer departure. In mid-July, the Sonora lost its topmast and nearly sank in a sudden squall. In early August, Bodega y Quadra and Mourelle rebelled against Heceta’s command, using a bout of vicious rain and dense fog to separate the Sonora from the flagship Santiago; they sought personal fame and national glory, and saw the weather as an obstacle to be overcome in the name of God and the Crown. The crew’s welfare was not considered, and was subverted to ideas about a grander, greater mission. Over the next months, which remained rainy and foggy, Bodega y Quadra and Mourelle tried on two occasions to head farther north, and were forcibly rebuffed each time by rainstorms. As autumn came, it grew colder, rains fell harder, and sickness spread. In light of these conditions, the crew began resisting orders; Bodega y Quadra and Mourelle soon handed out some of their well-made flannel clothing to the rank-and-file as a means of self-preservation. Their expertise was required to pilot the ship, but the crew was clearly on the verge of mutiny.124 In early September, a major rainstorm offshore of Haida Gwaii nearly sunk the Sonora a second time. Illness among the crew forced Bodega y Quadra and his second officer to take turns pumping water out of the ship, and Mourelle complained that such labor “in no ways conformed to their past exercise” and should have been carried out by young sailors.125 Mourelle also wrote that he thought the crew should have been content with “dying in their craft rather than return[ing] without enlightenment.”126 It is difficult to discern between genuine and performative devotion, but 123 Most of the voyage’s officers and crew thoroughly disagreed and wanted to spend the summer and winter repairing the ships in sunny Monterey, established 1770 as the capital of Alta California. See Tovell, At the Far Reaches of Empire, 19- 21. 124 Tovell, At the Far Reaches of Empire, 19-38. 125 Tovell, At the Far Reaches of Empire, 39; Mourelle quoted in Cook, Flood Tide of Empire, 81 126 Cook, Flood Tide of Empire, 79 83 Bodega y Quadra and Mourelle, it seems, believed that the rainy weather was a challenge placed before them by God, and if it was to be the death of them, then so be it. Heceta, meanwhile, continued north for a brief period to try and find the Sonora but wisely returned south along the foggy coastline. During a spell of pleasant weather he sailed up to the mouth of the Columbia River — then at a summer low — and recognized it as a freshwater outlet, but was unable to enter in part due to a strong current and in part because of illness among the crew. They were too sick to help guide the ship over the Columbia Bar, and Heceta was concerned that if the crew dropped anchor off of the river mouth they would be too ill to ever weigh it up again. Heceta thus returned to Monterey in late August with reports of a large river and a latitudinal estimation, which the Spanish kept secret — although a copy of Mourelle’s journal somehow managed to reach England, and was used in 1778 by James Cook.127 When Bodega y Quadra and the Sonora finally docked at Monterey in mid-October of 1775, they and the rest of the crew had to be carried off the ship, unable to walk and with little more than rain-rotten rags upon their shoulders. No one died of scurvy, however, which was taken as a divine intervention and sign of providential favor. It is impossible to discover how many of the peasant crew may have perished in the months after the voyage as a consequence of their sufferings at sea. Despite having willfully disobeyed Heceta’s command, Bodega y Quadra and Mourelle had reached higher latitudes than any previous Spanish voyage, and Bodega y Quadra was praised by the Spanish Crown for what Freeman Tovell has paraphrased as his “heroic constancy and disdain of risks.”128 He later wrote a treatise on how to best navigate the winds, currents, and waters 127 Cook, Flood Tide of Empire, 78-85. On map secrecy, see J.B. Harley, “Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe,” Imago Mundi 40 (1988): 57-76; and Cook 4-5. 128 Tovell, At the Far Reaches of Empire, 44 84 of the region, informed by his and Mourelle’s observations.129 However, once again, rainstorms had prevented Madrid from ascertaining any knowledge of the Russian presence in Alaska. A prominent Spanish friar wrote in 1779 that he worried Russia would extend its influence southwards to California if not expelled from Alaska, and suggested that vagrants from Mexico City who came “from those areas of Mexico by nature cool in climate” could be forcibly settled up north, but his letter was not sent to Madrid until 1789. The Spanish sent further expeditions northward between 1775 and 1790, but became complacent regarding Russian fur traders and suffered long-term structural disadvantages in regional commerce.130 Though their later vessels were better-equipped than those of the earliest voyages, Spanish sailors continued to suffer and die in the wet and the cold environment of the Northwest Coast — it was common for surviving veterans of these voyages to use the phrase salud qubrantada, or “broken health,” to describe their ordeals. Bodega y Quadra himself almost died after his second voyage in 1779, and the meager Spanish presence at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island generally produced gloomy, unfavorable accounts of the coast’s potential for permanent settlement or agrarian proselytization. Exposed to wind, cold, and rain, the outpost’s biscuit rations rotted in the excess moisture, the vegetable gardens were destroyed, and the men were commonly quite ill.131 129 Tovell, 46; 66-68; see Antonio Mourelle, Journal of a Voyage in 1775 (London, 1780): 520- 524 on his personal observations, which warned particularly of rainstorms and blustery winds north of the 40th parallel. Mourelle also noted that mild showers often calmed heavy winds; this was an observation also made by Juan Crespi, a friar aboard the 1774 expedition of Juan Perez. Crespi additionally noted that such periods of drizzle and calm brought heavy swells on the water, “which made us roll until we were weary.” Herbert Eugene Bolton, ed. Fray Juan Crespi, Missionary Explorer On the Pacific Coast 1768-1774, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1927): 362. 130 See Cook, Flood Tide of Empire, 98-99, 134-136. The naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, similar to the Spanish friar, commented on Spain’s climatic aversions towards the Northwest Coast, see Cook 527. 131 Tovell, At the Far Reaches of Empire, 204; Greg Bradsher, “Spanish Explorations of the Pacific Northwest and the First Nootka Sound Settlement, 1790-1791,” Blog of the Textual Records Division at the National Archives, Oct. 12, 2017. Accessed April 2, 2023 at https://text- 85 The Spanish garrison at Nootka Sound also complained of heavy rheumatic pains, which they attributed to the cool, damp environment. Similar associations were made by other crews on the Northwest Coast.132 Unfortunately, it is not possible to definitively support or refute their claims on the basis of modern medicine: laypeople have made connections between rainfall and rheumatic pains across vast expanses of time and space, and the question remains a source of unsolved consternation among doctors and scientists despite massive volumes of research.133 What is certain, however, is that Euro-American navigators on the Northwest Coast believed in this connection, and it informed their understanding of regional climate and environmental (un)healthfulness. The region’s winter humidity was blamed for nine deaths among the garrison, and sickly men were commonly sent back to Monterey to recuperate in what was seen as a more favorable climate. In 1790, Bodega y Quadra, by then an administrator in Mexico, wrote of reports from Nootka Sound that he found it “painful to see such an enormous expenditure of funds with no purpose… [Nootka message.blogs.archives .gov/2017/10/12/225-years-ago-spanish-explorations-of-the-pacific- northwest-and-the-first-spanish-settlement-in-washington-state-nunez-gaona-neah-bay-1792-part- ii-spanish-explorations-of-the-pacific-northwest-a/ 132 Tovell, At the Far Reaches of Empire, 204. For additional rheumatic complaints made by Robert Gray’s crew in the winter of 1791, see Howay, Voyages, 307-308. 133 The self-reported connections between rheumatism and weather are supported by smaller studies that examine factors such as humidity, rainfall, and sunshine, see for instance E.M. Savage et al., “Does rheumatoid arthritis disease activity correlate with weather conditions?” Rheumatology International 35 (2015): 887-890; and Tim McAlindon, “Changes in barometric pressure and ambient temperature influence osteoarthritis pain,” American Journal of Medicine 120, no. 5, (May 2007): 429-434. On the other hand, one recent study utilizing large amounts of outpatient visit data for rheumatic pains found no significant correlation between rainfall and medical appointments, see Anupam B. Jena et al., “Association between rainfall and diagnoses of joint or back pain: retrospective claims analysis,” BMJ 35 (2017): j5326. Self-reported longitudinal data by citizen scientists in the United Kingdom suffering from chronic pain, however, found a strong association between rainfall, humidity, and major rheumatic pains, see David M. Schultz et al., “Weather Patterns Associated with Pain in Chronic-Pain Sufferers,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Vol 101 no. 5 (May 2020): 555-566. Suffice it to say that while the connection has not been disproved and may never be disproved, it also has not acquired strong support among researchers. See Robert H. Shmerling, “Does weather affect arthritis pain?” Harvard Health Blog, January 17, 2019, accessed March 30, 2023. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/does-weather-affect-arthritis-pain-2019011715789. 86 Sound] cannot be maintained without great cost and heavy loss of life because of its harsh climate… it is a harbour that produces nothing but water and firewood.” Two years later, after having spent five months at Nootka, Bodega y Quadra’s impressions seem more favorable — he wrote that one could “winter in it without fear” and that the climate was “healthy” — but these comments stand in stark contrast to other Spanish reports of the area, were made by a man privileged with resources, and were likely influenced by professional self-interest in the face of Spain’s potential withdrawal from the region where Bodega y Quadra had made his name and career.134 Spain was ultimately distracted by the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, and, with little presence to back up its claims, was outcompeted on the Northwest Coast by the early 1800s.135 The English, on the other hand, developed a strong and successful imperial interest in the Northwest Coast. James Cook, the first Englishman to thoroughly explore parts of the Northwest Coast, came to the region in 1778 after a long voyage around the world, which included the first white landings on New Zealand and Hawai’i. His venture to the region was part of a broader imperial effort to make legible the Pacific Ocean and strengthen trans-oceanic commerce.136 His crew found the sandy beaches of the Hawai’ian Islands so hot even in December that they were “plunging hourly into the water to cool themselves,” but were no more pleased with the weather on the Northwest Coast: days after personally referring to the weather as “mild,” Cook encountered spring rainstorms 134 Tovell, At the Far Reaches of Empire, 276-277, 290 135 Cook, Flood Tide of Empire, 526-537; Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America. As part of an international treaty agreement to avoid an Anglo-Spanish war, Spain, Britain, and the United States mutually abandoned Spain’s only regional outpost, at Nootka Sound, in 1794. In 1819, Spain relinquished former claims north of the 42nd parallel to the United States. 136 Glyndwr Williams, “George Vancouver, the Admiralty, and Exploration in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Enlightenment and Exploration in the North Pacific, 1741-1805, 38-48 87 offshore of California and Oregon and, feeling dreary and annoyed, renamed the first piece of land he sighted Cape Foulweather.137 Cook was the first surveyor to produce something vaguely resembling an accurate map of the Northwest coastline. His maps were nowhere near as detailed as what his countryman and former officer George Vancouver would publish in 1796, but they represented a major movement towards legibility on the Northwest Coast (see Figure 1.2). Springtime storms prevented his voyage from sighting, following, and mapping most of the coast in any great detail; other than his approach at Cape Foulweather, siting of Cape Flattery, and brief anchorage at Nootka Sound, the entire shoreline south of what is now Alaska is undelineated on Cook’s official chart of the expedition. Absent from the map were the entirety of the Northwest fjordland; the Salish Sea; Haida Gwaii; and the insularity of Vancouver Island: like every navigator before him, Cook found conditions unfavorable to entering the Inside Passage. Pleasant weather later in the summer — and a little bit of help from Russian fur traders — allowed the expedition to map southern Alaska with much greater accuracy.138 Cook’s voyage was one of the first to sight the exterior shoreline of the upper Northwest Coast, where elevation contrasts between land and sea dwarf even the imposing coasts of northern California and southern Oregon. Here, snow-capped peaks rise precipitously from the rocky shores of the Northwest fjordland and leave little room between the sea and the summit. As historians Maria Tippett and Douglas Cole note, these northerly impressions ran directly contrary to 18th century British ideas of fertile beauty, instead bringing to the fore a “sublime desolation” wherein 137 On the heat of Hawai’i, see James Burney’s entry for December 30, 1777, in James K. Barnett, ed. Captain Cook’s Final Voyage: The Untold story from the Journals of James Burney and Henry Roberts (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2017). For James Cook’s comments, see James Cook, The Three Voyages of Captain Cook Round the World VI. Being the Second of the Third Voyage (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821): 236-238 138 Williams, Voyages of Delusion, 308, 330 8 8 Figure 1.2. Chart prepared by James Cook and published in London in 1784. Cape Foulweather at bottom right. Note the dotted line following the coast, which represents Cook's sailing route. His few approaches to the southern part of the coast directly correspond with cartographic detail, showing that storms often dictated what areas of the coast sailors were able to approach. 89 “the dusky green of the conifers helped to associate the forest with desolation and terror,” and the darkness of clouds and rain created an atmosphere of terrible, dreary gloom.139 As Cook and later voyages increasingly began to follow and map the Northwest Coast shoreline, they faced new weather-world dangers. Oft-fogbound shores were one common concern. Because the ocean currents that run along the Northwest Coast are cool and produce heavy upwelling of cold water year-round, coastal fog, too, is produced throughout the year, usually the result of contrasts between warmer tropical moisture plumes and chilly coastal waters. Heavy fjordland indentation in the upper reaches of the Northwest Coast captures this fog, creating dense mists; farther south, fog is also present year-round, but tends to move inland as part of a marine push or linger along the shoreline. Offshore of southern Oregon and northern California, localized differences between warm land surface temperatures and cool oceanic temperatures create especially thick banks of fog during the summer. Depending upon their season and pattern of origin, some fogs are especially common in the morning but usually dissipate into pleasant weather by midafternoon as a result of sun-warming, whereas other fogs are shielded in the cooler months by cloud cover and can linger most of the day unless dispersed by winds.140 All of these fogs obscure sandbars, stone columns, and the shoreline itself, which meant that any ship venturing close to the land — whether intentionally or blown off course — risked being run aground or dashed upon the rocks if the weather was inclement or happened to shift for the worse after a period of relative calm. Most voyages to the Northwest Coast, including Cook’s, first approached land near Cape Mendocino, the westernmost point in what is now northern California. Because of cooastal fog, however, many mariners only knew they were approaching land because they saw driftwood and 139 Douglas Cole and Maria Tippett, “Pleasing Diversity and Sublime Desolation: The 18th- Century British Perception of the Northwest Coast,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 65, no. 1 (Jan., 1974): 1-7. 140 Cliff Mass, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, 126-132, 244-249, 277. 90 kelp floating on the surface of the water, and it was common for ships to never sight this part of the Northwest shoreline or to glimpse only the headlands. As a result of anxieties about inclement weather, the exterior coast, or littoral zone, was often obscured or avoided by ships entirely (this too can be observed by examining Cook’s largely ocean-borne path, see Figure 1.2). Even when later voyages penetrated the Inside Passage, which is protected from the worst oceanic weather, archipelagic geographies posed new dangers, unpredictable rainstorms persisted, and dense fogs made foundering an ever-present risk. Cook did, however, have a significant technological advantage over prior voyages to the Northwest Coast, both in terms of shipbuilding and navigational instruments. The development of the full-rigged schooner ship to replace the carrack, for instance, enabled steadier ship bearings, more exact adjustments to a vessel’s course, and faster reaction times to changes in wind direction, all with fewer hands working the rigging.141 Another major development was the spread of the marine chronometer into wide usage by Cook himself in the 1770s; the device enabled the determination of longitude without using dead reckoning. However, the marine chronometer relied on the observation of celestial bodies, which was often not possible in cloudy or stormy weather; this was one reason why Cook found the greatest success surveying during the summer, when skies were clearer along the Northwest Coast.142 Despite such technological advancements, seafaring remained an intensive and very dangerous profession beholden to the whims of oceanic weather. Cook and later British survey expeditions to the Northwest Coast may, however, have had a second important advantage over 141 John Kendrick, “The Evolution of Shipbuilding in the Eighteenth Century,” in Enlightenment and Exploration in the North Pacific, 88-102; and McCoy, On the Edge, 51-69. 142 Brian William Richardson, Longitude and Empire: How Captain Cook’s Voyages Changed the World (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005.) Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Walker & Company, 2005). 91 earlier Spanish ventures: bodily tolerance and familiarity with rainfall and cold conditions at sea. In common with Spain, the British Navy practiced naval impressment well into the 1810s, commonly forcing young men along the Atlantic coastline of what is now Canada and New England into service for both regional and global operations.143 However, many of the young men recruited or impressed by the British Navy in the Isles or in North America were maritime workers who, regardless of whether they had experience sailing, had worked on or along the cold, oft-rainy waters of the North Atlantic for many years. They likely would have previously accumulated at least some physical and cultural knowledge of how to minimize their individual suffering in wet-cold conditions, and, crucially, had some measure of experiential fortitude with which to bear the unpleasant and dangerous realities of working at sea.144 There is even some evidence from modern neuroscience that regular physiological exposure to frigid conditions alters individual neurobiology, creating enhanced habitual responses such as shivering, to generate heat, and vasoconstriction — the narrowing of blood vessels — which both reduce metabolic heat loss and facilitate greater wet-cold tolerance.145 Such responses were probably a very minor advantage, by no means deterministic of English success at sea in general 143 For an overview, see Denver Brunsman, The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013). For a few specific case studies of resistance to impressment, see Keith Mercer, “Northern Exposure: Resistance to Naval Impressment in British North America, 1775–1815", Canadian Historical Review 91 no. 2 (June 2010): 199–232; and Christopher P. Magra, “Anti-Impressment Riots and the Origins of the Age of Revolution,” International Review of Social History, 58 (2013): 131- 151. The North Atlantic and the southeastern Pacific were the closest climatic corollaries to the North Pacific that were regularly sailed by European navigators at this period in time. 144 Daniel Vickers, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), esp. 1-6 and 17-18; Daniel Vickers, Farmers & Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 145 John W. Castellani and Andrew J. Young, “Human physiological responses to cold exposure: Acute responses and acclimatization to prolonged exposure,” Autonomic Neuroscience: Basic and Clinical, 196 (2016): 63–74. 92 or along the Northwest Coast in particular, but still illustrate the influence of rainfall and weather on individual physiology and experience. “For whatever reason they found themselves afloat,” writes the historian N.A.M. Rodger, sailors typically “found the discomforts of life aboard ship more or less severe depending on their standard of comparison.” A sailor raised in a well-to-do family who went into the British Navy with plans to become a commissioned officer probably found the wet-cold realities of the Northwest Coast to be a greater hardship than the sailor who grew up “in a cramped and leaky cottage” and had to work in seasonally damp farm fields or along slippery docks in his youth.146 Regardless of from where or to where a man sailed, maritime life was not romantic or enjoyable, few went to sea because they dreamed of it, and many vulnerable young men were forced into service that they later died from. For the experienced sailor, being wet and cold was the unfortunate reality of a harsh profession. For the newly-initiated or forcibly impressed, it was a waking nightmare. The drenched, precarious, emplaced materiality of maritime life along the Northwest Coast compressed these hardships into a long, drawn-out winter of rain, fog, gales, and gloom, which suffused the entire experience of regional encounter in diverse ways and soured imperial impressions of the region’s potential and desirability as a site of settlement. One did not pass through the storm and move on: the storm lingered, and it rained, and rained, and rained. 146 Rodger, The Wooden World, 60. Life in the 1600s and 1700s for the average denizen of many coastal cities in the United Kingdom was full of many sensorial unpleasantries, ranging from overcrowding to rotting food to odoriferous urban animals — all this, in streets often muddy and wet from the drear of a rainy isle. See Emily Cockayne, Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600-1770 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). 93 “Savages,” Sea Otters, and Sodden Geographies of Fear in the Maritime Fur Trade Perhaps the greatest long-term consequence of James Cook’s voyage was the acquisition of sea otter skins. During a brief anchorage at the village of Yuquot on what is now known as Vancouver Island, Cook’s crew found themselves in need of warm garments to protect them from the incessant wet-cold of the region’s rains.147 George Gilbert, one of the expedition’s midshipmen, wrote that the crew purchased various animal skins from the Mowachaht, including sea otter furs, which “lined our Jackets, and made caps and gloves, from which we found great comfort; and indeed we had need for we experienced very little from our provisions, which were only just sufficient to keep us alive.”148 The crew acquired around 1500 furs, which surely helped insulate them from the region’s rains, but remained unaware of their value until they encountered Russian traders in southern Alaska. After James Cook’s violent death in Hawai’i in 1779, the voyage docked in China on the way back to England and sold their remaining sea otter furs for an immense profit.149 When an officially sanctioned version of the expedition’s journals and maps was published by the 147 Warren Cook summarizes this encounter in Flood Tide of Empire, 63. Yuquot appropriately translates to “Wind comes from all directions,” and was a summer residence on Nootka Sound. The Mowachaht spent the winter farther inland to avoid storms, and chose to venture down to Yuquot out-of-season in order to trade with James Cook’s crew. In 2021, Yuquot received about 126 inches of rain with temperatures usually between 40 and 60F. Data drawn from Meteostat for Nootka Lightstation, station XV7X4. 148 Christine Holmes, ed. Captain Cook's Final Voyage: The Journal of Midshipman George Gilbert (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1982): 72. 149 On China’s market for furs, see Jonathan Schlesinger, A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017). On the role of the China trade in the United States, see Dael Norwood, Trading Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022); James R. Fichter, So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo- American Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Dane A. Morrison, Eastward of Good Hope: Early America in a Dangerous World (Baltimore: JHU Press, 2021). 94 Admiralty in 1784, it proved popular with the British and American publics. Commercial interest in the value of sea otter furs crystalized quickly, setting off the maritime fur trade.150 Privately funded fur trading voyages soon became the most numerous and active Western vessels on the Northwest Coast. The first such voyage departed in 1785, captained by James Hanna in the tellingly named Sea Otter, and was followed by many other ventures.151 Most of them originated in England or New England and their crews likely had some experience working in cold, temperate environs, perhaps as fishermen, dockworkers, or shipbuilders. By the late 1790s, the trade was dominated by Americans sailing out of Boston — ‘Boston Men,’ as the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast called them. Although the private benefactors of the early British voyages had a vested interest in making the Northwest Coast more legible to mariners and often urged the British Crown to approve a comprehensive survey expedition to the region, the fur traders themselves were not equipped or instructed by shareholders to practice cartography, although they kept detailed accounts of winds and daily weather conditions.152 Their mission was global commerce: crucially, seasonal commerce, predicated upon Indigenous hunting skills, mediated by the rhythms of the Northwest Coast’s rainy winters, and intertwined with the regional ecological and geographical assemblages within with rainfall is embedded and through which it manifests materially. The subject of this commerce was, of course, the sea otter, Enhyndra lutris. Now a charismatic endangered species beloved by adults and children alike, the sea otter was then 150 See Barnett, ed. Captain Cook’s Final Voyage, 7. On prior Euro-American ignorance regarding the value of sea otter furs, see Warren Cook, Flood Tide of Empire, 87. 151 For an index of ships engaged in the trade in California, see Richard Ravalli, Kirsten Livingston, and Hannah Zimmerman, “A Revised List of Vessels Engaged in the California Sea Otter Trade, 1786-1847,” International Journal of Maritime History, 24, no.2 (Dec. 2012): 225- 238. For an index of vessels along the Northwest Coast, see Cook, Flood Tide of Empire, Appendix E; and Gibson, Otter Skins 299-318. 152 Williams, “George Vancouver, the Admiralty, and Exploration,” 41-42 95 relatively unknown to Western science, having been described previously and only briefly by Russian explorers. Endemic to the Pacific Rim from Japan to Alaska to the west coast of Mexico, the sea otter lives almost all of its life in the littoral zone of the chilly North Pacific, whose cold waters hover between 40F and 50F degrees for most of the year. These waters churn to the surface as part of coastal upwellings, introducing rich nutrients to the nearshore environment and sustaining immense biodiversity. In order to survive and thrive in these cold waters, the sea otter has evolved the thickest fur of any animal on Earth, with as many as one million hairs per square inch. In contrast to other marine mammals, the sea otter has no subcutaneous fat layer. All of its heat is generated by its incredibly thick fur, which contains innumerable tiny air pockets that trap warmth and keep the otter relatively cozy — even in violent coastal rainstorms accompanied by fierce wind chill.153 While sea otter fur develops primarily as a means of staying warm in cold waters, violent coastal rainstorms are a defining part of life and a major weather-world manifestation of winter throughout much of their northern range. Windy rainstorms are thus an incessant multiplying factor as well as a behavioral variable, materially shaping sea otter bodies and ethology. Prior to the beginning of the maritime fur trade, sea otters were a keystone species across their native range and played an integral role in the maintenance and evolution of nearshore ecosystems, primarily through sea urchin predation and kelp forest generation. They spend around one-tenth of their waking life grooming themselves to prevent fatal heat loss, and once numbered between 150,000 and 300,000 throughout their range.154 153 Mass, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, 10; N.T. Zellmer et al., “Sea Otter Behavior: Morphologic, Physiologic, and Sensory Adaptations,” in Ethology and Behavioral Ecology of Sea Otters and Polar Bears (Cham: Springer, 2021): 42-44. 154 Richard Ravalli, Sea Otters, xvii-xix 96 Sea otter furs have been valued for millennia by Indigenous societies along the Northwest Coast, Beringia, and in Japan. Their exchange was a part of regional pre-contact era trade networks, and on the Northwest Coast their pelts were generally considered prestige items worn by chiefs and other elites. Sea otters featured in oral traditions for many peoples, particularly those who lived in colder, wetter, more northerly climes and had greater incentive to hunt otters for their furs or meat. Because sea otters dwell in the littoral zone, they came into especially frequent contact with coastal societies and have coexisted ecologically with humans for thousands of years. The intensity of pre- contact sea otter hunting varied spatially and culturally: some populations experienced significant reductions in numbers as a result of Indigenous hunting, while others appear to have supported sustained harvests for long periods of time. Various hunting methods were deployed, ranging from the use of arrows and snares on the water to stealthy on-shore kills, and these encounters were sometimes infused with moral significance: the Aleuts, for instance, believe that sea otters are “involved in the moral evaluations of hunters,” that there are proper and improper ways to carry out a hunt, and that worthy hunters are sought out by sea otters in acts of self-sacrifice. For many peoples on the Northwest Coast, sea otters are non-human kin, and their behaviors — holding hands to avoid drifting away during rainstorms, for instance — certainly make strong impressions on people.155 The otter-inhabited waters through which Euro-American fur traders sailed with hopes of wealth were complex Indigenous borderlands, and had been the site of inter-group contestations 155 Ravalli, Sea Otters, xix-xxiii; Marguerite S. E. Forest, “Searching for Sea Otters,” We Proceeded On 33, no. 3 (August 2007): 18–27; Michelle M. Cortez and Randall W. Davis, “Reproductive Behavior of Female Sea Otters and Their Pups,” in Ethology and Behavioral Ecology of Sea Otters and Polar Bears 131; Todd Braje and Torben C. Rick, eds. Human Impacts on Seals, Sea Lions, and Sea Otters : Integrating Archaeology and Ecology in the Northeast Pacific, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); and Dana Lepofsky and Megan Caldwell, “Indigenous marine resource management on the Northwest Coast of North America,” Ecological Processes 2, Article 12 (2013). 97 for millennia. The commencement of the maritime fur trade on the Northwest Coast introduced new elements to these contestations, disrupting established networks of exchange, resource contention, and human-sea otter relations. New inter-group relationships emerged between fur traders and Indigenous peoples, with immense consequences for all parties involved.156 Rainfall, particularly heavy winter rains, spatially and seasonally mediated many of these emergent relationships. From the very beginning of the maritime fur trade, for instance, the actual trapping of sea otters was primarily carried out by Indigenous hunters. While pre-contact hunting of sea otters was occasional for most peoples of the Northwest Coast and generally conducted in preparation for ceremonies or displays of wealth, the emergence of an external market for furs in exchange for resources valued by various peoples — such as iron, tools, and firearms — introduced new commercial and cultural incentives to acquire sea otter pelts. As a result, Indigenous peoples throughout the Northwest Coast began to devote time, people, and resources to trapping large numbers of sea otters; this activity was carried out in the rainy winter months, when furbearers are considered prime because of harsher weather. The Tlingit of southeastern Alaska, the anthropologist Thomas Thornton has noted, “became decidedly less sedentary” in the winter months as young and middle-aged men spent time creating paths and even new seasonal villages in order to produce sea otter skins and other furs. Winter remained a time predominantly for staying indoors at permanent villages and participating in “ceremonies, storytelling, and household 156 One of the first scholarly volumes to represent this new view was Robin Fisher, Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1992, second edition). A newer view that argues violence played a greater role in complex early white-Indigenous interactions is Joshua Reid, The Sea is My Country: the Maritime World of the Makahs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). 98 chores,” but changes in seasonal paths of resource use shifted how people lived in, off of, and through the material and other-than-human assemblages of a multisited, multispecies world.157 Indigenous hunters along the Northwest Coast possessed what Karin Amimoto Ingersoll refers to as a “seascape epistemology,” which is a “knowledge of the ocean and wind” — and rain — “as an interconnected system that allows for successful navigation […] It’s an approach to life and knowing through passageways.”158 They harnessed this emplaced understanding of the contours and climate of their seascapes in order to trade with each other, and adapted their knowledge to trap sea otters en masse in the era of the fur trade. Indigenous hunters wore warm, waterproof traditional clothing made from skins, woven cedar bark, animal intestines, or wool from wooly dogs and mountain goats, which kept them comfortable and healthy when out for long periods in a saturated environment, and they understood how to safely navigate regional waters in rainy and foggy weather (Figure 1.3).159 Peoples who lived along the Northwest Coast often understood emplaced complexities that newcomers could not see, both because said newcomers were not looking and because they did not know where to look. Euro-American navigators often described the coast in monotonous terms, all 157 Thomas F. Thornton, Being and Place Among the Tlingit (Seattle: University of Washington Press and the Sealaska Heritage Institute, 2008): 131. Thornton revises an earlier view that sedentary traditions remained relatively unaltered, see Laura F. Klein, “Demystifying the Opposition: The Hudson's Bay Company and the Tlingit,” Arctic Anthropology 24, no. 1 (1987) 101-114. On the potlatch as a “way of life” rather than a ceremony among peoples of the Northwest Coast, see Rebecca J. Dobkins, The Art of Ceremony: Voices of Renewal from Indigenous Oregon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022): 66-86. 158 Karin Amimoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016): 6, and especially 1-40, 127-154. For a study of Indigenous weather knowledge on the Bering Sea, see Ann Fienup-Riordan and Alice Rearden, Ellavut/Our Yup'ik World and Weather: Continuity and Change on the Bering Sea Coast (Seattle: University of Washington Press and Calista Elders Council, 2012). 159 On traditional clothing, see for instance Hilary Stewart, Cedar: Tree of Life to the Northwest Coast Indians (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995); and Leslie H. Tepper, Janice George, and Willard Joseph, Salish Blankets: Robes of Protection and Transformation, Symbols of Wealth (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017). 99 Figure 1.3.“Hooded coat made from seal intestine, with embroidery at cuffs and hem.” Pitt Rivers Museum, item 1908.73.1. This kind of garment was worn by Aleutian/Unangan otter hunters, who were often hired by maritime fur traders to hunt for furs along the Northwest. 100 foggy and hard-breaking and rainy, and they devoted considerable resources towards quantifying certain aspects of regional geography and not others.160 But Native navigators could recognize visually obscured landmarks by watching how water swelled or currents moved; were able to predict worsening weather by observing the interfaces between sea, land, and sky; and knew where to find shelter if particularly dangerous rainstorms were afoot. Experienced with using traditional watercraft designed for specialized purposes, they had embodied knowledge of how to manage inclement weather as it manifested on the water and continually shifted in real time. Joshua Reid writes, for instance, that among the Makah of what is now coastal Washington state, “Individuals with the most developed weather-prediction skills” advised hunters when it was safe to go out on the water.161 Consider Aleutian sea otter hunters, who were variously hired or enslaved by Russian fur traders, and utilized a traditional craft called the baidarka. They had honed its use in the Aleutian Islands, which are some of the stormiest and rainiest in the entire world. A traditional baidarka was used alongside a bladder, crafted from the stomach of a sea lion or seal; this bladder was used to keep the baidarka upright, prevent capsizing, and provide the raw material for vessel repairs during particularly bad weather. Such technology and emplaced skill served Aleutian sea otter hunters well, and were a significant reason why Russian fur traders went to violent ends to acquire their 160 Bruno Latour briefly discusses variable ways of geographical knowing in the context of maritime exploration in Science in Action, 215-225. He notes that “For the new navigator entering the bay, the most important features of the land will all be seen for the second time,” the first observations having been through reading logbooks and perusing maps produced by earlier navigators. I would add, however, that early Euro-American navigators on the Northwest Coast did not find that these logbooks and maps — what Latour calls inscriptions — gave them any major advantage over Native peoples. Such complex and hard-won inscriptions were necessary simply for them to see and survive the contours of the raincoast; the climatic realities of the region were still uninscribed, and Native peoples had the advantage of what Latour calls ethnogeographic knowledge. Rainfall had enough power as a force of environmental and historical influence to contest and counter Euro-American ways of knowing. 161 Reid, The Sea is My Country, 142-143; Thornton, Being and Place Among the Tlingit, 54, 78. 101 labor. As the furs of the Aleutian Islands were depleted by overhunting, Russian traders moved eastward and brought Aleutian hunters with them to Kodiak Island, southeastern Alaska, and eventually down the Northwest Coast to California, where the baidarka was adapted to a different maritime space. In contrast to American and European vessels, Russian traders did not trade with local Native groups so much as exploit Aleutian hunters to capture furs without middlemen.162 Indigenous hunters along the Northwest Coast applied emplaced knowledge and epistemology to their fur trapping ventures, deploying their understandings of sea otter behavior and the rainy environment in order to procure pelts. For instance, sea otters often haul-out on land or in sea caves during rainstorms, both to rest and to avoid being washed far out to sea.163 This rainfall-linked behavior provided hunters with excellent opportunities to ambush sea otters when they were exposed, vulnerable, and less likely to perceive threats: rain, especially when heavy, would wash away lingering scents and obscure noises that might alert a sea otter to human presence. Furthermore, sea otters in the early maritime fur trade era were somewhat accustomed to the presence of Indigenous people, who had previously only hunted them in very small numbers. John R. Jewitt, an American fur trader who spent 1803-1805 as a captive of Maquinna, a leader of the Nuu-chah-nulth, noted that the sea otters he encountered offshore of Vancouver Island were “in general very tame, and… permit a canoe or boat to approach very near before they dive.”164 162 See Arthur Woodward, “Sea Otter Hunting on the Pacific Coast,” The Quarterly: Historical Society of Southern California 20, no. 3 (Sept. 1938): 119-134, esp. 121; James R. Gibson, Imperial Russia In Frontier America: The Changing Geography of Supply of Russian America, 1784-1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976): 32-33; and Gibson, Otter Skins, 14-15. 163 Ravalli, Sea Otters, xix; also Cortez and Davis, “Reproductive Behavior of Female Sea Otters and Their Pups,” 131-132. Other specialists in sea otter behavior have noted that some contemporary sea otter populations in the Aleutians have restricted habitat usage and have cautioned that storm avoidance may not be universal in all populations. See Nathan L. Stewart et al., “Testing the nutritional-limitation, predator-avoidance, and storm-avoidance hypotheses for restricted sea otter habitat use in the Aleutian Islands, Alaska,” Oecologia 177, (2015): 645–655. 164 Jewitt is quoted in Marguerite S. E. Forest, “Searching for Sea Otters,” 22. 102 Indigenous hunters were able to take advantage of this familiarity, although sea otter behavior changed over time due to overhunting and the use of loud muskets.165 The same inclement weather that was an impediment to Euro-Americans hunters became an advantage for Indigenous hunters. Some kinds of hunting were, of course, easier or only practicable in clear weather, but an understanding of how to effectively hunt in the context of a rainy climate and sudden weather shifts offered Indigenous hunters an edge in the coastal sea otter fur trade that Euro-Americans did not have. In part because of their emplaced knowledge of the rainy seascapes of the Northwest Coast, Indigenous hunters produced the vast majority of the sea otter skins acquired by maritime fur traders. In the first decades of the trade, vessels typically arrived in the Northwest in early spring or summer to find premium winter pelts already harvested and prepared for trade by Indigenous peoples, and spent much of their time navigating along the coastline searching for new sources not already exhausted by competitors. It was common for the first encounters between whites and Indigenous groups to occur when Indigenous canoes came across the water, often through dense fog or inclement weather, and immediately greeted the ships with proffered furs — a sign of their familiarity with European ships and proactive role in shaping commerce. In many cases, Indigenous navigators even guided Euro-American captains to anchor, helping them handle inclement weather and coastal hazards.166 165 Forest, “Searching for Sea Otters,” 21-23; Shana Loshbaugh, “Sea Otters and the Maritime Fur Trade,” in Ethology and Behavioral Ecology, 163, 179, 185. One European account of Northwest Coast sea otter hunting describes a manner of hunting involving kayaks, encirclement, and the exhaustion of otters based on their need to resurface to breathe, see Alphonse Louis Pinart, ed. Richard L. Bland, “The Hunting of Marine Animals and Fishing Among the Natives of the Northwest Coast of America,” in Journal of Northwest Anthropology 2 no. 2, 2018: 236-237. 166 See, for instance, Robert Haswell’s report of a September 1788 encounter with the one of the Nuu-chah-nulth peoples offshore of Vancouver Island, in Howay, ed. Voyages 47; or John Boit’s report of an encounter with the Makah offshore of Cape Flattery in September of 1791, in Howay 380. Additionally, see Reid, The Sea Is My Country. 103 Explorers and fur traders alike were usually eager to depart the Northwest Coast prior to the onset of the rainy season; very few maritime fur traders remained in the region over the winter, with most either sailing to China to sell their furs or wintering elsewhere before returning in the next season. For those who chose to wait out the Northwest Coast’s rainy winters in less stormy climes, Hawai’i’ became the primary harbor. This preference for wintering in Hawai’i stands in contrast to the California sea otter trade, which produced poorer quality furs, operated in a much drier climate, and involved almost year-round pelt hunting. Beginning in the 1800s, some traders along the Northwest Coast actually began to winter in Southern California rather than visit Hawai’i. In part because of Hawai’i’s initial status as a convenient haven for maritime fur traders, the islands became a popular waypoint for many other trans-Pacific voyages and enterprises. This waypoint status caused enormous cultural and ecological changes in the decades immediately after James Cook’s initial landing in 1778, notably the introduction of Old World domesticates such as cattle and pigs. Inhabited by large numbers of feral meat animals, the islands offered a stopover market for provisions for passing ships, including those seeking the Northwest Coast.167 Through their material influence on sea otter furs, Indigenous hunting patterns, and the seasonal travels of Euro-American vessels, the cold and rainy winters of the Northwest directly 167 For instance, see John Ryan Fischer, Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i, (University of North Carolina Press, 2015); and J.R. McNeill, “Of Rats and Men: A Synoptic Environmental History of the Island Pacific,” Journal of World History, 5, no. 2 (Fall, 1994): 299-349. Pigs were another important imperial introduction; see Sam White, “From Globalized Pig Breeds to Capitalist Pigs: A Study in Animal Cultures and Evolutionary History,” Environmental History 16 no. 1, January 2011: 94-120; Jordan Sand, “People, animals, and island encounters: A pig’s history of the Pacific,” Journal of Global History 17, no. 3: 355-373; and Umberto Albarella et al., eds. Pigs and Humans: 10,000 Years of Interaction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). On introduced diseases in Hawai’i, see Seth Archer, Sharks upon the Land: Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawai'i, 1778–1855 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). On the broader environmental history of Hawai’i, see John L. Culliney, Islands in a Far Sea: The Fate of Nature in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005). 104 shaped the global rhythms of the maritime fur trade for both foreign traders and Indigenous peoples, discouraging fur traders from having a year-round presence and framing shifts in traditional Indigenous winter activities. Only in the 1810s did an increasing number of fur traders stay along the Northwest Coast through the winter — and they did so because Indigenous hunters and leaders leveraged their power to raise prices, further parlaying emplaced knowledge into commercial advantage. To be competitive buyers in the waning decades of the sea otter trade, which peaked c.1810 and slowly declined until ending the 1840s, European and American traders had to get an early start on the next spring/summer trading season.168 This meant suffering more of the rainy season, not because traders wanted to, but because Indigenous power required it. Despite of — or perhaps because of — Indigenous power, violence was an integral part of the fur trading enterprise. Both traders and Indigenous people engaged in violence for a variety of reasons, and Indigenous violence was usually strategic or related to the concerns of elites with regard to inter-group competition and rivalry. Among Euro-Americans, violence against Native peoples was common in part because individual sailors and most captains conceived of the trade as transitory and impermanent, and in part because some Euro-Americans felt a sense of superiority. Although most of the trade was controlled by powerful chiefs and routed through nodes of concentrated commerce that had to be revisited by multi-season traders, crews often believed that if they slighted a group of Natives or killed someone, they could move on without consequence or recompense and leave next-comers to bear any revenge enacted for their cruelties.169 168 Fisher, Contact and Conflict 5, 10. 169 Reid, The Sea is My Country, 53-80; Ravalli makes this point in Sea Otters, 57-60. On fear in a global context of history, see Michael Laffan and Max Weiss, eds. Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). Reid’s conception of the maritime borderlands of the Northwest Coast emphasizes violence as part of competition between rival chiefs, and as an integral aspect of the maritime fur trade era. His work represents a critique of views first advanced in the 1970s by historians such as Robin Fisher, who argued that Indigenous economic power forced Euro-Americans to minimize violent conduct; 105 Yet white traders were also very fearful, often entering encounters with preconceived ideas about “savagery” and the inherent inferiority of the Northwest Coast’s first peoples.170 Joshua Reid has noted that this mindset was spatially embedded: when whites bestowed their own names onto topographical features, for instance, they often utilized names which reflected the past history of white-Indigenous violence. Thus, violence both real and not-yet-real was inscribed onto the physical and mental maps of mariners, creating a “geography of fear.”171 Examining fur trader narratives with an eye towards the weather reveals that the Northwest Coast’s rainy, foggy, overcast winters played an additional role in shaping this geography of fear, providing an atmospheric context that both shaped and reinforced preconceptions about Indigenous savagery. Consider the British fur trader James Colnett, who spent the period from September 5th- November 19th, 1787 on and around what he tellingly christened Calamity Island — now Banks Island — along the upper coast of British Columbia. While in the area, Colnett’s trading venture became the first white men to contact the Tsimshian of the middle Inside Passage. Beginning in late September, the weather on Calamity Island became consistently “Tempestuous and weat.”172 The crew spent part of October building a shelter and storehouse, and on the 24th, as they neared completion of the Calamity Island house, a Tsimshian canoe landed on the shore in the early Fisher, in turn, critiqued earlier historians who portrayed the maritime fur trade era as a bloodbath conducted by powerful Euro-Americans against helpless, inferior Natives. See Fisher, Contact and Conflict, esp. xv; 12-13. Revenge was a very real part of life in the maritime fur trade, both for Euro-Americans and Indigenous peoples, but it should be emphasized that most violence was not practiced out of petty vengeance and in fact had very specific purposes, or else represented particular mindsets and perspectives. 170 For a general overview of how traders and settlers in the Pacific Northwest conceptualized the region’s Indigenous groups through the lens of race, see Fisher, Contact and Conflict, 73-94. Of note is the tendency of traders and settlers to view coastal peoples as inferior, mainly because they relied more on fishing for foodstuffs; fishing was seen as a ‘lazy,’ uncivilized way of living. 171 Reid, The Sea is My Country, 53-80. 172 James Colnett in Robert Galois, ed. A Voyage to the North West Side of America: The Journals of James Colnett, 1786-89 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003): 140, 277. 106 morning hours. This followed several tense interactions that involved gunfire over the previous few days. One of the men guarding the house became fearful and fired his musket; Andrew Bracey Taylor, the second mate, wrote that: “[the guard’s] piece hung fire and alarmed the Indians, who made hastily to their Canoe, we were all on the Spot by this, I fired a Musquet towards them in a very good direction most of the others hung fire from the Constant Wet but as they retreated I discharged a Gun with Grape, as well directed as the darkness of the night would admit, and I had great reason to believe they were injured, we heard a groan from them, which we judged to be a man dying They had been accustomed to Musqetry some time, and as they frequently missed fire, either from bad flints but more frequently from damp powder, they rather disregarded them”173 [emphasis mine] Gunpowder has often — and rightfully — been considered a significant tool of Euro-American imperial power. Francis Bacon, in the 1620s, expressed the view that “No empire, sect or star… exercised a greater power and influence on human affairs.” But Taylor’s recollection of the incident on Banks Island shows that the Northwest Coast’s rainy weather and saturated environment complicated and mediated the newly emergent relationships between Euro-Americans and Indigenous peoples like the Tsimshian in ways that limited gunpowder’s utility. It was a tool that was not equally effective or advantageous in all contexts.174 The maritime fur trade was certainly a violent enterprise, and muskets and cannons were successful at instilling situational fear and ending many Indigenous lives. But maritime fur traders 173 Galois, ed. A Voyage, 60. Robin Fisher has noted the unreliability of muskets in the context of the Northwest Coast, but made no explicit connection to the damp climate, see Fisher, Contact and Conflict, 16. 174 Bacon is quoted in Michael Rawson, The Nature of Tomorrow: A History of the Environmental Future (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021): 15-16. Many historians have considered gunpowder a key technology in aiding European imperialism; see for instance Reidy et al., Exploration and Science 1; and David Cressy, Saltpeter: The Mother of Gunpowder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). For a structural and political critique of gunpowder’s imperial power that politically contextualizes its usefulness, see Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 107 were few in number and lacked emplaced knowledge of the Northwest Coast, and were thus unable to fully realize gunpowder’s imperial potential.175 Whether in a crate onboard a ship or in a musket chamber, Euro-Americans well understood that gunpowder was fickle with regard to moisture and rainy weather, and this unnerved them. Gunpowder’s unfavorable matchup against the Northwest Coast’s prolonged season of rainfall contributed to Euro-American geographies of fear by sometimes dispossessing them of a tool whose power they had become accustomed to, and which they expected to serve as an advantage wielded by civilized people against savages.176 Quite to the contrary, the arms that Euro-American traders exchanged in return for sea otter pelts were far more 175 I do not mean to suggest that, if the climate of the Northwest Coast were dry instead of wet, gunpowder would have turned the tides in favor of imperial agents —- rather, I aim to point out that gunpowder interfaced with ignorance, knowledge, and rainfall in meaningful and historically powerful ways, and to suggest that gunpowder should be considered in relationship to the environment in other histories of imperialism. For instance, in regions of the world with stark dry and monsoonal climates, such as parts of India, was gunpowder of limited effectiveness in some situations? Was there any seasonality to imperial usage of such tools? Rather than focusing on the tools of empire as inherently superior, what roles did local circumstances or cooperation play in various imperial spheres? 176 Even in the 1880s, gunpowder was still considered “a nervous and sensitive spirit,” susceptible to the whims of weather, moisture, daily changes in humidity, “morning mists… [and] the dews of evening,” both in the context of field usage and manufacturing. Furthermore, the soot left in a gun barrel after a successful shot was corrosive when mixed with water. One major concern of ongoing research into gunpowder formulas concerned how to make them more resilient to damp conditions; gun designs were also updated to reflect new ways of keeping moisture out of the barrel. Black powder is uniquely vulnerable to water because it is both a low explosive and shock-insensitive. Black powder can also be ruined in storage because saltpeter, a key ingredient, is water-soluble and susceptible to washing out of the mixture. This was a particular issue in the fur trade era, though later industrial manufacturing processes used water in precise amounts to form saltpeter crystals inside of charcoal rather than outside; interior crystals made black powder more resilient to damp conditions, but manufacturing was unwieldy. See Charles E. Munroe, “Notes on the Literature of Explosives VII,” Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute 11, no. 1, (January 1885); and “Notes on the Literature of Explosives VIII,” Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute 11, no. 2, (February 1885). However, advancements in gunpowder and gun design did make a difference over the course of the 19th century: muskets traded to Natives in the early 1800s were considered outdated by the 1880s and frequently misfired in wet weather, while Fraser River miners had newer, more reliable flintlocks. Cole Harris, The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Geographic Change (Vancouver UBC Press, 1997): 111. It is worth investigating whether the HBC intentionally traded outdated firearms to Native peoples, knowing that they were less effective than newer models in damp conditions. 108 lethal in the hands of Native leaders, some of whom stockpiled massive numbers of firearms, militarized, subdued neighboring peoples, and leveraged their power over fur traders.177 Rainfall also contributed to geographies of fear by turning ships into sites of precarious mentality: of near-constant worry and watchfulness over the weather, which had to be carefully observed and obeyed. Psychological and physiological experiences and maladies were often entangled with rainfall’s presence. When John Meares encountered wind, rain, and dense fog in July of 1788, he was forced by this inclement, “gloomy” weather to anchor offshore of Destruction Island, renamed by the English for two violent incidents that had previously occurred there between whites and the Quileute people. Meares wrote that his men felt “distress… apprehension… [which] endanger[ed] the loss of the ship,” suggesting near-mutiny.178 For men who had cultural preconceptions that the Quileute were violent savages thirsty for blood, being beholden to the weather and stuck anchored offshore of an ill-omened island in dense fog and dripping mists was undoubtedly a foreboding experience. Far from their ports of origin and largely stranded on wet, cold, uncomfortable ships, sailors were also deeply homesick. Because the Northwest Coast was still largely illegible to mariners in the late 1780s, melancholy and anxiety rooted in alienation and fear of the unknown were probably particularly common and intense. The American fur trader Robert Gray’s anchorage at Tillamook Bay in 1788 is another example of how the gloom, drear, and bodily-felt unpleasantries that emerged from the time fur traders spent on the Northwest Coast contributed to geographies of fear and to occasional white- Indigenous violence. After the previous day had seen violence between Gray’s crew and the local Tillamook, Indigenous canoesmen used a veil of dense morning fog to approach his ship with 177 Daniel J. Silverman, Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), esp. 155-189. 178 Meares, Voyages, 159-161; Reid contextualized this account in The Sea is My Country, 69, but I expand upon the role of rainfall and weather. 109 notched arrows, feeling shielded and safe in the fog and capable of using the mists to their advantage.179 Later, on Gray’s second voyage in 1791, an on-edge watchman shot his musket through early-October fog at what he thought were canoes full of hostile Natives; they turned out to be rocks exposed by low tide.180 These kinds of encounters show that fear and hostility are embodied emotions, and that the suffusive, permeating materiality of rainfall contributed to them. A sailor who saw and experienced the Northwest Coast as waterlogged, desolate, and forsaken was more likely to be anxious, unhappy, and fearful, which could inform his reactions to Indigenous presence in ways that created cross-cultural misunderstandings, insulted guests and hosts, or led to violence. The overarching seasonality of the maritime fur trade thus reflected a physical, emotional, and aesthetic aversion to the Northwest Coast’s rainy climate. Put bluntly, for most traders the Northwest Coast was an ephemeral means to an end: they would voyage to the coast, acquire furs, and move on after two or three seasons of trade. The miserable coastal rains were approached as an emplaced difficulty, to be sidestepped if at all possible, endured to what extent necessary, and then fled from. Individual fur traders who attempted to establish a long-term presence or pre-arrange seasonal fur quotas with specific Indigenous groups were generally seen as foolish by both their fellow sailors and Indigenous sellers alike.181 Fur traders who were forced to stay at least part of the winter along the Northwest Coast due to inclement weather found that it was small material comforts, like having dry socks, that were cause for celebration. On October 25th, 1787, for instance, Andrew Bracey Taylor wrote: 179 Haswell in Howay, Voyages, 39-41. On the culture of the Tillamook people, see William R. Seaburg and Elizabeth D. Jacobs, eds. The Nehalem Tillamook: An Ethnography (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2003). 180 Haswell in Howay, Voyages, 304-05. 181 David Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013): 5. 110 “our House was completed, and our situation became far more comfortable. We could hang our Hammocks up in the House and had the comfort of a good fire to Dry our Bedding, and Cloaths, a Dry Bed was quite a treat, for till now we were always obliged to Sleep in our Cloaths, during our continuance in the Tent I always went to Bed wet footed, and my custom at night, to use the Seamens term, was always to reef my stockings, I learned this same of my People when I went to Bed, I pulled my Stockings about half off so that my feet became comfortable in the Dry part of the Stocking and the feet got dry while I slept from the warmth of the Bed Cloaths. I know not whether the Ladies might chuse to adopt my plan of drying Stockings in wet weather, when no fire could be got, but in cases of necessity, this method answers very well for a sailor.”182 Taylor and others still complained about the bunkhouse’s leaky roof, but a drip-drip-drip was better than a drenching. Staying dry — or getting dry after becoming wet — took a lot of time and effort. Euro-Americans found it very difficult to start fires outside even when it was not rainy and windy, because the entire coastal environment was utterly saturated, including potential firewood and kindling. At least some Northwest Coast Indigenous peoples, however, used emplaced ethnobotanical knowledge regarding what plant materials were best used as firestarter. The Chehalis people of southwestern Washington, for instance, were reported by mid-1800s Indian agent James Swan to be “the most expert people to build fires in wet weather I ever met with,” using the interior matter of the cow-parsnip stalk to ignite tall blazes in a matter of minutes and maintain them despite spring rains, wet sands, and waterlogged wood.183 Other fur trader accounts of wintering on the Northwest Coast report similar frustrations with the rainy climate — Robert Gray, approaching Clayoquot Sound in September of 1788, encountered dense fog; second officer Robert Haswell wrote that “the first thing that discovered itself to us thro ’the fog was a wide spredding rock […] providentialey a light air sprung up […] there was scarce the hollow of one swell betwixt us and a watery grave.”184Such incidents were 182 Galois, A Voyage, 161. 183 James Gilchrist Swan, The Northwest Coast; or, Three Years Residence in Washington Territory (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1857): 247-248. 184 Haswell in Howay, Voyages, 43-44 111 commonplace across regional waters throughout the 1700s and much of the 1800s, and near-misses like Gray’s were generally described as merciful acts of divine providence.185 Haswell also noted that conditions in September of 1788 were “unfavourable to our work onboard or onshore,” and the expedition was forced to winter at Nootka Sound because of the late season, which precluded safely making a detour to the Hawaiian Islands. All throughout October, Haswell reported that the weather was “rainey and Disagreeable,” and that William Douglas, another trader in the area who was short of provisions, went up the Sound to “plunder [a native village] of all the fish and oil they could find […] and leav the poor harmless wretches unprovided for a long and rigerous winter.”186 Whether the natives truly suffered or whether Haswell’s observation was a condescending one, this kind of thievery was common in the winter amongst early mariners on the Northwest Coast, and evidences a disconnect between Indigenous and colonial relationships with the region’s rainy winters. Fur traders had only what provisions they had carried aboard: after those ran out or rotted from constant dampness, they were mostly dependent on what was available through trade or plunder. They sometimes hunted, but they had little emplaced knowledge, rainy weather often handicapped them, and they would not have survived without stealing from or trading with coastal Indigenous peoples who spent much of the summer stockpiling food for the winter. There is some evidence that the winter of 1788-1789 was unusually cold, as Haswell records snow — a rarity at Nootka Sound — but he also notes that “the rigour of the weather [did not] detur [the Mowachaht]… from their daily visates,” which involved the exchange of local 185 Juan Perez, for instance, ended most of his journal entries with “Nothing more new. Thanks be to God,” see Beals, ed. Juan Perez on the Northwest Coast. For another dangerous approach, see Lamb, ed. Voyages: Volume II, 503. 186 Howay, Voyages 53, 118. 112 foodstuffs and, by later winter, significant numbers of sea otter skins.187 The expedition almost grasped a consolation prize — by being forced to winter at Clayoquot, Gray had access to prime- quality furs with little competition — but Gray proved to be a poor salesman in China, and his half of the voyage was apparently a financial loss. John Kendrick, who ran the other half of the voyage, later sold his furs for a profit and was paid enough by his financiers to erase his personal debts. Disputes arose between Gray and Kendrick as to whether Gray underreported his sales and made off with the difference.188 When Robert Gray returned on a second voyage to the Northwest Coast in June of 1791, he found that few furs were available on Vancouver Island, having been already gathered by Indigenous hunters in winter and traded away to the first ships to arrive in the spring.189 Gray decided to winter again at Nootka to get a head start on the 1792 trading season; ship clerk John Hoskins noted that their plan was to spend the winter building a smaller, more navigable vessel for the fjordland because “nothing else could be done” in the rainy season.190 The remainder of the summer was spent traveling up the Inside Passage to find what furs remained available elsewhere. On August 3rd, Robert Haswell wrote that the ship became trapped in the Clarence Strait by ill winds and thick fog; ensconced by foreboding mists, he lamented that they were so “disagreeably situated,” for he feared that if they lost their ship but survived they would be “drawn out in a miserable existance in a savage country.”191 The expedition spent the winter of 1791-92 on Meares Island, not far from Clayoquot Sound. Tall forests and persistent cloud-cover blocked the sun for most of the dim daytime, and morale was consistently very low. The woods were gloomy, dark and 187 Howay, Voyages, 56 188 Scott Ridley, Morning of Fire: John Kendrick's Daring American Odyssey in the Pacific (New York: William Morrow, 2010): 199-211, and 263-266 189 Hoskins in Howay, Voyages, 187 190 Howay, ed. Voyages, 188-89 191 Howay, Voyages, 217 113 deep.192 Beginning in late September, the crew busied themselves with constructing a house about thirty by eighteen feet, made of logs and packed with mortar to keep out the rain. The weather turned rainy at the end of the month, preventing work from being done outside, and the crew built a shed to house ship timbers so as to protect them from the rain. In mid-November a member of the crew was badly wounded and had his nose split open when a tree fell on him while he was chopping timbers. No other information is given, but it is possible that his injury was the result of slipping on muddy, saturated ground in an attempt to flee the falling tree.193 Beginning in the late 1700s, mariners sometimes commented upon the Northwest Coast’s mild temperatures relative to latitude, but their remarks are not straightforward praise. Understandings of climate during the 1700s still centered around latitude, with the belief being that climates were similar along the same parallel; initial European encounters with the cold-winter continental climate of eastern North America showed otherwise, but beliefs about latitude persisted. Early approaches to the Northwest Coast, having originated in the Atlantic World and within corresponding Enlightenment frameworks of knowledge, assumed that the western side of North America would be frigid much like the eastern side.194 Boston-born Robert Haswell, first mate on Robert Gray’s second voyage to the region in 1791, said for instance of Nootka Sound that “The climate of this part of the country […] is certainly much milder though not so healthy as that on our side of the continent [emphasis mine],” and favorably noted the presence of berries on bushes through the winter. However, he also proceeded to complain that the voyage encountered “almost 192 Howay, Voyages, 247, 307-308. Fur trader George Dixon noted in May of 1787, near King George’s Sound, that the coast was “dreary… the surrounding prospect teemed with all the horrors of winter.” He also observed the dangers of vast differences between high and low tide levels. See George Dixon, A voyage round the world; but more particularly to the north-west coast of America: performed in 1785, 1786, 1787, and 1788, in the King George and Queen Charlotte, Captains Portlock and Dixon (London: Geo. Goulding, 1789): 162. 193 Howay, Voyages, 247-252 194 For an explanation of these frameworks of knowledge, see Sam White, A Cold Welcome, 9-27. 114 constant rain” for two consecutive months, and noted that “according to [Mowachaht] accounts it was a very moderate winter.”195 Additionally, it was common Western belief that thick forest cover exacerbated rainfall, and accounts commonly remarked with mixed feelings upon the dense rainforests that blanket much of the coastal Northwest — they provided excellent timbers for repairing weather-damaged ships, but intimated little in the way of agriculture or settlement.196 The Northwest Coast shoreline finally became legible on a broad scale with the surveys of British naval officer George Vancouver, who mapped the Northwest Coast’s indented fjordland in strenuous detail during the summers of 1792-1795. He wintered at Hawai’i in-between survey seasons. Vancouver, who had been a midshipman on James Cook’s second and third voyages around the world, came to the Northwest Coast better prepared than anyone who had preceded him. He carried the latest navigational technology; brought cutters and small oar-boats for detailed fjordland surveys; and, according to Bern Anderson, “had awnings and canopies made for all the boats [as well as] a tent with a painted floor cloth large enough to shelter the entire boat’s crew. Provisions and spare clothing were packed in painted canvas bags.”197 All of these preparations 195 Howay, Voyages, 256, 280-81. 196 The belief that thick forest cover created rainfall was especially prominent in tropical spheres of empire, see Edward Long, The History of Jamaica or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island: with Reflections on its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government: II (London: T. Lowndes, 1774): 170-171. On the Caribbean as a testing ground for Enlightenment ideas of environment, disease, and climate, see J.R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Philip J. Morgan, John R. McNeill, Matthew Mulcahy, and Stuart B. Schwartz, Sea and Land: An Environmental History of the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). Americans, newly independent, inherited these universal models of medical climatology, which persisted prior to the development of particularly American intellectual traditions. The forest rain-making hypothesis now has relatively strong scientific backing, see Douglas Sheil et al., “How Forests Attract Rain: An Examination of a New Hypothesis,” BioScience 59, no. 4 (April 2009): 341–347; and Brett M. Bennett et al., “The enduring link between forest cover and rainfall: a historical perspective on science and policy discussions,” Forest Ecosystems 5, Article 5 (2018). 197 Bern Anderson, Surveyor of the Sea: The Life and Voyages of Captain George Vancouver (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969): 81, 156. 115 were informed by his prior experience and by previous expedition accounts, and had a positive impact on the everyday life of the crew. But these solutions were also imported from abroad for general application, in contrast to the emplaced nature of Northwest Indigenous clothing, canoe design, and village architecture. They reflected attempts at imposing imperial power through the usage of standardized instruments, materials, and methods; Natives were far more open to incorporating these imported technologies into their own cultures when it was suitable than Euro- Americans were to dressing in barkcloth. Vancouver’s imported instruments, however, were challenged by the weather of the Northwest Coast. Together with overcast skies, rainfall limited the usefulness of many of the instruments that imperial agents used to craft maps; maritime surveyors required sunny and calm weather in order to make meaningful cartographic advancements and improve imperial legibility of the coast. Many navigators concerned with cartography thus restricted their activities on the Northwest Coast to a narrow window in the summer where optimal conditions were more common — but they frequently encountered poor weather even in spring and summer. For instance, Vancouver’s voyage faced “extremely gloomy […] thick rainy weather” when approaching the coast of northern California for the first time in mid-April of 1792, and almost foundered on their first approach. Just north of Cape Mendocino, they were met with a violent rainstorm that carried away half of the Discovery’s head-railing and rendered the sails only partially functional; Vancouver wrote that “the consequences attendant on this accident might have been very alarming” if the wind had been blowing from out at sea, as was normal, instead of eastwards from the land.198 198 W. Kaye Lamb, ed. George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World, 1791-1795: Volume II (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1984): 484-495. Vancouver himself acknowledged that he depended on weather to make observations, noting that he sighted some landmarks James Cook did not because of fairer weather along certain portions of the coast; at other times, fog prevented him from seeing any of the shoreline or interior landscapes. 116 Later that same year, in August, the flagship Discovery ran aground near modern-day Kent Island on a foggy afternoon in what was a near-catastrophe for the expedition. Such incidents were relatively common along the Inside Passage, where major contrasts between high and low tide lines are especially dangerous.199 In order to conduct accurate surveys of the heavily indented fjordland, Vancouver approved forty-six excursions by small boat over the summer of 1792. On one of these outings, lieutenant Peter Puget remarked that “after a most disagreeable and Laborious row, the Boats and their Furniture were all wet nor was there a Spot to shelter us from the Inclemency of the Weather, & […] it was equally uncomfortable either remaining in the water or on the Ground.”200 This was despite Vancouver’s extensive preparations, and Puget commented that the men on this particular outing were grateful merely to be able to start a fire on the beach to dry themselves out and keep warm. Poor weather along the Inside Passage and southern Alaska prolonged the expedition’s attempts to determine longitude, and Vancouver had little positive to say about the region’s steep- sided inlets and year-round rains.201 If anything, men sent out on the smaller oar-driven craft to scout and survey parts of the Northwest fjordland were probably the most vulnerable to inclement weather — their open vessels rarely offered any shelter or protection. If the weather turned rainy while they were out, they were utterly exposed and left stuck on often less-than-ideal shores until conditions improved, which could take days. 199 Lamb, ed. Voyages Vol. II, 640-642; Anderson, Surveyor of the Sea, 92. Tidal variations in parts of Cook Inlet, for instance, can reach up to thirty feet, some of the most extreme in the world. On the development of imperial tidal science, largely motivated by the need to avoid shipwrecks, see Michael S. Reidy, Tides of History: Ocean Science and Her Majesty’s Navy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 200 Puget quoted in Williams, Voyages of Delusion, 390 201 Alun C. Davies, “Testing a New Technology: Captain George Vancouver’s Survey and Navigation in Alaskan Waters,” Enlightenment and Exploration in the North Pacific, 103-115; Tippett and Cole, “Pleasing Diversity and Sublime Desolation.” 117 Vancouver’s only positive comments about the Northwest Coast came when he ventured into Puget Sound, remarking favorably upon the region’s climate. The expedition’s survey of the Salish Sea was crucial in widening the geography of the maritime fur trade, and Vancouver was enraptured with what expedition botanist Archibald Menzies called “the enchanting variety of the surrounding scenery.”202 Vancouver and Menzies alike wrote that the Puget Sound area had immense prospects for cultivation, the first implicit intimation by any Euro-American that the Northwest Coast might be suitable to permanent settlement. However, although they praised the lush “park-like scenery” of the Puget Sound shores and lowlands, their vision was of the potential embodied in the landscape’s supposedly evident fertility. In reality, these “rural” landscapes were the result of Indigenous land management practices, rather than inherent ecological proclivities or the possibilities of a virgin wilderness.203 The expedition also visited only in summer, when the coastal lowlands of Puget Sound are one of the driest yet lushest parts of North America. Vancouver himself noted in his journals that, on sunny days, the landscapes of the Northwest Coast “was probably not a little heightened in beauty by the weather that prevailed.”204 Future visitors would be left to encounter the winter rains of the intermontane lowlands, mild from an intra-regional perspective but no less incessant in global comparison. 202 Menzies quoted in Anderson, Surveyor of the Sea, 86 203 Cole and Tippett, “Pleasing Diversity and Sublime Desolation.” On Indigenous burning and landscape management practices, see Robert Boyd et al., Indians and Fire in the Pacific Northwest (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, second edition, 2021); William Robbins, Landscapes of Promise, 23-49 204 Lamb, ed. Voyages Vol II, 498. 118 Conclusion: Beyond the Sea By the conclusion of his surveys in 1795, Vancouver had once-and-for-all debunked the myth of the Northwest Passage and produced maps of the Northwest Coast that were still used well into the latter half of the 1800s. He wrote with pride that his multi-year survey had been conducted “with a degree of minuteness far exceeding the letter of my commission or instructions.”205 The maritime fur trade continued for many more years, but despite changes in the trade sailors continued to encounter miserable rains and largely avoid wintering along the Northwest Coast. Rainfall continued to shape and mediate the global movement of people and goods in the early colonial Northwest, playing an integral part in shaping the region’s role in trans-Pacific and international commerce. For the Americans, rain mediated the Northwest Coast’s role as a node in the China trade that so was crucial to the United State’s recovery from the post-independence economic depression. In the years to come, fur traders and other merchants with interests in the region would have Vancouver to thank for the strong cartographic record that guided them, greatly easing the navigational difficulties of later shipping traffic. They also had access to detailed written observations of winds, currents, and weather, both from Vancouver and from the handful of fur trade accounts which had been published since 1785. These observations, however monotonous they had been for sailors to collect, helped future mariners know what to expect at sea and, in combination with Vancouver’s maps, how to avoid or minimize some common emplaced dangers. 205 Williams, Voyages of Delusion 402-405. Vancouver was indeed exceedingly thorough on most accounts. One example is his attitude towards longitude: he regularly used old and new methods alike and compared them for accuracy, on some occasions taking measurements using lunar tables, chronometers, and dead reckoning. See for instance Lamb, ed. Voyages Vol II, 484. 119 Significant regional commerce became more palatable and, by the early 1800s, hundreds of vessels participated in the trade on an annual basis. Hundreds more vessels also sank in rain, fog, and on rocks and shoals, adding flesh and timber carcasses alike to the infamous Graveyard of the Pacific. Paper navigational charts of the Columbia Bar were rendered useless within a few years due to changes in sandbar composition. Inclement weather, primarily rainstorms, continued to contribute to a geography of precarity and failure in the era of pre-industrial commerce that followed Vancouver’s survey, and continued to challenge attempts to render the region legible. Britons and Americans became imperial rivals in the region, each contesting swathes of the Northwest Coast with one other — and with myriad Indigenous peoples, who both cooperated and competed amongst themselves for valuable trade goods and political alliances. By 1821, the maritime trade in sea otters was in steep decline; by the late 1800s, sea otters were near extinction as a result of overhunting, with major ecological consequences that echo into the present.206 At the mouth of the Columbia River in the present day, two jetties jut long out into the Pacific Ocean to buffer the nonetheless brutal impact of outgoing and incoming waves. The United States Coast Guard maintains a large station on the Washington side of the river, hosting the only rough weather rescue operation school in the United States: this is the place where prospective Coast Guard pilots learn what bad weather means. The Bar remains perhaps the most dangerous commercial waterway in the entire world, and the only one in the United States with 24/7 bar pilotage requirements. Winter rainstorms blowing in from the west often create bar-bound swells 206 On the continued challenges of navigating along the Northwest Coast, see for instance William F. King, “George Davidson and Marine Survey in the Pacific Northwest,” The Western Historical Quarterly 10, no. 3 (July 1979): 285-301. King notes that Davidson faced issues using survey instruments because of inclement weather and experienced damp discomfort while encamped out on beaches. 120 20-30 feet high, which meet with outgoing river tides to create enormously dangerous surf conditions: pilots call them “standing waves” because, upon impact with the bottom of small craft, they send the vessel standing vertical against the crashing breakers. It is normal for modern rescue craft to roll over during storms, and they have been designed accordingly. Fatalities are rare, but still occasional. The Graveyard of the Pacific seems a distant memory to most, and is now a part of local lore and museum culture, attracting tourists and maritime history buffs. Over two thousand ships have wrecked at the Columbia Bar alone throughout the last three centuries, and a few thousand people have drowned in the area — it is not a site of colonial success, but of historical precarity, disorientation, and failure. Yet, in the two-hundred and thirty years since Robert Gray crossed the Columbia Bar in 1792, the settler-colonial and capitalist projects have drastically transformed the Pacific Northwest’s physical and cultural landscapes. Although imperial surveys and early commerce in furs mutually reshaped imperial powers and Indigenous societies, intensive colonial and settler- colonial transformation of the environment only began in earnest following Vancouver’s surveys: within little more than a decade, overland expeditions brought Americans and British in from the east, reframing the geographies of the region’s imperial contestation and making the Pacific Northwest, both coastal and interior, the next major source of beaver furs on the global market. Introduced diseases wiped out large swathes of the regional Indigenous population, with profound consequences for the survivors, for settlers, and for regional ecologies. But the rain still fell, the fog still gathered, the wind still blew, and the winters were still wet, wet, wet. Overland expeditions like those of the Corps of Discovery and fur trading posts like those at Astoria, Fort Nisqually, Fort Vancouver and Fort Langley would have to contend with the region’s rainy climate and Indigenous peoples in new places and in new ways. The experiences of the people involved in these overland expeditions and commercial endeavors are the subject of the next chapter. 121 CHAPTER TWO “NO OTHER CANOPY BUT THE HEAVENS:” ASTORIA, THE CORPS OF DISCOVERY, AND HOW NOT TO PADDLE A CANOE, 1805- c.1821 One year after Robert Gray entered the mouth of the Columbia River in 1792, the first overland expedition from the eastern half of North America reached the Pacific Ocean. Led by Alexander MacKenzie, a Scottish explorer, their journey took them from Fort Chipewyan, in what is now northern Alberta, to the outflow of the Bella Coola River on the upper Northwest Coast. They spent less than a week in July of 1793 along the interior inlets of the Inside Passage, then headed back east. But despite their summer arrival and brief stint on the coast, MacKenzie wrote that on July 17 the expedition encountered “hail, snow, and rain,” and had a difficult time hunting game in the inclement weather.207 The narrow valleys and hillsides were often shrouded in fog, and the important task of taking astronomical measurements was thwarted by cloudy weather. The group encountered Heiltsuk people who were familiar with the maritime fur traders, and who variously offered sea otter furs or acted with hostility after having been earlier slighted by a white trader unaffiliated with the expedition.208 Having come to the region in the heart of the summer fur trading season, MacKenzie and his expedition became briefly entangled in the web of seasonal and 207 Alexander Mackenzie, Voyages from Montreal […] (London: R. Noble, Old-Bailey: 1801): 315-316. Chapter title is from a journal entry by the fur trader Alexander McLeod, dated November 1, 1826. McLeod’s journal is reprinted in K.G. Davies, ed. Peter Skene Ogden’s Snake Country Journal 1826-1827 (London: The Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1961), appendices B, C, and D, 141-226. 208 Entries from July 20th to July 22nd in Mackenzie, Voyages from Montreal, 340-347. Mackenzie makes the claim about being the targets of vicarious animosity, although considering the mutually limited comprehension between the expedition and Indigenous parties this is not certain. 122 commercial relationships that tied together sea otters, Indigenous peoples, Euro-American traders, and the rains of the Northwest Coast. Of his sufferings in the cold, snow, and rain of western North America, Mackenzie later wrote proudly that “the toils I have suffered, have found their recompence; nor will the many tedious and weary days, or the gloomy and inclement nights which 1 have passed, have been pulled in vain.”209 With a similar imperial mission, other Euro-Americans soon followed MacKenzie. In subsequent years came Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, in 1805; Simon Fraser, in 1806; and David Thompson, in 1812.210 When Thompson reached the mouth of the Columbia, he was greeted by men of the Pacific Fur Company, a venture of John Jacob Astor: in 1811, they had established the first enduring site of white settlement along the Northwest Coast at Fort Astoria, the site of modern-day Astoria. British traders would later supersede American control over Fort Astoria and establish a much broader and more commercially successful network of outposts both west and east of the Cascades. Whereas maritime fur traders primarily encountered rainfall at sea, overland traders and travelers were exposed to a more diverse set of climatic zones. They also had a more diverse set of goals, seeking to establish a permanent imperial presence in the region — not necessarily settlement, but, rather, outposts of sustained commerce and resource extraction, connected to global markets and reliant on global provisioning chains. Drawing on the journals of overland explorers, 209 Mackenzie, iv. 210 When Simon Fraser descended what later became the river of his namesake in the summer of 1808, his party encountered many foggy mornings but made few remarks on the weather, being preoccupied with navigating the churning rapids and steep canyons. Fraser did, however, note that the river was “in places unnavigable, especially when in freshet,” fed by rain-on-snow meltwater from the continental climes of what is now central British Columbia. Fraser and his party spent very little time along the raincoast, but, on July 21st of 1808, heading upriver on what was later called the Thompson River, he noted encountering “rain and bad weather,” which “rendered our situation very unpleasant.” Simon Fraser, The Letters and Journals of Simon Fraser, 1806-1808, ed. W. Kaye Lamb, (Toronto: Macmillan, 1960): 26, 122. 123 fur traders, and travelers, this chapter argues that rainfall played a significant and evolving role in this initial period of Euro-American imperial commerce in the overland Pacific Northwest, beginning in 1793 and ending with the proliferation of post farming in the 1820s. During this period rainfall seriously constrained the first Euro-American settlements in the Pacific Northwest, profoundly influenced attempts to explore and exploit regional landscapes and fur resources, and formed an integral part of everyday experience. For instance, explorers such as Lewis and Clark and overland traders such as the Astorians relied almost exclusively on intermittent overseas food supply runs, which made them vulnerable to rainfall’s pervasive presence and detrimental impact on food preservation. Indigenous groups often leveraged their knowledge of regional food resources to influence the balance of local power; they also parlayed their embodied skills at navigating rainy waterscapes into diplomatic advantages, ferrying traders along rivers and sometimes rescuing them from stormy weather. Traders felt mostly alienated by the fluid geographies that rainfall embossed upon the Northwest Coast, whereas Indigenous people were at home. The prolonged coastal rainy season was also a major cause of illness among rank-and-file fur traders, who were exposed on a near-daily basis to inclement weather as they engaged in laborious drudgery to establish and upkeep their forts in the face of the wet climate. Such exposure was unequal, with superior officers sometimes hogging the best provisions; rainfall thus magnified class divisions in ways that reinforced the frustration and disillusionment of the average fur trader. Rather than adapt to the rainy climate by adopting Native clothing or food production techniques, however, early fur traders made moral judgements about the Pacific Northwest’s landscape, prolonged rainy season, and local cultures. They deemed the wet, humid climate of the coast uncivilized, and insulated themselves inside the perimeter of their commercial outposts. Everyday life was full of gloom, monotony, and fear of Native attack, reflecting interwoven ideas 124 about the inferiority of both Northwest environments and Northwest peoples. Rainfall contributed to the development of a fortress mentality, wherein the Pacific Northwest was a savage and unpleasant country that a trader had to endure and survive for only meager rewards. Temporary imperial extraction remained the business model, and myriad Indigenous nations individually held more power than any foreigners.211 As fur traders began to occasionally explore the intermontane zone between the Coast and Cascade ranges, they complained about the rainy season much the same as they did at Astoria and other coastal outpost. However, when traders visited the Willamette Valley during the same pleasant climes of summer that had so invigorated navigators like George Vancouver, they were enraptured. They were grateful for a nostalgic reprieve from the drizzle and damp of winter, and began to intimate at the agricultural possibilities and settlement potential of the intermontane zone. Experiences and impressions of the Pacific Northwest’s environments and climate became deeply polarized between summer and the rest of the year; between the coast and the intermontane zone. Overall impressions were still quite negative, but the seeds of what later became a regional narrative of climatic exceptionalism and healthfulness had been planted — with immense consequences for the future. 211 Jean Barman, French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2015): 53, notes that “The fur companies viewed the…. region as simply one more site where profits were to be had… before moving on.” 125 “Wet and Disagreeable," Or, How the Rains Haunted Lewis and Clark Fifty-one in number and helmed by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the Corps of Discovery Expedition departed westward from St. Louis, Missouri, in May of 1804. This initial figure included nine French-Canadian voyageurs hired as boatmen, six other French-Canadians, thirty enlisted men, seven officers including Lewis and Clark, and Lewis’s dog, Seaman — the only dog not eaten along the way. Several members would leave the expedition en route; on the other hand, a Shoshone woman named Sacagawea and her husband joined them.212 Tasked by Thomas Jefferson with traveling overland to the Pacific Ocean and gathering information about the peoples, geographies, and natural resources of the western half of North America, it took nineteen months for the group to reach and cross over the Rockies, and, in mid-October of 1805, they at last began their descent down the Columbia River towards the Pacific Ocean. For the next five months, it rained almost every day. The wet, gloomy weather dampened and deeply shaped the day-to-day lives and experiences of the expedition. While frequently memorialized in public spaces and popular culture as a heroic operation, the Corps of Discovery was at heart an imperial enterprise.213 Indeed, one of the marble sculptures 212 Charles G. Clarke, The Men of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002, orig. 1970) and Larry Morris, The Fate of the Corps: What Became of the Lewis and Clark Explorers After the Expedition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) for an overview. Many, many dedicated biographies exist of Lewis, Clark and Sacagawea. 213 For instance, in 2002 the Chinook Nation’s federal tribal recognition was revoked in a continuation of settler-colonial dispossession. During the same week, President George W. Bush commemorated the Lewis and Clark bicentennial; his office’s official statement read that the bicentennial should “serve to remind us of our Nation's outstanding natural resources. Many of these treasures first detailed by Lewis and Clark are available today for people to visit, study, and enjoy.” See Amy McFall Prince, “Feds revoke tribe's status,” Tacoma Daily News, July 6, 2002; and for Bush’s statement, see “Lewis and Clark Bicentennial: a Proclamation,” Federal Register, July 3, 2002. On public commemoration of the Corps, see Wallace G. Lewis, In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark: Early Commemorations and the Origins of the National Historic Trail (Denver: University Press of Colorado, 2010). 126 that still stands outside of the Oregon State Capitol is a 1934 relief carving of Lewis and Clark, inscribed: “Westward the star of empire takes its way.” The expedition returned east with vast amounts of new geographical information, aided and encouraged Thomas Jefferson’s confidence in westward expansion’s necessity, and were at the vanguard of the settler-colonial invasion of the American West. Yet their descriptions of the Northwest Coast’s rainy climate did not paint the region as a desirable place for American settlement, even if they encouraged commercial fur exploitation. Weather of many sorts proved a significant challenge to the expedition throughout their travels across the continental interior and the Rockies, but the incessant winter rains of the Northwest Coast were especially all-encompassing.214 They cast a near-perpetual pall over the group’s sodden descent to the sea, and hounded them as they constructed Fort Clatsop out of the timbered giants of the coastal forests. The subsequent everyday realities of wintering at Fort Clatsop were suffused with an unpleasant volume of rain, and the wet climate complicated basic survival tasks like hunting, staying dry, and preserving food. The expedition’s encounters with the rainy winters of the Pacific Northwest began on October 28, 1805, three days after the expedition navigated westward down Celilo Falls, then the largest waterfall and Indigenous fishing site on the river’s main stem.215 Celilo Falls marks the edge of the transitional zone between the arid, eastern leeward side of the Cascades and the wet, western 214 Two authors have directly addressed the expedition’s encounters with weather; one, Vernon Preston, has assembled a reference book gathering the expedition’s weather-related entries and meteorological observations, while another, George R. Miller, has briefly described in prose the challenges presented to the expedition’s Northwest leg by snow, ice, and rain. See Vernon Preston, Lewis & Clark: Weather and Climate Data from the Expedition Journals (Boston: American Meteorological Society, 2006); and George R. Miller, Lewis & Clark's Northwest Journey: "Weather Disagreeable!” (Portland: Frank Amato Publications, 2004). Dick Pintarich, James Ronda, and several other authors and scholars have touched briefly on the sodden nature of their winter at Fort Clatsop, but have not centered the everyday experiential realities of the rainy climate. See for instance Dick Pintarich, “The Whining and Dining of Lewis and Clark.” 215 Until its submersion in 1957 after fifteen thousand years of continuous human habitation. See Barber, Death of Celilo Falls. 127 windward side. After passing down the falls, the Corps spent a few days at a site now known as Rock Fort, resting and resupplying through trade with some of the Upper Chinookan peoples. As they set out on the 28th to continue westward towards the sea, however, an early winter storm system forced the group to encamp for the night on the south side of the river.216 Heavy rain, blown by the fierce westerly winds that channel winter moisture east from the sea through the Columbia River Gorge, prevented the expedition from making any progress. The wind and rain persisted throughout what Clark called a “wet and disagreeable” night.217 That particular phrase — “wet and disagreeable” — appears twelve times in the collected journals of the expedition between October 28, 1805, and March 28, 1806; more general descriptions of “disagreeable” rainstorms occur almost another sixty-five times between the same dates. This accounts for half of all uses of the term “disagreeable” in the journals, almost all of which are weather-related. That weather forms such a consistent subject of note in the expedition’s journals shows reflects how it encompassed and shaped the everyday embodied experiences of the expedition as they wintered on the Northwest Coast, but it also shows that detailed records of the weather were a necessary component of making the western half of North American more legible to the United States. The Northwest Coast had already acquired a reputation as a rainswept region because of the accounts of maritime fur traders, but collecting descriptive data about the meteorology of the lower Columbia and the continental interior were considered important tasks.218 216 This was despite their having not yet passed out of the semiarid climate that dominates east of the Cascades. Generally, Hood River is considered the beginning of the rainforest zone along the Gorge; The Dalles is decidedly semiarid. However, the region’s rainy winters send significant quantities of seasonal precipitation through the mountain gap to the Dalles during a truncated Nov-Feb rainy season. Because of the low elevation, this precipitation generally falls as rain, rather than snow. For an overview of Oregon climatic zones, see George H. Taylor, The Climate of Oregon: From Rain Forest to Desert (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1999). 217 Clark, JLCE: 5: 346-8 218Thomas Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis, June 20,1803, in Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents 1783-1854, ed. Donald Jackson, (Urbana: University of 128 As the expedition continued downriver, it continued to face difficulties resulting from the rainy climate. Fog delayed the expedition’s daily departure or impeded members’ sight-lines on several occasions, and unceasing rainfall left them wet and cold despite mild temperatures and “little appearance of frost” in the surrounding country.219 These delays were significant because the expedition usually set out early in the morning, around 8AM or 9AM by Clark’s tally, in order to take advantage of the limited and dwindling daylight: the sun rose around 7:00AM and set around 6:30PM at the start of November, allowing fewer than twelve hours of travel time (owing to the weather, it was almost certainly impossible to keep a fire alive for nighttime navigation on the river). Nonetheless, for the first week of November the rains were not accompanied by fierce winds as they had been upriver: by Clark’s intermittent calculations, the expedition was able to travel 32 miles downriver on November 5th, and another 34 miles on November 7th.220 The discomfort caused by the rains were more a result of their incessant nature, which prevented clothing from drying in the open air and made it difficult to stay warm while in the canoes. This was compounded by the exposed nature of the Columbia’s waterways, which were wide and open to the rains as they fell. Maneuvering in the mists and rain was difficult, and camp was made wherever feasible and whenever necessary, not when and where it was comfortable. Illinois Press, 1978): 61-66. On state attempts to improve the legibility of various aspects of material reality, James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 219 Clark, JLCE: 6: 24-35. Although expeditions and travelers in the region had a near-ubiquitous tendency to describe the climate as ‘temperate ’or ‘mild, ’these descriptors do not ring as unvarnished endorsements when considered alongside actual recorded experience. Frederick Brown observes that some American emigrants in the 1830s and 1840s read or heard such accounts of a mild climate, but did not get looped in on the soggier realities of experience. Frederick L. Brown, “Research Files: Imagining Fort Clatsop,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, 107, no. 4 (Winter, 2006): 590-606 220 Clark, JLCE: 6: 24, 33 129 Late in the day on November 7th, the expedition crossed into the Columbia’s tidal estuary, a thirty-mile-long stretch of brackish water extending westward towards the sea. In doing so, they entered a complex estuarial rainscape that had been inhabited by the Lower Chinookan peoples for thousands of years. This was a place of wide waters, embayments, shifting sandbars, forested hills, and riparian wetlands: geographies all shaped in part by people and by rain. It was also a place of oyster beds, spring and autumn fish runs, wapato gardens, and redcedar stands: living beings embedded in material networks alongside rain. The Lower Chinookans, who call the Columbia River and these other living beings kin, also understand themselves as a part of these networks of being.221 Since time immemorial, the Lower Chinookan ancestors inhabited seasonal summer and winter villages along the lower reaches of the Columbia River. Like many other peoples of the Northwest Coast, they migrated between seasonal villages according to what resources were available where at different times, and generally spent the summer and early fall processing and stockpiling dried and preserved food for the cold, wet months of winter. Spring and early summer salmon runs were less likely to be dried and stored compared to early fall salmon runs, in part because the period from March to June is still fairly rainy on the coast; the damp inhibited traditional smoking and drying practices.222 In winter, the rains swelled the rivers; in spring, they fell warm on the mountaintops, melting the snow and sending many of the region’s waterways into flood stage. Many traditional Northwest Coast creation stories involve major floods, which destroy 221 The best single-volume work of scholarship on the Lower Chinookan peoples is Robert Boyd et al., eds. Chinookan Peoples of the Lower Columbia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015). 222 Virginia L. Fisher and Michael A. Martin, “Aboriginal Fisheries of the Lower Columbia River,” in Chinookan Peoples, 84-5. 130 existing villages and disperse people to different locations; where one washes up, one comes to live. The development of such emplaced oral traditions and rhythms of life constitutes a distinct ethnogenesis, rooted in emplaced relationships to regional climates and environments.223 By moving farther inland from the river’s floodplain during the rainy winters and settling at the resource-rich shores during the drier summers, Native peoples holistically aligned their activities with local pluvial rhythms. Although they actively transformed landscapes and coastal ecologies in profound ways, they likely enhanced local ecological productivity beyond what would have existed in their absence.224 Except for short journeys to trade with neighboring peoples, winter was a time for peoples such as the Lower Chinookan groups to gather in place. It was a time for resting, celebrating, and renewing social and spiritual bonds. As the rains pattered upon the roofs of Chinookan huts and longhouses, the people sat together inside along the walls in front of roaring fires and spoke, told stories, danced, ate, wove waterproof blankets and baskets and other goods, and participated in 223 Adam R. Hodge, Ecology and Ethnogenesis: An Environmental History of the Wind River Shoshones, 1000–1868 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019). 224 On seasonal rhythms, David V. Ellis, “Cultural Geography of the Lower Columbia,” in Boyd et al., Chinookan Peoples 50-62. Vine Deloria, Jr. has characterized summertime Northwest Coast population densities as “suburban,” so rich were the region’s natural resources and so active were Indigenous practices of caretaking. See Vine Deloria, Jr., Indians of the Pacific Northwest: From the Coming of the White Man to the Present Day (Golden: Fulcrum Publishing, 2012). Such a pattern of summertime mobility and relative wintertime sedentism contrasts with the seasonal rhythms of many people of the Plains, New England, and the interior of what is now Canada, who often traveled long distances during winter. For some, this included participation in the interior fur trade. See for instance Arthur J. Ray, Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Roles as Trappers, Hunters, and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay, 1660-1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974); and Thomas Wickman, Snowshoe Country. On Indigenous contributions to ecological productivity on the Northwest Coast, see Madonna L. Moss and Aubrey Cannon, eds. The Archaeology of North Pacific Fisheries (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2011), and Madonna L. Moss, Northwest Coast: Archaeology as Deep History (Washington, D.C.: Society for American Archaeology, 2011). 131 important traditional ceremonies. Not every year was generous with food — sometimes, the salmon, eulachon, or fish runs failed, and there was not enough dry stock to easily feed everyone — but there were often feasts, marriages, and comings-of-ages. The winter rains often coincided with a time of much joy; a time of traditional displays of wealth and heightened spiritual potency.225 For the Corps of Discovery, however, their winter entry into the Columbia’s estuary marked the beginning of the worst the downriver trek. Although Clark noted that there was “great joy in camp” upon sighting the estuary, he and the rest of the expedition initially mistook it for the ocean itself, and experienced great difficulty continuing towards the sea.226 Over the next three full days, from Nov 8-10, the expedition traversed a mere ten miles. The winter rainstorms intensified, often making navigation untenable; several men became seasick due to the ferocity of the weather and waves; and their encampments were sometimes partially submerged during the nightly tides. Great efforts had to be made to avoid losing the canoes and supplies to the river. Everyone was “as wet as water could make them,” in Clark’s words, and their buffalo leathers were rapidly rotting in the damp climate, providing little protection and necessitating daily changes of very limited 225 This is not, of course, to romanticize Indigenous existence, or to erase the real hardships sometimes brought by the winter rains. Enslaved people among the Chinook and other groups, for instance, had different experiences, as they were often excluded from winter festivities and tasked with repetitive manual labor, such as cutting firewood, and would likely have been consigned to more time outside in the worst weather. Winter was, however, certainly a time of social gathering and celebration for most Northwest Coast peoples. On famine among peoples of the Northwest Coast, see Ellis, David V. Ellis, “Cultural Geography of the Lower Columbia,” in Boyd et al., Chinookan Peoples 52; and Andrea Laforet and Annie York, Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories, 1808-1939 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998): 68. On winter ceremonies and spirituality, see for instance Suzanne Crawford O’Brien, Coming Full Circle: Spirituality and Wellness among Native Communities in the Pacific Northwest (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013); and Pamela Thorsen Amoss, Coast Salish Spirit Dancing: the Revival of an Ancestral Religion (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978): 14-15. 226 Clark, JLCE: 6: 33. Clark later wrote on November 9th that the party was “chearfull,” “notwithstanding the disagreeable situation of our party all wet and cold,” 38. This was not a ringing endorsement. 132 clothing.227 The rain did, however, provide fresh water to drink, for which the expedition was grateful: the estuary was salty, and those who drank of it experienced unpleasant laxative effects. The period from November 10-15, 1805 illustrates the persistent difficulties of the downriver venture. Perhaps the absolute low point of the entire expedition, these six miserable days saw incessant, driving rainstorms that stranded the party on a single rocky beach about seven miles from the ocean. The entire expedition was essentially cornered between the swelling Columbia and steep, thickly forested hillsides, which were unsafe to ascend, oversaturated from rainfall, and prone to bleeding stones and streams of muddy rainwater onto the beach. Extrication by land was impossible due to the incessant rains and rough terrain; hunting was also untenable given the weather. Dubbed a “dismal nitch” by William Clark, the beach was so small and cramped that the expedition had to place their baggage — and themselves — on logs that were “on flote” during high tide, sometimes for several consecutive hours.228 The expedition had lost its oilcloth and canvas along the course of the journey westward and so had no tents; much time was spent searching out crevices where they could painstakingly start fires to try and dry their sodden, flea- infested bedding and rotting leathers.229 They listened to and felt the rain fall upon them as they went to sleep, and regularly woke up to wet blankets and clammy skin. Clark wrote on November 11 that their situation was especially unfortunate because this was “a time that our day[s] are precious to us.” This was a reference to the limited daylight, but, 227 Clark, 35-39, 47. Untreated and without regular drying, buffalo and other leathers like this tended to fray, shrink, and rot. See the recollections of settler J.W. Nesmith, “Annual Address,” Transactions of the Oregon Pioneer Association, 1880: 18. 228 Clark, JLCE: 6: 39-45. The expedition had brought canvases with them, but these and many other supplies had been lost during their journey. Dismal Nitch is now a WSDOT highway rest area; an interpretive sign at the rest area emphasizes the rainswept misery the expedition faced. 229 Clark, 26. Clark blamed the presence of fleas on poor Native hygiene, unaware that the villages he and the Corps had passed through were abandoned for the winter and thus not maintained at the time. Fleas thrive in moist environments with modest temperatures. 133 more importantly, to the impending close of the maritime fur trading season: the expedition’s hope had been to at least partially resupply themselves by trading with the Bostons. However, because the vast majority of traders cycled westward in the winter to spend the rainy season in Hawai’i and allow a new season’s otter furs to ripen in the stormy Pacific, the Corps chance’s of encountering a ship faded with each rainy day.230 In the meantime, they were wet, cold, desperately hungry, and utterly exposed to the Northwest Coast weather-world. Clark wrote that if the ambient temperature accompanying the rains had been cold rather than cool, they would have “eneviatilbly Suffer[ed] verry much as Clothes are Scerce with us.”231 Clark was not a hyperbolic journalist, and this was very strong language for him. Even as the expedition huddled together in the torrents subsisting only off small quantities of dried fish obtained weeks earlier from the Upper Chinookan peoples, the Lower Chinookan peoples went about their normal winter routines. These routines included engagement with newcomers such as the Corps: sometime on November 11th — the expedition journals disagree widely as to whether it was morning, afternoon, or early evening, likely because the sky was continually overcast — a group of Cathlamet paddlers navigated with ease through the rainstorms and came ashore to exchange fish with the stranded expedition in return for “fishing hooks & some other trifling things.”232 During this encounter and in other encounters with the Chinookan peoples, Clark remarked on local Indigenous clothing. His remarks reflect Western understandings of proper dress and reveal a contrast in how the expedition and the locals used garments to insulate themselves from the winter rains (or try, in the case of the former). Describing the traditional woven redcedar bark 230 Clark, 40. 231 Clark, 44-47. 232 Clark, 40. 134 garments worn by many of the Chinookan peoples and other Northwest Coast groups, Clark noted that they were “Soft,” but also described them as “badly made,” and disdained that some of the men wore “nothing except a robe around them.”233 These kinds of descriptions recur throughout the expedition’s stay in the Northwest, lingering particularly on the tendency of the Chinookans to often wear only one layer of clothing and to not be fully covered from head to toe. Other white- authored accounts of Indigenous dress on the Northwest Coast by maritime fur traders, HBC officials, travelers, and overland emigrants also linger on these impressions, describing traditional clothing in unfavorable terms that sometimes suggest they were “filthy” and utterly exposed to the elements.234 These accounts lean into the “noble savage” myth, suggesting Indigenous innocence, stupidity, exposure, and sexual profligacy, interpreting cultural differences as a sign of primitivism. Clark for instance lingered in one journal entry on the craft of cedar-bark garments worn by women, which were tasseled below the waist and thus “not altogether impervious to the penetrating eye of the amorite” when the woman was not standing up straight.235 Differing ideas about the morals and 233 Clark, 30. Indigenous peoples on the Northwest Coast also wore various animal skin robes, but generally did so only in clear or misty weather, see Stewart, Cedar, 140. 234 See for instance Franchere, who referred to cedar skirts as “wretched garment[s],” Gabriel Franchere, Adventure at Astoria 1810-1814, ed. Hoyt C. Franchere (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967): 110-111; Robert Stuart, The Discovery of the Oregon Trail: Robert Stuart’s Narratives of His Overland Trip Eastward From Astoria in 1812-13, ed. Philip Ashton Rollins (New York: Edward Eberstadt & Sons, 1935): 12; or Alexander Henry’s March 4, 1814 diary entry, where he described a group of Indigenous women in cedar skirts as “the most disgusting creatures I ever beheld,” in Henry, The Journal of Alexander Henry the Younger, 1799-1814: Vol II, ed. Barry M. Gough (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1992): 693. Gray Whaley has noted several other instances of this observation, see Collapse of Illahee, 45. 235 Clark, JLCE: 6: 32; Clark also noted in this entry that some of the area’s Native men had acquired Western garments from maritime traders, and wore them on occasion. Patrick Gass echoed Clark’s description of cedar clothing, writing that “their charms have but a precarious defence,” see Gass, JLCE: 10: 172; and Whitehouse, JLCE: 11: 390. Clark and Lewis generally saw Northwest Coast women as immodest and unattractive and had more favorable things to say about the more fully-covering dress of women farther up the Columbia, such as the Shoshone. See Clark and Lewis, JLCE: 6: 432-440; and Whaley, Collapse of Illahee, 44-46. On the connections between gender, race, and imperial scientific enterprise in the 1700s and 1800s, see 135 aesthetics of fashion led Clark and others to see cedar bark garments as scraggly, poorly made, and of immoral taste. Truthfully, the Lower Chinookan peoples were far better dressed for the rainy climate than the Corps were in their rotting leather robes. Redcedar barkcloth fibers expand when they become wet, creating a seal that strongly repels moisture. Garments were fashioned by stripping the outer bark of the redcedar tree, Thuja plicata, wetting it, separating the soft inner fibers from tough cellulose, felting the former, and tightly weaving them into strands, sometimes mixed with other plant fibers or with bird feathers. The results of this craftsmanship were soft, lightweight, waterproof, comfortable clothes suitable for all seasons, capable of keeping out the winter rains and insulating the wearer. Because the ambient temperature along much of the Northwest Coast usually hovers between 40-55F degrees all winter during the day, one layer of warm, well-made waterproof clothing — coupled with an animal skin robe or wool blanket when it got colder or windier — would have been sufficient protection from the elements in most locations (Figure 2.1).236 Different groups of people developed particular weaving styles and patterns, which both expressed unique aspects of one’s culture and helped identify members of other groups or families. In contrast to barkcloth’s emplaced suitability, the Corps of Discovery’s unprotected buffalo leathers became waterlogged, heavy, and soon rotted to shambles or shrank to uselessness Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). 236 Although many works exist on the subject, the best introduction to cedar bark textiles and cedar material culture is Stewart, Cedar. Cedar greeted many children at birth and saw off many elders at death, and remains important to many of the region’s first peoples; see Antonelis-Lapp, Tahoma and its People, 41-44; and Boyd et al., Chinookan Peoples, 71-72. The other primary local cloth fiber on the Northwest Coast is wool, either from a now-extinct breed of wooly dog or from mountain goats. For an overview, see Tepper et al., Salish Blankets. Gathering wool often involved intentionally traversing rugged terrain in rainy weather in order to reach the slopes where mountain goats dwell, and is reflective of the skill many Indigenous individuals had at navigating the weather-world; on this gathering as it took place on Mount Rainier, see Antonelis- Lapp, 49-50. 136 Figure 2.1, “Gathering Seaweed.” This photograph illustrates two different kinds of barkcloth garments. The woman on the left is wearing a plaited, fringed style more similar to the “scraggly” variety described by Clark; the woman on the right is wearing a woven style more resemblant of Western clothing. After the introduction of Western clothing, barkcloth garments were sometimes woven into sleeved shirts and coats. This photograph was produced in 1915 by Edward S. Curtis and included in his The North American Indian, Volume 11: The Nootka, The Haida (Cambridge: The University Press, 1916): 98. 137 in the damp climate. Yet rather than adopt the local practice of wearing cedar garments in rainy weather, the Corps described them unfavorably. Clark, Lewis, and other members of the Corps came from a society that had specific ideas about what constituted nakedness, and which fixated on particular varieties of clothing — such as woolen coats, women’s corsets, and flannel woolen shirts — as befitting of civilized man. Nakedness did not mean wearing no clothes. It meant not wearing the right clothes, thus signaling that one was unashamed, unschooled in proper fashion, and perhaps even in danger of damnation. In part because they often wore less encompassing clothing than Euro-American imperialists and settlers deemed proper, Indigenous peoples across the world were painted in travelogues and colonial missives as vulnerable and exposed to their natural environments. Charles Darwin, for instance, judged the Yaghan and other Indigenous peoples of what is now Tierra del Fuego to be “the most abject and miserable people I have anywhere beheld,” and based this judgment off particular ideas of nakedness. The Yaghan were adept at identifying natural shelters from stormy weather; wore warm capes and coats made from sea otter skins; and were remarkably skilled at starting and maintaining fires in the wet, rainy, temperate climes of their traditional homeland. Yet Darwin focused on his own dour impression of the “inclement country” that they lived in, disdained their migratory lifeways, and made an entangled judgement both about the character of the land and the character of the peoples who lived there. His impressions, made in the 1830s, would be cemented later in the century after the genocide of the Yaghan, which left many materially impoverished and perpetuated stereotypes about their nakedness in the face of the elements.237 237 Philippa Levine, “States of Undress: Nakedness and the Colonial Imagination,” Victorian Studies, 50, no. 2 (Winter, 2008): 189-219. Darwin quoted on 192, 210-211. Levine further explores these ideas in “Naked Truths: Bodies, Knowledge, and the Erotics of Colonial Power,” Journal of British Studies, 52, no. 1 (Jan. 2013): 5-25. On Darwin and the naturalization of 138 Darwin’s ideas, like Clark’s and those of the Corps, rested in a Euro-American moral tradition that often favored superficial image over elemental insulation. As Philippa Levine has noted, in colonial Nigeria white women advised their friends to wear corsets, “even… on the warmest of evenings; there is something about their absence almost as demoralising as hair in curling-pins.” Though the corset was not visible in public, its very bodily presence was understood as a signifier of civilized society and personhood.238 Euro-Americans conceived of certain forms and materials of fashion as integral to one’s cultural identity, and expectations regarding these ideal forms and materials were imposed upon imperial spheres, ranging from subtropical Africa to southern Chile to the Northwest Coast. If ideals of civilized dress did not match with the climatic genocide, see Tony Barta, “Mr. Darwin's shooters: on natural selection and the naturalizing of genocide,” Patterns of Prejudice 39 no. 2 (2005): 116-137. On the Yaghan and sea otter furs, see Penelope Dransart, “Dressed in Furs: Clothing and Yaghan Multispecies Engagements in Tierra del Fuego,” in Living Beings: Perspectives on Interspecies Engagements, ed. Penelope Dransart (London: Routledge, 2013): 183-204. Similarly, retrospective narratives of a rugged, heteronormative American West of deserts and plains and cowboys dressed in cowboy clothing have obfuscated the region’s more diverse past, see Peter Boag, Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 238 Levine, “States of Undress,” 209-210. On the corset, see Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Some of these ideas about fashion and nakedness were later imported by the Meiji-era government of Japan, see Satsuki Kawano, “Japanese Bodies and Western Ways of Seeing in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Dirt, Undress, and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Body's Surface, ed. Adeline Masquelier, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005): 149-167. Kawano notes that pre-Meiji-era Japan had relatively relaxed standards of what constituted undress, primarily the result of the country’s hot, humid summers, when many people took their shirts off for comfort. These standards changed with the introduction of specific Western ideas of nakedness, resulting in Meiji-era attempts to redefine a broader idea of undress and bar such exposure in public spaces. Thus, traditional cultural adaptations to the climate —- as simple as taking a shirt off so one doesn’t sweat profusely through the fabric — came to be regulated as ‘uncivilized,’ with varying success. In contrast, a major symbolic and material component of Gandhi’s anti-colonial activism in India was spinning and wearing indigenous Indian cloth, often only a loincloth, as an act of resistance. Such cloth is climatically suitable to much of the Indian subcontinent. See Lisa N. Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi's Nation: Homespun and Modern India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 139 reality of a landscape, fervent complaints from Euro-Americans were common — not about clothing choices, but about the supposed inhospitable nature of the environment itself. The Corps fully recognized that cedar barkcloth garments were waterproof and excellent at withstanding inclement weather, yet they continued to craft the rest of their clothing out of beaver skins, elk skins, and other untreated animal leathers, which once more rotted in damp weather and had to be replaced throughout the winter. Rather than adapt to the climate by adopting local materials in what were rather deprived circumstances, members of the Corps preferred to suffer rather than abandon their sense of moral superiority over the landscape and local Indigenous populations. They imposed an outside morality of fashion, an ethics of modesty, and broad conceptions of what constituted nakedness onto the Clatsop and other Northwest Coast peoples, perceiving them as woefully unashamed and primitive because they often chose clothing suitable to the climate, rather than clothing suitable to Western norms. In making these judgements, Clark, Lewis, and other members of the Corps prioritized aesthetic and moral concerns, rather than pragmatic ones. This decision was rooted in the belief, widespread at the time, that particular environments could be inherently uncivilized, and that civilized people could be, in a sense, morally superior to those environments despite being made materially miserable by them. Civilization lay at the interface between fashion and place: if clothing and environment were incompatible, then that reflected poorly on the environment and the people who dwelled within it. Cedar bark clothing was simply not a civilized style of dress in the eyes of many among the Corps, even though it was suitable for the rainy climate. Instead, the rainy climate and wet local landscapes were implicated as a detriment to the character of the region and its peoples.239 239 In later years, settlers often claimed that the peoples of the Northwest Coast went naked much of the year regardless of the weather; that they went barefoot all of the time; and that they were 140 Despite their disdain for cedar-bark clothing, the Corps did immediately attempt to take advantage of the waterproof properties of the cedar mats they obtained from the Cathlamet. They hung these mats on makeshift poles to try and keep out some of the rain, but, as they were not full- scale dwellings, these protections were meager and no substitute for local knowledge of where and how to procure and produce a broader spectrum of cedar wovens.240 Clark later expressed his distaste with their drenched situation by referring to the cedar mats as “useless,” a reflection more on the Corps’ wider inability and cultural unwillingness to better adapt to their rainy environment than on the mats themselves.241 As the expedition spent more time in the rains during their winter at Fort Clatsop, Clark and Lewis both had woven cedar hats made to fit them and also doled some out to the men, remarking favorably on their waterproof properties.242 Hats, it seems, were far less important in moral terms than the garments covering one’s torso and lower body. When the Cathlamet departed from the expedition’s “dismal nitch” after the completion of their trade, it was raining hard and the river was frothing with high surf. Whitehouse wrote that the expedition “all consider'd [the conditions] too dangerous” to cross the water, despite possessing a utterly exposed to the elements. While some of the region’s Native peoples did go barefoot for much of the year on beaches, inside homes, and along soft, cool-surfaced earthen trails, claims about utter nakedness and exposure are distortions. These claims fed a historical narrative of elemental vulnerability, on the Indigenous side, and proper insulation from the dirt of the world, on the Euro-American side. Such descriptions fed into convenient visions of Indigenous extinction, wherein the civilized man came to the Northwest to remake nature in the image of “proper” society, while the savage stupidly bandied about unprotected from, for instance, rainfall, and eventually died out. See for instance Crawford O’Brien, Coming Full Circle, 45-6. 240 Gass, JLCE: 10: 169-170 241 Clark, JLCE: 6: 119. 242 Clark and Lewis, in their entries on January 29th and January 30th, 1806, favorably describe the waterproof nature of these hats, see JLCE: 6: 246-253. Lewis, on February 22nd, mentions ordering tailor-made hats for himself and Clark, and buying other hats for the rest of the expedition, see Lewis, JLCE: 6: 336-7. Gass, on February 20th, described these hats as “handsome,” see Gass, JLCE: 10: 194: In an entry on November 21st, 1805, Clark notes that some Natives tried to sell him hats made of beargrass which were woven in a style similar to one recently popular in the United States, indicating that Natives adapted some of their trade goods to suit Western fashions, see Clark, JLCE: 6: 76. 141 Chinookan canoe. Nonetheless, Clark noted that the Cathlamet had little apparent difficulty in the swells and winds, and were “Certainly the best Canoe navigators I ever saw.”243 Combining traditions of canoe design that emphasized durability, waterproofing, and efficient sculpture with emplaced knowledge of how to navigate in rainy conditions, the Cathlamet and other Chinookan peoples wittingly and willingly set out on the water in inclement weather to engage with the newcomers in an commercial and observational encounter. Indigenous knowledge of the Columbia River rainscape allowed them to navigate in heavy squalls, keeping balance on rough waters and avoiding the worst of the wet thanks to proper clothing, whereas ignorance and material scarcity in the face of an unfamiliar place and climate left the Corps stranded on a miserable slice of beach that flooded during high tide. The Cathlamet chose to canoe across the river to trade with what would have been best described as a group of drenched and desperate whites. While there may have been pragmatic incentive for the locals to ascertain who the Corps was and to establish some form of relations, this was not a task for which the Cathlamet or others would have risked their lives in inclement weather: the Corps did not represent any clear and immediate threat, drenched as they were, and the Chinookan peoples had access to many (much better outfitted) maritime fur traders at the river mouth. By canoeing across waters that the Corps found frightening and dangerous, the Cathlamet and other locals showed that they could reliably, even easily navigate the Columbia’s estuarial rainscape. 243 Clark, JLCE: 6, 40-41; Whitehouse, JLCE: 11: 392. Clark also noted in his October 28 entry that the inclement weather, “the cause of our delay, does not retard the motions of those people [the Wishram] at all, as their canoes are calculated to ride the highest waves,” see Clark, JLCE: 5: 347. Similarly, on November 12th, Clark noted an unsuccessful attempt by his best paddlers to descend the Columbia in squally weather in Native-made canoes, see JLCE: 6: 42. 142 When the driving rains at last receded to an incessant drizzle and the Columbia River (temporarily) became once again navigable for the expedition, the party continued onwards. They advanced downriver past a promontory that Clark had variously called “blustering point,” “Stormey point,” and, on his personal map of the lower Columbia River, “Point Distress” (see Figure 2.2).244 On the advice of the Clatsop, the expedition scouted out a wintering site on a river that drained through the southern boundary of the estuary. They arrived at the site on December 7, wet, cold, and tired from their journey downriver. Unfortunately for them, the task of carving out a suitable winter dwelling from the rainforest remained — and daily showers abided. Sergeant Patrick Gassnoted that, on December 10th, “all hands were employed at work [site-clearing] notwithstanding the rain.” During this time, Joseph Whitehouse attributed the “very ill” state of one party member to “being constantly wet.”245 Yet their precarious food stocks and need to erect winter shelter meant that the rainy weather could not be avoided: it had to be endured before any respite could be had. Work continued in weather that was sometimes very violent and dangerous, with wind, rain, occasional hail, and “Trees falling in every derection” on what Clark called “Certainly one of the worst days that ever was!”246 Work finished on December 30, after more than five weeks of traveling and three weeks of laboring in the winter rains. In the meantime, the men stayed in temporary huts covered by leathers. For all but Lewis and Clark themselves, days were filled with hard physical labor such as tree-cutting, wood-splitting, wood-hauling, and the placement of 244 Clark, JLCE: 6: 48-54 245 Gass, JLCE: 10: 181-182; Whitehouse, JLCE: 11: 404. Earlier, on November 16th, Clark had noted one man was violently ill due to exposure in wet bedding, see Clark, JLCE: 6: 53. 246 Clark JLCE: 6: 126-7. For a brief overview of the important role of wind in the ecology of Pacific Northwest forests, see Gail Wells and Dawn Anzinger, Lewis and Clark Meet Oregon’s Forests: Lessons from Dynamic Nature, (Portland: Oregon Forest Resources Institute, 2001): 36- 39. 1 4 3 Figure 2.2, William Clark's hand-drawn map of the lower Columbia River mouth. 1805. Note where the dotted lines converge; this is the site of the expedition’s miserable encampment, labelled Point Distress. Interestingly, in the original 1814 published adaptation of the expedition’s account, Point Distress is removed and not renamed — the only such label not retained from the original map. Map from page 152 of Codex I of William Clark’s journals, digitized by the American Philosophical Society. 144 boards, all of which was accomplished in near-constant rain and permeating wet weather. Tools were very limited — only an axe, mallet, and froe are mentioned in the journals — and at least some of the men had no shoes (regarding gloves, the journals are unclear).247 The men’s sopping, rotting leather clothes had to be continually replaced with new elkskins, and Clark wrote on December 17th that “most of our Stores are wet. our Leather [covered] Lodge has become so rotten that the Smallest thing tares it into holes and it is now Scrcely Sufficent to keep the rain off a Spot Sufficiently large for our bed.”248 Fires required great effort to start and maintain: dry wood was scarce, and most of it was coniferous softwood — generally poor firewood. The expedition members went to sleep on cool, damp, flea-infested bedding, their bodies an attractive source of biotic warmth for such pests. As they shut their eyes beneath towering evergreens, the pitch darkness echoed with the sounds of wind and rain; of boughs dripping and creaking; and of the coughing and sneezing of their compatriots. The expedition faced food shortages throughout the construction process. Men had to be sent out to clear trails for navigation during foggy weather and to kill elk; this sometimes involved wading through streams that overflowed during winter downpours or waist-deep bogs that were at their muddiest in the rainy season.249 They had mixed success, with hunters occasionally getting lost in the rainforest for a day or more or losing game in inclement weather. Parties sent out into the field lacked any means of shelter or dry wood to start a fire, and sometimes had to spend multiple nights essentially sleeping in puddles in the rain on sodden ground.250 Elk generally weigh 247 Brown, “Imagining Fort Clatsop,” 597-8. Clark, JLCE: 6: 130. 248 Clark, JLCE: 6: 127. 249 Clark, JLCE: 6: 115-116. Elk became more scarce later on after overhunting. 250 Clark, JLCE: 6: 126; Ordway, JLCE: 9: 261; Whitehouse, JLCE: 11: 403-405. Meat preservation became even more difficult as temperatures warmed in March, and hunting became less productive once local elk had either been killed or had learned to avoid the area. See Holland, Feasting, 183-195. 145 between 500-750 pounds, and, in the absence of a sense of spatial awareness, it was common for hunters to require multiple trips to transport meat back to camp. Yet by the time that men had been sent back out to recover the cached carcasses, the meat had often spoiled in the mild temperatures and wet weather — excellent conditions for microbial growth. Lacking salt supplies and finding the climate too wet for air-drying meat or isolating salt by passive evaporation, hands were immediately spared to go down to the sea and boil ocean water; they remained there for seven weeks extracting salt, reducing available labor at the fort and prolonging the construction of a reasonably watertight shelter. Indeed, trying to salvage edible meat was such a priority that the first building completed and covered at Fort Clatsop was the smokehouse — the only reliable method the Corps knew of to preserve meat in the wet climate. Winter meals consisted of smoked elk, fish, and pounded roots, which the men found tiring.251 The expedition moved into an unfinished Fort Clatsop on December 24th, 1805, and bunked there until March 22nd, 1806. While archaeologists have identified the location of the original Fort Clatsop and uncovered many artifacts leftover from the Corps of Discovery’s winter there, the physical structure’s layout and material makeup remain somewhat unknown. A modern reconstruction at the site approximates the best known model, but conflicting details and a lack of precise descriptions have prevented certainty.252 As a result of the urgent nature of construction and the lack of any milling facilities, whole logs scraped of bark were used; these were assembled into a smokehouse and two to three bunkhouses, the latter all close together. The buildings and wall 251 See Holland, Feasting and Fasting on salt, meat preservation, and climate. The expedition’s fifteen French-Canadian members often had more success than the Americans with tracking elk in rainy weather, see Barman, French-Canadians 33-35. The Corps’s stubborn independence on the coast contrasted with their continual neediness along much of the rest of the journey, see for instance James P. Ronda, Lewis and Clark Among the Indians (Lincoln: Bison Books, 2002). 252 See Brown, “Imagining Fort Clatsop,” esp. 603 for two conjectural layouts; and Julie K. Stein et al.,“ A Geoarchaeological Analysis of Fort Clatsop, Lewis and Clark National Historical Park,” November 2006. 146 were likely constructed from Western Hemlock, a common evergreen in the immediate area surrounding the fort — and a species with very poor rot resistance. Whether this choice was the result of ignorance or urgency is unknown, but, since whole logs were used, it was sapwood, not the hardier interior heartwood, that was fully exposed to the elements.253 The roofs were covered with split grand fir boards, also of very poor rot resistance, intermixed with cedar boards stolen from empty Clatsop summer villages. These boards were stolen out of convenience, but resisted rot well.254 The fort was tightly chinked with mud and moss. If any windows were carved into the bunkhouses, they were likely small and would usually have been covered in leathers or cedar mats in order to minimize the risk of rain seeping inside. As a result of this construction, the shade cast by the rainforest giants, and the near-perpetually cloudy winter weather of the coast, there was likely little ambient light inside of the fort’s rooms.255 Candles were used to provide some level of 253 For an identification of hemlock, see Brown, “Imagining Fort Clatsop,” 592. Northwest forest ecologist Jame Agee has expressed his view that the fort was constructed of redcedar; considering redcedar’s excellent rot resistance and the fact that much of Fort Clatsop rotted away soon after the expedition vacated, this is unlikely, but see Agee’s opinion noted in Wells and Anzinger, Lewis and Clark Meet Oregon’s Forests, 58. On the rot resistance levels of hemlock and cedar woods generally, see USDA Forest Products Laboratory, “Wood Handbook: Wood as an Engineering Material,” March 2021, 14-15; for details on the specific species of the Northwest Coast, see Douglas Deur and the Knowledge-Holders of the Quinault Indian Nation, Gifted Earth: Ethnobotany of the Quinault and Neighboring Tribes (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2022): 23-35 for redcedar, and 45-49 for hemlock. The Quinault and some other peoples used hemlock for temporary purposes, or layered bark over planks to increase the resilience of structures. 254 Gary Moulton argues convincingly for that the roof boards were split from grand fir, see Clark, JLCE: 6: 124; and Gass, JLCE: 10: 182. Several days later, probably having exhausted the smaller trees in the area, the expedition began to encountering difficulty splitting planks, see Clark, JLCE: 6: 127. In response, Clark sent out men to steal pre-cut planks from empty Clatsop villages; these planks were made of cedar, see Clark, JLCE: 6: 133. The Lower Chinookan peoples generally carried cedar boards with them during seasonal migration. 255 On the remarkable absorbent properties of moss, see Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2021). This observation on window size is based on Brown, “Imagining Fort Clatsop,” as well as the author’s 147 manmade light, but they were in short supply and had to be riskily made by hand from small quantities of elk tallow and traded beeswax. Each bunk-room had a chimney and a firepit to provide some measure of warmth, although dry wood was scarce and the buildings often backfilled with smoke during periods of high wind. Goods were stored inside the fort, but some of the gunpowder still got wet despite Lewis’s use of lead canisters. The fort structure had no gutters, and water flowed over the makeshift roof before dripping steadily off the eaves.256 None of the extant journals explicitly mention a leaky roof, but given the scarce resources they had available to seal cracks and the poor rot resistance of the roof boards it is likely that this was a continual problem. That it was not mentioned is evidence of how accustomed to everyday hardship the Corps had become. All of these factors made the interior atmosphere at Fort Clatsop dim, dark, cool, humid, and surrounded by the pitter-patter and breeze-blow of a windy, rainy winter weather-world. Daily life for the rank-and-file at Fort Clatsop was mostly monotonous, filled with constant hunting to replenish spoiled meat stores; structural maintenance of the fort; and occasional trading with the Lower Chinookans. The general mood was of boredom, sodden drudgery, a longing for drier, warmer weather, and a fearful sense of dislocation in a land viewed as wild and uncivilized. Lewis wrote that New Year’s Day 1806 was spent: “principally in the anticipation of the 1st day of January 1807, when in the bosom of our friends we hope to participate in the mirth and hilarity of the day, and when with the zest given by the recollection of the present, we shall completely, both mentally and corporally, enjoy the repast which the hand of civilization has prepared for us.”257 July 2022 visit to the reconstructed Fort Clatsop National Historic Site. Without glass, either leather or cedar mats were used. 256 On candles, see Clark, JLCE: 6: 200-201; on gunpowder, Clark, JLCE: 6: 272. The Clatsop had obtained beeswax from the wreck of a Spanish galleon, which likely crashed into the coast during stormy weather in 1693. For an overview of the wreck, see Cameron La Follette, Douglas Deur, Dennis Griffin, and Scott S. Williams, “Oregon's Manila Galleon,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, 119, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 150-159. 257 Clark, JLCE: 6: 151-152. 148 There was little adventure outside of regular hunting and fishing trips: the incessant rain and wetness made wandering too far from the fort both undesirable and unsafe. The Corps rarely solicited and received minimal assistance from Indigenous groups regarding food supplies, both because of the expedition’s wary desire to keep their distance and the choice of local Indigenous groups to prioritize feeding their own in what was a very wet winter. The fort was surrounded by a picketed wall, which indicates that the Corps was at least somewhat preoccupied with fears of attack by hostile Natives. Those fears were exacerbated by the constant rain and thick fog, which obscured visibility and softened sounds from the surrounding rainforest. Diets remained poor even after the fort was completed, and sickness frequently recurred throughout the winter. Rare moments of excitement for the expedition members came in the form of sexual liaisons with Clatsop women that their commanders did not approve of, and which facilitated the spread of venereal diseases like syphilis. What small quantities of medicine the expedition had to alleviate any illnesses were almost entirely ineffective; some of their remedies, like mercury, were actively harmful.258 Meriwether Lewis had been provided a list of instructions for practice in the field by the physician and politician Benjamin Rush, who included advice that “[wool] flannel [be] worn next to the skin […] in wet weather,” which was unfortunately not possible at this time in their journey given their scarce remaining articles. Woolen flannel fabric was admired for keeping in warmth, and Rush himself claimed that “No vermin are bred in it when worn months without washing” — a reference to wool’s antimicrobial properties. Rush also advised that the men were “always to take a little raw spirit, after being very wet.” This advice showcases 258 For a sense of what medicines the expedition carried and their (in)effectiveness, see David J. Peck, Or Perish in the Attempt: Wilderness Medicine in the Lewis & Clark Expedition (Helena: Farcountry Press, 2002), esp. 215-231 for an account of the 1805-6 winter at Fort Clatsop. Peck briefly notes some of the negative health impacts of wet weather. 149 the common understanding at the time that prolonged exposure to damp conditions was dangerous to one’s health, although alcohol is now known to have no medicinal value in such circumstances.259 William Clark and Meriwether Lewis — the latter of whom had not been in the mood to write from September 10th, 1805, through January 1st, 1806 — spent much of the winter writing in their journals about local flora, fauna, terrain, and local Indigenous peoples, providing detailed descriptions and drawings in lieu of having other tasks to do. Their writings were intended to make the Northwest Coast a more legible region to American imperialism, but reflect no love for the area. Lewis wrote that he felt “imprisoned… [in the] impenetrably thick forrrests of the seacoast,” and was eager to return to the “dryer and more pure” air of the arid interior.260 As the expedition departed back up the Columbia River on March 23rd, 1806, after over a week of delays caused by wet spring weather, Clark singled out the winter rains as the most significant immiserating factor during the expedition’s time on the Northwest Coast, writing that during their winter at Fort Clatsop the party “had lived as well as we had any right to expect […] not withstanding the repeeted fall of rain which has fallen almost Constantly [since late October].”261 Even after leaving Fort Clatsop, rainstorms followed them upriver, ceasing only when they passed back east of the Cascades. The men were mostly grateful that everyone had survived the winter.262 On March 30th, as they passed the mixed forest-prairies that lay between the Coast and Cascade ranges on both sides of the Columbia River, Lewis wrote that if “properly cultivated” the valleys would serve as “the only desireable situation for a settlement which I have seen on the West 259 Benjamin Rush, “Directions for M. Lewis for the preservation of his health & of those who were to accompany him,” MSS 262, Benjamin Rush collection, Oregon Historical Society (hereafter OHS). Rush’s remark on wool is quoted in Nathan G. Goodman, Benjamin Rush, Physician and Citizen, 1746-1813 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934), 239. 260 Lewis, JLCE: 7: 131. 261 Clark, JLCE: 7: 8. For Clark’s note, on March 17th, that “Showers of rain prevented the Canoes drying… even with the assi[s]tance of fire,” see Clark, JLCE: 6: 430. 262 Clark, JLCE: 6: 8; 444. 150 side of the Rocky mountains.” Although the knowledge that the Corps of Discovery brought back to the eastern seaboard formed the impetus for American interest in developing an overland fur trade along the Northwest Coast, it did not result in any desire for permanent settlement, nor did their sojourn mark the beginning of American idealization of the Northwest Coast. John Logan Allen has observed that the area was portrayed “least favorably of all western regions in the official reports of the expedition,” and only temporary exploitation of fur resources seemed like a worthwhile endeavor in such a rainy, sodden country.263 Several scholars have speculated that the dreary winter climate of the Northwest Coast may have had a tragic personal influence on Meriwether Lewis, who experienced what David Nicandri called “the first cracks in his psyche” during the winter of 1805-1806 and is generally considered to have ended his own life in 1809.264 Just over five years after the Corps of Discovery departed from the Northwest Coast, a young fur trade clerk named Gabriel Franchere stumbled through the nearby rainforest and came across a series of dilapidated and largely decomposed wooden structures. He described them as “ruins.” Subjected to incessant coastal rains, Fort Clatsop had mostly rotted away within half a decade.265 Though the dwelling structures of the Corps’ imperial venture decayed, the larger 263 Lewis, JLCE: 7: 34. For portrayal, see John Logan Allen, Lewis and Clark and the Image of the American Northwest (New York: Dover, 1991), 326, 397-8. See John Jackson and Lloyd B. Keith, The Fur Trade Gamble: North West Company on the Pacific Slope, 1800–1820 (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2016): 24 on fear among North West Company administrators that Lewis and Clark’s reports would drive Americans to the overland fur trade via the Missouri River. Interestingly, when Lewis made his positive observation about the Willamette Valley, he initially wrote that “The Natives who inhabit this valley are larger and rather better made than those of the coast.” He later crossed out this sentence, recanting his initial viewpoint. See Lewis, JLCE: 7: 33; and Gary Moulton’s note, 37. 264 For a summary see David Nicandri, “The Columbia Country and the Dissolution of Meriwether Lewis: Speculation and Interpretation,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, 106, no. 1 (Spring 2005): pp 6-33 265 Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 58. Alexander Henry, in his journal entry for December 14th, 1813, corroborates, describing the structures as “in total Ruins” and noting that twenty-five foot tall willow trees were growing up from within the bunkrooms. He remarked that the structures would serve well as a hunting blind and wilderness shelter. Henry, Journal, 624. Robert Stuart 151 structures of politics and economy that brought them to the coast would endure — and would only strengthen. “Incessant Rain:” the Sodden Experiences of the Astorians, 1811-1813 On March 22, 1811, the Tonquin arrived at the mouth of the Columbia River carrying thirty-one newcomers. Despite being an American vessel owned by an American company, only three were American; seventeen were British subjects, and eleven were hired Hawaiians. Employed by the Pacific Fur Company (PFC), a newly created subsidiary of the American Fur Company (AFC), they had been sent to the Northwest Coast to establish an overland fur trade outpost at the mouth of the Columbia. This venture was the brainchild of John Jacob Astor, a New York banker and one of the richest men in human history.266 Enticed by reports of lucrative, yet-untapped peltries on the Pacific Slope, Astor sent a two-pronged entrepreneurial contingent: an overland party of eighty-six on the track of the Corps of Discovery, and a party by sea around Cape Horn in the Tonquin. The latter party was vested with the responsibility of establishing the fort; when the overland party joined them in January of 1812 wearing “nothing but fluttering rags” after their also echoes, The Discovery of the Oregon Trail, 4. John Kirk Townsend noted in 1836 that the roof was missing, but some of the logs were “still perfect,” Narrative of a Journey Across the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1999): 189. 266 See John D. Haeger, “Business Strategy and Practice in the Early Republic: John Jacob Astor and the American Fur Trade.” Western Historical Quarterly 19, no. 2 (May 1988): 183-202. Astor’s assets as a proportion of the American economy at the time of his death made him wealthier than every American except Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller, see Michael Klepper and Robert Gunther, The Wealthy 100: from Benjamin Franklin to Bill Gates— a ranking of the richest Americans, past and present (Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996). Klepper and Gunther’s estimates were calculated as a fraction of the contemporary economy by Sam Williamson of Measuring Worth and reported by Steve Hargreaves, “The Richest Americans in History,” CNNMoney, June 2, 2014, accessed February 21, 2023. 152 journey down the Columbia, the Astorians began exploring upriver and building trade networks with regional Native American groups.267 The PFC operated for only two years at Astoria and was ultimately a flailing-about financial failure. Bought out by the British North West Company (NWC) in the autumn of 1813, the PFC was the first and last major attempt by Americans to control the overland fur trade in the Northwest. Among the many reasons that the PFC collapsed so quickly were the challenges of establishing a viable overland fur trade in the context of the rainy weather-world of the Pacific Northwest: the Astorians found their lives drenched and dampened by the coastal rains of the lower Columbia and the intermontane rains of the Willamette Valley. Other reasons, entangled with the difficulties of the rainy season, included a lack of integrated supply and provisioning infrastructure, poor outfitting, and the fear of a forceful British takeover of the fort. The experiential realities of establishing, managing, trading, and living at the first permanent Anglo-American imperial outpost on the Northwest Coast were fundamentally shaped by the rainy climate, and carry broader implications for understanding the seasonal rhythms and mundane routines of the region’s overland fur trade as it would develop in the coming decades.268 The rains were almost immediately an agent of tragedy. In order to cross the Columbia Bar safely, it was necessary for the Tonquin to take soundings of the channel and discern the location of shoals and sandbars; however, the ship’s captain, Jonathan Thorn, had a well-earned reputation for being prickly and stubborn, and refused to wait until the weather improved despite the 267 Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 144–151. 268 Nootka, while earlier settled by Spaniards and frequented by Britons and Americans for about a decade, was abandoned by whites and left to the Nuu-chah-nulth peoples who had long lived there; it was only re-colonized by whites in the late 1800s. Sitka, Alaska was an earlier permanent outpost, but was occupied by the Russians until 1867. 153 objections of the entire crew and his own first mate.269 Instead, on March 22nd, Thorn immediately sent out a party to examine the channel, consisting of his first mate, Mr. Fox, alongside an elderly French sailor and three greenhorn Canadians. Their longboat had not been supplied with a sail prior to the Tonquin’s departure from New York City; one of the PFC’s partners aboard the Tonquin, sympathetic, “gave Mr. Fox a pair of bed sheets” to try and ease his conscience.270 According to Alexander Ross, before setting out on the water, Mr. Fox “turned to the partners with tears in his eyes and said — ‘My uncle was drowned here not many years ago, and now I am going to lay my bones with his.’”271 Fox’s party never returned: caught in the tumult of a rainstorm, all five men drowned. Those still aboard the Tonquin were of a “gloomy” spirit after the quarrel and made other several trips out in longboats to try and find the missing men, but were repelled by rainstorms and high surf and nearly capsized. Thorn nonetheless sent out two more parties to take soundings, to no 269 Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 55-56; for a prior incident similar to this in the Falklands stopover, see Duncan McDougall, quoted in Robert F. Jones, ed. Annals of Astoria: The Headquarters Log of the Pacific Fur Company on the Columbia River, 1811-13 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999): 9. For remarks on Thorn’s temper, see Alexander Ross, Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River, 1810-1813 (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1904): 67, 86-87, and Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 13. Thorn’s poor temper and untimely rudeness have been exaggerated in some narratives of Astoria, see Hoyt C. Franchere’s note in Adventure at Astoria, 36. However, enough evidence exists to show that he was a prickly fellow. His temper would later get him and twenty-eight others killed when he disrespected a Nuu-chah-nulth chief, Wickaninnish, by rubbing an animal fur in his face at Clayoquot Sound. Robert F. Jones, “Identity of the Interpreter of the Tonquin,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 98, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 296-314; and Reid, The Sea is My Country, 81-82. 270 Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 37; Ross, Adventures, 76-79 for corroboration. 271 Ross, Adventures, 77. Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 38 and McDougall in Jones, Annals, 4- 6 corroborate the conflict between Thorn and the rest of the crew, but this dramatic detail is Ross’s mention alone. Ross was known to exaggerate, but whether this quotation was a romantic literary flourish or an actual memory is unknown: the only proof would lie in identifying Fox’s relative aboard one of the maritime vessel manifests, but no one has yet attempted such an internecine hunt for answers. 154 avail.272 In total, eight men died before the Tonquin had ever entered the river, including two unnamed Hawaiians. All of these deaths were a result of heavy rainstorms and Thorn’s poor judgement, which Ross attributed to “anxiety at the danger” posed to the ship by the Columbia bar and the vicious, rainy weather that swirled about it at the time.273 The Tonquin at last anchored in the estuary on March 26th. The crew’s first order of business was to identify and clear a plot of land on which to situate the fort; this was easier said than done. One impediment was geography: the estuarial shorelines were often steep, and were almost all heavily forested, sometimes right down to the rough-crashing water. Other areas were swampy, full of sandbars and marshy channels that regularly rose during the rainy season and spring freshets and flooded the few low-lying open areas along the Columbia’s tributaries. Ross remarked that “the impervious forests give to the surrounding coast a wild and gloomy aspect,” echoing the opinions of Spaniards and others from decades earlier. Such tall, dark forests — humid, shrouded in fog, and drizzled upon by steady rainfall — were seen as inherently uncivilized landscapes that reflected poorly on their inhabitants, and presented significant physical obstacles to permanent settlement of a ‘civilized’ Western variety.274 The rains themselves were another impediment to site-finding. It being still the first half of spring along the Northwest Coast, the settlers from the Tonquin were greeted upon arrival by “squally” weather, and for several days faced “incessant rain which has prevented any work going either on board or shore.”275 The weather at the Columbia river mouth during winter is prone to frequent fluctuations, and the difference between steady showers and heavy downpours was often 272 Ross, Adventures, 78-84. The first of these later parties was caught up in a heavy squall; the second was abandoned to heavy breakers by Thorn, who refused to bring them aboard despite a period of calm weather. 273 Ross, 81. 274 Ross, 78. 275 Jones, Annals, 3-8 155 also the difference between a productive and unproductive day for the Astor party. As a result of their unfamiliarity with the details of local climate and geography, the Astor party was often frustrated by their inability to foresee rapid shifts in weather. For example, on April 5th the spring rains lightened up enough to allow Duncan McDougall, the leader of the party aboard the Tonquin, to go out with a scouting party to explore the vicinity of the river-mouth and identify possible locations for the fort. After snooping around the area for two days, the scouting party set out to return to the ship on April 7th, despite the warnings of a local Chinook leader named Comcomly not to cross the estuary “in such a great wind as then blew in.”276 The weather shifted while they were part of the way across the mouth, and a heavy rainstorm “obliged [them] to leave the Boat, having lost several articles and narrowly escaped with their lives.”277 According to Franchere’s recounting of the incident, Comcomly had sent out a group of oarsmen to follow the whites, and it was thanks to their greater skill in navigating the estuarial rainscape that McDougall — who could not swim — and the rest of the scouting party were rescued from drowning. The Chinooks brought the scouting party ashore, kindled a large fire in the rain in order to dry their clothes, and brought them back to their winter village, where Comcomly entertained them for three days owing to continually heavy downpours.278 When the rain subsided somewhat on April 10th, Chief Comcomly and several Native paddlers ferried McDougall and company back to the Tonquin with all persons intact. 276 Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 45. 277 Jones, Annals, 8-9. 278 Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 45-47 for his recounting. It is also possible Comcomly used the rains as an excuse to observe and entertain the newcomers; Natives were much better skilled at navigating in rainy weather and were often able to endure weather that whites flailed around in, but they were also astute at judging when it was best to remain on land or to portage. See Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 99; and Jones, Annals, 133. 156 It was not a coincidence that the canoe was paddled by Chinook oarsmen. Rather than send McDougall and company on ahead with their own canoe, Comcomly explicitly opted to ferry them across to the Tonquin as a display of hospitality, parlaying embodied knowledge into diplomacy. As the Corps of Discovery and maritime fur traders had earlier observed, the Chinooks were much better skilled at navigating the estuarial rainscape than whites; they were better able to judge when it was safe to set out on the water, and were more successful at managing sudden shifts in the weather.279 Consider one of the longboat expeditions to search for Fox and company. Sent out on March 27th, the party scoured forty miles of coastline before landing on the north shore of the estuary and hitching a return trip across the river in a canoe paddled by the Chinooks. During this return journey the canoe “was suddenly overtaken by a storm,” and capsized. In Ross’s telling, the eight members of the search party were “unable to swim,” and were “depending on the fidelity of the four Indians who undertook to carry us over; yet, notwithstanding the roughness of the water… these poor fellows kept swimming about like so many fishes, righted the canoe, and got us all into her again.” After rescuing the Astorians, the Chinooks: “showed the skill and dexterity peculiar to them. The instant the canoe rose on the top of a wave, those on the windward side darted down their long paddles to the armpits in the water to prevent her from upsetting; while those on the leeside at the same moment pulled theirs up, but kept ready as soon as the wave had passed under her to thrust them down again in a similar manner, and thus by their alternate 279 This somewhat comical circumstance — Natives paddling whites back to their camps during rainy weather as a result of their much greater ability to navigate the coastal rainscape — occurred many times in the period of early imperialism. Sometimes they were hired to navigate; other times, they offered ferrying as part of informal agreements in order to maintain good relations. While French-Canadian voyageurs did much of the non-Native labor of the fur trade and had many embodied skills, their knowledge was not emplaced with regard to the rainy climate and riverscapes, and many drowned in storms on the lower Columbia. On the exposure of voyageurs to weather while paddling, see for instance Samuel Parker, Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains (Minneapolis: Ross & Haines, 1967): 156. On drownings, of which there were at least sixty-eight among HBC servants before 1846, see Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains 62. 157 movements they kept the canoe steady, so that we got safe to shore without another upset.”280 The Chinooks also found it necessary to rescue another group of whites, who had noticed the incident from across the water and been quickly sent out from the Tonquin to rescue Ross’s party. Ross later wrote that among the crew, “it was supposed, from the skilful manner in which [the Chinooks] acted afterwards, that the sordid rascals had upset us wilfully, in order to claim the merit of having saved us, and therewith a double recompense for their trip.” Given the many other ways in which the Chinooks craftily used their skills and emplaced knowledge to try gaining an upper hand in trade and social relations with the Astor party, often successfully, this speculation should be taken seriously rather than remanded as prejudicial.281 Throughout all of these sounding-taking and site-scouting expeditions, the bulk of the Astor party was stuck on the water aboard the Tonquin for a period of about three weeks.282 Although anchored and far safer than the small longboats that sank on sounding expeditions, the ship was hardly a comfortable place to sleep and live in rain and rough waves: the crew were not eager to prolong the damp claustrophobia of their long voyage down and up the coastline of the Americas. Yet the dangers of local rainstorms created an atmosphere of caution among the rank- 280 Ross, Adventures, 85-87 281 Ross, Adventures, 86-87. Other examples include parlaying the harsh winter of 1812-1813 into an opportunity to raise food prices (genuine hardship among the Chinook was also a factor), and spinning yarns about the looming depredations of other Indigenous groups upon the Astorians in order to strengthen Chinook ties to the Astorians. For some explanation see Whaley, Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee, 3-70. 282 Some parties were sent ashore on the northern bank of the river during parts of the day to cut firewood, gather water, and so forth, but spent the night aboard the ship. No shelters were ordered to be built ashore at this time, despite Captain Thorn’s impatience. Jones, Annals, 7-9, James Ronda, Astoria & Empire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993): 197 claims all men were encamped ashore by April 1; this is a misreading. McDougall’s notes in the headquarters log explicitly refer to parties “going ashore” each morning to work on land during the day, implying that they slept on the Tonquin and that many remained aboard the ship all day until the Tonquin moored near Point George on April 16. 158 and-file, who wanted to tread lightly and wait out the inclement weather. Forced against this course by Thorn and other leaders of the expedition, the mood was somber. Franchere wrote of the eight deaths at the bar that “In the course of so long a voyage, the habit of seeing each other every day, living in the same quarters, busy with the same duties, and facing the same dangers, had formed among all the passengers a connection that could not be broken — above all in a manner so sad and so unexpected.” He noted that two of the dead were young men, perhaps eighteen or twenty, who had been personally entrusted to Captain Thorn by their parents as trainees in the trade. Franchere dryly remarked in his narrative that “this ocean is not always pacific.”283 On April 11, a site for the fort was at last chosen. The site lay along a peninsula on the south bank of the Columbia River — now the downtown of the settler city of Astoria — and the bulk of the expedition was sent ahead to assemble axes and begin clearing the forest.284 It was with Gabriel Franchere’s first landing at Point George that the first kernels of climatic exceptionalism germinated in the Northwest. Coming ashore to remove underbrush and tree stumps so that the Tonquin could dock and site-clearing could begin in earnest, Franchere remembered being enchanted by the arrival of a warm, sunny day along the Columbia estuary, writing that “Springtime, usually so tardy in this latitude, was already far advanced. Leaves were beginning to appear and the earth was clothing itself with verdure. The weather was superb and all nature smiled. We imagined ourselves to be in an earthly paradise — the forests looked like pleasant groves, the leaves like brilliant flowers.” Astutely, in an observation that encapsulates so many of the problems of relativism and memory that in large part created the historiographical myth of a carefree 283 Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 40-42. This unwittingly echoed the sentiments and wordplay expressed five years earlier by William Clark, see Clark, JLCE: 6: 104. 284 Jones, Annals, 9. The Tonquin moored nearby on April 16 after a period of preparation. Later on, McDougall considered moving the fort to Tongue Point, in part because the ground there “is less muddy in the rainy season.” This ultimately did not happen due to logistical issues. See Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 99. 159 Northwest climate, Franchere added that “Without doubt, the pleasure of knowing that we had reached the end of our voyage, free from the ship, made things appear even more beautiful than they really were.”285 Franchere’s idealism was soon dispelled, as the actual process of site-clearing was rain- soaked. Upon debarking, everyone immediately joined the arduous task of carving out enough space to construct the fort, which was to be established in an area “studded with gigantic trees of almost incredible size, many of them measuring fifty feet in girth.” A fifty-foot girth may sound too round and fantastical a number, but the girthiest known still-living Western Redcedar has a circumference of about 61 feet. Prior to the clear-cutting of the Northwest’s old-growth forests, much of the region was blanketed in forests containing many individual trees of such massive size — and greater. These coastal giants benefitted from the incessant rainfall of the area and reliable summertime sunshine, having evolved to grow to such sizes only as a result of the favorable climate. The largest of trees likely ranged between 200-400 feet tall.286 Almost all hands among the Astorians were put to work clearing these rainforest giants and the dense underbrush from sunrise until sunset; many of the men had never handled an axe before. According to Ross, four men were assigned to each tree, which were scaffolded at about ten feet off the ground and then chopped-away at continuously, often taking two days or more to completely fell. Ross wrote that “there is an art in felling a tree… but unfortunately none of us had learned that art.” Hours were spent debating what direction a tree would fall in and how best to complete the task without flattening anybody, yet “at last, when all were assembled to witness the fall, how often 285 Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 46 286 Ross, Adventures, 89. See for instance Carl E. Fiedler and Stephen F. Arno, Douglas Fir: The Story of the West’s Most Remarkable Tree (Seattle: Mountaineers Books, 2020); Ruth Tittensor, Shades of Green: An Environmental and Cultural History of Sitka Spruce, (Oxford: Windgather Press, 2016); and Stewart, Cedar. Alders, hemlocks, and maples were much smaller, but still grew to impressive sizes relative to forests on much of the rest of the continent. 160 were we disappointed! the tree would still stand erect, bidding defiance to our efforts.” When they finally toppled a tree, the thickness of the forest often sent it nestling together in the crown of another, with multiple trees sometimes hanging together and necessitating further work to actually send them to the ground. Roots and stumps were removed using gunpowder detonations, the remnants of each colossus taking several days to extricate.287 All of this work continued for two months, with “scarcely yet an acre of ground cleared” by mid-May.288 McDougall recorded that it rained for seventeen of the thirty-one days between the beginning of site-clearing on April 16 and the May 16 erection of the fort’s sixty-by-twenty-five foot storehouse on what little land had been denuded at that point.289 During the process of site- clearing, the rain muddied the forest floor and, alongside saturated blankets of moss, made every log a slipping hazard. It also likely complicated the task of detonating stumps; if the gunpowder was dry and the rainfall only paced at a sprinkle, intercepted partially by the canopy above, the task was quite doable, if still dampened. If there was a heavy rainstorm, however, or the gunpowder was exposed to the wet, then such work was likely delayed. Furthermore, in the course of site-clearing two men were wounded by falling trees; although no details are given in any of the first-hand accounts, it is quite probable that their injuries were a result of wielding axes in wet, rainy conditions, where a foot could easily give way or a slippery axe handle could easily slide out of one’s hand in the course of repetitive swinging.290 The wet ground made digging somewhat easier, 287 Ross, Adventures, 90-92. A smaller contingent of men began building a frame for a small river-navigation ship, to be called the Dolly, and a frame for the fort’s storehouse. Ronda, Astoria & Empire, 200-201 describes some of these site-clearing issues in detail. 288 Ross, Adventures, 92. Ross claims two months, while McDougall’s entries indicate closer to one month. It is likely that men were tasked with further clearing after the storehouse itself was erected in mid-May, and McDougall simply does not explicitly single them out. 289 Tabulation based on McDougall’s entries in Jones, Annals, 11-16. 290 Ross, Adventures, 89-94. There are no explicit records of wet gunpowder in this particular period of time, but, given that such issues arose later in the year after the completion of the fort, it is reasonable to presume powder sometimes got wet earlier, without the protection of the fort. 161 but also made slipping and falling more likely and probably exposed men’s feet to puddled rainwater in especially muddy areas. Although the summer of 1811 was a wet one, which often necessitated frequent breaks from work to wait out showers, the party was able to make progress constructing the fort and, learning a lesson that the Corps of Discovery had not, quickly adopted the Indigenous practice of intentionally using cedar bark as a waterproof roofing material (Figure 2.3). They found, however, that much of Fort Astoria was still structurally susceptible to the influences of rainfall. McDougall’s entry in the headquarters log on July 9, 1811, notes that after a mere near-four months of living at Fort Astoria “The wet & disagreeable weather that prevailed this some time back [has] retarded the buildings considerably,” with the warmer temperatures of summer likely accelerating the process of rot.291 The high humidity of the coast prevailed for most of the season, too, meaning there was little chance for structures to dry out considerably between showers. Winter brought cooler temperatures, but the incessant rains and moderate temperatures offered the wooden fort no respite from continual decay. Repairs and maintenance were constant. Part of this may have been the result of poor choices of construction wood: while Redcedar and Douglas-fir have good rot resistance, Western Hemlock is very susceptible to moisture-rich fungal decay.292 Perhaps in part due to the contemporaneous lack of botanical knowledge of the region, no notes exist in the historical record specifying the precise species of trees used to construct the bulk of Fort Astoria. Traders generally described new species of trees in relation to what they were familiar with elsewhere, resulting in many species being noted generally as a “fir” or “pine” based on superficial appearances. Lewis Robert Stuart also complained about wet gunpowder in 1812, see Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains, 100-101. 291 Jones, Annals, 17, 32. 292 USDA Forest Products Laboratory, “Wood Products Handbook,” 14-15. 1 6 2 Figure 2.3, drawing of Fort Astoria in 1813. Note the row of cannons facing the water; the small potato garden; and the fact that the fort is located in a relatively small clearing, with no other forest cover eliminated except that necessary for a building plot. Sketch by S.C. Avery, located in the first English printing of Franchere's narrative, translated from the French and printed by J.V. Huntington in 1851 in New York. The original French printing was published in 1819. 163 and Clark also followed this pattern, though with detailed physical descriptions that better allow some retrospective identification. Only in the 1820s would white botanists such as David Douglas and Thomas Nuttall begin to construct more precise Western taxonomies of the region’s plantspecies, struggling all the while to preserve specimens in the damp climate.293 It is known for certain that whole logs were used to construct Fort Clatsop, as no milling facilities existed, and the difficulty of working with massive old-growth species would have made smaller species like Western Hemlock more appealing on a practical basis. If Fort Astoria was largely built using local species with poor rot resistance, and without any protective coating, it was no wonder that within several months there was noticeable deterioration. Everyday encounters with the rains of the Northwest Coast were serious matters. If a trader or trapper got soaked because of improper clothing, poor canoe paddling skills, or the insistence of an administrator that they carry out a particular task even in inclement weather, they risked getting saturated, chilled, and eventually rendered unable to function normally until they got dry, which was not always easy and in some cases impossible. In part because of constant exposure to the weather-world, regular sickness quickly became a part of life at Fort Astoria. Although temperatures at the fort were relatively mild year-round, the constant rain and wet seeped into the clothes, bedding, and labor of the Astorians; it was usual for at least a handful of men to be unwell throughout the year, sometimes up to seven or eight. For a fort-based workforce that varied between twenty to thirty, this was a significant inconvenience. Ross and McDougall both attributed some of 293 See David Douglas, Journal Kept by David Douglas During His Travels in North America, 1823-1827 (London: William Wesley & Son, 1914); Robert D. Clark, “The Strange Case of Oregon's Spring Beauty: Discovery, Abduction, Rescue, Identity,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 96, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 80-97, esp. 86-87. On the role of plant collection in imperialism and scientific development, see for instance Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), and Clare Hickman, The Doctor's Garden: Medicine, Science, and Horticulture in Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021) 164 this sickness to the high humidity, incessant rain, and pervasive dampness of the coast.294 Rheumatic pains were particularly common, as were “cholics and sstiches,” each of which McDougall attributed to the “late wet weather we [suppose?] to be the cause of so many being unwell.”295 There were also general colds and fevers, some of which were doubtlessly made worse by excessive exposure to cool, wet weather; mild though the temperatures may have been, the reality of conducting laborious tasks in a saturated outdoor environment while wearing clothes that got wet throughout the day’s business meant that the men’s bodies were colder than the air temperatures might have suggested. It was being wet that made them cold; coastal wind chills certainly did not help. Although they had the supplies and the indoor space necessary to dry out their articles by a fire, the Astor party were “without tents or shelter” during the spring of 1811, so keen was the focus on constructing the fort and so meager the expedition’s initial provisioning.296 In contrast to the Corps of Discovery’s mostly self-sufficient winter stopover, Ross wrote that throughout Fort Astoria’s operations “we had to depend at all times on the success or good-will of the natives for our daily supply, which was far from being regular,” and the limited diet that they suffered as a result of their poor stores and inability to gather a diverse array of foodstuffs doubtlessly left them weaker and less able to fight off illnesses. Everyone was made worse off too, of course, by the lack 294 Ross, Adventures, 92; Jones, Annals, 26, 42-48, 67, among other entries. In November of 1812, the “greater part” of the men were idle with colds after a period of particularly cold, rainy weather. 295 Jones, Annals, 26. “Cholics and sstitches” refer to sharp abdominal pains, often the result of intense physical activity. Whether medically correlated with dampness and rain or not, the fact that the Astorians perceived rainfall and dampness as sickening, unhealthy attributes of space and climate provides a window into how they went about their daily routines and understood their environment. 296 Ross, Adventures, 92 165 of a trained medic: Astor had not hired one to be sent along with the party, much to the belated anger of the men.297 Not all the Astorians were equally susceptible to rain and damp-related sicknesses. A common theme throughout the first-hand accounts from Fort Astoria is the vulnerability of the Hawaiians, who Ross and McDougall describe as particularly sensitive to the cool, wet weather of the Northwest Coast. In November of 1812, for instance, McDougall wrote that “Nearly all the Sandwich Islanders are laid up on account of the continual Wet & damp weather that now prevails.” Although the eastern, windward parts of the Hawaiian islands are extraordinarily wet even at lower elevations, many of the pre-colonial population centers lay in the drier, sunnier, leeward rain shadows on the western side of the islands. Higher-elevation leeward areas that do receive relatively abundant rainfall were only intermittently visited and tend to experience fewer days per year of precipitation — and the rain is usually warm. The prolonged cloud-cover, cool humidity, and incessant cool-to-cold drizzle of the Northwest Coast was doubtlessly a stark adjustment for many of the Hawaiians, more so than for the English, Scottish, and French-Canadians who had some experience living in more northerly and cooler climes. At the very least, Ross and McDougall’s comments reflect a sense among the whites that the humid atmosphere was unhealthy; that people were susceptible to such environmental influence; and that geographical or ethnic differences might be reflected in reactions to and suitability for a given climate.298 297 Ross, Adventures, 92; Ronda, Astoria & Empire, 202 298 Jones, Annals, 42-48, 67, 134; Ross, Adventures, 92; and Jackson and Keith, The Fur Trade Gamble 165. The definitive examination of Hawaiians in the early imperial and settler-colonial Pacific Northwest is Barman and Watson, Leaving Paradise. For a broader look at Hawaiians as travelers, explorers and laborers in the imperial spheres of the Pacific, see David A. Chang, The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); and Gregory Rosenthal, Beyond Hawai’i: Native Labor in the Pacific World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018). 166 Opposite the drenched Hawaiians was Chief Factor Duncan McDougall. Alexander Ross was particularly fervent in his denouncement of Astor for the privation of the Astorians during this time period, and even more so of McDougall, “the great pasha,” who he described as “the most ignorant of all [of us]” and claimed “overlooked” the bare necessities of the rank-and-file. It is also Ross who provides perhaps the clearest evidence that McDougall’s journal, the official headquarters log of Fort Astoria, underestimates and downplays the day-to-day sufferings of the laymen. Ross claimed that during the site-clearing, “one-half of the party, on an average, were constantly on the sick list,” which would imply a total of about fifteen sick, whereas McDougall’s official log mentions only four to six sick at a given time during the spring of 1811. Yet Ross also claims that McDougall himself “was served in state,” having set aside a sizable portion of the group’s provisions for himself, and was “a man more interested in personal comfort than the health of his hardworking employees.”299 Clerk Alfred Seton concurred that McDougall was “guilty of hiding away a certain quantity, so that it might be kept from his partners, & at the same time accept[ed] a share in the remainder.”300 Excepting his participation in the scouting party that identified a site for Fort Astoria, McDougall’s responsibilities as leader of the Astorians tended towards the administrative and clerical, with little record of him participating in mundane, laborious tasks of construction and maintenance. His headquarters log tends to be focused on progress, commerce, and recordkeeping, with few personal reflections or vivid descriptions of the day-to-day lives and concerns of the men under his command. Although he mentions rainfall as a matter of daily weather reporting and as an obstacle to daily goings-on, McDougall’s headquarters log entries never mention personal disgust with the wet climate. It is 299 Ross, Adventures, 90-92 300 Robert F. Jones, ed. Astorian Adventure: The Journal of Alfred Seton, 1811-15 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993): 132. Seton also calls McDougall a “compound of all the mean & petty passions that generally disgrace the lowest of animals.” 167 unlikely he enjoyed the rains, but he was certainly insulated from working in them on a daily basis and enjoyed considerably more material comforts than the rank-and-file. Chasing Pigs and Trapping Beavers: The Astorians in Winter The “dark and dismal” winters at Fort Astoria were undoubtedly the hardest season of the year for the rank-and-file. In 1811, the rains onset in mid-October and immediately flooded the root cellar, where the Astorians had been storing their gunpowder. Men were put to work hauling water out of the cellar, making a drain on the exterior of the fort, and constructing gutters to try and avoid a repeat of this incident, but in mid-November the powder was once again found damp. After that, it was moved upstairs and covered with oilcloths and wool blankets.301 For men who were consistently on alert over the possibility of antagonistic natives, wet gunpowder was not a mere inconvenience: it was a life-threatening problem that removed their primary line of defense against attack. Rain and fog thus moldered the mind and perpetuated a pervasive atmosphere of fear, foreboding, psychological tumult, and deep gloom. Rain threatened to seep into the fort, produced wet clothes that necessitated continual drying, and contributed to a general atmosphere of anxiety and gloom over dwindling provisions, the presence of Indigenous populations, and isolation from the rest of the world. Despite Chief Comcomly’s assurances that he would protect them, Ross wrote that the men were very fearful of hostile natives, a fear crystalized in the context of cloudy skies, steady rainfall, fog, and the dim pall of the darkened rainforest floor. Both before and after the completion of fortifications, the rainforest and the surrounding coast were mapped as a geography of fear by the Astorians. Sounds were muffled by the incessant rainfall and visibility was low in the cloudy, foggy rainforest, and 301 Jones, Annals, 52, 59. Oilcloths, composed of cotton fabric coated in linseed oil, were the best rainproofing available at the time, but were not exceptionally durable to continued exposure. 168 men were often distracted by random noises. Sometimes this was out of well-earned caution — three men were killed during the process of site-clearing by Natives — and sometimes it stemmed from paranoia in the face of the unknown. While vistas of the Northwest Coast today evoke Tolkienesque awe at fantastical foggy rainforests and shorelines, the Astorians largely saw the region as a “dreary & savage” land, a “miserable country” devoid of civilization; these negative impressions were reciprocal with prejudicial views of the Natives who were so “well-suited” to life on the raincoast.302 This dank, dark anxiety and sense of displaced alienation doubtlessly informed their views of and interactions with local Indigenous peoples: men on edge were more likely to snap to violence. Winter tasks were disproportionately of the indoor variety: covered work spaces had been set aside for tasks such as carpentry, for instance. But the interior of Fort Astoria was dim, humid, and gloomy nonetheless, having been constructed for utility rather than comfort. Tightly hewn timbers and dense clay and moss chinking helped minimize the amount of rain that seeped in, but also blocked out what little sunlight peeked through the clouds. Outdoor labor was still unavoidable — brush-clearing, timber-hauling, woodcutting, etc — and at least some of the men traded for cedar hats to protect themselves better from the elements, but continued to wear Western garments on the rest of their bodies.303 Axe injuries were common, and many were likely related to the rainy, wet environment.304 302 Ross, Adventures, 89-94. Descriptions of gloomy moods appear throughout Ross, Franchere, and McDougall’s accounts. “Dreary and savage” and “miserable country” come from Alfred Seton in Jones, Astorian Adventure 89-91. Seton also clarifies that the Natives who killed the men were not Chinook but belonged to some other group. On geographies of fear, see Joshua Reid, The Sea is My Country, 53-80 303 Jones, Annals, 77 304 Jones, Annals, 90. 169 The fort’s goats and pigs were allowed to roam free within a short distance of the fortifications and were able to largely subsist off of the surrounding understory even during the winter as a result of the mild temperatures. Sometimes, however, they had to be chased down and brought back to camp during wet periods. This was a muddy, unpleasant task to be sure, and one that evokes rather risible images of wet, disheveled Astorians running after pigs in the rainforest. Anyone who has ever chased a pig before would imagine that they fell flat and filthy on their face a fair number of times. Winters at Astoria were largely spent preparing for summer, and the dry days of summer were largely spent preparing for the doldrums of winter. Wood was burnt at the coal-pits to create charcoal, stumps were cleared using controlled burns, cedar shingles were made and traded for, roofs were repaired, boat seams and structures were caulked with moss and mud, and furs were obtained from the natives and pressed into packages for transport away from the Northwest Coast. The onset of the winter rains often dictated an end to certain varieties of work, such as the creation of charcoal — whereas the Chinooks were capable of building large outdoor fires even in winter rainstorms, the Astorians struggled with similar feats.305 Rainy weather often prevented canoe excursions for hunting or trading, and water continued to leak into the cellar and dampen or rot some of the items stored there.306 Throughout all of this, the Astorians struggled to adequately feed themselves. Their provision shipments were few and far between, and the Chinooks, who traditionally stockpiled food for the winter and provided much of the fort’s sustenance during the spring, summer, and fall, prioritized their own wellbeing over charity to the oft-hapless whites.307 The Astorians failed to do 305 For one observation on Native fires, see Jones, Annals, 171. On the stoppage of work, see for instance Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 45 306 Jones, Annals, 168, 180. 307 Jones, Annals, 61, 69-70. 170 their own stockpiling of local food resources, and instead attempted to hunt for game during the winter. Unfortunately, the incessant rainfall made hunting far more difficult. Visibility was obscured, tracks were washed away, trails were slippery, sounds were drowned out by the rain, the dim understory obscured slight movements, and animals were often sheltering rather than roaming about.308 The constant damp also interfered with the gunpowder, which sometimes failed to discharge in the field and necessitated constant attempts to keep arms in order.309 Come mid- November of 1811, Franchere and a hunting party found themselves “half-frozen and exhausted” after getting lost in the dim, dark rainforest during a torrential downpour, and spent several nights unable to start a fire in the wet, nor erect a shelter against the weather-world.310 Like the Corps of Discovery, the Astorians found that the meat they did manage to kill easily spoiled in the damp, mild climate; yet the humidity made air-drying meat and saltmaking by evaporation nearly impossible during much of the year, and created a “scarcity of dry wood” for use in boiling sea water and smoking meat.311 Winter thus often necessitated a reduction in rations from three meals a day to two or even only one, the bulk of which was fish saved from trading with the Chinook — so much fish. At various junctures some men suffered scurvy as a result of their undiversified diet; the wet weather then worsened the issue, as Vitamin C is depleted faster when the body is cool or cold.312 The soil at Fort Astoria was poor, little in area, and was used only for 308 Jones, Annals, 93; Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 72. 309 Washington Irving, Astoria (Portland: Binsford & Mort, 1967, orig. 1836): 295. 310 Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 46, 58-63. 311 Jones, Annals, 75, 177; Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 100. The men tried to adopt Native methods of drying salmon, but their inexperience and the wet climate hindered them. Jones, 202. The most efficient Indigenous method of curing fish and meat in much of the Pacific Northwest was wind-drying during the summer, with lower-fat content fish often dried upriver in less rainy areas and traded downriver. Other methods included smoking, salting, and sun-drying. Methods were variable depending upon the season, the fish, and the locale. 312 Jones, Annals, 83-84, 150-51, 158; Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 73-75. On scurvy and cold weather, see Anitra C. Carr and Sam Rowe, “Factors Affecting Vitamin C Status and Prevalence of Deficiency: A Global Health Perspective,” Nutrients 12, no. 7 (June 2020): 5. 171 growing small amounts of potatoes, radishes, peas, and carrots, which did not compensate for a wholesale dearth of calories and slim diet.313 Provision shortages sometimes necessitated halting work. No men starved to death, but deficient nutrition made them more susceptible to general illness and contributed to a poor quality of life.314 In part to defray the number of mouths it was necessary to feed at Fort Astoria, McDougall sent several small parties southeast to establish winter quarters and trap furs in the Willamette Valley. They were the first Europeans to actually venture up the Willamette River, and their initial impressions of the valley in March of 1812 were positive. Both Seton and Franchere reported that the valley was rich in deer, elk, and beaver, and the spring weather less rainy than that of the coast.315 The heart of the valley was a fertile parkland, Native burning practices having created interspersed forests and prairies rich in game habitat. When he revisited the area in August of 1813, Seton was enchanted by the verdancy of the rolling hills and prairies, interspersed with groves of oak trees and coniferous forest. He wrote that “If in the course of events, a settlement should be undertaken in this country; this river is (in my opinion) the most eligible place — as the land is good and spots large enough for farms, all ready cleared, are common.” After having complained earlier in the year about “this miserable country,” 313 Jones, Annals, 13, 87; George Simpson, Fur Trade and Empire: George Simpson's Journal, 1824-1825, ed. Frederick Merk (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, second edition, 1968): 105 314 Keith and Jackson have characterized c. 1813 Astoria “overstaffed” and claimed that many men were idle in the winter, see The Fur Trade Gamble, 82-84. On the contrary, there was much work to be done, but poor hunting and food preservation — both related to incessant rainfall — necessitated ordering most men to idle. See Jones, Annals, 148. There were too many mouths to feed at Fort Astoria, as a result of poor provisioning, the extra resources necessitated by the return of parties from the interior, and the inability of the Astorians to adapt to the coastal environment and climate. Nowhere do McDougall or others claim that there was not work to be done. 315 Jones, Astorian Adventure, 121; Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 75 172 Seton was momentarily made wistful on August 29th by “A Beautiful clear day, with a serene sky, and gentle breeze,” a bucolic interstice in his career with the PFC that he noted: “forcibly recall[ed] to my recollection times of yore, when I used to mount my Horse in company with Edward or some other friends & gaily gallop to either my Uncle Ogden’s & Uncle Martins or to my Aunt Farquhar… where there I used to be welcomed by the smiles of friendship & love, & pass my Sunday as happy as happy could be.”316 But the summertime sunshine was fleeting, Seton recognized, and he placed the bulk of his time along the Northwest Coast in great contrast to this nostalgic musing. On the whole, he thought himself “In the wild woods in a savage country in a savage dress, accompanied by Mortals but one degree above the brute creation, whose whims & fancies it is necessary to consult to lead any thing of a quiet life; where friendship & love are names never heard of, in short where one lives more like a Brute than a Christian, wandering about from place to place in search of a miserable existence.” Of going home, he said he spoke for his fellows when he could not “say how anxiously that time is looked for, how each day is counted as it brings us so much nearer the time.”317 Even in the sunshine, the rain was still on his mind. He was only twenty years old. Other summer journeys upriver from Fort Astoria also produced more favorable remarks on the climate of Northwest. Franchere reported in 1811 that a scouting party sent up to the Okanogan Valley on the eastern side of the Cascades had favorable opinions of the summertime weather, which was warm and dry.318 David Thompson, a British-Canadian surveyor and North 316 Jones, Astorian Adventure, 121-23. These were landscapes created by Indigenous burning practices, see Robert Boyd, ed. Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2022). 317 Jones, Astorian Adventure, 121-123. Seton refers to wearing “savage dress,” implying that at least some of the Astorians donned leathers. This was the result of the scarcity of resupply runs, the poor quality of provisioned goods, and the wearing-out of their flannel clothing through arduous labor. One might be tempted to think Seton refers to the imperial adoption of cedar garments, but there are no mentions of such an adoption and ample evidence that traders continually crafted leather clothing instead. 318 Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 55. 173 West Company trapper who mapped much of the Columbia River drainage, descended the river to Fort Astoria in July 1811 — but he encountered little inclement weather outside of a few foggy mornings, and made no subjective remarks on the climate either east or west of the Cascades.319 In part out of suspicion regarding Thompson’s allegiances, an Astorian scouting expedition accompanied him back upriver; Alexander Ross was among them, and he remarked many years later that as they departed the juncture of the Columbia and Willamette River, “the whole country on either side of the river, as far as the eye could reach, presented a dense, gloomy forest. We found, however, a marked improvement in the climate. Here the air is dry and agreeable. Fogs, mists, damp and rainy weather, ceased after we had passed the Wallamitte.” Ross noted elsewhere in his narrative that the summertime climate of the Willamette was “salubrious and dry… sufficiently intense to ripen every grain in a short time,” although the winter brought rain “almost incessantly from the beginning of November till April, and the country in other respects is gloomy and forbidding.” It is important to note that Ross’s narrative was written in 1849, at the height of the first wave of emigration to Oregon, and so his comments reflect a distance of several decades from his actual experiences in the region and, especially in his remark about ripening grain, an interest in selling books and perhaps promoting parts of the region for settlement. His comments nonetheless indicate a clear and well-remembered dislike of the rainforests, the coastal climate, and the wintertime rains that fall west of the Cascades, but also a budding fondness for the brief, dry, mild summers of the intermontane zone.320 When Seton and others visited the Willamette Valley in the middle of winter to trap furs, however, exposure to the rains dampened spirits no less than they did on the coast. Seton lamented 319 See David Thompson, Columbia Journals: Bicentennial Edition, ed. Barbara Belyea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007): 142-160. 320 Ross, Adventures, 100-101, 107-109. 174 that there was “one continual sheet of rain in this country” between October and May, and noted that because of poor provisioning the party started up the Willamette in February “with nothing to shelter ourselves from the weater but our blankets, [we] suffer[ed] from hunger, from fatigue & from weather.”321 They were able to construct a small dwelling to keep out the weather, but, as their mission involved trapping furs and collecting and preparing venison to bring back to Astoria, they had to spend large amounts of time exposed to the rains with only oilcloths to protect them.322 A paucity of detailed accounts from west of the Cascades makes it difficult to reconstruct the exact conditions under which beaver trapping took place either for Indigenous or European trappers, but ethological research shows that beavers generally spend more time on land during periods of heavier precipitation. This is because precipitation washes away scents and softens sounds, both reducing the efficiency of predators and eliminating their smells from a given area; beavers thus associate rainfall with reduced predation risks.323 Chasing beavers around in the water would have had little success and entailed exposure to severe cold; trappers instead pursued them on land or lay steel-spring traps, and probably had better luck doing so during rainy weather when beavers were less alert. That humans hunt largely using sight instead of smell differentiates them from most predators and enables them to take advantage of rainy conditions provided they have proper clothing; the Willamette trappers had minimal protection, however, and would have been rather exposed to the rainy weather-world. 321 Ross, 112. 322 Jones, Annals, 96. McDougall also mentions that some men were put to work at Fort Astoria making oilcloths, but it is unknown if the Willamette trapping parties were allotted any. If Seton is to be believed, they were not. 323 Laura Bartra Cabre, Martin Mayer, Sam Steyaert, Frank Rosell, “Beaver (Castor fiber) activity and spatial movement in response to light and weather conditions.” Mammalian Biology, 100 (2020): 261-271. Beaver hunting methods are much better documented elsewhere in North America, in climes that see much more snow and ice in the winter and far less rainfall. 175 In part because of the challenges posed by the Willamette Valley’s rainy winters and their insufficient dress, the Astorians’ intermontane ventures had only marginal success, bringing back “thirty-two bales [of venison]” and about 775 beaver furs in the spring of 1813.324 They could not, however, make up for systemic provisioning and preservation problems at Fort Astoria. Furthermore, peltries from the Willamette Valley and coastal areas were of poor quality compared to those caught east of the Cascades: temperate rainfall, no matter how incessant, did not season furs as well as harsh cold and snow. Far more peltries were acquired east of the mountains, and most were caught by Indigenous trappers.325 Between the middling fur returns, struggles to find food, and a sense of alienation and fear from the Northwest Coast’s rainy climate and landscapes, there were few occasions for celebration at Fort Astoria. Although work was always to be done, it was monotonous and, in Seton’s words, “There [was] nothing doing [t]here worth mentioning.”326 There was little sense of home among the men, nor any feeling that they were doing meaningful work to improve their personal station or bring ‘civilization’ to the Northwest Coast. Seton in particular thought that the environment and climate of the Northwest Coast broke down a man’s character, calling it a place “where one lives more like a Brute than a Christian, wandering about from place to place in search of a miserable 324 Quote from Fred S. Perrine, “Early Days on the Willamette,” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, 25, no. 4 (Dec. 1924): 306; number of furs drawn from J. Neilson Barry, “Site of Wallace House, 1812-1814: One Mile from Salem,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 42, no. 3 (Sep., 1941): 205-207. 325 On fur quality geography, see Jackson and Keith, The Fur Trade Gamble, 159; Merk, Fur Trade and Empire, 176, 191; Jones, Astorian Adventure, 107; Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains 11, 22, 35, 67, 70, 82, 103. Between 1814-1821, the PFC’s successor, the NWC, reported total fur returns of 36,324 from the Fort Astoria (renamed Fort George) trade, of which 64% were from Indigenous trade; in no year did company trappers return more furs than Indigenous trappers; see Jackson and Keith, The Fur Trade Gamble, 308. It is important to note that totals listed as caught by “trappers” probably included furs trapped by freemen, many of whom had taken Indigenous wives and thus procured furs weighted with the emplaced knowledge of Indigenous women and kin. 326 Jones, Astorian Adventure, 125. 176 existence,” and wrote in his melancholy that “friendship & love are names never heard of.”327 Men frequently attempted to distract themselves from the sodden reality of day-to-day life by soliciting sex from Clatsop women; they then sometimes had to manage venereal diseases, mainly syphilis. Liquor was rationed out on a daily basis to the Astorians and rowdy demands for extra rounds were frequently made, but intoxication combined with general winter gloom and the claustrophobia of prolonged coexistence in such small quarters also frayed tempers, leading to threats and physical altercations. Drinking was especially heavy on winter holidays or prior to the departure of trapping parties, and often delayed progress for one or two days afterwards. In McDougall’s telling, the men “kept up New Year at too high a rate.”328 Yet the close quarters of the fort sometimes created camaraderie, and the rains that often drove people inside created opportunities for cross-cultural socializing. The historian Daniel Laxer notes that the wider North American fur trade was full of rich soundscapes, and the Northwest Coast was no exception. Franchere wrote that “In the intervals between our daily duties we enjoyed music and reading, having some instruments and a good library [for those who were literate]. Otherwise we should have passed our time rather sadly during this rainy season, in the midst of the deep mud that surrounded us and made the pleasure of a stroll impossible.”329 A paucity of sources from the region prevents too many vivid details and the company’s strict social hierarchies informed interactions between officers and laborers, but one might imagine the Scotsmen, Englishmen, far-flung Hawai’ians, and French-Canadians of the PFC gathered around in one of the 327 Jones, Astorian Adventure, 121. This was not a universal sentiment, of course. Jean Barman has noted in French Canadians that many French-Canadian employees of the HBC and other fur enterprises found camaraderie amongst each other; Seton’s identity as a young American with no familial ties to the fur trade or experience in remote areas may have isolated him somewhat. 328 Jones, Annals, 141-142, 151, 153; Ronda, Astoria & Empire, 215. 329 Franchere, Adventure at Astoria, 73. Franchere also notes that he felt close bonds with his fellow Astorians, see Franchere 42. 177 bunkhouses listening to someone play the violin or the fiddle as the rains pitter-pattered upon the roof. Some listened quietly; others were raucous and drunk. Perhaps a voyageur’s tune lilted through the room, or a melody was sung, rain-remembered from a clouded-over childhood in the Hebrides; and maybe, when some of the Chinook or Clatsop visited and people were in good spirits, there was dancing. Such soundscapes could exist in any weather and any season, but the winter rains of the Northwest Coast both drove people indoors and sonically contextualized indoor activities. A great cause of gloom and fear and sorrow, then, also catalyzed cheerful, memorable moments among the traders; every now and then, it revived some of their worn-out joys.330 Even after the Pacific Fur Company’s sale to the North West Company, the fur returns of the lower Columbia region lagged far behind the returns of the interior. Indigenous trappers continued to contribute the majority of pelts in most years, and the dank, rainy climate contributed to the region’s poor, soggy reputation among company men. Alfred Seton became “lonesome & unemployed” after the PFC’s dissolution, and refused an offer to join the North West Company on account of low pay and a dislike of the climate. As he waited for a boat back to New York he tagged along with an NWC party and helped establish a trading post in the Willamette Valley in the winter of 1813-14; during this time, he claimed with obvious sarcasm that the valley was a “paradise.” Provisions under the NWC were no better than those of the PFC, with minimal shelter. Seton 330 Daniel Laxer, Listening to the Fur Trade: Soundways and Music in the British North American Fur Trade, 1760–1840 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022). Laxer hardly touches on the Northwest Coast, but his frame is a fantastic one to consider in a regional context. Maritime fur traders and later overlanders had the opportunity to attend Native potlatches, for instance, and in the warmth of rained-on longhouses, experience the dances, songs, and oral traditions that had cheered and guided Indigenous populations during the rainy winters since time immemorial. Timothy Ingold has critiqued the concept of the soundscape as having outlived its usefulness and become one of many multiplying ‘scapes,’ though I nonetheless deploy the term and the suffix; see Timothy Ingold, “Four objections to the concept of soundscape,” in Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2022, orig. 2011): 168-172. 178 glumly passed the “dismal & gloomy” days, and wrote that he could not “express how Ennuyant (as our Frenchmen call it) it is at this place, how melancholy & slowly the Time lags on. Lying down on our backs with a pipe in our mouths listening to the rain as it pours upon the roof, consumes our days and nights.” Later, in 1835, he published an account of his travels in The American Monthly Magazine. Here, he described winter on the Northwest Coast as the season when one lived “an Indian life” in a “Savage Country” where transient men were not interested in civilizing the rainswept landscape.331 Of the 228 employees sent to Fort Astoria by the Pacific Fur Company between 1811 and 1813, at least 66 died, most of illness or drowning — a fatality rate of 34%.332 Conclusion: Fleeting Sunshine Although the structure of the early overland fur trade differed from that of the maritime fur trade, rainfall and its fluid carvings upon Northwest landscapes continued to shape and challenge imperial ventures. Rainfall proved an encompassing, permeating climatic agent, challenging and hindering the success of the Corps of Discovery and the PFC. The presence of a prolonged rainy season necessitated and drove seasonal rhythms of fur trade labor and commerce, and created asymmetries between whites and coastal Indigenous peoples. Better able to navigate and dwell within the rainy weather-world, the Chinooks had distinct advantages in everyday movement and commercial leverage. Rainfall was thus a mediating force that opened gaps between Native power and imperial power, often in favor of the Natives and their resource-gathering abilities and ability to set prices they deemed favorable. 331 Jones, Astorian Adventure, 129-136, 181. 332 Jackson and Keith, The Fur Trade Gamble, 90. 179 In what became a pattern for the wider Northwest fur trade in the 1820s and 1830s, the functions of supplying, maintaining, and operating Fort Astoria were seasonally oriented by the rainy climate. For the rank-and-file Astorians, the rains permeated and complicated what was already a backbreaking and monotonous employment and became a source of gloom and drear from which many sorely wished to escape. French-Canadians, British, Scottish, and Hawaiian employees alike suffered emotionally and physically from frequent elemental exposure and found fort life a largely purposeless drudgery — a means to earn money, and for most, little else. Days passed onto days, yet the clouds remained stalwart overhead and the showers continued with little interruption; the boughs of the rainforest canopy above dripped a second rain even during these intermissions, and the winds of the Pacific Ocean blew crisp and hard against the exposed clearing in which Fort Astoria had been carved out. Traders distinguished the Willamette Valley from other parts of the region, but during wintertime the intermontane climate was described similarly to that of the coast: a steady drip of chilled misery and an engulfing fog of homesick isolation. Glowing accounts of the intermontane zone in summertime primarily show that the Astorians and later traders viewed the season as a reprieve from the dreary monotony which characterized both their repetitive physical labor and the weather of the long coastal rainy season. Summer was largely a time of cloud-clearing: an opportunity to remember better times and places and await a return to home and family. Early trappers and their employers viewed their presence in the Northwest in ephemeral terms: settlement was not in the cards, and no one planned to live and die there amidst the rain — not yet. 180 CHAPTER THREE “I CANNOT SAY THAT I ADMIRE MUCH THIS COUNTRY:” FUR-TRIMMED IMPERIALISM AND DAY-DRINKING IN THE RAIN, 1821-c. 1840 In 1821, the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company — the two largest fur trading operations in North America, both British — were effectively at war with one another. Fur stocks in the northern interior of Canada were rapidly dwindling, and competition for limited peltries was often violent. The British Crown responded to this situation by forcing the two companies to merge with one another, creating a continental monopoly with deep institutional knowledge and a much greater array of resources at its disposal than any other fur trading enterprise that came before it. The merger between the NWC and the HBC fundamentally transformed the nature of the overland fur trade in the Pacific Northwest, and established the HBC as the de facto government of much of the western half of what is now Canada and the Pacific shore of the United States. With no significant rivals and a pressing commercial need to extend into new trapping territory, the HBC began to deploy more resources into the Columbia District, a vast subdivision that encompassed the HBC’s operations in what are now the colonial jurisdictions of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. American buyers continued to dominate the declining maritime fur trade, but purchases in the overland fur trade in the Pacific Northwest were almost entirely controlled by the HBC. This remained the case for the duration of the overland fur trade, which was largely moribund by the time the Oregon Treaty of 1846 divided imperial claims to the Pacific Northwest between the British and the Americans. The period from 1821 to 1846 saw the establishment of fort-based agriculture, animal husbandry, and a permanent imperial presence in the region in the form of post farms. The establishment of these post farms was meant to free the Pacific Northwest’s fur traders from some 181 of the constraints posed by oceanic food supply chains and diversify the HBC’s resource extraction into global markets for lumber, salmon, and other natural resources. But rainfall deeply challenged the initial establishment of agrarian forts and outposts, and formed a continual obstacle and atmosphere for the duration of the overland fur trade and its provisioning system. Post farms remained dependent, for instance, on outside sources for articles such as shoes, clothing, and farm tools — and the quality of these goods sometimes did not measure up to the travails of the rainy climate. Nor did the climate prove as suitable to post farming as HBC managers postulated in their correspondence and board meetings: crops regularly failed because of excessive rainfall, and livestock frequently died in mud and wet. Even after the emergence of post farming, traders were at least somewhat dependent upon the emplaced expertise of local Indigenous peoples for food, supplies, transportation, and trapping labor, and the seasonal round of the fur trade remained profoundly influenced by the rainy season of the coast and the intermontane zone. Enough was grown and raised at post farms to turn a profit most years, yet this success rested not on the easy gifts of the climate but on the toil of rank-and-file laborers, most of whom were French-Canadians, Hawaiians, or of part-Indigenous ancestry. Barred from career advancement, excluded from the best lodgings at forts, and provided with minimal provisions, many became indebted to the HBC in order to purchase articles as basic as clothing — a necessity if they were to work outside in the rainy season. Even as they enabled the HBC to rake in vast revenues from the sale of beaver pelts and other commodities, laborers were often marginalized, denigrated by HBC elites as lazy, and left exposed to inclement weather. In part because laborers disliked their experiences in the rainy climate, the Pacific Northwest acquired a poor reputation among the company’s servant class. Well into the 1830s, the HBC had no intentions of remaining permanently in the Columbia District: post farms were transient endeavors, the fur trade itself was 182 an extract-and-run operation, and the company sent many of its misbehaving employees to the Northwest Coast as punishment. Rainfall was a major countervailing aspect of place in the eyes of HBC employees: many of their first impressions of the region strike a gloomy, melancholy, unpleasant chord. There are clear separations between the coastal and intermontane experiences with rainfall, and between how rainfall is filtered through the bodily experiences of the layperson as opposed to the commercial interests of the fur trading governors whose missives and pamphlets were oriented towards profits and promotion. Visitors who came to the Northwest in the summer or had personal interest in promoting the trade often experienced or described the region in more favorable terms to their varying audiences, whereas the men who had to clear land, cultivate it, and maintain the forts through the winter were often less sanguine about the climate — and generally left behind fewer primary source records. Yet these rank-and-file employees of the HBC also formed the first permanent Euro- American communities in the Northwest: disallowed from living inside the walls of forts, they created mixed-descent communities in the vicinity of HBC post farms such as Fort Vancouver. Bolstered by kinship relations with Indigenous groups, however, and disillusioned with the fur trade, a small number of French-Canadians left the HBC entirely and settled in the Willamette Valley. They established smallholding farms, creating French-Indian communities that might be considered the first truly settler-colonial spaces in the Pacific Northwest. These communities developed multicultural, metis relationships with rainfall and rain-shaped landscapes, even as the region’s few American travelers continued to find the rainy season a frustrating, undesirable time of year, juxtaposed against a short, idyll summertime. 183 “The Day Has Been Gloomy:” Seasonality, Post Farming, and Servant Life On November 8th, 1824, John McLoughlin arrived at the newly established outpost of Fort Vancouver, on the northern shore of the Columbia River. It was raining. He had been sent there as Chief Factor to oversee the fort’s transformation into the new regional headquarters for the Hudson’s Bay Company’s fur trading operations in the Columbia District (Figure 3.1).333 Selected because of the site’s ample prairie land — the product of millennia-old Indigenous burning practices, and supposedly ideal for transformative Western pasturage and agriculture — Fort Vancouver was to serve as a primary source of provisions for the Columbia District’s many outposts, growing crops and supplying domesticated meat products so as to minimize the need for supply importation. This scheme for efficiency was the brainchild of the HBC’s George Simpson, Governor of Rupert’s Land, who, on a tour through the lower Columbia over the winter of 1824- 1825, wrote in his private journal that the climate near the Fort Vancouver site was “temperate regular and salubrious.” Praising the healthful climate and the fertile potential of the land, Simpson brought back to the HBC’s Board of Governors a story about a mild, equable place where life was relatively easy. He briefly mentioned that it rained continuously from November through March.334 333 Initially, the Columbia District headquarters was to be located at Fort Langley on the mouth of the Fraser River. This decision was abandoned, however, because of the poor navigability of the Fraser canyon area; Fort Langley remained an important agrarian outpost, but Fort Vancouver became the Columbia District’s center of operations. George Simpson, quoted in Merk, Fur Trade and Empire, 73-76. 334 Merk, Fur Trade and Empire, 105. Simpson has been referred to by fur trade historians as “the Little Emperor” for his vast influence over the HBC’s activities, arguably more transformative than that of the company’s Governor-General. His favorable remarks on climate, however, have been taken at face value by some fur trade historians, who have described the coastal climate as mild and easy to farm and live in. See for instance Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains, 152- 153. Mackie largely portrays Fort Vancouver as a place of bounty, quoting an employee who remarked that the table at the fort was often rich and well-stocked with the “produce of the country.” This employee, however, was an Englishman and a clerk whose access to such largesse was not representative of the average servant’s experience. 184 Figure 3.1. The Columbia District, 1843. Reprinted from Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains, 250. 185 John McLoughlin was less enthused. “I cannot say that I admire much this country,” he wrote to his uncle, the noted imperial explorer Simon Fraser, adding that “The climate is very mild but moist and cloudy […] since my arrival on the 8th of Nov[ember] we have not seen one clear sun Shineing day and not ten days without rain.” The man who later became known as the Father of Oregon then told his uncle that he planned to stay in the Columbia District for only five years.335 Throughout his tenure as Chief Factor, which lasted until the early 1840s, he continued to occasionally remark on the difficulties and inconveniences that the climate posed to everyday life and commercial operations at Fort Vancouver and other HBC outposts west of the Cascades. When McLoughlin visited the Willamette Valley for the first time in the summer of 1832, however, he called it “the finest country I have seen.”336 Imperial interests in the Northwest Coast prior to 1824 were largely transient, rooted in the exploitation of fur resources through the seasonal round. Indigenous peoples did most of the actual trapping in the winter, when cooler weather, snow, and rain worked together to imbue beaver furs with the warmth and thickness that made them so valuable in China and Europe. Significant but comparatively small numbers of furs were snared by company and freemen trappers during winter expeditions. Over time, company trappers came to capture an almost equal share of furs compared to Indigenous trappers; however, this also coincided with an increasingly Indigenous and Metis 335 John McLoughlin, The Letters of John McLoughlin from Fort Vancouver to the Governor and Committee: First Series, 1825-38, ed. E.E. Rich (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1941): xcviii; and Jane Lewis Chapin, “Letters of John McLoughlin, 1805-26,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol 36, no. 4 (Dec 1935): 334-337. As an interesting aside, Chapin’s selection of letters includes one from 1808, when McLoughlin had first entered the fur trade as a physician for the NWC in Ontario, wherein he stated his distaste for low pay and wrote that he would “prefer living on potatoes and milk [elsewhere] than in this country on any Other terms.” He then urged his uncle to burn the letter. 336 quoted in James Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 130. After the Oregon Treaty of 1846 settled British and American boundary disputes in the region, McLoughlin established a home in the valley, and lived the rest of his life and died there. 186 company workforce, as Canadiens became more difficult to recruit into the Columbia District trade on account of a poor reputation. This reputation in part derived from the rainy climate of the coast.337 Company dependence on Indigenous trappers for sourcing beaver furs is especially obvious in that company traders were often sent en derouine to live with Natives during the winter, both to encourage them to trap and to reduce food demands on outposts; the NWC had earlier attempted to wean itself off of this dependence, to limited success.338 The HBC had little more. John McLoughlin wrote in 1826 that he was having difficulty preventing Native trappers and traders from cutting the tails off of otters, and stated that “the Furs procured at this place pass through so Many hands before they come to us that it is next to Impossible to get them dressed as we wish.” His frustration shows that the HBC was clearly reliant on Indigenous labor, and that they were not in full control of it.339 Despite this dependence, a continual and prejudicial complaint of PFC, NWC, and HBC company administrators was that Natives had poor trapping skills, needed to be induced to trade for European goods, and had to be taught how to use steel traps, especially west of the Cascades. The supposed “indolence” of the coastal tribes was the result of a prior lack of any need to trap large numbers of fur-bearing animals. In the pre-contact absence of European demand for furs and 337 On fur returns by trapper origin, see for instance Keith and Jackson, The Fur Trade Gamble, 308. They provide evidence from Fort George/Fort Astoria in the 1810s. On Canadien recruitment, see Barman, French Canadians, 59. Recruitment of Canadiens became more difficult beginning the late 1830s and early 1840s, in part because of reputation and in part because more economic opportunities emerged elsewhere. 338 Keith and Jackson, The Fur Trade Gamble 8, 188; Merk, Fur Trade and Empire, 74, 195-196. Richard Somerset Mackie has argued that at least some small portion of fur trade labor was enslaved, the result of trade between the HBC and Native tribes that kept slaves. however, the history of slavery in Indigenous societies on the Northwest Coast is fraught with controversy, in part because very few reliable sources exist to describe it. Many of the sources Mackie cites have been largely discredited, notably Leland Donald’s Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America. See Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains, 282-310. 339 Rich, First Series, 31. 187 Indigenous demand for Western trade goods, including mass-produced woolen blankets, the mild rains west of the Cascades had made cedar bark and wool clothing sufficient warmth for the average person and average winter.340 If Natives truly seemed to be reluctant to trade with the HBC, it was likely because the HBC was not offering them the goods they desired at the rates they thought fair, or else because of inter-group competition. Regardless of who trapped them or how, Columbia District furs in general were inferior in quality to Arctic and Subarctic furs. Their inferior quality and poor value on the Chinese market had proved the undoing of the NWC, whereas the HBC oriented Columbia District sales to the more profitable European market. Even within the Columbia District, colder, snowier climes produced far higher quality beaver pelts compared to mild, rainy coastal areas, and so the actual acquisitions of the overland fur trade in the Northwest were concentrated on the regions east of the Cascades. Most furs were caught in the interior, and returns along the Inside Passage were better than those of the Oregon and Northern California coast both because the southern coast was milder in climate and because the northern coast was adjacent to interior districts whose Native trappers funneled trade down to the coastal passages.341 Rain or snow, trappers worked throughout the winter, and, each spring, small parties of HBC employees were dispatched to the field from regional outposts both east and west of the Cascades. Their mission was to exchange trade goods for furs with Natives and freemen trappers 340 For a summary of HBC accusations regarding Indigenous incompetence, see Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains, 79-81. For a more comprehensive look, see Elizabeth Vibert, Traders' Tales: Narratives of Cultural Encounters in the Columbia Plateau, 1807-1846 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000). 341 On fur quality and NWC/HBC strategy, see Keith and Jackson, The Fur Trade Gamble 240- 246. Mackie notes that “once export trades and colonial economies had emerged on the south coast, the interior districts became known as ‘the fur districts’ or ‘the fur countries’ to distinguish them from the Pacific coast.” The 1844 value of HBC fur returns was £40,437, of which Forts Nisqually, Victoria, Langley, and Vancouver accounted for a mere £5,416. See Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains, 252-254. 188 in the surrounding areas; this continued throughout the summer, which was dry and warm. In the fall, all furs were routed back to the outposts and ferried down the Columbia, where they were packed (a process sometimes delayed by rain) and transported by sea to market.342 This seasonal round ensured that furs were largely captured at peak quality, but allowed for winter as a time of fort maintenance and planning for the upcoming year, and enabled merchant vessels to wait out the rainy season in Hawai’i and elsewhere. This avoided the riskiest time of year for navigating the Columbia bar, and minimized the possibility of losing cargo or lives in rainstorms.343 It also minimized losses to ship rigging, which sometimes rotted in the damp climate.344 Generally, the latest a vessel was sent out from Fort Vancouver was November. As specific captains became more familiar with the weather and contours of the Northwest Coast, they were able to sail in a wider range of conditions and for a longer period of the year — but winter was still largely a time for ships to anchor.345 Crucially, all of the HBC’s supplies and provisions were shipped from overseas or, in the case of food, canoes, and some other articles, frequently acquired, traded, or stolen from local 342 The coastal outbound route for furs originated at Fort Astoria and formed one of the few advantages that the PFC ever had over the much larger NWC, which was then still shipping furs out across the Rockies. When the NWC acquired the PFC and took ownership of Fort Astoria, it continued this coastal outbound route, creating a regional dynamic where trapping was centered east of the Cascades and the packing/shipping of furs was centered on the Columbia River estuary. When the HBC and NWC merged, furs captured farther north were routed to Fort Simpson or Fort McLoughlin on the Inside Passage or to Fort Langley at the mouth of the Fraser, outposts also known for their dankness and poor agriculture, see Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 9-10, 70; and Morag MacLachlan, ed. The Fort Langley Journals 1827-1830 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998). 343 Merk, Fur Trade and Empire, 120 for a summary of the seasonal round of shipping. Ships arriving in late fall/winter were often delayed for weeks by rainstorms at the bar, for example John McLoughlin, The Letters of John McLoughlin from Fort Vancouver to the Governor and Committee: Second Series, 1839-1844, ed. E.E. Rich (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1943): 238-239; and Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 21. 344 Gough, The Journal of Alexander Henry the Younger, 695. 345 Rich, First Series, 105 and Second Series, 238-9. 189 Indigenous peoples. Coastal forts were a centralized place to receive, store, and distribute furs and supplies to markets and other outposts; they were designed as fortresses within and around which most of the company’s employees worked and lived throughout the year in the context of a “gloomy” and “savage” wilderness. Forts in the interior, owing to their proximity to larger concentrations of Indigenous trappers, often featured a more prominent Indigenous presence, with more regular visitation and trade. The HBC’s primary post-1824 innovation on this seasonal, regionally integrated system was to open the intermontane areas between the Cascades and the Coast Ranges for small-scale company agriculture, establishing Fort Vancouver, Fort Nisqually, and other outposts in the lowlands. While the HBC still viewed the Columbia Country as essentially a temporary cache of furs, to be plundered and then abandoned in the same manner as other parts of North America, the establishment of fort agriculture and the imperial invasion of the Northwest Coast’s intermontane zones entailed changes to the daily routines and experiential realities of fur traders and trappers. Although the Columbia District as a whole was still seen as “a bad, barren country,” company farmers found the intermontane zones to have a climate more favorable to long-term cultivation: as a result of the Coast Range rain shadow, the valleys had a shorter rainy season, fewer fierce downpours, and enough rainfall by volume to produce verdancy but not so much as to consistently drown crops in the fields.346 Crucially, they also found that intermontane landscapes were better suited to agriculture and grazing: in contrast to the thick, dark, dripping rainforests of the coastal zone, many of the intermontane valleys — particularly the Willamette Valley and tributary valleys 346 Fort George Chief Factor James Keith, quoted in Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 17; for Simpson on the Columbia as temporary cache of furs, see 15-16; and 73 on poor views of the Columbia District within the HBC. Also see Jennifer Ott, “‘Ruining' the Rivers in the Snake Country: The Hudson's Bay Company's Fur Desert Policy,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, 104, no. 2, (Summer 2003): 166-195. 190 — had been long shaped by widespread Indigenous burning practices that created swathes of mixed prairie and woodland. The presence of these semi-open landscapes minimized the need to clear rainforest acreage in order to farm, although outside of the Willamette Valley arable acreage was very limited and sometimes needed to be expanded through painful, prolonged forest-cutting.347 Complaints about the gloom and saturation of winter were still common, and the rains posed many challenges to agriculture and long-term residency, but the process of working the variegated landscapes of the intermontane zone fed the germs of settler-colonial visions of progress. Consider post farming at Fort Vancouver, the most successful post west of the Cascades and a place, Simpson waxed fondly in 1825, where “the climate [is] so fine that Indian Corn and other Grain cannot fail of thriving.” Established on a thin strip of prairie on the north shore of the Columbia River and bordered to the north by dense rainforest, Fort Vancouver’s cultivated land grew from 120 acres in 1829 to a peak of 1,500 acres by 1842, not counting land set aside for pasture. Between company employees, freemen, and a small number of missionaries, the fort had a population of about 550 in 1839, and by 1841 the post farm’s total land area stretched for 3,000 acres and included fifty log houses outside of the fort’s walls.348 Ecological imperialism was in full swing: the fort grew “grains, grasses, legumes, roots, melons, squashes, berries, and various fruits… the livestock consisted of cattle, horses, pigs, sheep, goats chickens, turkeys and pigeons, which ran both at large and in check. Wheat, oats, barley, peas, and potatoes, plus cattle, pigs, and sheep, predominated,” whereas contrary to Simpson’s proclamations, corn fared poorly in the dry summers.349 By 1828, the fort produced more than enough food to feed all of the HBC’s employees 347 Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 68-9 348 Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 30-36. The most successful other post farms were east of the mountains. 349 Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 37-39. On ecological imperialism, see Crosby, Ecological Imperialism. 191 in the Columbia District — a number that grew from 184 in 1821 to 612 by 1845 — and was exporting sawn timber and barreled salmon to markets in Hawai’i. As the supply of peltries in the Columbia District dwindled, Simpson wrote in 1841 that the financial successes of post farming at locales such as Fort Vancouver made up for some of the decline.350 There are few surviving firsthand accounts of the fur trade on the Northwest Coast between 1813-1835, and most of those that remain extant were written by elites who were deeply insulated from the daily drudgery of fort life. Effusive climatic accounts issued by Simpson and other visitors with commercial interests in the region obfuscate the frequent drear and damp of daily life for those who lived and labored in in the rains, and often reflect elitist perspectives and inequities. Simpson, for instance, was fond of accusing administrators and laborers of profligacy and thumb-twiddling, boasting of his 1824-25 visit to Fort Astoria that by “determining the plan on which the business of this side the [Rockies is] to be in future conducted” he had made good use out of “42 short rainy Winter Days when the people would otherwise have been laying idle.”351 If Duncan McDougall’s approach was any indication, Simpson may have been right about the tendency of administrators to value their own comfort over all else. Certainly, there were plenty of officers and even high- ranking administrators who were known to pocket company money and goods, or order excess provisions to sell privately for personal gain.352 350 Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 20, 35; for employee tables, 51. On non-fur commodities see Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains, 184-217. Interestingly, one complaint that some fur traders made regarding salmon accused Native fishermen of not delivering the fish promptly enough to ensure they would not spoil in the mild winter temperatures; it is hard to take this complaint seriously in light of consistent beliefs in Native laziness, but it does indicate that spoilage was a challenge when preserving salmon for market. 351 Merk, Fur Trade and Empire, 118. See also H. Lloyd Keith, “Shameful Mismanagement, Wasteful Extravagance, and the Most Unfortunate Dissention": George Simpson's Misconceptions of the North West Company,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, 102, no. 4 (Winter, 2001): 434-453 352 Edith I. Burley, Servants of the Honourable Company: Work, Discipline, and Conflict in the Hudson's Bay Company, 1770–1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997): 146-7. 192 Yet Simpson himself was familiar with living at York Factory, a much larger and better- provisioned outpost than any in the Columbia District, and as an administrator he participated little in the daily labors of upkeep and operations. He admitted that he took the same allowances as all other administrators, including extra rations of foodstuffs such as butter, sugar, flour, tea and wine, and wrote that any excess “goes to my private account.”353 Rather than laboring in the mud or the rain for months on end with meager provisions, administrators and officers like Simpson generally spent their time writing letters, hosting emissaries, conducting low-intensity scouting of landscapes, and managing general fort business. Though this was not easy work, it was done inside and with access to a larger ration than the layman. Simpson was also well-known for thinking very little of his employees, for instance expressing his opinion to the HBC’s Governors that there were “many worthless characters in the service.”354 No matter how many plans and maps the HBC’s administrators made and no matter how frequently they proclaimed the climate healthful and mild in private correspondence, the reality of life on the ground for the lay laborer was arduous and deeply entangled with the realities of a rainy weather-world. Agricultural success at Fort Vancouver and other posts west of the Cascades did not come easy. Ploughing, for instance, was often done in winter to take advantage of the malleability of wet soils, but this was filthy, exposed, back-breaking work for both humans and animals alike. Whoever ran the plough felt every push, the resistance offered by every muddy furrow, the sopping mud of every step taken in shoes that were not always fully waterproof.355 353 Merk, Fur Trade and Empire, 201 on administrator allowances; on accusations about profligate Chief Factors and others, 188, 196-197. 354 John McLoughlin, The Letters of John McLoughlin from Fort Vancouver to the Governor and Committee: Third Series, 1844-1846, ed. E.E. Rich (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1944): 348. 355 Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 141. John Ball observed the post farm at Fort Vancouver in January of 1833 and noted that their efforts had been “commenced… with difficulty,” see M.M. 193 All commercial post farming was done north of the Willamette Valley, in locations were soil composition was often middling: Fort Vancouver, for instance, was situated on a terrace overlooking the Columbia River, and as a result suffered from “poor miserable Dry S[h]ingly soil” that quickly drained much of the area’s rainfall down into the river and the better soils that lay along the bank.356 These better soils, however, were flooded during winter and spring high-water, and between “one-quarter to one-half of the arable land (including three-fifths of the best arable land) was subject to flooding.”357 A levee was built to try and minimize this problem, with little avail. Planting thus had to be carefully managed and timed to the rainy season and the Columbia River’s resultant floods, but it was typical for at least some cropland to be inundated each year — not exactly the model of efficiency. Some years brought particularly ruinous flooding, although the prolonged rainy season sometimes allowed for crop sowing in late spring after waters receded, and a harvest several months later. Despite lower volumes of precipitation compared to the coast, heavy winter rains sometimes rotted crops in the fields or in storage.358 Labor-intensive drainage was necessary in order to convert marginal wet prairies throughout the lowlands into arable acreage, and could take years to complete; clearing forest land was no easier, and McLoughlin complained that stumps and roots Quaife, ed. “Letters of John Ball, 1832-1833,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 5 no. 4 (1919): 465. 356 Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 67. According to the USDA’s Web Soil Survey, the area on the terrace consists mostly of various slope-grades of “Lauren gravelley loam,” which is classified as “Somewhat excessively drained” and would not have been well-suited to farming in the mid- 1800s. 357 Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 69-70; and James R. Gibson, The Lifeline of the Oregon Country: The Fraser-Columbia Brigade System, 1811-47 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997): 143- 44. On flooding, see for instance Rich, Second Series, 63. 358 Rotten potatoes and hay seem to have been a particular problem. See entries for Jan. 23, 1853; March 28, 1855; Nov 26, 1856; and March 8, 1868 in Steve Anderson, ed. The Journal of Occurrences at Fort Nisqually (Tacoma: Fort Nisqually Association, 2016). Private copy. Furs sometimes got moldy, too, see entry for Feb. 8, 1870. 194 had to be left out for years to rot. 359 Given that post farming was still considered a temporary venture, efforts throughout the 1820s and much of the 1830s generally focused less on transforming how rainfall manifested on landscapes and more on taking full advantage of the limited prairie acreage already available. Agriculture at the forts was thus subject to the whims of variable rains and flooding, and outdoor labor was at various times attuned to seasonal rhythms and forced to work against them. Accumulated informal knowledge about the Northwest Coast’s different climatic zones sometimes influenced the timing of planting and other tasks, but unfamiliarity reigned.360 Owing to the difficulties of cultivation and the high costs of landscape transformation, much of the lower-lying land at Fort Vancouver was simply set aside for pasturage. Livestock were allowed to roam free for much of the year, able to self-subsist even during rainy autumn and spring weather.361 They were, however, rounded up and sheltered at the fort during the wettest months of winter and particularly cold periods in order to avoid exposure, and fodder was sometimes needed from December to January as they sheltered from the rains.362 Too much exposure to wet weather was dangerous enough because of the risks of hypothermia, but it also made animals a tempting target for pests such as midges that thrive in standing water, and could lead to bacterial and fungal infections or skin irritations such as rain scald. 359 Rich, Second Series, 17 360 Detailed observations are a common feature of early journals and logs, and, as early as 1824, some variety of rain gauge was used in the area to record daily rainfall. For mentions of plurometer usage, see Merk, Fur Trade and Empire, 105; and Anderson, The Journal of Occurrences at Fort Nisqually, entry for March 6, 1835. However, in the first half of the 1800s rain gauges were not always accurate, both because they were not standardized and because the principles of how to accurately measure precipitation were not yet established. See Ian Strangeways, Precipitation: Theory, Measurement and Distribution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 137-149 on early attempts to measure precipitation and an overview of common obstacles. 361 Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 34, 40, 95, 121, 143. 362 Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 103, 129 195 In part because of their thick coats, sheep may have suffered the most of all livestock. Wool keeps sheep warm during cold periods, can absorb significant amounts of moisture without losing heat retention properties, and has molecular advantages that prevent fibers from get tangled during wet weather. Yet the lower-lying land set aside for sheep pasturage at many post farms remained mucky and saturated throughout the year and often mired free-roaming livestock, which proved “not easily dislodged.”363 Miring was also a problem at Fort Nisqually on the south end of Puget Sound, where the soil was poor, farming was minimal, and the primary agricultural activity consisted of grazing.364 Miring impacted all livestock, but if a sheep got stuck in the mud and weighed down by wet, dirty wool, it became particularly difficult to extricate. Dirtied wool also lost value and made shearing more challenging.365 Another problem facing sheep in particular was scab, a variety of mange caused by Psoroptes mites. These mites thrive in rainy winter and spring weather, when sheep wool is fuller and forms an attractive, insulated, yet moist environment; that sheep were often sheltered during the wettest periods of winter only facilitated the spread of mites from sheep to sheep.366 Precise tallies do not exist, but scab killed large numbers of sheep in some seasons. Lambs were particularly vulnerable both to scab and to wet exposure in general, and in some years thousands died during the rainy season.367 Spring rains also complicated shearing and wool-packing, as both were best done in dry weather. 363 Quoted in Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 68. On miring, see for instance Anderson, The Journal of Occurrences at Fort Nisqually, entries for April 9, 1849; March 21, 1851; September 13, 1852; and September 23, 1860. 364 Anderson, The Journal of Occurrences at Fort Nisqually, entries for April 9, 1849; March 21, 1851; September 30, 1856; and September 23, 1860. Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 67, 87, 96 on soil; also the Occurrences entry for June 4, 1833, and Rich, First Series, 139 365 Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 123 366 Emily Nixon, Ellen Brooks-Pollock and Richard Wall, “Sheep scab transmission: a spatially explicit dynamic metapopulation model,” Veterinary Research 52, Article 54, 2021. 367 Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 120. I have found inspiration and aid in conceptualizing the difficulties of agriculture in a temperate climate from Herbert Guthrie-Smith’s 1921 study of environmental change on a sheep station on the eastern coast of New Zealand’s North Island, 196 In the context of these agricultural troubles, even company administrators questioned the Pacific Northwest’s appeal. In 1822, the HBC’s Governors had argued for abandoning the Columbia District entirely, and only recanted after Simpson convinced them that post farming could alleviate some of the district’s financial drawbacks. Agriculture, Simpson had assured them, was the answer. But in 1845, in his last letter to the HBC Governors, John McLoughlin wrote that “Had it not been for the great expense of importing Flour from Europe, the serious injury that it received on the voyage, and the absolute necessity of being independent of Indians for provisions, I never would have encouraged farming in this Country.” From the man tasked on the ground with implementing Simpson’s grand vision of a regionally integrated provisioning system, this was not a glowing endorsement of the region’s environmental advantages. It also reveals a central tension that ran through the overland fur trade in the post farming era: the dependence of the trade on Native and mixed-descent labor and trade, on one hand, and the desire to implement civilizational ideals of agriculture and self-sufficiency on the other.368 The rainy climate caused sundry other problems for post farmers and imperial agents living in the intermontane zone. Fort Nisqually’s Chief Factor, William Fraser Tolmie, waxed poetic about the gorgeous summer vistas of the Puget lowlands, but had a habit of hiring Natives to start campfires for him when he went out into the country, writing that one night it “rained heavily… [I] lay shivering… and roused my swarthy companion twice to rekindle the fire.”369 Goods and beaver Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018). 368 See Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains, 35; Rich, Third Series, 113. 369 William Fraser Tolmie diary transcription, entries for Sept. 1-3; Nov. 30, 1833, pp. 9-10, 29, UWSC. Many whites hired Natives to attend to such tasks during visits to the countryside. Natives had emplaced knowledge of how to start different kinds of fires in different conditions; during seasonal burning, for instance, some groups set large fires only on days when their knowledge of local weather conditions told them rainfall would come in several days to extinguish the flames. See Andrea Laforet and Annie York, Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories 1808-1939 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999): 68-9. 197 furs had to be stored carefully, but it was difficult to insulate them from the damp.370 The intermontane rains degraded buildings no differently than the rains of the coast: although the construction of sawmills allowed for the use of cut heartwood planks on the interior of buildings, whole logs with no exterior finish still predominated simply as a matter of convenience and in order to make structures more durable to potential attack. The rains gradually rotted them away, necessitating constant maintenance and regular, deeply cumbersome replacement. Stockade posts at Fort Vancouver, for instance, “ordinarily lasted for about four or five years.” (Figure 3.2). Repairs were occasionally neglected for long periods, and large portions of the stockade were left in such a decayed state that on occasion “ten or fifteen-foot sections… were blown down by the wind.” Fort Vancouver also suffered from leaky roofs until the early 1840s, the result of using knotted boards with holes and cracks rather than cedar shingles.371 For all of these problems, however, visitors found Fort Vancouver’s accommodations “exceedingly comfortable,” and the interior stockade was home to the fort’s “gentlemen.”372 Gentlemen were men like John McLoughlin, who were of high social status and company rank and feasted with one another as they made top-down decisions about the operations of the fur trade — McLoughlin, for instance, has been called a ‘benign despot’ by admirers. Almost all officers were British: because of prejudice, it was extremely rare for anyone else to be entrusted with managerial roles. Excluding company trappers who made such bargains in the field, officers were usually the 370 Rich, Second Series, 131-132, 295, 345. 371 John A. Hussey, The History of Fort Vancouver and its Physical Structures (Tacoma: Washington State Historical Society Press, 1957): 161-165; also for instance Anderson, The Journal of Occurrences at Fort Nisqually, entries for Jan. 13, 1838, Dec. 5 1857, and Dec. 14, 1868; and Rich, Second Series, 121 372 Hussey, The History of Fort Vancouver, 131. Hussey also quotes Herbert Beaver, a visiting Anglican priest, describing the sleeping quarters as “infested with insects” — which would certainly be a problem made worse by moisture. However, Beaver is well-known to have had a deep antipathy towards John McLoughlin and Fort Vancouver, and historians have debated the reliability of his words. Figure 3.2, drawing of Fort Vancouver by Henry J. Warre, in Sketches in North America and the Oregon Territory (London: Dickinson & Co., 1848). 1 9 8 199 only ones permitted to purchase furs from Indigenous traders. This reflected the fact that the Hudson’s Bay Company was, at heart, a paternalistic corporation, with an authoritarian governing structure managed by social and business elites who expected deference and obedience from their employees. Everyone who was not a gentleman was a servant, hired for a particular purpose — whether to labor on the farm, trap beaver in the field, or deploy specialized skills as a carpenter or plumber. At the height of the HBC’s reach, between 1820 and 1850, it employed between one and one-and- a-half thousand servants across North America. Most were recruited from marginal populations, such as poor agrarian communities in Scotland, the Orkney Islands, or the St. Lawrence Valley.373 But, as the emergence of global capitalism and industrialism remade many aspects of life and livelihood for the laboring class and reformed wage relationships between laborers and employers, these servants frequently took issue with the HBC’s paternalistic governance structure. Administrators expected deference and obedience; employees expected living wages, as well as permission to continue customary social relations and traditions. For administrators, the HBC was a lifelong venture: they were often paid generously in company shares. For the lay laborer — whose average age was twenty — the HBC was a temporary occupation, something that would last a few years and at least allow them to support any family they had back home. When these obligations were not met, they often resisted or refused to work; administrators, in turn, blamed this defiance on laziness or inherent ethnic character.374 Daily life for servants was very different from that of administrators and officers. At least at Fort Vancouver, for instance, servants were forbidden from living inside the stockade walls. Instead, they developed makeshift log homes out on the outskirts of the post farm fields, where 373 Burley, Servants of the Honourable Company, 64-108. 374 Burley, 10-20. 200 many of them labored during the day. They had Sundays off, though there were often many things to do, and worked the other six days from sun up to to sundown. Discipline was enforced strictly by the gentlemen; servants who deserted were chased down, and, if caught, were often lashed in public view of the rest of the workers. The Columbia District, in this regard, had a nasty reputation — throughout the 1830s and 1840s, the company had difficulty recruiting servants to the west coast, both because of the climate and because the administrators had been accused of “severe ill- usage.”375 The Columbia District’s rainswept coastal outposts were also the preferred destination for the company’s misbehaving employees, in part because they were isolated and difficult to desert from. McLoughlin regularly complained that many of his employees were of poor character and had little work ethic. It is difficult to discern whether the region’s officers and administrators were really harsher than elsewhere, but corporal punishment was undoubtedly commonplace. George Simpson himself was known to beat servants on country tours.376 Many of the company policies that garnered the most protest originated with Simpson. In part because administrators like Simpson were insulated from the elemental exposure that servants experienced on a daily basis and did not have an appreciation for the hardships of their labor, many were convinced that servants were lazy and wasted time. Simpson thus sought to implement tighter controls on the pace of labor. Most servant labor was unsupervised, and employees were accustomed to keeping a pace which suited them; considering that most work was hard, monotonous, involved physical exertion, and was conducted outside, often in inclement weather, 375 Rich, Second Series, 157-9 376 Burley, Servants of the Honourable Company, 95-6; 177-186; and Rich, Second Series, 45, 88, 157-9, 175-6, 182-3, 307-8. McLoughlin downplayed complaints of poor treatment, asserting that the servants were “quick to slander.” The HBC’s Governors were deeply concerned about this bad reputation, and eventually ordered that administrators and officers keep journals detailing all infractions and disciplinary actions, to be annually sent to London for review. Burley has suggested that some complaints were performative, part of negotiations for better treatment, but this is impossible to quantify and should not be assumed, see Burley, 213-218. 201 they deeply valued such flexibility. Simpson and the Governors, however, ordered that craftsmen keep daily journals recording their work; banned the issuance of payment for servant-caught furs, concerned that they were being trapped on company time and sold for a personal profit; and forbade the use of surplus lumber to craft personal items, such as furniture or storage chests.377 Simpson also successfully advocated for a restructuring of servant compensation. Rather than provide low wages and reasonable non-monetary compensation —- such as rations, clothes, shoes, blankets, and other necessities — Simpson raised wages and heavily reduced or eliminated such non-monetary compensation. Only boatmen were given shoes, and only two pairs. In some positions, he introduced piece-work: the allocation of wages based on production, rather than time worked. This was done to increase production, even if servants had to spend more of their own time, and became the preferred method of paying Native laborers throughout the company's operating areas.378 Simpson also proposed that the company pay high wages and charge high prices for company goods at company stores, thus creating a truck system of servant indebtedness; the Governors refused, concerned that this would ruin the HBC’s reputation.379 Unfortunately, however, the severe reduction in non-monetary compensation did create indebtedness among some servants, especially in the Columbia District. To put a roof over their heads, do the work that they were contracted for, and protect themselves from rainfall and inclement weather, many servants had to rent or buy tools, warm clothes, and other basic supplies from company stores. If they wanted to diversify their diet away from the salmon rations provided by the HBC, they also had to spend their off hours cultivating personal gardens.380 Some went into 377 Burley, 13, 41-45, 187-192. 378 Burley, 41-45 379 Burley, 57-61. Later, in 1844, Simpson proposed that the company sell luxury items like sugar and tea in company stores, so as to encourage men to spend more of their wages and reduce any credit owed to employees. He cited a desire to prevent feelings of “independence.” 380 See for instance Barman, French Canadians, 85; Burley, Servants, 57-61. 202 debt as a result. The company did not make it impossible to pay off such debts, so servants were not in debt bondage, but, since the only reliable method of leaving the region prior to the 1840s was via company transportation, the HBC forced employees to stay until they had paid off their purchases. This was a form of peonage. Servants who attempted to desert, usually to fur trading vessels, were tracked down and subjected to lashings. Magnifying the problem, many provisions were of poor quality or were damaged in transit to the Northwest Coast. John McLoughlin himself complained in 1842, for instance, that the leather shoes provisioned to Fort Vancouver for sale to employees and as trade goods for Native trappers “are still inferior and unsuitable for the inclement winters of this place… being hardly sufficient to last out the winter months with the expected comfort of being kept dry, as they take water at every pore.” That McLoughlin brought the issue of shoes up in his missives suggests he received frequent complaints from servants who were continually coming in from a rainy day’s work with sopping wet feet. The shoe quality saga lasted for several years, from at least 1837 to 1842, at which point the company administrators indicated they were changing shoe suppliers to alleviate the issue.381 Poor shoe quality affected even able-bodied individuals who got caught out in inclement weather while traveling, and sometimes suffered long-term injuries. Cowlitz Jack, a Native man who worked at Fort Nisqually in the late 1840s, was a victim of leaky footwear provisioned by the HBC: while traveling between Nisqually and Fort Vancouver in the winter of 1847, his feet sustained a non-freezing cold injury (NFCI) due to exposure to the rain and mud. It took “some 381 On goods being damaged in transit, see Rich, First Series, 29; and John McLoughlin, Letters of Dr. John McLoughlin written at Fort Vancouver 1829-1832, ed. Burt Brown Barker, (Portland: Binsford & Mort, 1948): 214. On shoes, the earliest letter, from 1838, is written by McLoughlin’s second-in-command, Chief Factor James Douglas, and appears in Rich, First Series, 265-266; a letter from McLoughlin himself and a response from the Governors apologizing follow in Rich, Second Series, 69, 306. The Douglas letter dated in 1838, however, mentions that the latest shipment of shoes is “still” of poor quality, implying that an earlier shipment, at least from 1837, contained flimsy shoes. 203 weeks” before he could walk again, and such a serious incident probably carried lifelong consequences.382 Servants reacted to general hardship, company mistreatment, and leaky shoes in many ways, frequently resisting company policies and extracting concessions from officers. They were far from helpless, and were often defiant, to the frustration of the HBC’s paternalistic administrators. In the Pacific Northwest, however, many indulged excessively in alcohol — and, framed by bodily experience and ideas about rainfall and personal health, alcohol and alcoholism were deployed by the HBC as tools of imperial governance. Alcohol was enjoyed among HBC servants regardless of geography, and was customarily doled out on holidays and celebratory occasions, but it was also distributed by officers as an informal means of keeping employees happy and avoiding mutiny. This was especially common in the coastal and intermontane forts of the Northwest, in part because spirits — particularly undiluted spirits — were believed to help preserve health when one was exposed to wet weather. Servants thus cited excessive exposure to rainfall and moisture when they requested additional alcohol rations. Men at Fort Simpson — where in the present day it rains for about two hundred and forty five days per year and dumps around one hundred inches annually — demanded a dram each morning in exchange for showing up to work. James Douglas, Chief Factor at Fort Vancouver and later Fort Victoria, instructed that men be given 382 Anderson, The Journal of Occurrences at Fort Nisqually, entry for February 11, 1847. This injury is analogous to trench foot. In contrast to frostbite, which is the result of tissues partially or fully freezing, NFCIs occur from sustained exposure to low temperatures without actual tissue freezing. The hands and feet are most commonly affected; loggers are especially vulnerable, and lifelong impacts include numbness, chronic pain, and hypersensitivity to cold. Cold water exposure can cause hypothermic responses much quicker than cold air exposure, because heat is lost much more quickly in water than air; air temperatures that would not cause any lasting harm if one went on a stroll can prove dangerous or injurious if one becomes saturated or immersed in water. Ken Zafren, “Nonfreezing Cold Injury (Trench Foot),” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 19 (Oct. 2021): 10482. 204 an additional alcohol ration when they returned from labor wet and tired.383 In such a climate, this was unavoidable for between half and two-thirds of the days in the year. In 1841, however, the HBC’s Governors abolished regular alcohol allowances across much of the fur trade, restricting them only to men who had been exposed to wet weather. A year later, George Simpson forbade any liquor from being rationed out along the Northwest Coast; he cited his belief that complaints from laborers who requested alcohol after working in sodden conditions — requests that had probably increased tremendously after other allowances were eliminated — were “totally unworthy of notice.” John McLoughlin protested, insisting that Simpson was exaggerating how much alcohol was given out. Wary of rocking the boat and disrupting established traditions of alcohol use, the HBC’s Governors overruled Simpson and decided that it was best to let officers on the ground decide what to do in specific circumstances. As a result, officers in the Pacific Northwest continued to dole out alcohol in order to satisfy demands, alleviate ill health attributed to exposure, and help keep servants in line. 384 In truth, alcohol has no medicinal effects with regard to exposure to cold temperatures or wet weather. It does, however, have stimulate blood vessels, widening them in a process called peripheral vasodilation. This creates a flushing, warm feeling on the surface of the skin, giving the impression that drinking spirits heats the body. But vasodilation actually does the opposite: even 383 Burley, Servants, 133-139. A dram is a very small measurement — one-eighth of a fluid ounce, whereas a traditional serving of 40ABV liquor is one-and-a-half fluid ounces. Alcohol that was rationed out for health purposes was probably in the form of undiluted spirits, which rest between 90-95ABV; a dram would thus be about one-fifth of a standard drink. A dram in the morning alone thus wasn’t much, but it was indicative of how alcohol was used as a ‘carrot’ by supervisors. Frequent reports of drunkenness make clear that men frequently drank much more than a dram. My thoughts on alcohol and statecraft have been informed by Mark Lawrence Schrad, Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); and Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 384 Burley, Servants, 133-139. 205 as it makes one feel warmer, it stokes heat loss. In the context of laborious exposure to rainfall, wetness, and cold, alcohol would have created superficial sensations of comfort while actually accelerating the onset of hypothermia in inclement conditions.385 It is generally accepted by modern medicine that feeling cold predisposes a person to situational alcohol misuse, and there is also significant evidence that the broader embodied experience of living in a cold climate with fewer sunlight hours encourages higher alcohol consumption.386 While the coastal and intermontane Pacific Northwest are not especially cold in terms of ambient air temperature, exposure to rainfall and prolonged proximity to wet clothing can accelerate heat loss faster than frigid, dry air, and the winters are quite cloudy for their latitude — especially along the Inside Passage. It is possible that, in the context of regional geography and company drinking culture, rainfall and alcohol coalesced together to create an ecophysiological feedback loop of alcohol misuse. Employees working outside in wet weather requested spirits at the start of the day, or during the workday as they became cold; and as they worked, their clothes absorbed rainfall and cooled their bodies further. With alcohol in their system, servants’ physical and mental judgements about their own body heat and the safety of continuing to work in rainy, cold conditions were probably impaired. Then, at the end of the day, regardless of whether they were truly sick with a cold or bronchitis, some cited their shivering or snuffling — genuine signs of exposure and ill health! — as a historically accepted reasoning to get another ration of alcohol, which would not have helped matters. 385 See for instance Henry Guly, “Medicinal brandy,” Resuscitation 82, no. 7 (July 2011) 951- 954; Tamae Yoda et al., “Effects of alcohol on thermoregulation during mild heat exposure in humans,” Alcohol 36 no. 3 (July 2005): 195-200; and Per-Ola Granberg, “Alcohol and cold,” Arctic Medical Research 50 (Dec. 1990): 43-47. 386 See recent research by Meritxell Ventura-Cots, et al., “Colder weather and fewer sunlight hours increase alcohol consumption and alcoholic cirrhosis worldwide,” Hepatology 69, no. 5 (May 2019): 1916-1930. 206 This feedback cycle may have had some role in the frequent sickness at sodden, cloudy coastal outposts such as Fort Simpson, and may have exacerbated rates of alcohol addiction among servants. It is, of course, impossible to quantify how many servant requests for alcohol were the product of genuine worry about personal wellbeing, as opposed to a more general misery under gloomy skies — or a simple desire to have a drink and an excuse to ask for it. Regardless, historical beliefs about spirits, weather, and health entangled alcohol, people, and rainfall within the labor systems and fur forts of the Northwest, shaping emplaced experience and regional fur trade administration.387 Cross-Cultural Comfort: Company Men, Indigenous Women, and the French Prairie Far from home and often thousands of miles away from their families and loved ones, many servants also found solace in relationships with Indigenous women. Room existed for consensual sexual relationships outside of marriage, and these relationships became an important source of comfort for some men. However, many servants, especially French-Canadians, formally or informally married Indigenous women. This extended a continental fur trade tradition of cross- cultural marriages and relationships that dated back over one hundred and fifty years — and paralleled Indigenous traditions of kinship that date to time immemorial.388 About sixty percent of 387 It is of further interest to consider this in light of the fur trade’s tradition of trading alcohol to Indigenous peoples. One must also wonder at how such virulent stereotypes of the drunken Native American developed when the people doing much of the selling were models of sobriety. 388 French-Canadian as a term refers in this context to French-speaking Canadiens, Iroquois, and Metis individuals, the former of both Canadian maternal and paternal descent and the latter with at least one Indigenous parent. French-Indian refers more specifically to French-Canadians who were of Indigenous descent or who married into Indigenous kinship networks. On the broader continental traditions of intermarriage in the fur trade, see Anne Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); and Hyde, Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton, 2022). Classic older examinations of intermarriage in the fur trade include Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670– 207 marriages involved French-Canadians and Indigenous women from the lower Columbia, with another forty percent involving Indigenous women from east of the Cascades. Crucially, their marriages often produced mixed descent families: children born on the Northwest Coast to Native mothers and foreign fathers.389 There were many kinds of cross-cultural marriages in the Pacific northwest. Some were forced, the result of a long tradition of regional trade in enslaved Indigenous persons; others were diplomatic relationships, formed in part to strengthen relationships between fur traders and local Indigenous peoples; and still others emerged from genuine interpersonal bonds of an amorous nature. Doubtlessly, many marriages evolved over time: forced or diplomatic marriages may have come to include mutual affection, and some voluntary marriages likely involved domestic violence. Yet Indigenous women also developed a reputation for being independent, assertive, and resourceful. One of the Clatsop leader Comcomly’s daughters, Celiast, married a Methodist missionary and, in the 1840s, served as an intermediary between white settlers in Astoria and her kin, defusing conflicts.390 Observers described some cross-cultural relationships and marriages as intimate and reciprocal, or at least respectful; since many marriages were the result of diplomatic overtures to establish kinship relations or otherwise had that consequence, there were both individual and corporate incentives to avoid conduct that might anger Indigenous relatives.391 1870 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983); and Jennifer S.H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), although this older literature tends to rely more on elite sources and ideas about hierarchical relations. 389 Barman, French Canadians, 112-116 390 Barman, French Canadians, 132-134. 391 Barman, French Canadians, 120-121. On domestic violence throughout the history of the Pacific Northwest, see David Peterson del Mar, Beaten Down: A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002). For a later example of Indigenous/White intermarriage dynamics, see Llyn De Danaan, Katie Gale: A Coast Salish Woman's Life on Oyster Bay (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013). 208 Violence was still an integral part of the fur trade, especially between the HBC and groups west of the Cascades, but intermarriage mediated many conflicts.392 These relationships existed in the context of the seasonal round, with some wives or families accompanying trapping parties into the field and others remaining behind at the forts. Indigenous women sometimes contributed emplaced knowledge to these wintering outings, variously helping with gathering, food preparation, shelter-building, diplomacy, and interpretation. It is possible that they had an influence on what trappers ate, what they wore, and how they made camp, but what few sources survive are inconclusive. French-Canadians were well-known for wearing flamboyant clothing, but observers generally note leather and furs — no mentions are made of barkcloth garments. Indigenous women at Fort Vancouver were noted to be wearing Western clothing in 1842, perhaps the result of social taboos against wearing Indigenous dress at HBC outposts.393 One observer noted that Indigenous women taught some trappers east of the Cascades to build temporary shelters roofed by buffalo skins to keep off snow; the corollary to this west of the Cascades would have been temporary shelters roofed by waterproof cedar bark, although there are no surviving mentions of trappers building such structures. French-Canadians still relied largely on company provisions for food both when at forts and when traveling overland, and many disliked the universality of dried salmon rations.394 During one Willamette Valley trapping expedition in the winter of 1821-22, two French-Canadians accompanied by Native 392 On violence in the fur trade, see Whaley, Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee, esp. 1-98; David G. Lewis and Thomas J. Connolly, “White American Violence on Tribal Peoples on the Oregon Coast,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, 120, no. 4 (2019): 368-381. 393 Barman, French Canadians,152 394 On the tiresome salmon diet and field shelter craft, see Barman, French Canadians, 96, 155. 209 women enjoyed traditional French blood pudding made from elk blood, “which went a long way toward overcoming the discomfort of rain and snow.”395 It was the small comforts that mattered. Indeed, the clearest and most important impact that intermarriage had on how trappers understood and experienced the climate of the Northwest Coast was in providing them with companionship to endure the rainy season. While French-Canadians were noted for their camaraderie with one another, their relationships were frequently disrupted when a trapper returned east, was moved to another station, or died in an accident. Not everyone got along with one another, although facing similar challenges and circumstances helped forge strong bonds between some. But trapping was often lonesome, and the romantic image of the iron-spirited mountain man holds little truth: depression and suicide were especially common under the overcast skies and perpetual damp of coastal winters.396 Correspondence from family east of the Mississippi could take more than a year to arrive and be received, if at all. Just as fathers and mothers in Canada missed their sons, so too did sons in the Northwest miss their parents, siblings, friends, or their spouse — if they had been married before taking up their post.397 Relationships with Indigenous women — whether formal or informal, voluntary or involuntary, amorous or sexual or platonic — helped fulfill at least some sense of a need for 395 Willard H. Rees, “Annual Address,” Transactions of the Oregon Pioneer Association, 1879: 23; this expedition is also mentioned in Thomas Vaughan and Martin Winch, “Joseph Gervais, a Familiar Mystery Man,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 66, no. 4 (1965): 331-362 396 Jerry Ramsey makes this observation in Steve Anderson, ed. William F. Tolmie at Fort Nisqually: Letters, 1850-1853 (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2019). On homesickness and depression in historical context, see Susan J. Matt, Homesickness: An American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Dodman, What Nostalgia Was; Clark Lawlor, From Melancholia to Prozac: A History of Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 397 Gabriel Franchere and Alfred Seton, for instance, mentioning missing their friends. Barman notes that the families of many fur traders encouraged them to return home, see Barman, French Canadians, 79-85. Perhaps the best collection of correspondence in illustrating the Northwest Coast’s isolation is Helen M. Buss and Judith Beattie, eds. Undelivered Letters to Hudson's Bay Company Men on the Northwest Coast of America, 1830-57 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003). 210 intimacy. Sometimes this was a matter of physically coping with climatic discomfort; one might imagine a trapper and his wife sleeping next to one another for warmth, as the chill air sat damp and the rains drizzled upon the roof of their bedroom or tent. Intimacy was probably embodied in conversations about missed love ones, monotonous duties, and the problems of how to raise a mixed-descent child together in the Northwest. Intimacy could also be pragmatic, involving cooperation to complete mundane chores and fulfill the daily necessities of life. At outposts such as Fort Vancouver, Indigenous women were essential to daily operations, often working in various servant positions — and were not always paid for their labors. They utilized emplaced knowledge to help procure food for their growing families; contributed to the company’s agricultural production; and established permanent households in the servant villages outside of the fort walls. At least one source indicates that log homes at Fort Vancouver were roofed with waterproof cedar bark, likely a result of Indigenous women sharing their knowledge of local materials.398 Despite their integral contributions to the daily operations of the fur trade, however, Indigenous women and mixed-descent servants were generally regarded unfavorably by company elites such as George Simpson. Simpson’s disdain for the lay men and families who trapped for the companies, and for women in general, were well-broadcasted, although not uncommon for the time; he once referred to an officer’s wife as a ‘bit of Brown,” variously described women in his life as a “commodity” or an “unnecessary and expensive appendage,” and accused ‘half breed’ freemen trappers east of the Cascades, many of whom had Indigenous wives and Metis families or were 398 Barman, French Canadians, 146. Note that the Fort Vancouver complex itself was not roofed with cedar, a sign that vernacular Indigenous knowledge and materials did not always transmit upwards. 211 Metis themselves, of being “lazy and careless.”399 One of his stated objectives for increasing efficiency at outposts in the Columbia District was to clear the forts of the “heavy burden of families,” a policy targeted at expunging Metis men or men with Metis families. Even though the HBC offered only meager provisions to trapper’s families, he worried that those families represented an unnecessary expense — more mouths to feed, and little more in a highly patriarchal and hierarchical industry.400 Sex and marriage could also be the source of violent conflict with officers: Pierre Kanaquasse, one of the men involved in the murder of John McLoughlin, Jr., the Chief Factor at Fort Stikine, attested that one grudge he and his co-conspirators had against McLoughlin, Jr. was the man’s strict policies against against personal visits to “loose women” or to legal wives who had chosen to live with their Indigenous kin in nearby villages.401 Administrators and officers stationed on the ground in the Northwest generally, however, had more positive things to say about the matter, representing families and kinship networks as a means of preventing violence, maintaining goodwill with Indigenous nations, increasing the limited labor supply, and boosting retention rates among employees. These opinions came in part because officers themselves often married Indigenous women, although they were discouraged from partnering with women who were not considered far enough removed from their ancestral roots. John McLoughlin, who was an outlier among the upper administrators in that he did marry an Indigenous woman, Marguerite, sometimes felt compelled to defend her honor to his superiors and 399 Simpson is quoted in Burley, Servants, 52; and in Merk, Fur Trade and Empire, 198, 203; 194-4, 195-6. 400 Simpson quoted in Barman, French Canadians, 110. On ground-level support for long-term Indigenous-trader relationships and a detailed account of such families at Fort Vancouver, see Hyde, Empires, Nations and Families, 89-145. 401 Burley, Servants, 123-130. On this deposition, see Rich, Second Series, 67-69. Kanaguasse may have been sent to Fort Stikine in the first place because McLoughlin suspected he would try to desert, see Bruce McIntyre Watson, Lives Lived West of the Divide: A Biographical Dictionary of Fur Traders Working West of the Rockies, 1793-1858 (Kelowna: The Centre for Social, Spatial, and Economic Justice, 2010): 599-600. 212 company guests at Fort Vancouver — and once thrashed an Anglican priest who accused Marguerite of being a “loose woman.” Although McLoughlin was generally supportive of such marriages, some higher-ups who married Indigenous women expressed a belief that the rank-and- file were not to be trusted with such relationships.402 In any case, at least 300 French-Canadian trappers in the Northwest married Indigenous women between 1811 and 1858, out of at least 1,240 known French-Canadian employees — both numbers are almost certainly undercounts, and the former figure does not include intimacies not formally recorded as marriages. These numbers are the result of Jean Barman’s painstaking excavations. About 70% of the 1,240 known French-Canadian employees were Canadiens, 15% were Iroquois, and about 15% were Metis. About 490 of the 1,240 were PFC or NWC employees; the NWC was overwhelmingly staffed by French-Canadians, most of whom arrived with extensive experience elsewhere and passed through the region during brief tenures. The remaining 750 known French-Canadians were HBC employees; about 565 of them renewed a second three-year contract in the Northwest. Of these 565, about 70 died before completing their second three-year contract — a fatality rate of 12.5%, many of whom died of capsized canoes in the context of raging rapids or rainstorms or of illnesses exacerbated by exposure. The surviving balance of 495 who spent more than six years in the Northwest went to various, largely unrecorded destinies, some continuing to labor in the region before returning east and others settling permanently there.403 402 McLoughlin’s defensiveness is noted in Burley, Servants, 78-179. On officers who married Indigenous women, see Barman, French Canadians, 98-102. 403 Barman, French-Canadians, 63, 76-102. Data about marriages from the pre-1821 period is scarce, owing to the loss of some NWC records and the limited availability of contemporary firsthand accounts. Fort Astoria’s Chief Factor Duncan McDougall, for instance, married one of Comcomly’s daughters in 1813, and other sources indicate that more marriages certainly took place. 213 The development of intermarriages gave many HBC servants something to live for — a purpose beyond the low-paying drudgery of everyday work. For the first time, families also gave trappers a reason to stay and live amongst the rains of the Pacific Northwest. Permanent settlement in the Pacific Northwest had previously not seemed desirable, and indeed had been discouraged by the higher-ups of the fur companies. But, beginning in 1829, a number of senior French-Canadian trappers from the Hudson’s Bay Company chose to leave formal employment and settle in the Willamette Valley, ushering in the era of permanent Euro-American settlement in the Pacific Northwest. Intimacy thus preceded permanent settlement in what was then a very isolated corner of the world. As Jean Barman has noted, “it was easier to return home… than to stay,” and their choices to settle were deeply intentional. The official HBC policy, for instance, was to actively prevent former employees from settling in the Northwest by withholding the final payment of a laborer’s salary until they returned east; this was largely the result of fears that agrarian settlement — and, perhaps, the drainage of wetlands that would accompany it — would prove detrimental to dwindling fur-bearing animal populations. Some trappers managed to cajole Chief Factor John McLoughlin into allowing them to stay, but many followed the footsteps of fellows such as Louis Labonte, who returned east, claimed his final salary, and then trekked back westward via inland waterways to rejoin his mixed-descent family.404 McLoughlin relaxed his enforcement of company policy after 1829, due to concerns that spurning would-be settlers might create resentment and risk pushing their loyalties towards the Americans.405 404 Barman, French Canadians, 103, 172. For more on Louis Labonte, see H.S. Lyman, “Reminiscences of Louis Labonte,” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 1, no. 2 (Jun. 1900): 169-188. 405 Rich, Second Series 159-60, 173; Jetté, At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, 57-58; Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 130-131. 214 The result was that between 1829 and 1851, about 125 trappers, many with Indigenous wives, formally left the fur companies and staked claims in an area of attractive parkland in the northwestern corner of the Willamette Valley. This became known as the French Prairie (Figure 3.3). Despite having nominally “retired” from company work, most remained on-paper employees and were heavily dependent on the HBC for supplies, ranging from farm tools to seed grain. They sold surplus harvests to the HBC, and continued to trap beaver for the company in the winter — sometimes locally and semi-formally, sometimes joining a seasonal expedition east of the Cascades. They were the first people of European descent to settle in the Pacific Northwest with the intention of permanent residence beyond the extraction of furs, and occupied a nebulous space: the HBC did not view them as company colonists discouraged their presence, yet settlers and company came to rely upon each other for commerce. Despite forming communities of mixed- descent, the French Prairie settlers developed no national identity or strong Metis identity in the tradition of the Metis peoples of the Old Northwest and Canada.406 Settlers likely arrived at the French Prairie with the permission of the local Ahantchuyuk Kalapuya people, who at first far outnumbered them and continued to exercise significant local influence even after the malaria epidemics of the 1830s.407 There is no evidence of violence between the French-Indian settlers and the Kalapuya, who were often relatives through marriage, in contrast to the tense and occasionally quite bloody relationships between the HBC and the region’s many Indigenous peoples.408 What we know about the French Prairie settlers in fact suggests that their affinity for the Willamette Valley formed in part from their mixed-descent 406 This estimate of 125 settlers is from Barman, French Canadians, 125. On identity on the French Prairie, see Jetté, At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, 8-9; more generally, Barman, French Canadians, 290-317. 407 Jetté, At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, 55-6. 408 On this violence, see Jetté, At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, 46; and Whaley, Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee, 1-98. 215 Figure 3.3. Map of the French Prairie, with modern roads and urban areas overlaid. Note the presence of small rivers and streams running across the prairie. Courtesy of the Friends of French Prairie. 216 culture, whether inherited from their parents or constructed through their own marriages and community-building. Most of the former trappers were in their late 30s and early 40s at the time of retirement, had worked in the fur trade for ten to twenty years, and had childhood origins in a handful of agricultural towns in the St. Lawrence Valley in what is now Quebec. Many had spent the majority of their careers in Rupert’s Land, the HBC subdivision encompassing the frigid, by- then largely exhausted fur-bearing regions of the Hudson Bay drainage. Barman argues that their choice to settle was influenced by a desire for personal control over one’s livelihood, a sense of camaraderie among one’s fellow French-Canadian trappers and settlers — forged both in the coastal rains and the interior snows — and a sense of connection with one’s Indigenous kin-by- marriage, many of whose peoples had lived in the Pacific Northwest since time immemorial.409 The French Prairie settlers made their homes on a burned-over landscape that had been deeply shaped by the Kalapuya for millennia — and by rainfall. Bounded on the north and west by the Willamette River, on the east by the Molalla River, and extending south towards the modern- day state capital of Salem, at the time of initial agrarian settlement the French Prairie was a mixture of open grassland and scattered woodland; prairies blanketed rolling hills rising above waterways, and gallery forests framed small streams and creeks. The Willamette River and other major rivers on the prairie were surrounded on both banks by wetlands and rainforest groves that bustled with waterfowl, beaver, and all manner of native vegetation. In contrast to the river’s modern flow, which is heavily channelized, the river encountered by French Prairie settlers had many meanders, islets, and a wider ecotone that spread for one to two miles on either side. Winter rainfall and springtime rain-on-snow flooding sent rivers and streams rising and rushing over the bottomlands, 409 Barman, French Canadians, 77-85. Jetté notes that traders who settled on the French Prairie were influenced by a desire to have less hierarchical relations than existed at forts, see At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, 54 217 depositing rich alluvial soils and saturating lowland wet prairies in the immediate vicinity. Farther from the banks, the level prairies were still subjected to significant flooding roughly every ten years; up in the rolling hills and bench-lands were expanses of well-drained soils that were rarely inundated.410 The Kalapuya peoples conducted widespread controlled burns across the prairies in the late summer and early fall, clearing out tree saplings and overgrown areas of brush to create optimal habitat for wildlife and native food plants; they may have timed these burns to take advantage of dry vegetation but allow rainfall to extinguish the blazes and settle the ashes. Rich in nutrients, these ashes were then spread across the landscape during the rainy season, leaving new, tender verdancy to bud in the springtime.411 One ethnobotanical practice was the periodic cleaning or burning of accumulated acorn debris underneath the boughs of the native Quercus garryana, or Oregon Oak; when acorns were allowed to gather on the ground, winter and spring rains leached tannins into the soil, which signaled oak trees not to waste energy producing further acorns and thus inhibited future harvests.412 In common with many other Indigenous peoples along the Northwest Coast, the Kalapuya migrated between summer villages by the Willamette River and winter villages located up smaller streams or in the hills. When considering how the French Prairie settlers experienced and thought about the intermontane climate, it is important to note that their settlements took on decidedly different 410 On the transformation of the Willamette River by settler-colonialists, see P.A. Benner and J.R. Sedell, “Upper Willamette River Landscape: A Historic Perspective,” in River Quality: Dynamics and Restoration (New York: CRC Press, 1997): 23-48. 411 Boyd, ed. Indians, Fire, and the Land; Laforet and York, Spuzzum, 68-9. 412 This observation was shared by Joe Scott, an ecological knowledge program coordinator with the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians, during a presentation, “Good Fire,” delivered as part of the “Indigenous Environmental Histories in Oregon” plenary panel at the 2022 American Society for Environmental History Conference in Eugene, Oregon. Scott also quoted Kalapuya storyteller Esther Stutzman’s astute characterization that “The first whites in the Willamette Valley did not tame a wilderness: they inherited a park.” 218 character from that introduced later by American emigrants. French Prairie settlers developed both French-Indian families and what might be called metis methods of living, adopting many emplaced Indigenous practices and knowledges and blending them with Western traditions.413 Settlers imported geographies of settlement from France by way of Canada, dividing the land up into private longlots that extended from rivers and streams inland; this method provided a diverse array of waterfront, prairie and wooded acreage, variable soil and drainage types, and variable elevation. In form, the longlot system instituted semi-European regimes of delineated private property. Unlike in New France, however, the longlot system on the French Prairie coexisted with Native culture, rather than displacing it: Indigenous wives, for instance, still gathered traditional plant and animal resources from wetland landscapes along the rivers. It is reasonable to suppose that community members also continued the preexisting Indigenous practice of sharing resource sites.414 Homes on the French Prairie, however, appear to have mostly been roofed with ash bark, a tree familiar to the French-Canadians but generally considered to have poor rot resistance.415 413 I borrow this term from Scott, Seeing Like a State. This term is separate from the Metis ethnic identity, describing instead a mixture of Indigenous and non-Indigenous practices inspired by Scott’s ideas of mutuality and practical experience. 414 Jetté, At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, 51-52; and David Brauner, “National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form: Early French-Canadian Settlement, Marian County, Oregon,” prepared 1991. On preexisting communal resource gathering, see Douglas Deur and Nancy Turner, eds. Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005). Longlot, or ribbon farms, were established in New France as part of the land tenure seigneurial system; however, ’lords,’ or seigneurs, generally had far less power than they did in France. See Colin Macmillan Coates, The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000); Richard Cole Harris, The Reluctant Land: Society, Space, and Environment in Canada before Confederation (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008); Leslie P. Choquette, Frenchmen Into Peasants: Modernity and Tradition in the Peopling of French Canada (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Richard Cole Harris, The Seigneurial System in Early Canada: A Geographical Study (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984); and Allan Greer, Peasant, Lord, and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes 1740-1840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985). 415 On ash bark, see Barman, French Canadians, 177. Barman also notes that some French Prairie settlers also used animal skins; this contrasts with lower Columbia Indigenous use of cedar mats. 219 Archaeological evidence indicates that homes and cropland were mostly situated on natural levees and hills above the bottomlands, a deliberate choice that reflected knowledge about seasonal flooding and a preference for areas that would retain good natural soil drainage during winter rains and spring rain-on-snow freshets. There is no evidence that settlers attempted significant ditch- digging and drainage of the lowland prairies or wetlands — indeed, the persistence of Indigenous gathering practices and the inclusion of such considerations in land claim choices suggests that settler foodways were at least somewhat integrated into natural pluvial rhythms and Indigenous practices of seasonal burning.416 The settlements of the French Prairie thus produced what might be called a metis rainscape, where rainfall watered Old World crops on the hills and levees before draining into the bottomlands; there, it joined precipitation from upriver, ebbing and flowing in the context of wetlands, winter wet prairies, and meandering waterways. French-Indian settlement did, however, have ecological impacts, namely the introduction of Old World weeds and the destruction wrought by free-roaming livestock. Pigs, for instance, found the dense vegetation of the bottomlands an appealing and easy source of rooting material; the wetlands were thus not only a landscape used for gathering, but a landscape exploited by nonhuman colonizers. Later emigrant accounts and modern reconstructions of historical vegetation cover, though, show that these landscapes and the practice of annual Indigenous burning remained largely intact through the early-to-mid 1840s, albeit not at the same geographical scale due to population decline and early dispossession of Indigenous territories.417 It is possible that Native wives from east of the Cascades applied their knowledge to the west side of the mountains, resulting in everyday skills and practices that varied depending on origin. Burley, Servants, 11, notes that many fur trade historians prior to the 1980s had disparaging views towards French-Canadians, including their traditional usage of longlots. 416 Brauner, “Documentation Form,” 3-4. 417 Boyd, Indians, Fire, and the Land. On the endurance of pre-contact landscapes into the 1840s and 1850s, see John A. Christy and Edward R. Alverson, “Historical Vegetation of the Willamette Valley, Oregon, circa 1850,” Northwest Science, 85, no. 2, 2011; and Carl L. 220 Jean Barman and Melinda Marie Jetté, who have written the most thorough accounts of the French Prairie, both assert that the mild climate of the intermontane zone was a factor in the choice to settle. However, we have no direct statements of this from the settlers themselves.418 The period between 1813 and 1829 unfortunately reveals a frustrating gap in the primary source record, inhibiting our understanding of how said trappers experienced and discussed the region’s climate in the years preceding their retirement and settlement. In part because of low literacy rates among the largely French-Canadian company workforce, only one brief journal — that of the fur trader Alexander McLeod in the winter of 1826-1827 — survives to offer a firsthand description of trapper activity in the Willamette Valley during this time.419 From his recounting, we know that in 1813 the NWC constructed a temporary outpost in the northern part of the valley and thereafter continued to engage in winter trapping expeditions; the HBC later inherited this outpost in 1821 when the companies merged. No crops were planted beyond small subsistence gardens, and the outpost was staffed year-round only by a handful of men. McLeod, who describes a rainy season trapping expedition that set out from the Willamette Post southward to the Umpqua and Coquille river valleys, records incessant rain, frequent waiting-out of the weather, troubles preserving meat, and desperate attempts to preserve beaver furs from getting damp by wrapping them in woolen trade Johannessen et al., “The Vegetation of the Willamette Valley,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 61 no. 2: 286-302. On continuing Indigenous burning practices as a form of resistance, see Jetté, At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, 148 418 Barman, French Canadians, 77-85, 168; and Jetté, At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, 42, 50- 54. 419 French-Canadians had long made up the majority of formal employees in the entire North American fur trade, and the Pacific Northwest was no exception: of the 2,240 recorded fur company employees between 1811 and 1858, 1,240 were French-Canadian; another 350 or so were Hawaiian, with the remainder largely from the British Isles. Canadiens became more difficult to recruit in the late 1820s and onwards owing to the poor reputation of the Columbia District, resulting in an increased number of Metis and Iroquois employees. See Barman, French Canadians, 63-79. 221 blankets. Their efforts were focused on acquiring furs through trade with Indigenous peoples: McLeod makes no mention of company men trapping skins themselves.420 One might presume that as senior trappers spent more time west of the Cascades, the rhythms of the rainy climate simply may not have bothered or frustrated them as much. This is certainly possible, but neither subjective acclimatization or deliberate climate adaptation can be fully substantiated by scant contemporary sources. Company records and what remains of McLeod’s journal offers no support for the possibility that there were significant improvements in provisioning or emplaced knowledge among trappers; this suggests that everyday and seasonal experiences in the Northwest Coast weather-world were largely similar to previous decades. Summers probably still garnered praise, and the October-April rainy season was still probably dreaded on both an emotional and embodied level; this is also borne out by the enduringly poor climatic reputation of the region among HBC employees. In any case, the mobile nature of the fur trade limited the degree to which better preparation and supplying could insulate trappers from the weather-world when out in the field: every additional article was added weight and expense in a country full of rolling hills, dense forests, and grease trails that were often mucky in winter despite being strategically carved by Natives. Yet the fact that the French Prairie settlers chose to make homes and build families in the Willamette Valley is in itself proof that they found the rainy climate at the very least tolerable, perhaps even in some ways beneficent. There are a number of possible reasons for this. Since many had spent part of their lives in the northerly, snowy climes of the St. Lawrence Valley and the vast expanses of Rupert’s Land, they may have genuinely found that the rains of the Willamette Valley were easier to endure — and they certainly better facilitated subsistence farming. As Robert Gray, 420 Davies, Peter Skene Ogden’s Snake Country Journal, 141-226. 222 Gabriel Franchere and others had earlier observed, the Northwest offered much milder winter temperatures relative to areas of a similar latitude elsewhere on the continent. These comparisons were visceral, bodily ones, rooted in sensory knowledge derived from lived experience in an era and occupation where people were much more exposed to the elements on a daily basis than the typical person in many modern societies. Permanent settlement was also very different from the mobile, provision-poor life of a wandering trapper attempting to minimize their pack-load on temporary trips. To settle in a fixed location allowed better opportunities to establish a sturdy, insulated dwelling, stock supplies and food, accumulate meager comforts, and learn the details of a local landscape.421 Yet the decision of some French-Indian families to settle in the Willamette Valley is also hard to separate from the simple fact that they constituted the vast majority of the regional fur trade’s formal workforce: their trade colleagues from the British Isles, for instance, would have been more accustomed to a rainy, mild climate, but at best expressed mixed opinions of the Northwest. The crucial difference, perhaps, between French-Canadian men and their colleagues —and between fort-based living and free settlement — was that the former came from cultures more open to Indigenous intermarriage. They thus developed many more families and intimacies in the Northwest, and did not view their homes in the valley as fortresses against hostile Natives and bleak, dreary rainfall. Instead, Natives were often their kin: French-Indian children played with Kalapuya children, for instance, making games of diving off bluffs into the Willamette River.422 The French Prairie settlers adjusted to the 421 Barman and Jetté both note that the French Prairie settlers lived in relatively spartan homes, with food and hearth serving as the primary comforts. Later settlers and missionaries also noted their minimalistic dwellings. See for instance Jetté, At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, 53; and Barman, French Canadians, 178. 422 Lyman, “Reminiscences of Louis Labonte.” 223 rainy climate over time, with intimacy and permanence offering a reason and a chance to lay down roots and stabilize their relationship with the region’s rains and environments. They surely encountered many of the same rainy weather-world problems that post farmers did, such as sheep scab, livestock miring, and the grueling work of muddy ploughing. The rainy climate produced complications and demanded particular kinds of labor. Yet although settlers introduced Western agriculture to the French Prairie, they did not at first seek a wholesale transformation of the landscape in order to implement a civilizational ideal. It was the very benefits of a mixed-descent community — adaptability, emplaced knowledge, self-governance, and kinship — that made settlement worthwhile for French-Canadians in the 1820s and 1830s. Methodists, Malaria, and Racialized Rainscapes American missionaries and emigrants, who arrived en masse beginning in the late 1830s, had very different ideas about race, agriculture, and religion. Consider, for instance, Methodist missionaries, who came to the French Prairie beginning in 1834 with the ostensible goal of civilizing Native populations. They had deeply conflicting judgements of the French-Indians. Although French-Indians generally bent over backwards to lend them aid, Methodists were uneasy with their Catholic faith, as well as their metis lifestyles and continued kinship associations with what Methodists considered their “filthy, miserable-looking” Native relatives.423 The American Methodist Reverend Jason Lee, for instance, complimented French-Indian hospitality and cooking and relied on a settler named Joseph Gervais for shelter and sustenance as his party labored in 423 Jetté challenges the assumption that Methodist missionaries were truly interested in converting Natives, arguing that they subscribed to the myth of the vanishing Indian and made minimal efforts to proselytize, see At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, 70-102. James Gibson briefly explored this idea earlier in Farming the Frontier, 149-186. For an in-depth examination of relations between Methodist and Catholic missionaries and the French Prairie communities, see At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, 70-136 224 November of 1834 to build a mission house, “frequently obliged to retire early in the evening with our clothes wet to prevent being drenched in rain.” (Figure 3.4).424 Yet Lee imposed unnecessarily on Gervais for many years, preaching in his home until 1840 despite the availability of the mission house, and worried about whether the prairie’s unconverted bottomlands harbored malaria during high water. Another Methodist missionary, stopping suddenly on a stormy night at a Frenchman’s residence for shelter, was offended when he was charged a dollar for room and board and complained that he was being treated “like ten thousand fleas.” Most missionaries found it unacceptable that the French Prairie settlers “adopt, in many things, the customs of the natives,” complaining that “the tone of society” needed to be fundamentally changed. Jean Barman has argued that Methodists generally saw French-Indians in condescending terms and assumed that they were “pleased to associate with their self-styled betters,” as if “it was an honour” for Methodists to take advantage of French-Indian generosity.425 Even as the Methodists claimed a desire to convert the local Kalapuya and teach them proper, “civilized” lifeways, including those of agriculture, they looked down upon French-Indian settlers and thought of their metis farming and gathering culture in largely similar terms. They made efforts, for instance, to convert French-Indian children to Methodism, and tried teaching them to craft and sew Euro-American clothing.426 Other early travelers from the United States, like the farmer John Ball, were similarly disdainful of French-Indian communities. In September of 1833, five months after he first staked a claim on the French Prairie, Ball had tired of living a “primitive 424 Jason Lee diary, September 24th and November 9th, 1834, Jason Lee papers, MSS 1212, OHS. 425 Missionary quoted in Barman, French Canadians, 179; see also Jetté, At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, 80-84. 426 Jetté, At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, 83-84. Catholic missionaries made similar attempts later in the 1830s, to limited success, see Jetté 113-121. For an exploration of mission farming on both sides of the Cascades see Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 151-186 225 Figure 3.4, sculpture of Jason Lee at Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol. Despite recent efforts to remove his statue on account of his racism, Lee remains one of Oregon’s two statues, alongside John McLoughlin. Photo courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society. 226 life” in the mixed-descent community. Disappointed by the material realities of farming, the frequent presence of Kalapuya people, and the metis lifestyles of the French-Indians, Ball departed eastward only one year after praising the area’s prospects: experience had dulled his enthusiasm. In contrast to his French-Indian neighbors, Ball had no desire to adopt any Indigenous lifeways and had no family ties binding him to the region. He viewed mixed-descent families and communities as occupying a place closer to savagery than civilization; this judgement encompassed criticism of how French-Canadians interacted with valley landscapes, practices which were racialized as savage and untamed — incompatible with Ball’s vision of transformational white agrarianism, which emphasized the imposition of particular landscape practices that he believed necessary to reproduce civilized society.427 The author Washington Irving expressed the prevailing view when he wrote in 1836 that the French-Indians were, like Native Americans, destined to disappear, a fanciful and romantic race fated to be lost to time and the march of progress.428 That the mixed-descent families of the French Prairie seemed content to live as they were without implementing intensive, large-scale transformations of the bottomlands and wet prairies was a difference held against them. Whiteness was thus not merely a matter of skin color: for American missionaries and many others to follow, it was tied to how settlers managed the manifestation of rainfall on the landscape, even if they did not explicitly frame their judgements in terms of the weather-world. The racialization of environment and climate was especially prominent during periods of epidemic disease in the Pacific Northwest: owing to prevailing disease theories of time, the wet, humid climate was directly blamed for the prevalence of dysentery during the winter at Fort Vancouver 427 Ball, quoted in John A. Hussey, Champoeg: Place of Transition, A Disputed History (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1967): 64-66. Jetté concurs, At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, 61. 428 Irving, Astoria, 98-99. 227 and other locations, and likely with some accuracy, for the “Colds and complaints of the Lungs are also frequent.”429 Most devastating, however, was the unintentional introduction of malaria, variously referred to as “fever and ague” and “the intermittent fever” by American and British sources.430 The first epidemic occurred in the summer and fall of 1830, with outbreaks recurring every year through 1833; the anthropologist Robert Boyd has estimated that within this short span of time, 80% of the lower Chinookan and Kalapuyan peoples contracted the disease and died, including the Indigenous wives of many freemen and HBC employees.431 Euro-Americans did not yet understand germ theory in the early 1800s. Prevailing notions of Euro-American medicine instead attributed malarial outbreaks to vapors released by rotting vegetation and stagnant water in the riverine wetlands and wet prairies that were common on the lower Columbia and in the Willamette Valley. Although their understanding of disease transmission was incorrect, traders were right to think that the swampy areas adjacent to many of the HBC’s outposts harbored malarial mosquitos.432 Fort Vancouver in particular was considered by George Simpson to be in an “unhealthy [malarial] state,” one reason why the HBC chose to relocate its Columbia District headquarters to the drier Fort Victoria in 1843.433 Spring rains and 429 Lieutenant Henry Warre, quoted in Gibson, The Lifeline of the Oregon Country, 143-144. On prevailing disease theories of the early-to-mid 1800s, see Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Anthony E. Carlson, “‘Vast factories of febrile poison’: wetlands, drainage, and the fate of American climates, 1750-1850,” in Sara Miglietti and John Morgan, eds. Governing the Environment in the Early Modern World (London: Routledge, 2017): 153-171. 430 Smallpox arrived on the Northwest Coast even earlier than malaria, although with less devastating consequences on intermontane peoples compared to coastal groups. One possible source for the introduction was shipwrecks, most of which were the result of encounters with rainstorms. See Boyd et al., Chinookan Peoples, 235-238. 431 Boyd, The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence, 84, 94. 432 Carlson, “‘Vast factories of febrile poison’ […]” 433 George Simpson, quoted in Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 61. On Fort Victoria, which rests in the rain shadow of the Vancouver Island Ranges, see Simpson quoted in Gibson, Farming the 228 rain-on-snow freshets inundated low-lying areas and left stagnant water, creating breeding habitat for larvae that hatched in the summer and fall; from August through November it was common for dozens of residents and workers at Fort Vancouver to be laid up sick, sometimes up to half of the workforce.434 While some at Fort Vancouver made efforts to treat small numbers of native patients, white missionaries and American travelers such as Nathaniel Wyeth wrote that the disease “[on behalf of] providence has made room for us.” Views about the inferiority of the Northwest’s Native peoples and their destined extinction coexisted alongside perceptions that, in George Simpson’s words, “They are in general exceedingly filthy in their habits, their persons and habitations swarming with loathsome vermin.”435 Although seasonal migration between residences was core to the lifeways of peoples such as the Lower Chinookans, “All of the known Chinookan villages were located along waterways or on bodies of water.” Since malaria is a parasitic disease transmitted by mosquitos, which thrive in warm bodies of standing freshwater, the water-adjacent geography of Indigenous settlement and livelihood made such populations especially vulnerable to malarial exposure.436 Frontier, 114; and Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains, 278-80, who quotes James Douglas describing Fort Victoria as “a perfect ‘Eden’ in the midst of the dreary wilderness,” and “a very Elysium in point of climate & scenery” with less rain, fewer mosquitos, more sunshine than the mainland or the interior of the island. The relocation to Fort Victoria was also a strategic move in the context of the U.S.-British boundary dispute. 434 Barker, Letters of Dr. John McLoughlin, 152-53, 165, 175, 257-58. 435 Wyeth is quoted in Boyd, The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence, 104; Merk, Fur Trade and Empire, 99. William Clark made similar remarks, see JLCE: 6: 144. On the myth of the “vanishing Indian,” see Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 436 Boyd et al., Chinookan Peoples, 55. Reimer, Before We Lost the Lake, 41-42 notes that some Indigenous peoples migrated seasonally in order to escape mosquitos, which were native prior to the introduction of malaria. But avoiding them entirely was impossible in a region so well- watered. Ross, Adventures on the Columbia, 99 mentions seeing large numbers of fleas/mosquitos at seasonally abandoned winter villages. 229 Once they were exposed to malarial parasites, several factors dovetailed to increase Indigenous mortality rates far beyond those of Euro-Americans. High population densities and frequent mobility between villages facilitated transmission of diseases, especially in winter; many of their traditional medicinal practices worsened malarial symptoms; and whites were often unwilling to share quinine medicine. Warfare and hunting by John McLoughlin and the HBC had also significantly reduced the availability of some types of game and the capacity of some groups to muster resources. Finally, Indigenous populations did possess genuine genetic vulnerability to Old World diseases, although this factor should not be overstated or naturalized as deterministic.437 Because Euro-Americans thought that malaria originated in unhealthy, dirty, wet environments, they formed no biological connections between their arrival in the Pacific Northwest and the emergence of malarial parasites, and presumed that Indigenous death-by-disease was linked both to habits and lifeways that Euro-Americans saw as “filthy” and to the supposed higher destiny of the white race. Through the lens of miasmatic theory, traders and early settlers weaved together ideas about destined Indigenous extinction and Indigenous environmental and cultural inferiority. The seasonal round of the Chinookan and Kalapuyan peoples, a millennia-old adaptation to the alternating rainy and dry seasons of the Northwest Coast, was thus implicated by whites as an improper, uncivilized way to live, which doomed the region’s Indigenous peoples to disappear in 437 Boyd, Pestilence; on overhunting, see for instance Whaley, Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee, 37-41. On density and transmission, see Harris, The Resettlement of British Columbia, 13. For explanations of why narratives of genetic vulnerability are not sufficient in and of themselves, see Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton, and Alan C. Swedlund, eds. Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016); David Jones, “Population, Health, and Public Welfare,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016): 413-432; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014): 39-42; and Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). 230 favor of those who had the ambition and rectitude to transform such pestilential rainscapes into productive farms.438 Euro-American ideals of agriculture, however, demanded control, the drainage of marshes and swamps, and the digging of ditches to allow rainfall to wet the soil and then flow on without creating the muggy winter wet prairies that dominated pre-colonial bottomland environments. Euro-Americans desired the verdancy brought about by abundant rainfall, but they also wanted landscapes that were largely fixed in place, rather than fluid, shifting, cyclical. From the first plantings of seeds by the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Northwest’s ample rainfall was thus seen as a climatic boon only insofar as the Indigenous parklands could be transformed to allow that rain to flow through the soil and move on, rather than linger as part of a saturated landscape. This reflected a deep, sensorial nostalgia for the managed landscapes and material culture of the northeastern United States and the British Isles, and for the established agroecologies that were associated with conceptions of home; of civilization; of familiarity in a foreign land.439 A desire to cultivate and exploit new lands coexisted with a longing for a particular kind of environment, and a particular 438 For example, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, in their journal entries for January 19, 1806, remarked of the Clatsop that “Their laws like those of all uncivilized Indians consist of a set of customs which have grown out of their local situations.” This is an early articulation of the opinion that Northwest Coast Indigenous peoples and their environments were of a reciprocally “uncivilized” character. This perspective is rooted in Western ideas of universal morality: that there is a single civilized manner of living that applies to all people in all situations, and that some environments — and the people who live there — are uncivilized because they do not understand or support the proper kind of living. See Lewis and Clark, JLCE: 6: 221-223. Clark also complained, in his entry on November 5th, 1805, that waterfowl were so abundant and noisy on the Columbia that he could not slept, see Clark, JLCE: 6: 21. 439 On the managed settler landscapes of New England, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, first revised edition, 2003); and Anya Zilberstein, A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). On longing for the familiar in the 1800s, see Matt, Homesickness. My thinking about this kind of visceral, material longing has also been inspired by Alfredo González-Ruibal, “What Remains? On material nostalgia,” in Bjornar J. Olsen et al., eds. After Discourse: Things, Affects, Ethics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021): 187-203. 231 manner of living within it. For Wyeth and so many other would-be settler-colonialists, then, there was a better way to live amidst the rains. A right way. Conclusion: Here Come the Americans! Looking purely at financial metrics, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s presence west of the Cascades was largely a success. By establishing a permanent imperial presence in the region, the HBC consolidated its monopoly over the fur trade. George Simpson’s post farming strategy was able to both feed employees and turn a small profit, and the company made a fortune selling furs to Chinese and European markets. The HBC diversified its resource extraction activities and tapped into global networks of trade, further linking the Pacific Northwest to the rest of the imperial world. Rainfall, however, casts a cloudy shadow over such neat conclusions. Post farms were successful only because of the labor of the HBC’s servants, who toiled outside in inclement weather for meager pay and were in many instances exploited and marginalized by company policies. Racial hierarchies excluded most employees — those of French-Canadian, Hawaiian, and Metis ancestry, among others — from the possibility of promotion, and left them to fend for themselves when it came to finding warm clothing, waterproof housing, and farming tools. Furrow after muddy furrow, the HBC’s wealth was accumulated by those whose voices survive to leave us the least evidence of their hardship. Even still, crops sometimes failed because of excessive rainfall; livestock died in mud and wet; and voyageurs perished in rainstorms along the lower Columbia, their bodies and stories lost to the rapids and the rocks. To the upset of its administrators, the HBC was not successful in establishing imperial dominance in the Pacific Northwest. Many of the region’s different Indigenous peoples continued to hold leverage over the fur trade, providing food, supplies, transportation, and trapping labor in the context of a seasonal round profoundly influenced by the rainy season of the coast and the 232 intermontane zone. Far from being a place where, as Simpson claimed, agriculture and commerce “could not fail,” the Pacific Northwest was held in low esteem by the same servants who made the company’s profits possible. Servants complained of ill treatment, often drank excessively, and were difficult to recruit. The HBC had no intentions of remaining permanently in the Columbia District, and planned to evacuate the region as soon as its fur resources were exhausted. Some rank-and-file servants, however, entered marriages with Indigenous women and developed kinship relationships with local Native peoples. They found purpose, solace, and comfort in family, dwelling in villages on the outskirts of the HBC’s stockades. With something to bind them to Pacific Northwest, many decided to retire from the company and stay permanently. They settled in the Willamette Valley, created mixed-descent communities, and developed multicultural, metis relationships with rainfall and rain-shaped landscapes. American travelers to the Pacific Northwest did not look upon such communities kindly, associating them unfavorably with Indigenous populations, unhealthy landscapes, and uncivilized modes of living. But American promoters began to seize upon the region’s abundant rainfall and pleasant summers to promulgate a narrative of climatic exceptionalism and white supremacy; this narrative would overturn British imperial hegemony in the region by encouraging American emigration to the Pacific Northwest. At the heart of this narrative was a new vision of permanent settlement in the Willamette Valley — and a new vision of the potential of the winter rains, rooted in the large-scale transformation of regional landscapes rather than in metis methods of living. 233 CHAPTER FOUR CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF CIVILIZATION: RAINFALL AND OVERLAND EMIGRATION, c. 1840-1855 Marianne Hunsaker D’arcy was about three and a half years old when her family uprooted from their home in Illinois and set out for the Oregon Country in 1845. In the late 1930s, looking back upon these early years, an elderly Marianne recalled how as a small child she listened to her parents discuss the prospect of emigrating to Oregon. “I can remember all the surroundings,” she wrote, “A fire burning in the great fireplace… mother busy around the room, she and Father talking - always about Oregon; fine land; free, possibly, under Donation Land Grants; good timber for building; and no ‘ague’ in Oregon… probably father would not have that severe ‘lung fever’ every winter.”440 D’arcy’s parents would have learned about Oregon by word-of-mouth, from promotional pamphlets, and from glowing newspaper columns similar to one that appeared in the Illinois Free Trader in April of 1843, which pronounced the Willamette Valley “the most beautiful, productive, and healthful spot in the world — the real, tangible, literal Eldorado, discovered at last,” with few frosts, year-round verdancy, and a climate of “extraordinary mildness” that made “mid-winter… a more beautiful prospect than the Ohio [River Valley] in June.”441 Like many of their generation, D’arcy’s parents had likely struggled in the aftermath of the Panic of 1837, living with few luxuries and supporting their dozen children day-by-day. Whatever her father’s wintertime ailment was — probably pneumonia — he may not have been able to afford medicine to treat it, or may have had to work outside in chilly weather conditions that aggravated 440 Marianne Hunsaker D’arcy autobiography, MSS 1508, Overland journeys to the Pacific collection, Box 3, OHS. 441 The Illinois Free-Trader and LaSalle County Commercial Advertiser, April 14, 1843. 234 his sickness in order to support his family. For the D’arcys, the intermontane zone of Oregon represented a distant promise; the potential for a clean slate, far from corrupt politics, greedy land speculators, and the frigid snow of the Old Northwest. To emigrate was to have faith in the possibility of carving out a piece of fertile land in a healthful climate and contributing to the construction of a new society, fairer and more equitably prosperous than the United States.442 The D’arcy’s successfully emigrated westward and eventually settled near Oregon City, and Marianne lived in the area for her entire life. For American settlers such as D’arcy, ideas about climate and bodily experiences of rainfall played crucial roles in shaping early settler visions of the Oregon Country. Emigrants to the Oregon Country were not jingoistic patriots, nor were they universally celebrated figures within their lifetime: most were farmers, were poor, a small portion were illiterate, and they believed that the climate and natural prospects of the Pacific Northwest might allow them to escape or at least lessen some of their ills. They dreamed, and were often deceived by pro-emigration newspapers and private promotional pamphlets that portrayed the Northwest as a region of infinite bounty, mild temperatures, and easy living: an Eden-in-waiting. Much of the broader public thought emigrants foolish and continued to consider the Northwest a rainswept land of little worth, but word-of-mouth and media networks continued to spread climate misinformation, sometimes intentionally and sometimes out of ignorance. Promotional rhetoric about the potential of the Pacific Northwest was mixed with ideas about racial purity, racially suited climates and environments, and the myth of the vanishing Indian. Promoters touted the Oregon Country as a temperate region ideal for all of the agricultural practices and landscapes that settlers knew and valued, and insisted that the Indigenous peoples of the 442 Thomas Richards, Jr., Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020): 182-213. 235 Willamette Valley and beyond were lazy and destined to disappear before the vanguard of agrarian civilization. They made favorable climatic comparisons to France and Italy, bastions of Western civilization, and gradually erased the longstanding presence of Indigenous landscape management by portraying the intermontane zone as ready-made for the activities of a white, Christian society. Settlers found these ideas appealing, and many who got caught up in the bubble of emigration rhetoric spent large sums of money — often their life savings — to travel overland in search of a better life. As American settlers made their way overland to Oregon in the 1840s and beyond, however, they found that the rosy portrayals of promoters were inaccurate. Emigration was far from a triumphal westward march towards a promised land. Rather, it was a physically and psychologically harsh endeavor that often elicited homesickness and disappointment. It was also a seasonally-oriented bodily experience with many dimensions, and rainfall was felt viscerally along the last leg of the trail. Emigrants were not troubadours who endured it all with no fuss or complaining: they were often miserably wet, cold, and hungry, and lost a great deal along the weary way. Some of the greatest losses were nonhuman: as Alfred Crosby and William Robbins have noted, domesticated animals such as cattle also journeyed the overland trails, as part of a “grunting, lowing, neighing, crowing, chriping, snarling, buzzing” menagerie.443Their sufferings, too, were a key element of emigrant travails. As settlers trudged with their depleted herds of livestock along the Columbia River and into the Willamette Valley, the rainy climate often dampened the spirits and gave a chilly drenching to the hopes of many would-be colonists. 443 Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 193-194. Robbins has echoed Crosby’s statement with specific regard to the Pacific Northwest. See William G. Robbins, “Willamette Eden: The Ambiguous Legacy,” in Northwest Lands, Northwest Peoples, 99. 236 Upon arriving in the Willamette Valley, a sizable portion of early emigrants found the climate wholly undesirable. Most were poor, exposed to the elements, and had few options available to them. Contrary to the many hyperbolic promotional materials that declared Oregon a place where life was “easy,” it was not a land where handouts grew on bushes. Although settlers recognized that the abundant rains could make for fertile land and often commented favorably upon the agricultural potential of the Northwest lowlands, the sodden material realities of arrival and first winters in the Northwest did not match the hyperbolic proclamations of Edenic ease issued by self- interested boosters, politicians, and editors. Many emigrants promptly returned home to the eastern United States; others left for sunny California, kickstarting inter-state rivalries that persist to the present and have significant implications for anti-growth rhetoric and policy. Emigrants left the trans-Mississippi east hopeful of escaping the hardships of a continental climate, but found that a temperate climate brought its own struggles. The Rains of Empire: Boosterism and the Narrative of Climatic Exceptionalism In 1839, American settlers in the Oregon Country numbered somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty individuals. Most were associated with Methodist mission communities in the Willamette Valley, and they were outnumbered by several hundred French-Indians and Kalapuya.444 The response of the Hudson’s Bay Company to these first American travelers, missionaries, and prospective settlers was to try and strengthen Britain’s claim to the north shore of the Columbia River by attracting their own colonists. The Puget’s Sound Agricultural Company, a branch of the HBC that exported the region’s surplus agricultural products to Russian fur traders 444 Americans generally referred to the region as the Oregon Country, whereas the British generally called it the Columbia country or Columbia District, borrowing the Hudson’s Bay Company’s terminology. Population estimate given by Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 136. 237 in Alaska, attempted to recruit settlers from Scotland and Canada, particularly the Red River Colony in what is now the province of Manitoba. By establishing a viable agricultural settlement on the southern shore of Puget Sound, the HBC and the British government hoped to secure favorable terms in treaty negotiations.445 British efforts flopped. This was in part because the lands they offered were suboptimal, and in part because the HBC desired a heavily managed settlement process. By controlling what lands settlers occupied, they probably hoped to ensure good relations with Indigenous groups and avoid the elimination of beaver habitat. This desire for control, however, manifested in the HBC’s paternalistic terms of recruitment. Colonists were offered half-shares: the HBC would lease them 1,000 acres of land, farming tools, and a year’s worth of provisions, to be paid back in full, and in exchange settlers could take one-half of the agricultural output of the land. This, in effect, meant they were to be indentured — and such an offer was quite unappealing. The Pacific Northwest was also quite poorly known among the Anglo-American public until the late 1830s: few published accounts of the region existed prior, none were mass-produced, and the region generally attracted little wide interest. It had a mostly poor reputation among fur traders, evidenced by the HBC’s difficulty recruiting employees to work in the Columbia District and by the ample complaints noted by traders such as Alfred Seton, Robert Stuart, and Alexander Henry, among others. Although European sailors as early as the 1790s had written in their private journals about the mild temperatures of winter on the Northwest Coast, predominant public theories about climate and latitude concluded that since the Northwest was on the same continent and at the 445 Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 109-124; John S. Galbraith, “The Early History of the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company, 1838-43,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 55, no. 3 (Sept., 1954): 234-259; Bowen, The Willamette Valley,11-12. For background on the Red River colony, see Susan Dianne Brophy, A Legacy of Exploitation: Early Capitalism in the Red River Colony, 1763–1821 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022) 238 same latitude as the Northeast, it had likewise frigid winters. Combined with knowledge of the region’s many snow-capped mountain ranges, this led to a general sense among the Anglo- American public — or, at least, those who had time to pay any attention to such matters — that the Oregon Country was an inhospitable land, swept by blizzards on the east side of the Cascades and torrential rains on the impenetrably forested west side of the Cascades. There was also the matter of what lay in-between the eastern half of North America and the Pacific Northwest. In the early 1830s, a common understanding existed that much of the arid middle part of the North American continent was an uninhabitable wasteland. The Anglo-American public did not know of any region called the Great Plains: people were familiar instead with the “Great American Desert.”446 Later, in the 1870s and 1880s, popular narratives emerged in the United States that speculated rain would “follow the plough,” enabling white settlers to turn this vast desert into a garden.447 But for much of the first half of the 1800s, most Europeans and Americans believed that the core of the North American continent was barren, infertile, and “savage,” and largely impassable. The Lynchburg Virginian, for instance, wrote in 1829 that because it lay across such vast distances, Oregon “would be deprived of that frequent intercourse so necessary to a good understanding between members of the same confederacy,” and would be 446 John D. Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993): 28-61. On the Great American Desert, see Richard M. Dillion, “Stephen Long's Great American Desert,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 111, no. 2 (Apr. 1967): 93-108. 447 The deeply embedded historiographical perception of the American West as a region of aridity and settler-era water crisis is mostly accurate, but the universalization of this definition can fail to acknowledge the unique environments and issues of the Pacific Northwest. The tendency to focus on problems of aridity continues today; for example, see Donald Worster, “The American West in the Age of Vulnerability,” Western Historical Quarterly 45, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 5-16. Worster broadly identifies the American West as a place that will be “losing water” in the Anthropocene, but the western side of the Pacific Northwest is slated to see slightly more precipitation on an annual basis, albeit in different form and rhythm. See Dalton et al., Climate Change in the Northwest. 239 unable to receive economic or military aid.448 Distance alone — both geographic and psychological — was considered a largely insurmountable obstacle to settlement by much of the American public. In light of this unfavorable popular image, the British proved unsuccessful at encouraging colonization and made little effort to spread climatic hyperbole. Rather than work to boost the image of the Pacific Northwest in the minds of the British public, British newspapers were all too happy to perpetuate portrayals of the region as a sodden, rainswept land, as it was in the interest of the Hudson’s Bay Company to drown any seeds of American interest and monopolize the exploitation of the region’s dwindling beaver stocks.449 Unfortunately, this stance probably also had the effect of deflating British efforts to recruit colonists to the north shore of the Columbia River. The HBC, as an extension of the British Empire, tried its best — George Simpson and other administrators were effusive about the intermontane zone when it suited them. But John McLoughlin, whom the few British settlers consulted upon arrival, was quite honest about the agricultural difficulties he had observed during his time as Chief Factor. Though he was fond of the Willamette Valley, he expressed frustration with American booster claims regarding wheat bushel outputs, remarking that they were often inflated by a factor of four.450 He also stated his frank opinion that “This country is not worth going to war over.”451 The few British settlers who did come to the Pacific Northwest suffered from the same losses at post farms — sheep who died in the winter rains, cows who got stuck in the mire, and waterways that sometimes flooded in winter and spring. Many of them registered their complaints with the HBC and moved back home. And so came the Americans – but not for the reasons one might expect. It is popularly assumed that American emigrants came overland as patriots bound to a Manifest Destiny, 448 Lynchburg Virginian, March 19, 1829; Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, 41. 449 On British portrayals, see Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, 33-36. 450 Unruh, Jr., 33-36; Rich, Second Series, 147, 313. 451 Quoted in OPB’s Oregon Experience, Season 12, Episode 2, “Fort Vancouver.” 240 committed to claiming the Oregon Country for the United States. This viewpoint was also the consensus among historians until the latter half of the twentieth century. However, prior to the American acquisition of imperial title to the region in the Oregon Treaty of 1846, most emigrants had a more flexible view of the possible future of the Oregon Country. Many sought to form an independent government — what the historian Thomas Richards, Jr. has called the ideal of a “White Yeomen’s Republic of Oregon.”452 Early colonists were largely in favor of annexation when it arose as an issue, but it was not their first or only option, nor a significant motivation for their overland journeys. Only after 1846 and the abandonment of British interest below the 49th parallel did emigrants travel to the Oregon Country based on promises of free land from the American government; even then, very few departed with the primary, contemporary goal of patriotic service. This view was much more popular among boosters than emigrants, most of whom were motivated by a desire to escape financial distress, land monopolies, epidemic disease, and the hardships of a continental climate. They wanted, in essence, to escape the problems of contemporary America.453 Rather than being grounded in any overwhelming historical evidence, typical portrayals of American emigrants as patriotic adventurers were crafted in the mid-1800s by boosters, newspapers, and politicians as part of national narratives of progress, enhanced later in the 1800s by the tendency of early settler sources to retrospectively mythologize themselves and claim that 452 See Daniel J. Burge, A Failed Vision of Empire: The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, 1845-1872 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022); and, Richards, Jr, Breakaway Americas, 182-213. 453 Richards, Jr., Breakaway Americas, 182-213; Unruh, Jr. , The Plains Across, 53-54, 90-94; Bowen, The Willamette Valley, 17-22; Lorenzo Veracini, The World Turned Inside Out: Settler Colonialism as a Political Idea (London: Verso, 2021); Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020); Stephen Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (New York: Penguin Books, 2017). Missouri Senator Lewis F. Linn, a fervent advocate of Oregon emigration, had made earlier and widely publicized efforts to grant land claims to American settlers, but his legislation failed to pass. Only after the Oregon Treaty was the Donation Land Claim Act enacted, in 1850. 241 their initial motivations for emigration were nationalistic. Such settler hagiography was pervasive. As the historian Earl Pomeroy put it, “several decades of patriotic oratory at old settlers’ meetings did little to sharpen their memories or help them distinguish cause from effect.”454 Climate and environment occasionally figure in nineteenth and early twentieth century histories that follow the pioneer mythmaking tradition, but are addressed either as a temporary hardship quickly overcome by hardy pioneers, or in exceptionalist terms that portray the lands west of the Cascades as a place of Edenic, easy prosperity. Such histories generally take the most enthusiastic emigrants and boosters at their word.455 James R. Robertson, for instance, wrote in 1902 that “Climate and abundance of resource have rendered the population of Oregon free from much of that conflict with nature which the settlers of less favored regions have been obliged to experience,” even adding that such natural abundance led to “the problem of a population too easily satisfied and lacking in ambition.”456 Lost in these retrospective and historiographical visions was the reality that the Pacific Northwest had not always been considered an appetizing place to settle, in part because of excess rainfall and a prolonged rainy season. Settlers had to be convinced to emigrate: to do so entailed 454 Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, 36. On old pioneer meetings, see Earl Pomeroy, The Pacific Slope: A History of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah and Nevada (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965): 30. 455 Unruh, Jr. has noted that pioneer-era historians of overland travel and settlement tended to emphasize and exaggerate the hardships of emigrants in the frame of patriotic narratives, naturalizing their personal character as exceptional in the face of adversity. See Unruh, Jr, The Plains Across, 3-27. These early historians sometimes noted rainfall and the rainy season as environmental challenges. Later in the twentieth century, as historians began to push back against simple narratives of patriotism, they continued to sometimes acknowledge rainfall. See for instance Sidney Warren, Farthest Frontier: The Pacific Northwest (New York: Macmillan, 1949): 113-115. This seems to have become outmoded later in the twentieth century, when historians began to largely take the most enthusiastic emigrants at their word with regard to the Pacific Northwest’s climate and focus less on pioneer hardship in favor of more complex social and cultural history. 456 James R. Robertson, “The Social Evolution of Oregon,” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 3, no. 1 (1902): 3. 242 uprooting oneself, one’s family, one’s way of living, and undergoing an expensive overland journey to a place that they had never seen; to settle involved transferring previous modes of living to a new place, as well as adapting new modes of living when old ones were not possible — at least not until the land was “improved” further. Settlement also involved imposing intentions on a place, even as those intentions were reshaped by the material realities of unfamiliar environs. To emigrate to the Oregon Country — or anywhere else, for that matter — was to commit to living one’s life there, finding sustenance and employment there, and raising a family there — all this, day-by-day, in a distant land quite different from all that that they had known before. In that difference lay two interrelated kinds of possibility: the possibility to begin again, and the possibility of re-establishing familiar habits and routines in the context of such a new beginning, to experience all that was good east of the Mississippi with comparatively few of the social or environmental problems. Agrarian settlers knew that if they decided to stay, they would in all chance spend most of the rest of their life on their claim, engaging in laborious, intergenerational transformations of the landscape and enlisting their children to help them as part of process of personal enrichment and filial betterment. Their emphasis was on family, and on the faith that the Oregon Country offered a better future for them. Settlers understood that they and their loved ones would spend many of their waking hours outside, exposed to the elements, dependent upon climatic and weather-world rhythms for their livelihood and for life itself. In the context of nineteenth century ideas about environmental health, they wanted to know what those elements were, and how they manifested: were rain and sun reliable? Were summers hot, winters cold? Did temperatures often fluctuate between extremes? Was water available; did rivers flood and create disease-ridden ponds? Was the air pure, dry, humid? The healthfulness and geography of a prospective settlement were of 243 paramount consideration, and judgements were often heavily localized.457 To settle somewhere was be there for it all, for “the land and the days.”458 American promoters, drawing on the rhetoric of climate and environment, proved far more effective than the British at encouraging emigration to the Oregon Country. Their ingenuity — or galling hucksterism — began in 1829, when a New England schoolteacher named Hall Jackson Kelley founded the American Society for Encouraging the Settlement of the Oregon Territory. Kelley had corresponded with several current and former fur trappers and had read Nicholas Biddle’s 1814 account of the Corps of Discovery, and became convinced that the destiny of the Oregon Country, which he had never visited, lay with the United States. He also became convinced that he was to become the celebrated founding father of a new and prosperous settlement. Alongside dozens of other like-minded individuals who had never been to the Oregon Country, he devised plans for a community at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers, paid for recruitment solicitations in various East Coast newspapers, and wrote to Congress to request funding and land claim guarantees. In 1830, Kelley and his Society compatriots published the very first promotional pamphlet advocating emigration and agrarian settlement of the Oregon Country (Figure 4.1).459 It painted 457 Valencius, The Health of the Country; Nash, Inescapable Ecologies; Carlson, “‘Vast factories of febrile poison.’” Katherine Johnston, The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), has been a useful model in showing how private and public discourses regarding climate and medical geography have often differed. 458 I borrow this poetic phrase from the writer Tracy Daughtery’s recent memoir, which includes a discussion of “rituals of region” and explores how place and family mingle in more modern times in the Great Plains. Tracy Daugherty, The Land and the Days: A Memoir of Family, Friendship, and Grief (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2022). 459 Fred Wilbur Powell, “Hall Jackson Kelley—Prophet of Oregon,” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 18, no. 1 (Mar., 1917): 1-54. 244 Figure 4.1, title page of Hall J. Kelley’s first pamphlet. Note that the subtitles emphasize climate, geography, and the supposed natural, racial claim of white settlers to the lands of the Pacific Northwest. 245 broad brushstrokes, was anchored in his own ambition, and relied on secondhand knowledge, especially the glowing accounts that fur traders — such as his friend Joshua Pilcher — often gave of summers in the Willamette Valley.460 The pamphlet claimed that “no portion of the globe presents a more fruitful soil, or a milder climate, or equal facilities for carrying into effect the great purposes of a free and enlightened nation,” and identified the Willamette Valley, “sheltered by stupendous mountains,” as “more salubrious” than any other portion of the region.461 Owing to the region’s varied topography, Kelley wrote that the Pacific Northwest “abounds with springs and rivers of pure water… the air is more salubrious [than] the Floridas, New Orleans, and much of the Texas…. where the water is only pure, while falling from the clouds.” In the Willamette Valley in particular, Kelley wrote, the temperature “seldom falls to freezing point, and never below. It has been very justly remarked, that the severity of the weather, is better determined by the quantity of water that falls, than by its congelation. In the neighborhood of the mouth of the Columbia, rains are frequent in the winter.” Kelley claimed that the rainy season lasted only from December through February — a contrast to fur trappers, who often gave wider windows stretching from October to March — and were followed by “a mild summer heat” in April. By June, Kelley assured, “all kinds of mild fruit are ripened” in pleasant weather.462 Perhaps out of familiarity with Biddle’s narrative of the Corps of Discovery, he briefly noted that rains are frequent in winter on the lower Columbia, but offered no further descriptions and focused on mythologizing the intermontane zone. A second pamphlet followed in 1831, emphasizing that the climate and fertile 460 Hall J. Kelley, A General Circular to All Persons of Good Character, Who Wish to Emigrate to the Oregon Territory (William W. Wheildon: Boston, 1831): 3-4; for slightly more on Pilcher’s biography, see Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, 29. 461 Hall J. Kelley, A Geographical Sketch of Part of North America Called Oregon (Boston: J. Howe, 1830): 4. 462 Kelley, A Geographical Sketch, 17-19 246 soil, framed as products of Providence, would “conspire to make life easy” for emigrants of “good character” who had “patriotism” as their utmost motive.463 Kelley’s efforts met with failure, as they hinged on improbable government intervention in a territory it had agreed to joint-occupy with the British Empire, and which was largely seen in the U.S. as a peripheral backwater of little national or public interest. His solicitations also met with negative publicity in New England, with some accusing of him of being a restless, hyperbolic schemer whose visions conflicted with contemporary perceptions of the Oregon Country as a dangerous wilderness.464 Yet his writings represent the beginning of a long tradition of Northwest boosterism, and embody a particular and place-based focus on a myth of climatic exceptionalism: that the Pacific Northwest was a land devoid of sickness and harsh weather, where a settler would not have to worry about the climate or the environment thwarting their efforts to establish an agrarian vision. Kelley’s writing, like that which followed him, mixed fact and fiction, inclusion and omission, ignorance and deception. In a global context, the Pacific Northwest was not unique in being subject to narratives of climatic exceptionalism. It was common for those promoting settlement abroad to craft images of abundance and perfection that seem outlandish to modern observers, and were so even to many contemporaries.465 Yarns about salubrious climates and unfailing crops were not unprecedented, and these narratives catalyzed niche media networks among those who found such visions of 463 Kelley, A General Circular, 17 464 John B. Wyeth, quoted in Wilbur, “Hall Jackson Kelley — Prophet of Oregon,” 46-7 465 For instance, Unruh, Jr. notes in The Plains Across that some Northwest boosters told humorously hyperbolic stories about pigs who roamed around with knives sticking out of their backs, ready to eat. This story dates to the first century BC, see Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001): 283-284. People didn’t take these kinds of ready-to-eat swine stories at face value — they were entertaining — but they took more seriously the claims about climate that were mixed in with such tall tales. 247 prosperity appealing, over time persuading tens of thousands to emigrate, with varying success and permanence, to places like the Pacific Northwest, Panama, Palestine, Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina.466 Such visions of promise stretch across centuries and continents as part of the ancient human tradition of imagining a land of plenty and leisure, an Arcadia or Elysium or Cockaigne realm where one might start anew and escape from the stubborn burdens and injustices of one’s place and time. The term “El Dorado” was frequently applied to Oregon, referring to what Andrekos Varnava has called a tradition of hopeful imagination of places “where wealth or any benefit could be rapidly acquired with ease and little effort.”467 In the context of North America, though, promotionalist portrayals of the west side of the Cascades as fertile and abounding in rivers and artesian springs differed from contemporary views of the American West as a wasteland. In this sense, the Northwest Coast — where water is actually abundant and American colonization occurred rapidly — was the continental ur-myth of later Edenic claims about arid parts of the American West. It was a (wet) dry run for future boosters. Describing the visions of early promoters, the historian James Ronda perhaps put it best: “Here was an Eden before the fall, a place without vipers and beyond the hand of evil.”468 466 Andrekos Varnava, ed. Imperial Expectations and Realities: El Dorados, Utopias and Dystopias (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Veracini, The World Turned Inside Out; Thomas Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). A quick search on Wikipedia reveals that forty cities, townships, and communities across the United States are named Arcadia. 467 Varnava, Imperial Expectations, 5. This term was widely used in emigrant guides to Oregon, for instance in Lansford W. Hastings, The Emigrants’ Guide, to Oregon and California (Cincinnati: George Conclin, 1845): 6 468 James P. Ronda, “Calculating Ouragon,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, 94, no. 2/3 (Summer - Fall, 1993): 127. For an example of how arid parts of the American West later became the subject of visions about health, see Gregg Mitman, Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); or, listen to Harry McClintock’s folk song, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” about a hobo’s paradise. 248 Organized interest in colonizing this supposed earthly paradise remained very limited and niche at first, evidenced by the largely negative reception Kelley’s advocacy received. His solicitations had reached very few, and convinced even fewer to try emigrating westward. As Methodist missionaries such as Jason Lee began reporting back to relatives and friends on their experiences in the Willamette Valley, however — and their view that the valley’s Natives were in irreversible decline because of civilizational and biological inferiority — popular curiosity about the region slowly crystalized among the American public. Small emigration societies ceased to be the primary vessels of Oregon boosterism: in the wake of economic dislocation caused by the Panic of 1837, the movement inked itself into newspapers and began to wander the halls of Congress.469 Out of the Pamphlet and Into the Newspaper What newspaper editors and correspondents wrote about Oregon was very important. In the first phases of overland emigration, only a handful of Americans had yet made the journey to Oregon and their reports were most accessible when published or shared informally among friends. Information was scarce, often vague and idealistic, and incestuous in the sense that all public knowledge was either drawn and redrawn from the same limited selection of original sources, or outright fabricated. Chains of verbal communication obviously suffered from the distortion that comes with retelling, frequently self-interested or oriented to entertain. Newspaper columns and booster pamphlets, on the other hand, often reflected the promotional interests of investors, editors, politicians, and previous settlers, as well as the novelty of describing a “new” country to readers. The need to entertain frequently outweighed any need for accuracy. 469 Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, 91-92 249 Many papers, for instance, relied on published travelogues to inform no-byline pieces providing descriptions of the region. These sources were problematic for a variety of reasons. Many travelogues, like those of Alexander Ross, were written retrospectively with the intent of capitalizing on growing interest in the Oregon Country; the best of these were the product of both genuine experience and publicity-oriented editorial discretion, while the worst were outright fabrications written by individuals who had never visited the Pacific Northwest. Both kinds often played into public fervor by providing favorable descriptions of the Willamette Valley in a bid to attract readership. Travelogues written contemporaneously rather than retrospectively, such as Wyeth party-member John Kirk Townsend’s Narrative of a Journey over the Rocky Mountains, were often more honest. Townsend, for instance, remarked on the bountiful fruit orchards of the French Prairie and Fort Vancouver, but griped greatly about the rainy season. During the winter of 1834-35, he and several other visitors decided, in the tradition of the maritime fur traders, to sail to Hawai’i to wait out the rains. Reverend Samuel Parker, similarly, made clear in his Journal of an Exploring Tour that only small parts of the Northwest were suitable for agriculture and was clear about the long rainy season west of the Cascades, while still advocating settlement and presenting a relatively favorable climatic image.470 Narratives written contemporaneously as journals, however, were not as titillating as carefully crafted travelogues, and were thus not as widely available as the newspapers that emphasized and embellished their more positive remarks for dissemination to a large audience. Anecdotes about fruit trees drooping under the weight of a harvest were widely printed in newspapers: not so were less flattering stories. Support for westward migration to Oregon was far from universal or inevitable, but it was extremely vocal in comparison to the opposition: one 470 Townsend, Narrative of a Journey 114-138; Parker, Journal of an Exploring Tour, 113-198 250 contemporary newspaper columnist acknowledged that “flattering tale[s]” vastly dominated the popular written record. Positive coverage largely drowned out skepticism, as boosters felt much more strongly in favor of emigration than detractors were against it.471 Some prospective emigrants were surely dissuaded: but enough were enraptured by the burgeoning myth of climatic exceptionalism, and by entertaining storytelling, to spur one of the largest mass migrations in American history. Most newspapers who took a pro-emigration editorial stance were in the Old Northwest states such as Missouri and Indiana, which lay proximal to the various starting points of the overland trails. People living in set-off cities such as Independence, Missouri often had financial interests in encouraging overland emigrants, who purchased a wide range of supplies at local businesses. Overland emigration was not cheap, and often cost a family’s life’s savings. Initial outfitting alone, excluding expenses incurred on the trail or on arrival, ran between $100 and $300 per individual — about $4,000 to $11,000 at modern rates.472 John Unruh has noted that “thousands of poor persons were excluded from the overland emigrations” because they lacked enough capital to outfit a wagon train.473 Local papers and their advertisers had an obvious stake in this outfitting business, issuing pro-emigration coverage that reflected a much more nationalistic perspective than those held by emigrants themselves. For instance, an editorial in the Edgefield Advertiser warned in 1839 that England sought to “lay a formal claim” to the Oregon Country despite American right “by discovery, by occupation,” and demanded that the federal government act to secure the region’s 471 New-York Daily Tribune, April 1, 1843 472 This adjustment to modern rates is approximate rather than ironclad, but provides some useful context. See the historical price adjustment calculator at MeasuringWorth.com, a free, reliable tool managed and utilized by economic historians. 473 Unruh, Jr, The Plains Across, 94, 405-408. 251 “salubrious climate” and fertile land for the United States.474 Later, as the tide of emigration rose higher, the Daily Union of Washington, D.C., framed the matter as one of monarchy versus liberty. The paper also claimed that clerks at forts along the overland trails had witnessed HBC agents redirect emigrants to California with stories of a fertile, salubrious climate, in order to weaken American claims to Oregon.475 American papers with a nationalist stance towards Oregon often claimed that overland travel was easy— an ignorant distortion at best, and a propagandized falsehood at worst.476 With regard to climate, promoters continued to generalize positive descriptions across the entirety of the Oregon Country, both out of ignorance and out of a desire to make it seem as if there were vast swathes of land in the Pacific Northwest that were ripe for agriculture. In reality, the fertile intermontane lowlands are relatively small in area, comprising only a fraction of the land between the Cascade Mountains and the Pacific Ocean; meanwhile, the vast plateaus and basins east of the Cascades are arid to semi-arid, prone to extreme heat and cold, and far better suited for grazing.477 Deceived by these broad brush-strokes, some emigrants later expressed disappointment that there was not more fertile land. N.N. Osborne, after traveling back east, reported that Oregon was “much more circumscribed than we had supposed. There is so much mountainous, sterile land, that it will not accommodate a population of more than 250,000… Iowa is far preferable to it.” Osborne predicted the region would fill up soon, yet stated his intent to return again to the 474 Edgefield Advertiser, April 18, 1839 475 The Daily Union, January 1, 1846. Similar claims of British meanness and tyranny in the Sentinel of the Valley, March 19, 1846. Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, 36. 476 Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, 44 477 Kelley, A Geographical Sketch, 18-31; Richmond Enquirer, July 5, 1839; Richmond Indiana Palladium, October 20, 1838. 252 Willamette Valley – and then advised that those who were already well-settled east of the Mississippi not uproot themselves with the expectation of bettering their lot in life in Oregon.478 Promoters did often make some effort to get the basic facts right, even though many of them had never been within a thousand miles of Oregon. As early as 1831, newspapers open to the prospect of emigration correctly noted that the climate of the Willamette Valley was much more mild and stable than that of the eastern seaboard, with dry summers, verdant year-round greenery, wild berries on the bush even in December, and few temperature fluctuations between hot and cold.479 Even some papers with overt anti-emigration editorial stances acknowledged the mild climate, comparing it to France or Italy; this reflected romantic notions of Mediterranean culture and landscape.480 Some papers correctly noted that the “low and swampy spots” along the region’s rivers were prone to malarial outbreaks, yet they still claimed overall that “The healthfulness of this country is unquestionable.”481 Boosters often went far beyond these facts, however, constructing a narrative of climatic exceptionalism wherein the Willamette Valley was a land of easy living and boundless plenty: an Eden, if you could claim it. The zenith of this kind of remote aggrandizement is perhaps best embodied by Senator Lewis F. Linn (D-Missouri), a fervent advocate of the colonization of the Oregon Country, who in 1838 proclaimed on the floor of the U.S. Senate that the region’s climate was “tropical;” similarly, a promotional writer claimed in 1843 that the Pacific Northwest was ideal for growing oranges, lemons, pomegranates — even cotton!482 These narratives of climatic 478 Green-Mountain Freeman, September 30, 1847 479 The Arkansas Advocate, June 8, 1831; Indiana State Sentinel, August 20, 1846; New York Herald, December 28, 1844; The New Era, September 24, 1846. 480 The Native American, May 26, 1838; also The Kalida Venture, February 28, 1845. 481 The Illinois Free-Trader and LaSalle County Commercial Advertiser, April 14, 1843 482 Linn is quoted in Pomeroy, The Pacific Slope, 28 253 exceptionalism embedded themselves deeply among emigrants to the Oregon Country, becoming a foundational component of their hopes and expectations of the region’s prospects for settlement. Just like the first Methodist missionaries of the 1830s, promoters and prospective colonists also envisioned Oregon as a state for white people, with a climate well-suited to the kinds of agriculture and grazing that were deeply associated with notions of Western civilization. Hall Jackson Kelley wrote early on that the Oregon Country had been crafted by God for the use of “heaven-born man,” who by virtue of proper improvement had a better claim — a divine claim — than any Indigenous populations, who were explained away as a relict race soon to disappear. The climate of the Pacific Northwest, in other words, beckoned white agrarian settlement and would make it easy, even natural.483 The Richmond Enquirer framed American conquest in Biblical terms, writing of Oregon emigration that “All things of heavenly origin, like the glorious sun, move Westward.”484 The implication was that White American emigrants were destined by divine providence to claim the Pacific Northwest for the United States, and that they would be aided in this endeavor by a climate perfectly suited to their purposes. Free Blacks, Chinese emigrants, and other non-White people, however, were broadly excluded from this vision. On the eve of Oregon’s statehood, settlers adopted laws that denied racial equality and institutionalized White supremacy even as they outlawed slavery in the territory — and physiological arguments about race and climate played a crucial role in such debates. Consider George Henry Williams, an early Chief Justice of the Oregon Territorial Supreme Court who later served as U.S. Senator, U.S. Attorney General, and the Mayor of Portland. Williams wrote an influential letter to the editor of the Oregon Statesman in July of 1857, where, in his capacity as a delegate to the upcoming state constitutional convention, he argued that enslaved Blacks lacked 483 Kelley, A Geographical Sketch, 43. 484 Richmond Enquirer, July 5, 1839 254 agency and a desire to improve the land. They would thus be poorly suited to labor in a territory where free White laborers could be hired at a fraction of the cost of purchasing an enslaved person. Williams made a special point of arguing that enslaved Blacks would be a drain on the resources and productivity of Oregon because they would be useless in the rainy winters, asking: “What could a negro, fitted by nature for the blazing sun of Africa, do at chopping wood, splitting rails, or making fence in the cool drenching rains of an Oregon winter? One season of such exposure would endanger his life.” Excepting house servants, Williams claimed that enslaved Blacks would be “leeches upon the farmer during our long rainy winters,” and compared Oregon’s climate unfavorably to New England, where winters are “cold and dry, and a man can work in the barn or in the woods.”485 Slavery, Williams argued, was climatically incompatible with the Pacific Northwest’s rainy climate, but Whiteness was comparatively well-suited. Similar racial arguments were made about Indigenous people, drawing on predominant impressions of Natives as utterly naked to the elements. They naturalized genocide as disappearance and attributed that disappearance to stupidity in the face of climatic exposure. Some American newspapers and politicians, however, were entirely unconvinced that emigration and settlement of the Oregon Country was a matter of racial and climatic destiny. Anti- emigration arguments were much more common than historians have traditionally acknowledged. Rather than being inevitable, the matter of American settlement of the Pacific Northwest was contested both by Indigenous nations and within the American consciousness itself. Many thought that advocates for emigration were deceptive, and they called the niche fervor for westward emigration Oregon Fever for a good reason: they saw it as a compulsion not unlike an illness, “like 485 Williams, quoted in Philip Thoennes and Jack Landau, “Constitutionalizing Racism: George H. Williams's Appeal for a White Utopia,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, 120, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 468-487. 255 any other contagion.” Sometimes they attempted to explain the issue away as one of inherent character, opining that the pioneer was simply a restless soul drawn to new territories and unswayed by possible hardships.486 The issues at the heart of emigration were rarely mentioned directly, although environmental and climatic push factors were entangled with sociocultural and economic push factors to the extent that mentioning one may as well have involved mentioning the other. Just as boosters inflated Oregon’s climate to encourage emigration, their rivals slandered Oregon’s climate in order to discourage settlement. Often, their arguments reflected and hyperbolized already-negative popular understandings of the Oregon Country, rather than producing a novel viewpoint. Anti-emigration elements generally claimed that the land was worthless and due to distance could never be economically incorporated into the United States, with one paper describing “an insane rage for territorial acquisitions” as the “particular vice” of the United States — including a desire for the Oregon Country, which was described as “one of the least favored of heaven. It is the mere riddlings of creation. It is almost as barren as the desert of Africa, and quite as unhealthy as the Campania of Italy.”487 Similarly, Senator George McDuffie of South Carolina was described as claiming in 1846 that “the climate of the Oregon country was extremely variable… no region had ever been so cursed by the God that created it.”488 Such rhetoric about landscape and climate was entangled with ideas about uncivilized Indians; race and climate were thus linked not only by arguments in support of emigration, but also by those against it. Columns in anti-emigration papers typically lingered on the dangers of overland trails and reflected prevailing views of the Great Plains as an inhospitable wasteland, calling prospective 486 New-York Daily Tribune, April 1, 1843. On the broader lack of consensus over Manifest Destiny, see Burge, A Failed Vision of Empire; and White, Misfortune, 73-74. 487 The Evansville Journal, March 21, 1844 488 Paraphrased coverage in the Vermont Phoenix, April 16, 1846. 256 emigrants “foolish” for leaving “a comfortable home for a wilderness.”489 This rhetoric frequently made its way to trail outfitting towns in Missouri and elsewhere, as emigrants sometimes encountered stories of horrible trail mortality, Native massacres, and fatal environments.490 Some would-be overlanders were discouraged. As a result, anti-emigrant papers and politicians were typically excoriated by proponents of emigration as pro-British, reflecting enduring American anxieties about post-independence British power and domestic influence.491 Yet even papers with anti-emigration editorial stances allowed favorable letters and accounts to be published as part of catering to readers and public interest, sometimes accompanying favorable columns with editorial notes urging caution or presenting refutations.492 Furthermore, promoters of overland emigration did not need to convince the entirety of the American public: they propagandized largely for a niche audience. Although small in proportion to the American populace, there was a market for emigration, catering both to material needs and, more widely, to dreams of plenty and progress among both prospective colonists and the broader American public. No outcome was foregone and support for emigration was not all-encompassing, but skeptics ultimately stood little chance against the heady tide.493 As John Unruh, Jr. has noted, this became especially true in the early 1840s, as newspaper coverage and promotional materials incorporated some of the accounts produced by the first waves of overland emigration. Full-throated anti- emigration stances became more difficult to uphold, since colonists had proven the Great Plains to be traversable with some difficulty. 489 New York Daily Tribune, February 23, 1843 490 Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, 98-99. 491 Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, 1-89; Indiana State Sentinel, August 7, 1845 492 On Greeley, see Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, 38-42. 493 Burge, A Failed Vision of Empire. 257 Indeed, from the late 1830s onwards, the experiences and reports of the first waves of overland colonists to Oregon formed an ongoing reciprocal feedback loop among the public and private media ecosystems of the East Coast metropole. As emigrants traveled the overland trails, arrived in Oregon, and wrote diaries and letters about their travails and hopes and impressions of the country, newspapers and publishers selected the most tantalizing stories for further dissemination. However, emigrants who had more positive experiences in Oregon were more liable to write letters to relatives or papers back east, and papers generally selected favorable accounts in the political interest of encouraging emigration and sustaining public engagement. This feedback loop extended the reach of the myth of the Northwest’s climatic exceptionalism, increasingly sidelining or minimizing the real, material hardships that many emigrants contemporaneously wrote about with no intention of ever being widely heard. As such, it is necessary to track the development of discourses around climate in the 1840s and 1850s alongside the experiences and written records of emigrants on the last leg of the overland trails to Oregon. Over the Rockies and Into the Rains: Emigrants on the Overland Trails American emigrants began to arrive en masse in the Oregon Country in the early 1840s, profoundly and permanently altering the demography and environments of the Pacific Northwest. Between 1840 and 1848, 11,512 American emigrants went overland to Oregon; this figure skyrocketed alongside public interest in the Pacific Coast following the California Gold Rush of 1849, with 53,062 emigrants traveling overland to Oregon between 1849 and 1860.494 The corrected federal census of 1850 recorded that Oregon had a population of 11,873, which ballooned to 52,465 by 1860. Almost all were Protestant whites of Northern and Western European ancestry, and most 494 Numbers tabulated by Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, 119-120. 258 came from the Old Northwest states of Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, and Indiana, with much the remainder coming from the Atlantic states and Texas. They were disproportionately male.495 In the present day, most of these points of origin actually receive between five and ten more inches of precipitation by volume in an average year than the intermontane lowlands of the Pacific Northwest — although their totals are matched or dwarfed by those of Northwest’s coasts and mountains. For most emigrants, then, the volume of rainfall was not what struck them upon arrival. Rather, the primary difference in precipitation between the Old Northwest and the Pacific Northwest was that much of the rainfall in the former fell warm in the summer in heavy downpours, quickly followed by sunshine and evaporation. The intermontane Pacific Northwest instead offered dry summers and a prolonged rainy season running from October to April or May, during which cloud cover and fog predominate, the weather-world is utterly saturated, and most days bring a gentle, incessant drizzle. Emigrants found that snowstorms and frigid temperatures were largely absent in the intermontane lowlands, in contrast to the Old Northwest and New England.496 First impressions of the Oregon Country came along the last leg of the overland trails, which ran along the south shore of the Columbia River, snaking westward from the arid eastern 495 Jesse S. Douglas, “Origins of the Population of Oregon in 1850,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 41, no. 2 (Apr. 1950): 95-108; William Bowen, The Willamette Valley, 26. Newspapers both in Oregon and elsewhere commonly complained that there were more men than women in the region, see for instance the Indiana State Sentinel, November 20, 1851. William Bagley offers a different opinion, stating that most wagon trains in the 1850s and 1860s were majority women and children. His source, however, is unclear. Bagley, So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California 1812-1848 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010): 128. It may be that later wagon trains were starkly different by demographics than the trains of the 1840s; Oregon also seems to have had a more balanced gender ratio earlier than Washington. 496 The Northeastern United States has undergone a warming and wetting trend in the last two hundred years, and precipitation volume differentials between the Northeast and the Northwest were likely lower in the first half of the 1800s. The Northwest, in the same period, has become warmer, but rainfall trends are less certain. See J.R. Marlon et al., “Climatic history of the northeastern United States during the past 3000 years,” Climate of the Past, 13, 2017: 1355-1379; and Steinman et al., “1,500 year quantitative reconstruction of winter precipitation in the Pacific Northwest,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109, no. 29 (2012): 11619-11623. 259 side of the Cascade Mountains towards the intermontane zone. Owing to the tangled old-growth rainforests, steep slopes, and colossal snowdrifts of the Cascades, emigrants sought the same water gap that overland fur traders had used for decades. They sidled along the river until they passed below the fierce basalt-column rapids known by French-Canadian trappers as the dalles, which swirled at a riverbend marking the beginning of the ecotonal transition between plateau grassland and valley rainforest — which was also the climatic transition between arid and “well-watered.” By the time that emigrant parties reached this zone of transition, they were exhausted from a physically arduous and emotionally grueling overland journey that stretched for slightly more than two thousand miles. If they had carried oilcloths or heavy blankets with them, such supplies were usually long lost or worn away; the canvas roofs of their wagons, crucial for keeping out the elements, fared little better. Cotton clothing predominated but was a poor choice for rainy weather. Replacement articles were sometimes available at forts or from enterprising fellows along the trail for a premium, but not all emigrants had spare cash.497 Most parties had become accustomed to the dry, dusty conditions that prevail in the summer across the Great Plains, Rockies, and Columbia Plateau, and many had seen no precipitation for three to five months. Emigrants generally started along the overland trails in April or May, enduring their fair share of warm spring rains before they left Missouri. Many settled in nearby territories such as Nebraska and Kansas, forming communities, markets, and a new nexus of public interest. Those who made it across the Great Plains and over the Rockies traveled on crowded trails: although the paths ran over vast expanses, they were often profoundly congested. Few emigrants lacked company, nor community, which saved many lives.498 497 On traders along the trail, see Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, 267-301. On clothing, see Bagley, So Rugged and Mountainous, 161-168. 498 Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, 118-155. 260 This congestion developed in part because everyone attempted to time their journey so as to avoid encountering a frigid winter in the Rockies or Sierra Nevada. As a result of a common, seasonally oriented departure time, most emigrants approached the water gap of the Columbia River in September or October — about at the same time that the autumn rains commenced, and the sky clouded up for the better part of six to eight months. Emigrants, in their quest to not be frozen in the mountains and to escape the frigid winters of the Old Northwest and New England, typically got drenched. This is perhaps an apt summation of the weather-world’s broader role in the story of overland colonization: emigrants left the trans-Mississippi east in part to abscond from the hardships of a continental climate, but found that a temperate climate brought its own struggles. This usually first became evident at the dalles. Cecelia Adams, for instance remarked in 1852 that her emigrant party encountered heavy rain between present-day Umatilla and the dalles on October 18th, but on account of having choked on wagon dust for weeks on end she found it “very revivifying.” By October 24th, her party had reached the rapids and was rained on during the night, getting “pretty thoroughly wet,” at which point the rains ceased to be a welcome break from aridity and became a problem in and of themselves.499 Franklin Johnson, for instance, recalled in his later years that his emigrant party had been “cheerless” as they approached the dalles, where they confronted “excessive rains… [an] awful and continuous downpour… with which we were drenched, in spite of our best efforts to shelter ourselves.” He also remembered his father building an enormous fire on the shore at the foot of the dalles, remarking that though it kept them dry amidst the rains, it was a poor substitute for the intimate fires built by Northwest Natives. Natives, Johnson recalled, “build a small fire and hover close to it,” and thought that his father “makes his fire so large and so hot that he cannot even warm himself by it.” Natives had emplaced, embodied 499 McMillen recollection, MSS 1508, OJP, Box 1, OHS. 261 knowledge of what plant materials could be used to quickly start fires in inclement weather, whereas Johnson’s father seems to have gone for quantity over quality in constructing as large a fire as possible to keep it burning hot and able to withstand the constant rainfall. Johnson said that in his later years he knew a friend involved in roadbuilding near the dalles, who joked that “At the Cascade Falls it rains fifteen months in every year, and then sets in for a long rain.”500 After passing below the dalles, emigrant parties took one of two routes. Until 1845, most rafted their wagons and supplies down the river towards the confluence of the Willamette and the Columbia, proceeding from there southward into the Willamette Valley; the confluence later became the site of the city of Portland. Rafting a party’s wagon downriver was expensive, and was widely considered the most treacherous portion of the entire overland journey: exposed to autumn rainstorms on the open water, it was common for a party to lose most of their supplies. Drownings were frequent (Figure 4.2).501 In a continuation of their traditional role as gatekeepers of local waterways, developed over centuries and maintained in the era of the fur trade despite conflict with outsiders Upper Chinookan boatsmen played crucial roles ferrying livestock, belongings, and people across and down the Columbia River.502 Utilizing emplaced knowledge of the weather-world and embodied navigational 500 Franklin Johnson recollections, pp. 33-34, MSS 1508, OJP, Box 3, OHS. For another example of white travelers struggling to start fires in the rain, see A.J. Allen, Ten Years in Oregon: Travels and Adventures of Doctor E. White and Lady West of the Rocky Mountains (Ithaca: Mack, Andrus, & Co., Printers, 1848): 274. 501 On last-leg despair, see Unruh, Jr., The Plains-Across, 338-345. One drowning is described by Frances F. Victor, Eleven Years in the Rocky Mountains and Life on the Frontier (Hartford: R.W. Bliss and Company, 1881): 294-298. 502 See for instance Keith and Jackson, The Fur Trade Gamble, 105-106; Whaley, Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee, 54-56. 2 6 2 Figure 4.2, "Wrecked in the Rapids." Plate from Victor, Eleven Years in the Rocky Mountains. 263 skills, they both adapted their talents to help overland migrants and assimilated said migrants into pre-existing understandings of local gatekeeping. Although newspapers typically portrayed Natives as obstacles to the overland emigrants, emigrants themselves often entrusted Indigenous peoples with their lives and property. There were surely accidents involving Native navigators, just as there were with white ferrymen, though it is impossible to meaningfully compare how many accidents were whose responsibility. What is important is that emigrants recognized and sought out Native skill in managing craft during inclement rainstorms, with one overlander writing that the dangerous waters and turbulent weather-world of the Columbia River required “the most dexterous management, which these wild navigators are masters of […].”503 The importance of Native knowledge of weather and landscape is also apparent when one considers that many of the overland trails themselves were originally blazed by Indigenous travelers, hunters, trappers, horse-riders, and gatherers. Emigrants subjected these trails to much heavier traffic, livestock, and wagons; had limited knowledge of local terrain and resources; and depended on material culture that was often ill-suited to the climate. Their embodied experiences of the same trails were thus very different. That Indigenous navigators were enlisted at the dalles and elsewhere well into the early 1850s despite the development of colonial trail infrastructure and the growing asymmetry of local power in favor of settlers indicates that they had an edge over whites who were less familiar with the ebbs and flows of the river and the rain. Family patriarchs and older sons often, but not always, split from the rest of their family at the dalles, taking the party’s precious livestock along pack trails above the southern shore of the Columbia or diverting through the Cascades via Lolo Pass, north of Mt. Hood. Rafting the animals was both risky and very expensive, as livestock could frighten easily, were heavy, and could require 503 Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, 157-158, 408; Fuller, Eleven Years 276; Allen, Ten Years in Oregon, 96-99. 264 multiple trips to carry across. Animals, particularly cattle, represented a key element of emigrant hopes to establish an agricultural livelihood in the Willamette Valley, providing the means to reproduce further capital, transform landscapes through grazing, and feed families, all while providing the substance of what emigrants considered civilized society.504 Especially for emigrants who had already lost livestock along the trail, the possibility of losing what remained loomed large. Yet the pack trails themselves were gravely dangerous, in part because of bodily exposure and rough conditions created by rainfall. John Spencer, who brought his cattle along the pack trails in late September of 1852, wrote in his diary that the roads along the gorge were “slipery” and “unmercifully bad.” Because the topography of the Columbia Gorge is rocky and dominated by steep hills and ledges, the pack trails often paralleled slopes and cliffsides that became unstable and muddy during wet weather. Conditions were especially volatile at the beginning of the rainy season, when the prevalence of dust and sand created during the dry summers — including by the plodding of previous emigrants — made debris flows and landslides more common. This was a recipe for cattle death. Spencer wrote that he saw “numbers which had tumbled over and perrished,” a grim reminder that the path to Eden was often bloodied and lined with the bleached bones of dead animals. Spencer himself lost no cattle, but the rains “pour[ed] down” on him, his companions, and their livestock; he wrote that he went to sleep at night “‘in wet clothes, and wraped… in wet covering. The rain was still falling.”505 Many of his cattle scattered one night, possibly looking for shelter from the inclement weather among the trees, and Spencer passed several rainy days 504 The importance of cattle in the imperial and colonial history of the Pacific Northwest is portrayed fictionally by Kelly Reichardt in the A24-distributed film First Cow (2019), a vivid, sensorial feature which follows the mundane troubles and pleasures of a pair of outcasts who plot to get rich by stealing milk from a fur fort’s cow in the 1820s. 505 John Spencer diary, MSS 1508, OJP, Box 5, OHS. 265 corralling them before he could continue onwards in an organized fashion. They were far too important to his livelihood to leave behind. Families who split up at the dalles often only reunited weeks or even months later, sometimes farther downriver near the confluence of the Willamette and the Columbia and sometimes near trail’s end at Oregon City. Spencer, for instance, was separated from his family for two weeks as he led livestock along the pack trails, rendezvousing with them on October 5th, 1852 at the Cascades Rapids near modern-day Cascade Locks. He wrote that they were “in a sorry condition… All were sick.” While encamped waiting on John they had lost many of their belongings to the Columbia’s high tide. John Spencer himself soon fell ill, and summed up their situation mournfully: “Wet clothes, wet beds, rains, mud, cold, bad wood, and poor fire, with little to eat, and [sic] to crowded all sick myself and sick family, all worked hard up on me.” While their illnesses were not directly caused by the weather, consistent exposure to cold showers would have made them more susceptible to infection; living in close quarters and sometimes sleeping close together for warmth would also have heightened the likelihood of catching sick. Spencer and his family continued to struggle as they moved along towards the Willamette Valley, sleeping in wet clothes and enduring incessant drizzling rain during many nights.506 Maria Belshaw’s party experienced a similarly sodden journey down into the intermontane zone in September of 1853, with Belshaw writing that at the Rapids it was so stormy “we can scarcely walk about.”507 For many emigrants, their first experience in the weather-world of the Pacific Northwest was cold, wet, humid, and incessantly rainy; not only were their bodies chilled, but so too were their belongings. The rain seeped into cracks and tears in wagon canvas, saturated 506 John Spencer diary, MSS 1508, OJP, Box 5, OHS. 507 Maria Belshaw Diary, MSS 1508, OJP, Box 2, OHS. Partial transcript published by Joseph Ellison, “Diary of Maria Parsons Belshaw, 1853,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 33, no. 4 (Dec. 1932): 318-333. 266 their clothes and blankets, muddied every tired step taken, brought on colds and other ailments, and made starting fires an unwelcome challenge. It was a dampened welcome. Rafting wagons down the Columbia River or taking the adjacent pack trails remained the only viable trans-continental route to the Willamette Valley until 1846, when a settler named William Barlow joined together with several other colonists and, with permission from the Provisional Legislature of Oregon, developed a one-way toll road over the Cascade Mountains just south of Mt. Hood (Figure 4.3). The toll, which many emigrants could not immediately afford and promised to settle in the future, was $5 per wagon and $1 per head of stock — respectively, about $195 and $40 in present-day prices.508 Although marginally safer for emigrants than the water gap, the Barlow Road offered little in the way of improved travel quality or time. Emigrants who took the road detoured south from the Columbia River, passing through arid east-side desert and then west up into the Cascade foothills, and climbed to 4,155 feet before descending into the Clackamas River Valley and, later, the Willamette Valley. They faced a harsh climate along the way: the modern-day ski village of Government Camp, for instance, received an annual average of 89.77 inches of precipitation between 1991-2020, including 232.5 inches of snow. October, when many emigrants came over the pass, is one of the rainiest months, with temperatures often far enough above freezing to forestall snow into rain. Emigrants commonly encountered rain as early as mid- August.509 508 On the Barlow Road, see William Barlow and Mary S. Barlow, “History of the Barlow Road,” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 3, no. 1 (Mar., 1902): 71-81; William Barlow, “Reminiscences of Seventy Years,” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 13, no. 3 (Sep., 1912): 240-286; Mary Barlow Wilkins, “Samuel Kimbrough Barlow: A Pioneer Road Builder of Oregon,” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 26, no. 3 (Sep., 1925): 209- 224; Walter Bailey, “The Barlow Road,” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 13, no. 3 (Sep., 1912): 287-296. 509 Because one inch of measured snowfall does not translate into one inch of liquid precipitation, snowfall totals by inch always outstrip the actual liquid precipitation measurement. Depending on conditions, about thirteen inches of snowfall are necessary to equal one inch of rainfall. 2 6 7 Figure 4.3, Map of the Barlow Road, in red. Higher elevations denoted in lighter shades of green, and Mt. Hood in white. Yellow denotes the route from The Dalles to the Barlow Road cutoff; orange, a later route that bypassed The Dalles entirely. The Barlow Road itself ran for about one hundred miles. Image courtesy of WikiMedia Commons. 268 Despite its name, the Barlow Road was little more than a rough path carved by axe and fire through rainforest; rocky debris and the remnants of massive stumps littered the trail, which was interminably muddy, very steep, and hounded by rainfall which often froze overnight, creating black ice. Robert Caufield, for instance, passed over the road in the autumn of 1847, and wrote back to his brother and sister in April of 1848 that “the ‘Blue’ and ‘Caskade’ range of mountains are worse to cross than the Rocky mountains,” owing to inclement weather and tangled, heavily forested terrain.510 Days traveling on the Barlow Road were arduous and gnawing, no doubt often made so by the constant sound and sensation of rain pattering on one’s face, falling into mud puddles, and dripping down through the forest canopy. Rainfall soaked goods, had to be constantly wiped from the face, and could chill one to the bone with prolonged exposure. One emigrant remarked that it “rained and rained on us all night… The drizzly night seemed like a month,” a common sentiment of exhaustion and monotony.511 The worst of the trek, which one emigrant described as “the elephant of these mountains,” was a series of downhill chutes just west of Barlow Pass. Known as Laurel Hill, the chutes dropped precipitously and steeply from about 3,600 feet into a creekbed at 2,800 feet. George N. Taylor, who passed down Laurel Hill in early October of 1855, wrote that the path was “Crooked Muddy And full of Stumps… the most difficult hill to Descend In a wet time that there is in the mountains.”512 Emigrants commonly lost livestock, supplies, and wagons on the rocks, and the standard strategy for descent was to individually chain wagons either to a fallen tree or a thick 510 Robert Caufield letter, n.d., MSS 1508, OJP, Box 2, OHS. 511 Anonymous, October 24, 1862 letter, MSS 1508, Box 1, OHS. 512 George N. Taylor diary, pp. 29, MSS 1508, OJP, Box 6, OHS; Abigail Scott Dunaway diary typescript, pp. 98-100, MSS 231, Thompson Coit Elliott Papers, Box 1, OHS. Elevation estimate based on Google Maps topographic lines and a personal visit to the site. The exact routing has a margin of error due to the construction of the Mt. Hood Highway and the gradual erosion of abandoned trail segments. 269 stump at the top of the hill, gradually and precariously lowering them down each muddy chute. This jerry-rigging tactic left deep circumferential scars on the trunks of old-growth trees, some of which remain visible today. Despite emigrant efforts to save them, cattle and other livestock suffered the worst on the Barlow Road, to the detriment of morale and capital. The mountain rainforests provided poor grazing, and carrying large quantities of feed was often necessary: both an expense and an added burden of space and weight.513 George Belshaw, whose party rafted down the Columbia River in the autumn of 1853, wrote in his diary that he chose the water gap over the mountains because a group of emigrants had turned back at the pass and described it as “very cold and rainey… they say there is no feed for 50 miles… they loose sometimes all their stock in a storm.”514 Dr. W.B. Maley, similarly, wrote to his parents in the fall of 1852 that he knew an emigrant party who had lost part of their herds going over the Barlow Road. He wrote that “there came on a chilly rain that chilled [the cattle] to death. It was by very great exertion they saved the rest of their stock by putting blankets on the animals and building fires… Those Cascade Mountains has been the destruction of a great amount of property.” Maley lamented that there was not “a good road” over the mountains, a testament to the fact that many emigrants considered Barlow’s route no better than rafting.515 Beyond any financial or practical setbacks, the loss of animals on the last leg of the overland trails could also be a personal tragedy that resonated deeply with colonists. Many settlers knew their animals intimately, having helped raise or even birth them. They saw and felt individual personality in creatures like cattle and horses, and spent precious time and resources caring for 513 Benjamin Cleaver diary, pp. 16, MSS 1508, OJP, Box 2, OHS. 514 George Belshaw diary, pp. 50, MSS 1508, OJP, Box 1, OHS. No relation to Maria Belshaw. 515 W.B. Maley letter to his parents, September 1, 1852, MSS 1508, OJP, Box 4, OHS. A network of informants developed in the Clackamas River Valley to identify and return stray livestock to their proper owners, see various documents in MSS 996, Philip Foster Papers, Box 2, Folder 11, OHS. 270 them. A young Esther Belle Hannah, for instance, wrote in her 1852 diary about the loss of a mule during a mid-September ascent of the road. After trying and failing to prevent her clothes and person from getting thoroughly wet as she slept, she blamed the stiffness of her limbs on “the damp of last night;” another member of her party then insisted that she ride atop one of the mules that day rather than slog along in the cold mud. Hannah wrote: “we soon found that [the mule] could not go as she appeared to fail every step and finally she lay down on the roadside. I cannot describe my feeling at this time. This noble animal that had been of so much service to us and worth so much to us if we got her through had now, as we thought, laid down to die. I went on ahead with the mules, Mr. H and the young man waited awhile but could do nothing for her. Finally I saw them coming carrying her bridle. I knew then that it was all over with her. I bursted into a flood of tears!”516 For Hannah, the loss of one of her family’s mules in the rain and the mud of the Barlow Road embodied the physical and emotional challenges of the overland journey. It perhaps saddened Hannah even more because of how frequently emigrants were deceived as to the trail’s difficulties. Aiming to “cheer up those contemplating the trip,” in March of 1843 the Bloomington Herald reprinted remarks made on the floor of the federal House of Representatives by Congressman John Reynolds (D-Illinois), who claimed that the overland trails were “easily traversed; and the mountains themselves present no great obstacles to travellers.” In an attempt to assuage the concerns of families considering the journey, Reynolds added that “Delicate females have already travelled from St. Louis to the Pacific, over the mountains.”517 Some emigrants certainly encountered less rainfall than others, but the nationalistic fervor of such one- sided portrayals obscured the everyday difficulties and tragedies faced by colonists such as Esther Belle Hannah, including those created by rainfall. 516 Esther Belle Hannah journal, MSS 1508, OJP, Box 3, OHS. A similar, sorrowful account was relayed by Inez Parker; see Inez Parker reminiscence, typescript, pp.3, MSS 1509, Diaries and reminiscences collection, Box 4, OHS. 517 Bloomington Herald, March 17, 1843 271 Arrival, Emigrant Letters, and the Persistence of Promoters Colonists who made it down the Columbia River or over the Cascades arrived in the Willamette Valley wet, exhausted, sick, and often broke. Here was a place where, one emigrant wrote in recollection of her party’s lofty expectations, “mother [had] said money ought to grow on trees.”518 Instead, many emigrants found that it was a place where money was washed away, lost, like tears in rain. Maria Belshaw, for instance, arrived sorrowfully in the vicinity of the Clackamas River in late September of 1853, writing beneath cloudy skies of “how dreary it seems. Can it be,” she wondered, “that I have left my quiet little home and taken this dreary land of solitude in exchange[?] It is truly so, but I must not let my mind run in this channel long or my happiness is gone.” Traveling by foot in overcast, showery weather, her party searched for a land claim, but found that many of the “pleasant prairie[s]” imprinted on the landscape by Indigenous burning practices had already been dispossessed from the Kalapuya peoples by earlier emigrants.519 The Belshaw party scarcely made two or three miles in an average day on the mucky roads, and, despite being exhausted from their journey across the continent, had no choice but to camp for several weeks outside beneath the frequent autumn rains. In all likelihood, their only shelter was a battered canvas erected on makeshift poles, and they probably had little to separate their feet from the saturated ground. Belshaw noted that “Emmigrants [are] still coming in and feel disappointed when they get here and not find houses to suit them,” and observed that the sky “has the appearance of [the] rainy season, old settlers tell us.” Wistful, she noted how the rolling pastures and recently cultivated fields spread across “the beautiful hills… with occasionally the branches of a lone Fir bidding us welcome… yet our minds are not satisfied, they meditate on past pleasures — then 518 Sarah J. Seely reminiscence, pp. 6, in MSS 1508, OJP, Box 5, OHS. 519 Maria Belshaw diary, MSS 1508, OHS. 272 imagine those they may enjoy if they can find a better land.” Perhaps journaling in the evening as rain drizzled upon the battered canvas of one of the party’s wagons or tents, Belshaw became rather contemplative. “Human beings,” she wrote, “are so constituted that they are ever grasping at something ahead.”520 Overlanders like Belshaw typically arrived in Oregon at the start of the rainy season in mid-September to early October, and many found themselves literally and metaphorically homeless amidst the steady, unrelenting drizzle. Some stayed with relatives in cramped quarters with many children; others found hospitality at a stranger’s residence, and still others paid for temporary lodging (of very limited availability). The expenses of getting to Oregon, however, often drained a lifetime’s savings, leaving little to spare. John Spencer wrote that when his family arrived in the Willamette Valley in late autumn of 1852, they were “unwell” and bled “Near about $2 a day for the material for food to say nothing of other things.” A local preacher lent him money, and Spencer was grateful simply to have survived the journey overland. “We are alive,” he wrote, “Hope is left.” He noted, of course, that “It has been raining nearly all the time.”521 Broke emigrants in the 1840s and early 1850s were often offered help by the British Hudson’s Bay Company, which so many east-coast newspapers had relished in vilifying. The explorer John Fremont, visiting the area near Portland in 1843, wrote that many families stopped over at Fort Vancouver on their way down the Columbia to be furnished with clothing and provisions by John McLoughlin, and would otherwise have been “exposed to much suffering in the winter rains.”522 He also wrote that the onset of the 520 Maria Belshaw diary, MSS 1508, OHS. 521 John Spencer diary, pp. 31-32, MSS 1508, OHS. According to MeasuringWorth.com, $2 in 1852 has an equivalent purchasing power of about $79.25 today. 522 Samuel M. Smucker, ed. John Charles Frémont, The Life of Col. John Charles Fremont, and His Narrative of Explorations and Adventures In Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon and California (New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1856): 329-330. Originally published in 1843, Fremont’s reports were advertised as potential guidance for emigrants to California and Oregon; the reports 273 rainy season “left no beauty in any scenery,” and complained that the cloudy weather obstructed his surveying instruments. HBC assistance to emigrants tapered off after the Oregon Treaty, when the company refocused its operations out of American-claimed territory, but the charity and lodging businesses of established American settlers remained crucial to many new emigrants.523 When Melissa Stroud’s family arrived in Oregon in the autumn of 1852, they were allowed to stay in an old house on Sauvie Island. Stroud recalled that the homeowners were “earlier settlers and had built them[selves] a new house. We were glad to meet with such a good chance as houses were scarce and the rainy season coming on.” Her family initially subsisted mostly off of wheat hominy — payment from working for already-established settlers — and meat from stray hogs. When the Stroud family at last identified a suitable plot of prairie land in the Willamette Valley to dispossess from the Kalapuya and begin to farm, Stroud’s father, who had moved to Oregon in part to improve his poor health, fell ill again. He died in June of 1853, leaving a wife and four small children with “no money.”524 Other emigrants could not afford temporary winter lodging, and instead spent weeks or months wheeling around their wagons on muddy, unfamiliar “roads,” sleeping in the autumn rains had no copyright and were redistributed widely in abridged editions that sometimes left out large quantities of information. See for instance The Daily Union, January 1, 1846 523 The HBC relocated its Northwest operations to Fort Victoria in 1843, although it maintained limited operations at Fort Nisqually and Fort Vancouver into the late 1850s. The HBC briefly attempted to recruit settlers from the Red River Colony to move to the Willamette Valley in the early 1840s and establish a settler-colonial presence, but the predominant corporate view remained one of exploitation and transience. Ultimately, the British made little effort to establish a permanent settler colony in what became the American Northwest, believing that their post farms at Fort Vancouver sufficed. Former HBC employees who settled on the French Prairie and elsewhere often did so against company wishes. The Oregon Treaty of 1846 favored the Americans, who were able to claim Willamette Valley settlers as their own. 524 Melissa Stroud reminiscence, pp. 2-4, MSS 1509, DR, Box 5, OHS. On initial lodging, see Jackie Gonzales and Morgen Young, First Year in Oregon, 1840–1869: A Narrative History (Portland: Historical Research Associates, Inc., 2021): 32-35. 274 beneath battered canvases and tents as they searched for a desirable land claim. They squatted, homeless, on Indigenous territory, and remained highly exposed to the rainy weather-world for two to three months while building a makeshift log cabin and waiting for the springtime planting season. They were often isolated from neighbors and settlements due to swollen rivers and mucky terrain. Such conditions were hard both on their physical health and on their emotional wellbeing. One disgruntled emigrant, Thomas J. Farnham, wrote that Oregon was “in every respect… overrated,” a comment which followed his spending an entire night lost in the woods up to his knees in mud as the rains came down.525 A number of local and national newspapers did pick up on some of the challenges and letdowns faced by emigrants. The Portland Oregonian warned new emigrants in 1852 that they should not expect a “second Eden,” and that they had arrived at the beginning of the rainy season, “when all things wear a gloomy appearance.” If they were patient, however, they would realize in time that the Willamette Valley “is without a rival in point of natural advantages.”526 Some eastern papers reported that the region was prone to “constant rains and cloudy weather” during the winter, or that “the winters are disagreeable on account of the chilliness of the southeast winds, and the extreme humidity of the atmosphere,” but they largely continued to emphasize Oregon’s mild temperatures, lack of extreme temperature fluctuations, the prevalence of evergreen foliage, and the supposed ease of farming on prairie lands.527 Papers also began to recognize that the Northwest’s geography was not uniform, and began reporting more accurately on the variations in climate and terrain. The Indiana State Sentinel 525 Farnham is quoted in Pomeroy, The Pacific Slope, 32. On the role of homelessness in American history, see for instance Kenneth L. Kusmer, Down and Out, on the Road: The Homeless in American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 526 The Oregonian, July 10, 1852, quoted in Robbins, Landscapes of Promise 92 527 Joliet Signal May 23, 1848; Weekly National Intelligencer September 19, 1846. 275 reported ambivalently that “the climate cannot be considered desirable as a whole,” but would not “materially retard its settlement, or prevent its becoming the rival of the Atlantic States.”528 Particularly skeptical papers and editors noted that many travelers to Oregon “wander on farther south in search of better lands and happier skies” in California; one sarcastic columnist for the Louisville Journal wrote of “very rainy” Oregon as a place where men “drag their miserable carcasses thither only to find miserable graves. They who have strength enough… leave, on the opening of spring, for California, where there is a fine opening for emigrants.”529 There was more than a grain of truth to the Louisville Journal’s claim. About eight thousand six hundred and fifty emigrants — almost one-half of all overland travelers to Oregon between 1840 and the end of 1850 — either left for California or returned eastward. This was a major undertaking and expense that reflected profound dissatisfaction with Oregon’s limited land, relatively undeveloped colonial economy and infrastructure, and rainy climate.530 It was not, of course, reported in promotional pamphlets or pro-emigration newspapers. 528 Indiana State Sentinel, August 7, 1845. 529 See for instance The Daily Union, April 29, 1846; New-York Daily Tribune, May 1, 1846; Carroll Free Press, June 20, 1845; The New York Herald November 27, 1844. The Louisville Journal coverage, reprinted in the Weekly National Intelligencer, July 5, 1845, is utterly uproarious and well worth reading. 530 Estimate derived from figures in Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, 119-120, and Douglas, “Origins of the Population of Oregon in 1850.” Unruh estimates that 17,962 emigrants traveled to Oregon between 1840 and the end of 1850; Douglas estimates that at the 1850 census, there were 9,312 Americans living in Oregon. The rest of Oregon’s population was born outside the United States or in Oregon itself. Despite a formal completion date of June 1, 1850, the 1850 Census was conducted from September 6, 1850, to March 9, 1851, in Oregon, and so likely captured the majority of 1850’s autumn emigrants — if anything, it may have overestimated the population or included emigrants who later left. See Bowen, The Willamette Valley, 97. Subtracting Douglas’s figure from Unruh’s yields an estimate of 8,650 American emigrants who left Oregon by mid- March of 1851. This represents almost half of all overland emigrants to Oregon to arrive between 1840 and the end of 1850 — not a ringing endorsement of the region’s prospects. Earl Pomeroy noted this immediate exodus and the importance of climate in motivating it, writing: “Disappointed immigrants shuttled from California to Oregon to escape the drought, from Oregon to California to escape the rains, and back to the states to escape both; and they wrote letters that got into the press and gratified those who had been wise enough to stay at home.” See Pomeroy, 276 In the early 1850s, many newly founded Pacific Coast newspapers, particularly in California, even waged a fierce campaign to publicize the hardships of the overland trails and encourage federal aid to develop trail infrastructure and provide aid to emigrants, including on the final rain-soaked stretches of the main route to Oregon. However, such acknowledgements of the hardships and tragedies of the overland journey — including highly publicized disasters such as that of the Donner Party — were usually framed in terms of noble adventure and glory-seeking, arguing that emigrants represented a heroic, romantic struggle for westward expansion and deserved the wholehearted support of the public and government.531 Some argued that route improvements were necessary so that, as John Unruh, Jr., put it, emigrants “would not arrive cursing their new homeland.” Yet the focus of critical coverage remained on the trails themselves: one member of Congress complained that judgmental emigrants quickly wrote nasty letters back home because of their hardships on the last leg of the trail, but “ha[d] not seen” the Edenic landscapes and resources of Oregon. He made this claim, of course, from the comfort of his position and office in Washington, D.C.532 One emigrant letter in the Pike County Sentinel wrote in 1847 that “nearly all who come to Oregon are well pleased,” but also that some “who have their expectations raised too high will be disappointed.” The same emigrant, however, boasted that Oregon produced “turnips larger than the head of a flour barrel and parsnips and beets as large as a man’s thigh,” and wrote that harvests were “never failing” — with the apparent exception of the prior summer of 1846, which had “a rainy August.” It was precisely this kind of fantastical coverage, rooted in subjective short-term experience and the fanciful, entertaining stories that abounded in and about the Oregon Country, The Pacific Slope 33. Estimates for the 1851-1860 period are much more difficult to make because of migration between Oregon and California during the California Gold Rush. 531 Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, 48-55, 61, 77-89, 98-99. 532 Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, 344-45 277 that raised emigrant expectations so high and beckoned disappointment.533 Another emigrant, A.L. Davidson of Iowa, published a letter in the Springfield Journal in October of 1846 wherein he claimed Oregon produced a wheat harvest of “30 bushels to an acre,” a gross exaggeration (some sources claimed as high as fifty to sixty or even one-hundred twenty bushels per acre). Davidson also claimed that “the journey to Oregon was greatly promotive of health,” that “There were no fevers” in Oregon, and that “Persons who had left for Oregon in ill health had fully recovered there.” Echoing racialized views of Native and metis rainscapes, he also claimed that the only people vulnerable to sickness were French-Indian trappers who “lived in filth, with native wives.”534 Wesley Shannon of New York insisted that “there is but one opinion: [Oregon] is remarkably healthy.”535 These claims of infallible health would have come as a surprise to those who had lost relatives on the overland journey or after arrival in Oregon. Papers attributed such effusive coverage to emigrants, which was often true, but it is also likely that some accounts were faked, and that some coverage was heavily embellished by editors. When it came to rainfall itself, boosters seized on favorable emigrant accounts to frame the intermontane lowlands as a place where enough rain fell to make the area fertile and green, but not enough to be of any inconvenience whatsoever. Promoters were working against a still-common public understanding of the Oregon Country as an unhealthily wet place where “it rains constantly” for four to six months of the year.536 The local Oregon Spectator, for instance, complained in 1848 533 Pike County Sentinel coverage reprinted in the Joliet Signal, April 6, 1847. Another example is an emigrant account by William Myers, also reprinted in the Joliet Signal, October 17, 1848. Myers claimed that spring begins in Oregon in early February, which is somewhat of an exaggeration. 534 Davidson’s account, as reflected in Springfield Journal coverage reprinted in the New-York Daily Tribune, November 4, 1846. Another example is coverage in The New Era, September 24, 1846. 535 New-York Daily Tribune, August 25, 1846. 536 New-York Daily Tribune, August 25, 1846. 278 that the region’s winters had been “grossly misrepresented,” and published a local farmer’s daily tally of February weather observations to rebuke allegations of incessant rainfall.537 Yet this refutation embodied an enduring problem in both private correspondence and public coverage of Oregon’s climate: specific claims were rarely presented alongside reliable statistics, primarily because formal, standardized meteorological record-keeping was not yet widespread or well- communicated. Until the 1860s, promoters relied almost entirely on favorable, subjective accounts. Wesley Shannon insisted to the New-York Daily Tribune that “I have never seen any country where a man could as much work in the winter as in Oregon.”538 At length, the New-York Herald’s correspondent in Oregon reported in 1844 (Figure 4.4): “ploughing has been done throughout the winter rainfall… As regards rains in the winter, I have found them much less troublesome than I anticipated… a great deal more out-door work can be done in the winter season [in Oregon] than in the western States. The rains fall in very gentle showers, and are generally what you term drizzling rains, so light that a man can work all day without getting wet through a blanket coat. The rains are not the cold, chilly rains that you have in the fall and spring seasons in the east, but are warm as well as gentle… The rains are never hard enough here to wash the roads or the fields.”539 Other visitors also embellished or lingered on the positives. One paper cited the reports of Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, who led federal coastal surveys in the region in the mid 1840s. Wilkes wrote that the rainy season lasted from November to March, and that the rains themselves were “not heavy though frequent.”540 A paper in St. Louis characterized the rains of the Pacific Northwest as “gentle mists,” in contrast to the “torrents” that fell in the spring and summer in the Old Northwest; the paper added that “Here [in the Old Northwest] we can scarcely find shelter from the 537 Oregon Spectator, March 9, 1848. 538 New-York Daily Tribune August 25, 1846. 539 The New York Herald, December 28, 1844 540 The Kalida Venture, February 28, 1845. 279 pelting storm — here [in the Pacific Northwest] the husbandman ploughs and sows throughout the rainy season.” Such acclamations were common, often relying on positive comparisons to the continental climate of the Old Northwest and portraying the Pacific Northwest as a preferable alternative. Private letters from friends and relatives in Oregon were also important sources for later waves of emigrants, who depended upon various written sources in order to judge whether the Oregon Country was worth traveling to. Letters could account for questions about the safety of the overland trails, the fertility and resourcefulness of the land, and the health of the climate; as Laura Figure 4.4. Map of the Oregon Territory printed in the New York Herald, December 28, 1844. Note that the region’s geography is presented in largely uniform terms: the Coast and Cascade mountain ranges are not featured, despite having been outlined in detail on many other maps. Emigrants with limited access to information may have assumed, based on promotional texts and accounts, that glowing descriptions of the climate applied to large portions of the delineated as “Oregon.” 280 Ishiguro has noted, “writing and its circulation were key practices of colonialism… [people] depended on writing to know and govern from afar.” When someone sent a letter, it was widely expected that it would be shared with others, and many who sent missives from the Pacific Northwest in the latter half of the 1800s made personal, explicit recommendations that their family members join them — often with success.541 Yet the perspectives of recent emigrants could vary widely depending upon the season, year, and geographical context in which they were written. Some settlers who arrived in the Oregon Country in August or September, prior to the typical onset of the rainy season, wrote glowing accounts of the region’s climate and healthfulness. Others only found time to write come their first spring, after having endured months of cloud-cover and incessant drizzle and, were more liable to have complaints or disclaimers to offer — or to leverage their experience during their first winter to offer an authoritative positive account, regardless of whether their individual experience or tolerance of the climate was reflective of that of the average emigrant.542 Opinions expressed through correspondence also varied greatly depending upon individual circumstance, perspective, and motivation. Some emigrants genuinely had good experiences; others were inclined to write more positively in order to convince relatives to join them or to encourage the further development of regional colonial society, lessening their isolation and importing familiar comforts. It is difficult to always discern between the conveyance of sincere experience and the crafting of particular narratives due to other motives. James S. Dill, for example, wrote to his family in 1848 that the rain was considerable but came in “drizzels,” allowing him to 541 Laura Ishiguro, Nothing to Write Home About: British Family Correspondence and the Settler Colonial Everyday in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019): 39-77. 542 This observation is drawn primarily from a broad examination of MSS 1500, correspondence collection, OHS. 281 “work all winter.”543 After five years living in the Chehalem Valley, Betsy Bayley wrote to her sister in 1849 that “Men can work in their shirtsleeves all winter,” and that “The climate is mild and pleasant, and the air pure and bracing.”544 Talmadge B. Wood wrote to his brother Jesse in March of 1844 that his first winter in the Oregon County was “the most pleasant I have ever experienced,” and claimed that “there is no sickness at all in the country.” He praised the continual greenery of the grass during winter, perhaps reflecting a genuine, personal bodily experience of the rains as mild, refreshing showers, harbingers of verdancy in comparison to the frigid winters he had known east of the Mississippi.545 Another early settler, Nathaniel Coe, was more ambiguous in his praise, remarking in an 1853 letter to a friend back home that the winters were uncomfortably wet and the annually flooded bottomlands unhealthy, although he still found the climate “in most respects” preferable to the cold, towering snowfalls of upstate Scipio, New York.546 One emigrant drew on his experience over the fall and winter of 1842-3 to claim that the climate of the Willamette Valley was “mild and balmy,” advantageous for growing wheat because “during the time of its ripening, no rains fall, and it escapes all rust and mildew.” This view may have been rooted in personal experience, but it was also short-sighted: as early as 1840, wheat rust due to excessive rainfall was a frequent problem at 543 James S. Dill to John Kelly Dill, March 14, 1848, MSS 1500, correspondence collection, Box 2, OHS. 544 Betsy Bayley to Lucy P. Griffith, September 20, 1849, MSS 1508, correspondence collection, Box 1, OHS. Incredibly, Bayley also claimed to have “kept fresh meet [sic] for three weeks good and fresh without salt.” Taking her assertion at face value, it seems an exceptional circumstance, given the myriad accounts of fur trappers and overland travelers that complain of easily spoiled meat in the context of mild, humid winters. 545 Talmadge B. Wood letter to Jesse D. Wood, March 12, 1844, MSS 769, OHS. 546 Nathaniel Coe to Hon. N.H. Fordyce, August 7, 1853, MSS 431, Nathaniel Coe family papers, Box 1, Folder 3, OHS. 282 HBC post farms, sometimes offset by the planting of excess acreage to account for expected losses.547 One settler, Jacob Shartle, was admirably conscious of the cycle of hyperbolic rumor and disappointment that resulted from such tangled discourses. Although he thought Oregon a pleasant place, he expressed a considerate desire to avoid inviting anyone to travel overland, writing that he would “never encourage any person to come to Oregon to live for fear of their becoming dissatisfied and, thereby blame me for Encouraging them to come, I will never have that curse piled upon my head by any of my friends.” Instead, Shartle wrote that he strived to present objective facts and let his friends and relatives decide for themselves what course of action to take, if any.548 Shartle clearly knew some emigrants who had traveled overland only to become dejected by the realities of settlement in Oregon, and his cautious view reflected the intimate yet physically distant role that letter-writing played in encouraging overland emigration. Private correspondence and published letters were important in setting expectations, but did not always correlate with the totality of lived experience and could not change personal preference, forestall misfortune, or give emigrants material resources they did not have. Many emigrants did immediately find that the Oregon Country lived up to some of the expectations that promoters had elevated. Some viewed the rainy climate as a tolerable annoyance compared to the snowy winters of the Midwest, worth enduring to take advantage of “free” land; others portrayed the regional rains in highly favorable terms. Yet their claims often reflected only personal experience, or relied on short-term impressions that were derailed in the long-term when seasonal flooding drowned crops or turned roads into miring-prone swamps. Some emigrants also 547 The North-Carolina Standard, Oct 4, 1843. Early wheat rust is mentioned in Gibson, Farming the Frontier 124 548 Jacob H. Shartle letter, 1859, MSS 1500, Box 5, Folder 35, OHS. 283 had more resources at their disposal with which to travel overland more comfortably, pay to spend their first winter in the Willamette Valley in decent lodging, and wait until spring to set up a farming operation or other business; some had relatives in the area who could look out for them. It is possible that many of the emigrants who stayed simply had more subjective tolerance for rainy days and cloudy winters, perhaps because of where they grew up or perhaps because of personal affinity. Other migrants may have omitted discussions of the everyday drudgeries that chilly rains and mucky fields posed simply because they assumed that a certain level of hardship was inherent in the life of the farmer, found Oregon a comparatively pleasant place to tend the land, and wanted to encourage the local development of an idealized Euro-American society. They may have set off for Oregon with a more realistic view of their prospects, less prone to dreaming and believing those who claimed there was “no place where a man can live so easy” — even though they themselves may have later made such claims in order to attract further emigration.549 There were also some suggestions in newspapers that a disproportionate number of emigrants in the 1840s and early 1850s were lawyers, doctors, and clerks, among other wealthier occupations somewhat less exposed on a daily basis to weather. There were many farmers, but few laborers for hire: except for the richest, such as lawyers who kept a farm but paid others to work it for them, few could afford hired hands.550 549 New York Daily Tribune, April 22, 1844. Additionally, emigrants who were poorer, more exposed to rainfall, and fared worse upon their arrival in Oregon left far fewer documents that directly describe their experiences, leaving a body of source material that is disproportionately male, contemporaneously well-educated, and more financially secure (although even those with significant resources encountered many difficulties). 550 Indiana State Sentinel, November 20, 1851. Law was a very nepotistic profession in the 1800s, but lawyers played a key role in establishing courts and legal codes in the Oregon Territory. The systems they devised were often vigilantist at first. See for instance Gordon Morris Bakken, “The Courts, the Legal Profession, and the Development of Law in Early California,” California History 81, no. 3/4 (2003): 74-95. 284 The entire saga of discourses around emigration and the climate of Oregon is embodied well by the story of J.S. Griffin, a Methodist reverend associated with Jason Lee. During the winter of 1840-1841, Griffin got lost in a stand of Willamette Valley rainforest on a rainy, chilly night; his shoes were of poor quality, the terrain was saturated and muddy, and his feet became frostbitten from the cold and the wet. With help from a small group of Natives, he arrived back at the mission settlement on the French Prairie, and found — uncharacteristically — that the Willamette River had frozen over. Later, Griffin and several other missionary emigrants confronted Lee, with one of them claiming: “You told us back east that the Willamette never froze over.” The others concurred. Lee supposedly responded: “I told you that in three years I had never seen it frozen over, and you exaggerated this into the assertion that it never froze over.”551 Griffin’s anecdote shows that positive portrayals were often rooted in short-term experiences; were sometimes made with ulterior motives and carefully phrased to spin matters as positively as possible; and often led to disappointment and anger among emigrants who had trusted in the word of others. Regardless of whether emigrants wrote favorably or unfavorably about Oregon’s rainy season, subjective descriptions predominated, and papers or individuals who wished to promote emigration were free to perpetuate the most convenient claims that they could find — or fabricate. Both the private and public media ecosystems surrounding overland emigration formed a bubble that tended to be impervious to negativity: the small segment of Americans who were deeply interested in the prospects of Oregon emigration tended to read pro-emigration papers published in regions that in turn produced large numbers of eventual settlers, and they tended to be immersed in correspondence networks populated by those who had safely and healthily arrived in Oregon, found that they either tolerated or enjoyed the rainy climate, and decided to stay. Those who stayed were 551 John Smith Griffin, An Adventure in the Willamette Valley in the Winter of 1840-41,” MSS 1075, John Smith Griffin papers, Folder 2, OHS. 285 more vocal and enthusiastic than those who faced tragedy and disappointment, resulting in a primary source record and narrative skewed towards climatic exceptionalism. This bubble of mythologization was deeply consequential in historical terms, and obscured — and generally continues to obscure — the fact that many emigrants to Oregon arrived battered and drenched, and were profoundly disappointed to discover that the region had a long season of incessant rain and cloud cover. Conclusion: of Dreams and Disappointments Emigrants who traveled overland to the Oregon Country were deeply concerned about climate and environment. Desirous of an escape from the troubles of life in the Midwest and Southern U.S., they sought a land of plenty where hard work would be reliably rewarded by the land itself. Promoters recognized this dream, and exploited it to sell stories, supplies, and promises of wealth. They did so by crafting a narrative of climatic exceptionalism, which was woven with ideas of racial purity to portray the Pacific Northwest as the ideal place for a white yeoman farmer. It was a natural-born paradise, promoters claimed: one where good people, white and Christian and dedicated to working the land, would find success and happiness in this life. The region’s Indigenous people were largely reduced to a flickering image, a romantic tale soon to fade away. Most Americans derided the narrative of climatic exceptionalism, believing it foolish and far-flung. But thousands found it appealing and convincing, and they became emigrants, traveling thousands of miles across the North American continent in search of a promised land. By the time that they came to the Columbia River Gorge in late summer or early autumn, they were exhausted, and often homesick. In most cases, however, they were greeted not by riches but by rainfall. The sodden last leg of the overland trails drenched and beat down many emigrants and their nonhuman 286 companions, frequently depriving them of their last batches of supplies and leaving them ever poorer as they arrived in the Willamette Valley or set off north towards Puget Sound. Some emigrants were genuinely enraptured by the intermontane zone; others made hyperbolic statements in private correspondence or letters to newspaper editors, perhaps motivated by a desire to get their family to join them. Most emigrants, however, were homeless, and desperate for a slice of land to call their own. In an effort to survive their first winter and get out of the rain, many depended on the hospitality of neighbors and strangers — and all depended on the dispossession of traditional Indigenous territories. A significant number left the Pacific Northwest at the first opportunity, returning east to familiar lands or setting out south for sunnier climes in California. Yet the development of narratives of climatic exceptionalism only accelerated as more emigrants began to arrive in the Willamette Valley, creating larger markets for overland travel and titillating, hopeful stories about the Pacific Northwest. Even as the vast influx of American settlers began confronting the challenges that the rainy weather-world posed to their visions of a prosperous white agrarian republic and began transforming regional landscapes to control how rainfall manifested, both regional and national promotional discourses continued to draw further emigration and naturalize narratives of the Northwest’s climatic exceptionalism. Much of the American public continued to be skeptical of such narratives, even making fun of the Northwest Coast’s reputation for being rainswept — Californians were especially mocking. Rainfall’s integral role everyday settlement culture and regional image during the period of agrarian settler-colonialism is the subject of the next chapter. 287 CHAPTER FIVE TO CIVILIZE THE RAIN: SODDEN SETTLER-COLONIALISM IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST, c.1840-1900 "It's the getting started that's the puzzle. No way for a poor man to start." — King Lu, First Cow (2019) Winfield Ebey, one of the earliest white settlers on what is now known as Whidbey Island, learned through personal experience that people fell ill and died in the Pacific Northwest just as they did elsewhere. Winfield’s father, Jacob, had accompanied him across the continent to Oregon; sixty-one at the time, Jacob was roughly twice the age of the average emigrant. Like many older emigrants, Jacob and his wife were likely lured to the Oregon Territory in part by expectations of a healthy climate and the possibility of living out a full, productive life with a good constitution alongside Winfield and their other emigrant relatives. Isaac Ebey, Winfield’s brother, had emigrated to the area earlier, and, imploring Winfield to travel overland, described Whidbey Island in a letter as a “paradise of nature.”552 Though the Ebey family was better off than most of their neighbors, they were not rich, and Jacob helped Winfield run his farm and other business endeavors, sometimes laboring outside in inclement weather.553 They contributed to the colonization and dispossession of Native land by staking acreages under the Donation Land Claims Act, taking advantage of the fertile soils of the 552 Isaac N. Ebey to Winfield S. Ebey, April 25, 1851, Accession 0127, Winfield Scott Ebey Papers, Box 3, Folder 6, UWSC. 553 Although Whidbey Island rests in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains and receives less rain and fewer days of precipitation than most of the wet side of the Cascades, it is nonetheless prone to the same autumn shift towards cool, wet, cloudy weather. Settlers often described Whidbey Island in comparative terms as drier and less sodden than other parts of the Northwest, but still found the core months of winter to be quite overcast and saturated. 288 fire-shaped prairies on the heart of the island.554 In the early autumn of 1861, however, Jacob’s health declined suddenly. Winfield’s diary entries do not specify any theory as to why, but it was common in the 1800s for seasonal transitions and the onset of cold, wet weather to be blamed for sicknesses. Working outside in such conditions could certainly exacerbate existing illness. As Winfield cared for his ailing father over the autumn and winter of 1861-62, he made daily entries in his diary, noting a long succession of dull, cloudy, rainy days next to terse, at times emotional descriptions of his father’s deteriorating condition. Sometimes, he “was up again all last night… with Father,” listening to him cough as the rain fell steadily upon the cedar-shingled roof. In one entry, he simply wrote: “Father is still alive.” The winter days were wet and cool, and the humid air seeped into their home, creating a damp atmosphere that both father and son must have felt with each and every breath. On February 23rd, 1862, Jacob Ebey died at the age of 68 years and 8 months. Winfield wrote: “He was… restless all night and through this forenoon and was unable to raise any thing from the lungs. About noon he became unnaturally warm… I did not think he would go so soon, until some 10 minutes before his death I was at his Bed side when he spoke very clearly and distinctly, saying that he was blind, that he could not see me I then knew that he was touched by the Angel of Death. I asked him again if could see me. He said no he could see nothing. In a few minutes he passed from Earth perfectly lazy + quiet, without a struggle or moan — I never saw a more lazy death although sorrowing yet we sorrow not as those who have no Hope. We know that he is infinitely more happy than if he was with us. Life has been a Burden to him for a long time + he much preferred to go be at rest.” In the cramped margins of this elegiac entry, like a lingering rain-cloud of an afterthought, Winfield wrote that “the day has been very stormy.”555 Though the Ebey family had travelled across the vast 554 Richard White, Island County; Andrea Weiser and Dana Lepofsky, “Ancient Land Use and Management of Ebey's Prairie, Whidbey Island, Washington,” Journal of Ethnobiology 29, no. 2 (2009): 184-212. 555 Winfield Ebey diary, February 23, 1862, Accession 0127, Box 2, Folder 1, UWSC. 289 expanses of the North American continent to try and build a better life for themselves in a far-off land touted as healthy and Edenic, the mortal realities of being human — realities such as age, sickness, and, yes, stormy weather — nonetheless came with them. The Northwest’s especially rainy climate may not have been directly responsible for initially causing Jacob’s illness — it is impossible to say in this particular case — but it encompassed and penetrated the home in which he spent his last months bedridden, and it suffused and sounded in his life and the life of his son. Day by day, moment by moment, the rain fell on and on; the earth seeped and sprang, and puddles of standing rainwater shimmered even in the precious light of sunbreaks. Rain became a part of life for settlers such as Ebey; a part of memory, and of remembrance: a landmark of the place they were trying to turn into a home.556 This chapter explores rainfall in the context of settler-colonialism, first considering how rainfall shaped the everyday lives of agrarian colonists after they arrived in the Northwest and set to work identifying land claims, building homes, farming, and raising their families. From bad roads to drowned crops, settlers variously expressed appreciation and frustration with rainfall and its manifestation on Northwest landscapes. Rainfall played a crucial role in the creation and reinforcement of pioneer poverty, impeded the establishment of homesteads, helped bring periodic depression to many colonists, and motivated settlers to transform regional landscapes. Whereas settlement in much of the American West was challenged by the limited availability of water, colonists on the wet side of the Cascades found that there was often too much rainfall. Settlers often saw Northwest landscapes in terms of how rainfall and water flowed over them, and drainage became a necessary component of their civilizational vision — but the technology and labor 556 Jan C. Dawson, “Landmarks of Home in the Pacific Northwest,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 2 no. 2; (Winter 1996): 1-23; and Sallie Tisdale, Stepping Westward: The Long Search for Home in the Pacific Northwest. (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1991). 290 necessary to implement such changes were not equally accessible. Rainfall and drainage thus interfaced with the landscape in ways that manifested socioeconomic inequality. Promoters, however, continued to develop an idealized portrayal of rainfall, climate, and yeoman prosperity to project to the rest of the country. This rhetoric evolved as the railroads penetrated the intermontane zone, bringing with them more people and more industry. As the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the Euro-American colonization of the Northwest accelerated, lay colonists and colonial artists and writers began to portray rainfall in many different ways, a folklore of rainfall developed, and pioneers began to write histories of themselves, retrospectively naturalizing a narrative of climatic exceptionalism and regional whiteness that Americanized the region’s past and, in many ways, simplified their own experiences. Over time, rainfall even became an integral part of regional identity, playing roles in both regional narratives of progress and regional conflicts over the very meaning of progress and prosperity. A gap, however, developed in the 1870s onwards between how the first “pioneer” generation of farmers and the more urban second-generation colonists understood and portrayed rainfall; this gap was in part one between lay people and elites, who often mocked pioneer lifestyles by deploying language steeped in rainfall and framed by the growing regional strength of capitalism, urbanization, and industrialization. Taking advantage of new technologies, this second generation of settlers began undertaking more massive transformations of Northwest landscapes in an effort to “civilize” the region’s rainfall and control how it manifested, sometimes expanding upon the largely local efforts of the first generation of agrarian settlers. By the turn of the twentieth century, settlers were no longer content to tolerate or adapt to the rainy climate: they had firmly decided to try and tame it. 291 Pluvial Geography, Agriculture, and Pioneer (Re)settlement For much of the nineteenth century, the vast majority of overland emigrants to the Oregon Country were yeomen farmers; some single, some with families. Thus, when they arrived in the Willamette Valley in late fall or early winter after their journey across the continent, their first task was almost always locating a viable piece of land to claim or purchase. These claims were first made under the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850; the legislation’s 320-640 acre claim allowance for homesteaders who had arrived prior to December 1 of 1850 expired in December of 1855, moving to a $1.25 per acre purchase price in the years thereafter. Many emigrants could not afford to purchase the full acreage allowance.557 Some bought squatters rights from disappointed emigrants who wanted to leave. Women who were as young as thirteen upon their arrival in Oregon remembered being suspicious of frequent marriage offers, concerned that men only wanted to wed them to double their claim allotment.558 Although Oregon was touted as an earthly paradise by newspapers and promoters, the onset of the prolonged rainy season often dampened such visions. In search of whatever acreage they could find, emigrants made haste across the prairies and through the woods, camping out on wet ground underneath the shade of Douglas-firs. Although the mortal dangers of the Columbia River were behind them, they still had to ford the valley’s myriad streams and rivers, often swollen from the winter rains; pay for a ferry ride, which were often delayed by bad weather; or wait for the weather to shift and the waters to subside. Some found desirable land claims quickly; others spent 557 Kenneth R. Coleman, “‘We’ll All Start Even’: White Egalitarianism and the Oregon Donation Land Claim Act,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 120, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 414-439. Increasing numbers of emigrants came by maritime travel as the 1800s wound on, but this was a long and expensive journey around the horn of South America and accounted for only a small portion of incoming settlers. 558 Fred Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, ed. Mike Hulme (Eugene: Rainy Day Press, 1981): 125, 128, 174. 292 weeks or months traveling on nightmarishly muddy roads, essentially homeless, before squatting on the first hill or prairie that seemed appropriate to them. As they descended into the Willamette Valley, many emigrants found temporary room and board in the homes or musty barns of already- established settlers such as Philip Foster, whose hospitality offered a short reprieve to travelers.559 During their first months in the Northwest, many emigrants lived in a state of near-constant exposure to the cool, humid air; their tents, clothes and other coverings were often worn thin. Fire was sometimes hard to come by.560 Few were wealthy enough to afford formal lodging with enterprising hoteliers during their first winter. Rainfall thus created an urgent need for shelter, even as it enabled certain kinds of grueling work to take place in winter. This need for shelter from the rain shaped the priorities and everyday rhythms of new arrivals, as well as broader patterns of hospitality, employment, and debt. C.B. Talbot, an emigrant of 1849, wrote that new arrivals were generally “an object of pity, not of reproach, for all had trod in the same road” — but some had brought more cash with them than others. That cash came and went: prices were dependent on the consumption patterns of a small intermontane population, and were thus wildly unstable. Barter was the most common method of exchange at first. While many new arrivals were relatives or friends of established settlers, others were strangers, and the valley’s many subsistence farmers, who had accumulated little in the way of capital or food stores and often had their own debts to repay, sometimes expressed frustration with the influx of unfamiliar new neighbors. One folktale from the Willamette Valley, probably 559 Philip Foster’s farm lay along the Barlow Road’s descent into the Willamette Valley and was a common nightly stopover for exhausted emigrants. Foster often fed, clothed, and lodged emigrants, and helped them retrieve cattle that they had lost along the trails — sometimes for free, sometimes for a fee. He owned numerous businesses in the valley, including a general store in Oregon City, and it was in his best interests to see that emigrants safely made it to town. On McLoughlin’s aid, see Bowen, The Willamette Valley, 65. 560 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 58 293 apocryphal but nonetheless illustrative, tells the story of a poor farmer along the Barlow Road who finds himself overwhelmed by constant requests for help from weary emigrants — many of whom are drenched from the last leg of the trails and desperate for a night of dry sleep in warm sheets. Unable to accommodate every request, eager for privacy, and wishing to return to having hearty meals instead of splitting supper with a party of emigrants each night, the farmer hangs a sign outside of his home that reads “Inn.” From then on, the story goes, travelers no longer bothered him.561 One settler, Peter Burnett, complained in retrospect that “Our families were often overworked in waiting upon others, and our provisions vanished before the keen appetites of our new guests. They bred a famine wherever they went.”562 Widespread poverty both necessitated cooperation and caused frustration. The shelter and supply debts of poorer emigrants played a large role in the economy of early Oregon. Owing both to kindness and to economic necessity in a region with a small population, little paper money, and burgeoning colonial markets, new arrivals, most of whom were broke, were frequently allowed to establish lines of credit with local storeowners and merchants. Many of these merchants were already wealthy — it was expensive, and lucrative, to import goods to Oregon for sale — and accrued further social prestige and capital by extending such lines of credit. Similarly, some of the early agrarian settlers with the most fertile claims and well-placed storefronts acquired enough wealth by the early 1850s to retire from the day-to-day management and labors of their farms and businesses. This colonial gentry employed the agricultural labor of impoverished new emigrants who sought capital to establish their own farms, often setting a term of one or two years in exchange for payment of room and board or store credit. Emigrants who later failed to pay their dues when they had accrued enough money were ostracized; similarly, most 561 Bowen, The Willamette Valley, 66. 562 Bowen, 66. 294 settlers who refused to help new arrivals survive the winter were “soon isolated from the community.”563 Even as new arrivals grew the region’s population and productions in essential ways, then, they contributed to a general situation of frontier precarity throughout the 1840s and 1850s, wherein both established and prospective settlers sought to feed themselves and their families, pay off debts, and develop what was then a largely insular and informal colonial economy by converting prairies to farmland, building towns, and encouraging the development of a non-agrarian class who would both produce goods and consume the valley’s abundant crops.564 The growth of a non-agrarian social class to consume agricultural products was essential to the livelihood of most farmers, even as it created new social tensions. Indebted emigrants were often haunted by the losses that they had sustained along the last leg of the overland trails, where rainstorms, rushing waters, and torrid mountain rainfall robbed them of livestock and other commodities and left them less able to establish financial independence once they descended into the Willamette Valley. New settlers relied on a complex interplay of self- interest and community that often benefitted a small cadre of colonial elites; this interplay was framed by the material impacts of rainfall and contributed to the development of cycles of employment and debt, which helped generate the wealth of early pioneer elites and encouraged poor settlers to dispossess Native land in hopes of staking their own claim. An average male emigrant’s first winter was spent shacked up alone or with multiple family members at the one or two room home of an older settler, ploughing the mucky fields of another farmer, returning indoors 563 C.B. Talbot, quoted in A Small World of Our Own: Authentic Pioneer Stories of the Pacific Northwest from the Old Settlers Contest of 1892 (Walla Walla: Pioneer Press, 1985): 37; Bowen, The Willamette Valley, 67-69. 564 Bowen, 66-67. 295 at the end of each day with wet feet, sodden socks, and pay that was sometimes decent and sometimes downright exploitative. Whether they camped out alone, were availed of the hospitality of established settlers, or found temporary employment as they worked to accrue capital, new emigrants searched the valley’s countryside for possible homesteads during their first winter, usually when the weather cleared up or when the rains were falling at only a mild drizzle. One emigrant, Peter H. Burnett, wrote that new arrivals were often “embarrassed” by their poverty and sodden state, and were eager to establish their own land base. In order to do this, they “had to travel over the country in the rainy season in search of homes… they found it difficult to get along as fast as they desired. Many causes combined to make them unhappy for the time being.” Interestingly, and perhaps drawing on his own initial impressions of Oregon winters, Burnett also claimed that “The long rainy seasons were new to them; and they preferred the snow and frozen ground to the rain and mud.”565 Certainly, it was often easier to travel on snow and frozen ground than in rain and mud, and, while the latter made working outside in winter possible, it did not make such work easy. In the context of this rainy winter weather-world and on the advice of the same established colonists that they often stayed with during their first winter, new arrivals to the wet side of the Cascades exhibited geographical preferences when it came to choosing their own homesteads and constructing their houses. These preferences were largely predicated on how the region’s abundant 565 Bowen, 66-67. Burnett, who later became Governor of California, also wrote that, of the early emigrants, “Some were idle, worthless young men, too lazy to work at home, and too 181 genteel to steal; while some others were gamblers, and others were reputed thieves… [but] they were all honest, because there was nothing to steal; they were all sober, because there was no liquor to drink; there were no misers, because there was no money to hoard; and they were all industrious, because it was work or starve.” Peter H. Burnett, Recollections and opinions of an old pioneer (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1880): 180-181. Burnett played an instrumental role in the ‘whitening’ of early Oregon, see R. Gregory Nokes, The Troubled Life of Peter Burnett: Oregon Pioneer and First Governor of California (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2018). 296 rainfall manifested on existing landscapes: the rain fell and flowed on, and yet it remained, forming both permanent and temporary waters rich in nonhuman life.566 The social geography of early settler-colonialism largely mirrored this movement. Emigrants tended to avoid parcels in the bottomland areas along rivers, including the Willamette, or which consisted only of low-lying wet prairies that absorbed vast amounts of runoff in the winter and were prone to periodic flooding. Instead, many selected claims in hilly areas, on the bench-lands that lay in some places above the banks of major rivers, or along the edge of the Coast or Cascade foothills, preferring less saturated areas of gently varied elevation and diversified landscapes of prairie, forest, and stream. Areas of variable elevation were valued in part because they created small streams and artisanal springs, allowing many individual homesteads access to their own well-water or surface water for drinking, washing clothes, and other household tasks. The abundance of rainfall in the Northwest ensured a steady supply of surface water and groundwater for much of the year; when some wells dried up or were used up in the summer months, settlers were still able to gather water from larger rivers, with the dry season bringing much less fear of flooding and fewer of the rigors of excessively mucky terrain.567 Such water sources, free-flowing and continuously fed by rainfall for much of the year, were seen as pure and healthy, unlike the supposedly contaminated waters of eastern states.568 Small streams were also favorably compared to the intermontane bottomlands, 566 On the thriving ecologies of fleeting rainscapes, see D. Dudley William, The Biology of Temporary Waters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 567 Inez Parker, “Inez Parker reminiscence,” MSS 1509, DR, Box 4, OHS; Iren Calbreath, “Reminiscent Paper by Mrs. Irene Smith Calbreath,” pp. 4, MSS 1029, John Calbreath Papers, Folder 7, OHS; Jacilee Wray, River Near the Sea: An Ethnohistory of the Queets River Valley (National Park Service, 2014): 81; Gibson, Farming the Frontier 135. 568 On water purity, see J. Quinn Thornton, Climate of Oregon manuscript, pp. 252-257, MSS 371, J. Quinn Thornton papers, Box 1, Folder 14, OHS. Thornton specifically lingered on the water of eastern states, which he described as contaminated with “dangerous” sulphate and magnesium. These descriptions echo some observations made by Valencius, The Health of the Country; Nash, Inescapable Ecologies; and Ann Vileisis, Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History Of America's Wetlands (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997). This attitude towards 297 which were seen as reservoirs of malaria when springtime rains burst their banks and created pools of standing water that lingered over the summer months. These concerns about disease were rooted in emigrants’ prior experiences living along the Mississippi or Ohio Rivers, which in summertime were muggy, hot, and prone to large outbreaks of malaria that had sometimes killed settlers’ family members or significantly impacted their long-term health.569 Settlers, then, preferred locations with an elevation gradient of some sort, which enabled access to flowing surface water but distanced their homes and daily lives from rain-saturated wet prairies and bottomland landscapes. While such landscapes were essential to pre-colonial Indigenous lifeways and were valued by earlier French-Indian colonists, Anglo-Americans disdained them as uncivilized and useless spaces. The region’s abundant rainfall and prolonged wet season produced vibrant habitat and drove seasonal life rhythms for peoples such as the Kalapuya, but the enormous rain-fed biomass of the marginal lands along major rivers and streams was seen by white settlers as little more than convenient fodder for free-roaming hogs and other livestock, who often had to be rescued from the mire in the rainy season. Beginning in the 1830s, domestic livestock increasingly and ravenously eliminated many riparian plant habitats — such as camas fields and wapato gardens — that had been traditionally cultivated and gathered by Natives. Hogs, for instance, found the wet soil easy to root through. Native grasses, unaccustomed to such large wetlands was common in Europe, too. In northern Italy, “The word for land reclamation, the draining of the swamps and floodplains, is bonifiche, which implies a ‘making good.’” See Tobias Jones, The Po: An Elegy for Italy’s Longest River (London: Apollo, 2022). When not converted to agriculture or filled in by debris to facilitate paving, swamplands have often been used by American settler society for marginal purposes such as waste disposal. See for instance Martin V. Melosi, Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). 569 Boyd, The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence; Nathaniel Coe to Rachel Coe, February 12, 1854, MSS 431, Nathaniel Coe family papers, Box 1, Folder 3, OHS; Bowen, The Willamette Valley, 17-21. 298 numbers of grazers, quickly became marginalized, and introduced grasses largely took over.570 Some domesticated animals, particularly Spanish longhorn cattle, became “wild” after living long- term as free-roamers, and many new emigrants expressed a fear of running into them. As more emigrants arrived, fencing and delineating property lines became important both to appease one’s neighbors, ensure that one’s livestock were not stolen or butchered for subsistence or sale, and prevent livestock from getting mired in mucky areas.571 This kind of animal-driven habitat degradation coalesced with subsistence and recreational hunting by settlers, leading to a significant decline in waterfowl populations from the Willamette Valley north to the Fraser River mouth and decimating a crucial segment of the Pacific Flyway. Furthermore, hunters exterminated bears, wolves, and other predators, and destroyed much of what remained of the beaver population, which significantly altered stream ecologies. All of these actions were calculated both to expand farmland, reproduce livestock populations, and eliminate Indigenous culture by transforming the landscapes upon which peoples such as the Kalapuya had lived for millennia.572 570 On hogs, see Louis Albert Banks, An Oregon Boyhood (Boston: Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1898): 44-45; and Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 97. On grasses, Robbins, Landscapes of Promise 76. On traditional Native land management practices, see Turner and Deur, Keeping It Living. 571 On cattle, see Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 96-7, 186; Anderson, William F. Tolmie at Fort Nisqually, 205. On fencing and enclosure, see Reviel Netz, Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2009). The issue of free roaming cattle has appeared in other places in American history, such as in the first decades of colonization in New England. See Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 572 On hunters and Neo-European species generally, see Crosby, Ecological Imperialism; Robbins, Landscapes of Promise, 62-77; Louis S. Warren, The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). On the Pacific Flyway, see Robert M. Wilson, Seeking Refuge: Birds and Landscapes of the Pacific Flyway (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010). John Minto, a prominent early Oregon politician and observer of natural history, noted how the destruction of beaver populations impacted stream ecologies and theorized that a lack of dammed rivers resulted in rain-washed siltation being washed into sloughs and pools instead of into farm fields. He believed this reduced 299 Such actions were also, in many cases, motivated by the poverty of new emigrants: hunting local game was the cheapest option for feeding one’s family, and was often accompanied by the harvesting of native berries without the traditional burning practices that kept berry patches thriving. One settler, for instance, remembered a local pond in the Willamette Valley being variously “dark or white” with geese and swans when she first arrived. Her family, poor, shot waterfowl to supplement their food supply.573 American and British settlers in the Pacific Northwest thus took short-term advantage of the natural resource wealth created over millennia by abundant rainfall and Indigenous stewardship, dismantling native ecologies and rainscapes to sustain themselves as they struggled to learn how to implement Western agriculture in the context of a prolonged rainy season and saturated terrain. Settlers cared about a landscape’s vegetation and idyll aesthetics, but they also saw the world in terms of floodplains, bogs, and muddy hillsides. Ideal land claims were those that allowed settlers to locate their home on higher land less likely to flood, and contained rolling prairies with well-drained soils that absorbed ample rainfall but did not become saturated to the same extent as low-lying areas and river floodplains. Portions of the valley such as the French Prairie were especially popular, offering the practical advantages and idyllic aesthetics of extensive open land for farming, variable elevation, and frequent groves of forest for firewood and building construction. George T. Wood, who settled on a prairie in the Umpqua Valley in 1851, offered a the soil’s agricultural productivity. John Minto, Memoirs of Middle Life in Oregon manuscript, MSS 752, John Minto papers, Box 2, Folder 8, OHS. On the Kalapuya, see for instance Robert H. Ruby et al., A Guide to the Indian Tribes of the Pacific Northwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, third edition, 2010): 13-14; and James L. Ratcliff, “What Happened to the Kalapuya? A Study of the Depletion of Their Economic Base,” The Indian Historian 6, no. 3 (1973): 27-33; and, for the voices of several Kalapuya leaders on being dispossessed by settlers and the U.S. government, see Stephen Dow Beckham, ed. Oregon Indians: Voices From Two Centuries (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2006): 116-125. By the late 1840s and early 1850s, game such as elk were scarce in some areas. See Bowen, The Willamette Valley, 68. 573 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 111 300 typical description when he praised the valley’s rolling fields as “ready for the plow. There was no grubbing to do.” Settlers gladly took advantage of the variegated, fertile intermontane landscapes that had been cared for by Indigenous peoples for millennia, but often used language that minimized historic Indigenous presence and influence: in their eyes, the land had not been properly cared for, had been essentially “wild,” and had awaited the arrival of rightful stewards.574 As Indigenous populations were decimated by a combination of settler violence, environmental transformation, and disease epidemics, remaining peoples were marginalized and evicted to reservations; many prairies then became overgrown or began reverting to woodland in the absence of traditional more- than-human systems of kinship and land management. In part because of these ecological transitions and in part because established American colonists saw Indigenous peoples as lazy and incapable of utilizing the valley’s natural abundance, newer settlers became increasingly ignorant of the Indigenous origins of the prairies even as they continued to praise them as well-suited to homesteading. Beginning in the 1830s, promoters and settlers legitimized the dispossession of Native land in large part through narratives of climatic exceptionalism, attributions of divine right, and ideals of civilizational potential, portraying the intermontane Northwest and areas like southern Vancouver Island as a “New Eldorado” fit for Euro-American settlement and devoid of any worthwhile past. The historian Chad Reimer has noted that early settlers were accustomed to thinking about history in terms of old buildings, grand halls, ancestral homes, and spectacular feats of architecture and infrastructure in urban centers, each separated from one another by neatly delineated fields, farmhouses, and wooded windbreaks. Many Euro-Americans admired and had attachments to particular locations or natural features in the 574 See for example Robbins, Landscapes of Promise, 89. On the dispossession of the Native peoples of the Umpqua Valley, see Stephen Dow Beckham, Requiem for a People: The Rogue Indians and the Frontiersmen (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971); Whaley, Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee, 77-80 301 places they called home, but their understanding of how geographies of belonging and identity were embedded landscapes differed from that of the Northwest Coast’s Native peoples. They did not consider deep time.575 Faced with the Willamette Valley’s rolling hills and prairies and forests and derisive of the cedar-board dwellings and barkcloth garments of the Kalapuya and other Northwest peoples, agrarian colonists in Oregon interpreted the region as virgin; unspoiled: a land of wasted potential — of wasted rainfall — that was ripe for the plough and the planting. They saw no history. Yet history lay all around them, in the trees, the rivers, the mountains; in the beaver and the elk, in the salmon and the lamprey; in the wet prairies and bottomlands, and in their floods — and in the rains that fed them, and shrouded the land in mists in the wintertime, and had done so since the time of creation. Settlers did not see the past in terms of such entanglements: it mattered what men had created, what they had done to a place, rather than how they had been made from a place, and had reshaped it with a mind towards the more-than-human beings and kin that also dwelled there. In the words of the historian William Robbins, settlers went about “prescripting the landscape, and progress was measured by how thoroughly it had been transformed.”576 In ploughing up the land, colonists also ploughed up Indigenous life-worlds. This was an intentional tactic to prevent the reproduction of Native culture. These initial ecological transformations, however, did not prevent the Willamette River and other major waterways from regularly flooding during the rainy season. This became a major problem for some farmers, especially in the years after the Great Migration of 1853, when ideal 575 Chad Reimer, Writing British Columbia History, 1784-1958. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009): 17-23. Houses as physical manifestations of home are also powerful physical manifestation of history, with deeply embedded filial, cultural, and spiritual dimensions that persist across vast expanses of time. See for instance Carel Bertram, A House in the Homeland: Armenian Pilgrimages to Places of Ancestral Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022). 576 Robbins, Landscapes of Promise, 82-87. 302 land claims in the foothills and bench-lands became more scarce and emigrants often had to make do with parcels in low-lying wet prairies, adjacent to rivers, or in slightly elevated areas protected from annual flooding but still subject to inundation once every ten years or more.577 Flooding was also dangerous because so many important settlements and businesses were located along rivers. The worst floods occurred over the winter of 1861-1862, destroying the burgeoning towns of Champoeg and Linn City and displacing thousands of colonists in and beyond the Willamette Valley. Particularly for new arrivals who had little capital and were often indebted, a single flood could devastate their entire livelihood. Some flood victims in Oregon returned east, or tried their luck north of the Columbia River near the Cowlitz prairies or the shores of the Salish Sea.578 Flooding was especially disappointing for emigrants who had gotten the impression from promoters and relatives that ideal land claims were easily available, or who had traveled to the Pacific Northwest in order to escape the massive floods of the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Indigenous peoples saw annual floods from a very different perspective. Aligning their seasonal migrations and resource-gathering trips with the rise and fall of river levels, they passed on oral traditions which often described floods as an integral agent of their own creation as different peoples. Groups from the Willamette Valley northward to the mouth of the Fraser River have long told creation stories about a cataclysmic flood in olden times, one which passed all previous high- water marks and subsumed villages. People were scattered, forced to flee in canoes and wait out the vicious rainstorms; many were lost. When the waters receded, the stories say, they deposited 577 For an assurance of ample land, see for instance I. Franklin letter to Morritz Langsdorf, August 26, 1852, MSS 1512, OHS. For an example of how this was an overly rosy view, see Maria Belshaw’s diary, MSS 1508, OHS. 578 For examples of flooding displacement, see Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women 89, 119, 161. In the face of floods and the refusal of nature to submit to ordered human preferences, some emigrants favorably recalled the gardens and farmlands of the eastern U.S. See Robert Bunting, The Pacific Raincoast, 46. 303 different groups of people in different places — and wherever they happened to land, people stayed, making a new home in the aftermath. Annual river floods were similarly seen in terms of renewal, movement, and the sprouting of new life: they were dangerous, but they were also the way of the world, signaling the beginning and end of different gathering, cultivating, and hunting and fishing seasons, and sometimes punishment for those who had violated various cultural norms. 579 That emigrants had clear geographical preferences and were fearful of flooding punctures many of the promotional narratives of climatic exceptionalism and Edenic ease that had inspired them to move westward. Not all of the intermontane Northwest was desirable for colonists, and those places that were seen as more desirable were locations less saturated and problematized during the rainy season. Furthermore, even when emigrants found a suitable claim the everyday realities of establishing a homestead and a farming operation were grueling, especially during the rainy season. While the mild temperatures of the intermontane winter enabled outdoor chores, the chilly rains also soaked people’s clothes, wet their skin, and leaked into their boots as they worked to pay off their debts or establish a homestead. Shoes were mostly made of leather treated with linseed oil, were not fully waterproof, and required regular re-treatment to maintain their usefulness. Shoes were also not readily available to everyone in the earlier days of agrarian colonialism. Just as John McLoughlin had complained of the poor quality of the HBC’s shoe shipments, one second-generation American colonist, Irene Calbreath, recalled that her father Sidney Smith, who came to Oregon in 1839, had worked “barefoot in the rains” during his first winter until he “procured some moccasins from an Indian woman.” Marianne D’Arcy recalled 579 Crawford O’Brien, Coming Full Circle, 146, 267-9; Laurel Sercombe, “The Story of Dirty Face: Power and Song in Western Washington Coast Salish Myth Narratives,” in Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America, ed. Tara Browner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009): 34-53; Reimer, Before We Lost the Lake, 27-28. 304 going to school barefoot until her father could afford tanned leather and craft shoes for the family; another emigrant remembered that when she got up early on frosty mornings to milk the cows and do other chores, her feet “would get so cold I would make the cows that were lying down get up so I could stand on the ground where they had been lying, to warm my feet.”580 Stores often advertised their products as more durable against rain and mud than competitors, and some settlers developed family recipes for waterproofing boots. One, from a notebook kept by the Scholl family, prescribed the use of linseed oil alongside beeswax, pitch, and turpentine, to be reapplied as necessary — and as could be afforded.581 While settlers on the wet side of the Cascades never had trouble finding water with which to wash their clothes and blankets and other articles, they grumbled frequently about how tiresome it was to keep their personal belongings dry during the rainy season. Colonists across the state of Oregon developed vernacular jokes about traveling to the Willamette Valley to wash their clothes and then traveling to the east side of the Cascades to dry them out.582 Settlers whose families owned sheep frequently recalled knitting woolen socks and woolen shirts for home consumption and local sale; prior to development of regional woolen mills later in the 1800s, wool had to be shipped east to factories and residents on the west coast paid “exorbitant” prices for mass-produced garments.583 As new and old settlers alike struggled to stay dry with the onset of the rainy season, Oregon newspapers often issued gentle warnings to recent arrivals about the upcoming weeks and months of drizzle and cloud-cover. The Oregon Spectator of October 7, 1851 did “not wish to 580 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 153, 199; Reminiscent Paper by Mrs. Irene Smith Calbreath, pp. 1, MSS 1029, OHS. 581 This recipe is from the Scholl family notebook, MSS 400, OHS. For an example of a shoe advertisement, see the Cohen & Lyon ad in The Morning Oregonian, February 13, 1861, 3. 582 This joke was recorded by the WPA and noted in Jones and Ramsey, eds. The Stories We Tell, 18. 583 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 102, 195. On clothing prices see Alfred Lomax, “The Portland Woolen Mills, Inc.,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, 62, no. 2 (June 1961): 164-179. 305 frighten the ‘new comers’ by the prediction that ‘winter in Oregon’ is near at hand,” implying that the region had a reputation for being unbearably wet. Nonetheless, the paper advised that “they who are illy prepared for winter may take timely warning — that the bachelors scattered abroad over the land may set to work putting rooves on and chimneys to their houses. A word to the wise, &c.”584 The starter homes that new settlers constructed as they struggled to keep their clothing dry were almost invariably constructed from split, unhewn logs. If a settler or family sought to built their own house during their first winter, logs had to be harvested and transported to the building site during the rainy season. This involved cutting down trees in wet weather, when axe handles were slippery and the ground was often mucky — problems that dated back to Lewis and Clark’s experiences trying to construct a winter dwelling at Fort Clatsop. One settler, E.A. Hunt, recalled how her father, taking a job splitting rails after arrival, experienced a slip of the hand while swinging and cut off most of the toes on one foot. He almost died, and “was lame for the rest of his life.” Hunt, only seven years old, had to get a job to help provide for him.585 Unlike the Corps of Discovery, however, intermontane colonists sometimes also had to transport wood for significant distances over the prairies. In the mud, even just one mile was a long way. If a settler was fortunate to have a home site that lay adjacent to woodland, it was still necessary to hollow out cross-sections of a tree to make a crude set of wheels with space for an axle, and thereby a cart for placing whole logs; livestock were used to drag these carts to the home site, and could mire in muddy fields or roads in the process. It sometimes took four to six weeks of all-day work simply to fell, chop, and transport enough wood to begin laying logs, sometimes despite the efforts of multiple people pitching in to help.586 Then, varying widely upon the weather 584 Oregon Spectator, October 7, 1851 585 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 15 586 Bowen, The Willamette Valley, 73-76 306 and the set of experiences and skills that each emigrant brought to bear, followed another six to eighteen weeks of construction, complicated by wet surfaces, mucky ground, and logs covered in ample quantities of moss and mold and the assorted other slimy substances that grace the Northwest weather-world in the rainy season. New settlers did learn through trial and error and word-of-mouth what species of tree were best suited for homes, and tended to harvest rot-resistant Douglas-fir or Redcedar logs — if they were available nearby. Unfortunately, Douglas-firs and Redcedars are also some of the largest tree species in the world and were some of the most arduous and dangerous to fell; weaker deciduous woods from much less gargantuan trees would have been much easier to obtain. Roofs were nonetheless (usually) wisely shingled with cedar bark, which was easier to carry over long distances than tree trunks. Given cedar’s relative lack of abundance compared to other tree species in the Northwest, the widespread use of cedar shingling was a deliberate choice rather than one of convenience. The cracks between lain logs were daubed with mud or with moss to minimize how permeable the building was to everyday rainfall.587 Humidity, though was impossible to keep out of the home; some tried laying Native-knit rush mats under the door at night, to little success.588 Poorer settlers who could not afford salt — an expensive commodity in the days of early colonial settlement — probably struggled much like fur traders and explorers to preserve meat. Root cellars 587 The Astorians, for instance, traded for cedar shingles to use as roofing. See Jones, ed. Annals of Astoria, 34, 122, 126; Anderson, The Journal of Occurrences at Fort Nisqually, entries for December 1-2, 1846; Anderson, William F. Tolmie at Fort Nisqually, 241. If ideal wood was unavailable, homes were leaky, required continual maintenance, and could rot away within a decade. See for instance Jones and Ramsey, The Stories We Tell, 142-143; Arthur Lawton, “Homesteading As a Pastime,” MSS 1507, Prose and Poetry Collection, Box 4, Folder 3, OHS; J.W. Nesmith, “Annual Address,” Transactions of the Oregon Pioneer Association, 1880: 18. 588 On mats and humidity, see “Horace Lyman,” Transactions of the Oregon Pioneer Association, 1886: 72. On cellars, see Jacqueline B. Williams, The Way We Ate: Pacific Northwest Cooking, 1843-1900 (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1996): 105. 307 were sometimes utilized to store food, but were susceptible to leaks and became very mucky in winter. The initial reward for a settler’s toil was usually a modest one-story, one-room log cabin with little furniture, little space, and many cracks and crevices open to the rainy weather-world. Some cabins were no larger than twelve by fourteen feet, and had dirt floors that became mucky for a good part of the year.589 Long beyond the initial establishment of a homestead, rainfall and the rainy season significantly shaped the daily and seasonal rhythms of everyday life for colonists in the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps most profoundly, rainfall shaped the rhythms of planting and harvesting, often in ways that challenged emigrants to adjust their methods and timing compared to the familiar patterns they had practiced in the Old Northwest or elsewhere. From the 1840s into the early 1900s, agrarian settlers commonly advised new emigrants that “All signs fail in Oregon,” urging them to discard the conventional emplaced wisdom of their points of origins.590 Whereas most emigrants were accustomed to Northeastern and Midwestern climates with ample warm rain in the summer and persistent snow-covered ground in the winter, the intermontane zone of the Pacific Northwest offered a short, very dry summer and a long, rainy autumn, winter, and spring, with few periods of freezing weather. For all the Edenic claims made by boosters that painted Oregon as a land of easy plenty and a climate that did farmer’s work for them, agrarian emigrants often did not immediately know how to adapt to the region’s climatic rhythms. One settler, recalling how mud made it extremely difficult to wash wool and how sheep often froze to death due to damp exposure, described the rainy season as “inevitable… to be borne without complaint for nothing could be done about it.”591 589 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 44; 59-61 590 Jones and Ramsey, The Stories We Tell, 18. 591 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 3-4. 308 As late as 1887, McMinnville’s Telephone-Register was reporting that “The rain makes it bad for the farmers but they are trying to be resigned,” indicating that many farmers viewed the region’s prolonged rainy season as a burdensome reality that had to be accepted and dealt with.592 In a letter to the editor of the Oregon Farmer in September of 1859, David Newsom expressed his frustrations with fluctuating commodity prices and the tendency of wheat to be “winter-killed, or burnt up with drouth,” depending on whether planted in the autumn or spring. Framing the state of the region’s economy in dire terms and arguing that the Northwest needed to rely more on paper money and less on barter, Newsom asked: “If stock raising, fruit culture, nor wheat raising will pay in Oregon, how are we to live?”593 In the waterlogged Queets River Valley, in Washington, one settler recalled that “Vegetation grew very fast from the heavy rains and it was a real problem to keep under control;” her family’s solution was to keep goats, which ate away the growth.594 Farmers commonly complained about rust and rot brought by humid, rainy spring weather, and about the difficulty of ploughing the land and supplying water to their fields during the dry summers. Summer drought was an issue that promoters attempted to downplay in the 1840s and 1850s, when descriptions of the region’s climate were largely based on short-term experiences of sometimes only one season.595 But those on the ground had to farm in the context of the region’s climate: their livelihood depended on it. They rarely found wealth, and many remained broke, 592 The Telephone-Register, April 26, 1887. 593 Oregon Farmer, October 8, 1859. Newsom was an especially voracious letter-writer and opinion-haver, see Robbins, Landscapes of Promise, 116-118. 594 Wray, River Near the Sea, 83. Goat-based weed control has experienced a resurgence in the last few decades, especially in the Northwest. My family has kept a pair of goats in part for this purpose for almost three decades, and PEMCO Insurance, a regional firm, has run a ‘Northwest Profile’ ad featuring ‘Goat Renter Guy.’ 595 On drought, see for instance the Oregon Spectator, April 20, 1848. On fungal rust, see for instance Robbins, Landscapes of Promise, 115. 309 although most were at least able to produce enough to feed their families — no small feat, considering that most families had nine or ten children.596 To gather a better sense of the local climate and variations over a broader span of time, literate farmers often kept daily records of weather that they could refer to in the future. Most often, these were brief remarks made in a diary or ledger, usually naming the date; a brief note of the weather in the morning, afternoon, and evening; and sometimes the tasks carried out that day. Many settlers kept records throughout their lifetime; Nathaniel Coe and his sons, for instance, drew up meteorological tables in their farm journals from 1852 to 1907. These entries contained three daily temperature readings, a subjective description of the day’s weather, and a daily rain gauge measurement. Coe’s meteorological notes were accompanied by memoranda describing what chores were completed each day; in general, rainy days were less likely to have a memorandum, suggesting that less farm work was done on such days.597 Other settlers were less detailed. Furthermore, temperature records and rain gauge totals were not always accurate; contemporary rain gauges, for instance, tended to be makeshift, fashioned out of tin cans or other household items not suited to standardized measurement and comparison. Regardless, keeping such records allowed settlers to better understand local conditions in a region where climate and weather can vary significantly over short distances, and were useful for tracking the timing of frosts, rains, floods and high-water marks, among other things. Some settlers also made note of wind directions and the appearance of the sky, likely so that they could 596 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 156-158. 597 Coe family journals, MSS 431, Box 3, OHS. Other detailed weather records are found in the MSS 23, Seth Lewelling papers, MSS 23, Box 4, OHS; Alvah Davis diaries, MSS 1509, DR, card file box 1, OHS; T.R. Brown diary, MSS 1509, DR, card file box 1, OHS; MSS 408, Wilbur Fones diary, OHS. Librarians at the Multnomah County library kept a ledger from January 1870 to April 1874, see the “Meteorological Observations, Taken at the Rooms of the Library Association by the Librarian, Jan. 1870-Apr. 1874,” kept in the John Wilson Special Collections at the Multnomah County. Library. 310 learn how to predict local weather one or two days in advance. One colonist near Hood River remembered that locals often consulted a Native man who was skilled at foretelling the weather, indicating that they sought to benefit from Native knowledge even as they displaced Native peoples.598 That settlers kept personal meteorological records at all is a testament to the weather’s everyday importance, their consistent awareness of the weather-world’s rhythms and fluctuations, and their desire to realign their seasonal expectations to a new climate and render it legible. They wanted to generate their own emplaced knowledge. As farmers settled into life in Oregon and attempted to render the climate more legible, they commonly conceptualized the rainy season, and particularly the shoulder seasons of fall and spring, as the best time to plough fields and sow grain, including winter wheat or oat varieties imported from soggy old England. Soils saturated from days of drizzle were often more malleable before the plough, and generally mild temperatures meant one would not have to work in uncomfortable heat — or, on most days, uncomfortable cold.599 Many farmers expressed gratitude. One local paper announced the start of the autumn rainy season in 1888 by remarking that “The welcome rain is here;” another paper made a similar comment in July of 1872 after an unusually dry spring, celebrating the rains as “giving new life and vigor to the erstwhile parching grain.”600 598 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 85 599 See for instance the 1870 diary entries of John R. Jackson of Highland, Lewis County, Washington, kept in Accession 1949, Edmond S. Meany Jr. collection, Box 1, Folder 2, UWSC; or Egbert S. Oliver, Homes in the Oregon Forest: Settling Columbia County 1870-1920 (Brownsville: Calapooia Publications, 1983): 188-189. On crop varieties, see Richard D. Scheurman et al., Harvest Heritage: Agricultural Origins and Heirloom Crops of the Pacific Northwest (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2013). 600 Morning Daily Herald, September 30, 1888; The States Rights Democrat, July 5, 1872. Another example is coverage in the Willamette Farmer, February 26, 1875, which remarked: “The rain we are now having is much needed…. In many parts of the country the ground is actually too dry to plow well. There has not been a heavy rain to drench the earth since last winter, and so far the present season, there has not been water above a good boating stage, or more than the earth could readily absorb.” Also of note is M. Vanderpool’s correspondence with the editor of the Oregon Farmer, October 8, 1859. 311 Such commentary shows that farmers relied on rainfall to wet the soil and ease the process of ploughing in both spring and autumn, and were often frustrated by summer drought well into the 1880s. They also indicate that many farmers came over time to welcome the Northwest’s rainy season as a harbinger of fertility: it caused myriad problems and became tiresome, but was fundamentally life-giving, especially following the intermontane zone’s very dry summers. An appreciation for contrast and the cycle of the seasons was physiologically and psychologically embedded, and became both a literal and metaphorical way of describing the vicissitudes of life. When the vicissitudes of life dipped towards the unpleasant, the Northwest’s wet, chilly weather often made people more vulnerable to sickness, and, if the ground was excessively saturated by rainfall, seeds might drown or rot before they sprouted. Seth Lewelling, who owned a plant nursery in the Willamette Valley, noted that in 1854 he could not even set down tree grafts until late March because the ground was “to[o] wet.”601 Over-saturation was especially common after the heavier precipitation caused by atmospheric rivers, and was perhaps the most pronounced and universal problem faced by farmers west of the Cascades. One settler under the pen name ‘Plough Boy’ offered a solution in the Oregon Spectator in 1847. He claimed that contrary to conventional wisdom, it was unwise to plough and sow one’s fields when they were saturated from autumn rainfall because they would then remain “wet and muddy during the winter. Hence it is, when the dry weather sets in the land bakes and becomes hard.” Instead, he argued, the farmer should counterintuitively “plough his land in the summer during the dry weather, and get it sufficiently pulverised, it is my humble opinion that by a proper cultivation it will not again bake or become so hard but that it may be ploughed at any time, thereby permitting him to seed his land at any time, permitting him to experiment upon the time of sowing and ultimately selecting that 601 Seth Lewelling diary, 1854, MSS 23, Box 4, Folder 1, OHS. 312 time to sow his wheat best calculated to produce the greatest and surest quantity of grain.”602 This opinion does not seem to have been a popular one, but exemplifies the local discourses around agricultural practice that developed in the Pacific Northwest as settlers attempted divergent strategies to adapt to the cliamate and rainfall’s manifestation on regional landscapes. Rainfall and Everyday Settler-Colonialism in the Northwest In addition to rainfall’s influence on the planting and harvesting rhythms of agriculture, the climate had systemic impacts on every other aspect of Northwest society. Rainfall pervaded the everyday culture of resettlement, impacting transportation and communication networks, physical and mental health, and the culture of childhood. Settlers were often beholden to the rhythms of the rainy season with regard to their social and economic livelihood , and many complained quite thoroughly about it. Public debates about the region’s climatic character harnessed burgeoning meteorological statistics and lay weather observations, but did not come to any kind of consensus about how rainfall informed regional identity and destiny. Consider the deleterious influence of the rainy season on settler transportation infrastructure, which contributed to widespread physical, commercial, and psychological isolation throughout the 1800s. As Robert Bunting has noted, “Most [Northwest] farmers avoided shipping their produce any distance by wagon before the 1890s.”603 This was because most of the region was extremely rural and sparsely populated even into the early 1900s; settlers often lived a mile or more away from one another, and five to ten miles or more from the nearest town. Furthermore, local terrain was highly variable, with hills, rivers, and cultivated fields separating people even over short distances. Rail connected few towns and cities until the mid-1880s, and Oregon’s wide rivers, 602 Oregon Spectator, August 19, 1847 603 Robert Bunting, The Pacific Raincoast, 86 313 expansive, marshy bottomlands, and annual floods also made it difficult to build sturdy bridges in most places until rivers were increasingly channelized in the late 1800s.604 Despite continual local maintenance and government investment, the average road was a near-impassable quagmire of mud and standing rainwater for anywhere between six to nine months of the year (Figure 5.1).605 Rains generally onset in November at the latest. One settler, P.B. Chamberlain, wrote only in mid-April of 1860 that “The mud is beginning to dry up… so the prospect is that I may be able before long to use my carriage,” indicating a that it was common for roads to be inaccessible for six months out of the year.606 Visitors from the East Coast were often surprised at the poor condition of most roads in the Pacific Northwest, which is notable because many parts of New England and the Upper Midwest suffered from a ‘mud season’ that follows the spring thaw. Winter, for most northerly parts of North America and Eurasia, was to some extent a time of increased mobility: areas with frozen ground or permafrost were capable of supporting heavy loads, such as livestock, loaded wagons, and heavy machinery, and snowcover enabled movement via snowshoeing and skiing. In the 1800s, many roads in more populated areas were covered with brick or stone; were cleared regularly; and the countryside was at least navigable by 604 Morse family diary, pp. 66, entry for February 6, 1890, MSS 776, OHS. Add and Nellie Morse noted that the Willamette’s flood stage endangered bridges between Portland and outlying areas. 605 On the development of colonial road networks in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, see Randall V. Mills, “A History of Transportation in the Pacific Northwest,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, 47, no. 3 (Sep. 1946): 281-312; Jonas A. Jonasson, “Local Road Legislation in Early Oregon,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 42, no. 2 (Jun., 1941): 162-175; Frank Dillow, “Connecting Oregon: The Slow Road to Rapid Communications, 1843–2009,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, 111, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 184-219; and Oscar Osburn Winther, The Old Oregon Country: A History of Frontier Trade, Transportation, and Travel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969). One example of a local complaint about bad roads is covered in the Oregon City Enterprise, November 24, 1866. 606 P.B. Chamberlain to Bro Walker, April 14, 1860, MSS 1500, correspondence collection, Box 2, Folder 12, OHS. Promoters, of course, tended to gloss over the rain-stricken state of the country roads that were the main method of transportation, lingering instead on the importance of improving rail and waterway linkages and encouraging further emigration in order to accelerate such development. 3 1 4 Figure 5.1. "A.L. Clark Paving Company on muddy road, location unknown." Photo by George Milton Savage, c. 1918-1928, Washington state. An example of how muddy roads could be after significant rainfall. UWSC, UW11227. 315 horse for the majority of the year, including somewhat during winter snows. The spring thaw was thus dreaded in New England and other parts of the world with a similar freeze-thaw dynamic, such as Russia and Ukraine, because it acted first on the top layers of soil, leaving lower layers still frozen and thus preventing moisture from draining.607 The Pacific Northwest did not suffer from the freeze-thaw dynamic, but rainfall created a mud season that lasted for much of the year anyways. Roadbuilding also often created its own problems, denuding areas of their vegetation and thus their capacity to absorb rainwater. But, from the time of the first wagon trains into the Willamette Valley, settlers did their best to develop routes along hillsides and away from the marshy bottomlands most susceptible to over-saturation. They also attempted to make the most well-travelled thoroughfares more navigable by laying them with wooden boards to create plank roads, particularly when they had to traverse swampy terrain. But these “corduroy” roads were often constructed of cheap, poorly chosen softwoods, which were widely available but rotted away fairly quickly in the rainy climate and mild temperatures.608 Local governments often hired young men to continually replace planks and ameliorate the conditions on bare roads, but out of practical necessity rural residents frequently had to take up the task on their own initiative and without any compensation. Because of rain-rot and slickness, plank roads were little improvement over dirt roads during the rainy season and were valued more for reducing the dustiness of summer. Rain and wind frequently downed the region’s gigantic trees or triggered landslides, blocking roads for extended periods of time and sometimes leading to periods of localized food scarcity.609 607Atwood, Chaining Oregon 25. On mud season, see Gregory A. Zielinski and Barry D. Keim, New England Weather, New England Climate (Lebanon, NH: UPNE, 2005): 91-97. 608 See for instance the Philip Foster Papers, Box 4, Folder 5, “Two Men,” pp. 3; Winther, The Old Oregon Country 117, 124. 609 Egbert, Homes in the Oregon Forest, 31 316 All of this made traveling even short distances overland with small loads of cargo very difficult for much of the year. Settlers seeking to carry their goods to market either hoped that they could do so before bad weather set in, waited for extended breaks in the weather, or had to risk miring valuable carts and oxen.610 Mud and rain often made traveling dangerous, too. One settler noted in the late 1800s that emigrant wagon trains had cut their ruts very, very deeply: their tracks had been “exaggerated by the wash of the rains” to the extent that even portions of road not used regularly by colonists were visible decades later. These deep ruts, the product of rainfall flowing across and pooling upon the resettled landscapes of the Willamette Valley, were sometimes the cause of tragic accidents. One local newspaper, for instance, reported in the autumn of 1871 that an eighteen-year old farmer’s son had gone out racing his horse, who “caught her fore foot in a wagon rut and fell… tearing her hoof and foot off at the cofin joint.” In injuring herself, the horse also severely injured her young rider, who probably suffered from lifelong injuries.611 Horses were valuable, and settlers who could afford to keep them were not prone to risking such valuable livestock on travel unless it was absolutely necessary. When they did try to travel by horseback in the rainy season, they sometimes lost their ride, especially when fording streams.612 Steamship travel was generally a less messy and miserable option than traveling overland via roads, but waterway transportation suffered from numerous other drawbacks. Only a small 610 On the tedium of ox-cart travel, see Phoebe Goodell Judson, A Pioneer’s Search for an Ideal Home: A Book of Personal Memoirs (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984, orig. 1925): 92. Judson noted that horses were faster, but not everyone could own one. 611 On ruts, see Banks, An Oregon Boyhood, 4. Road conditions often worsened seasonally with the arrival of emigrant trains, see coverage in the Oregon Spectator, March 18, 1847. The horse accident was covered in The States Right Democrat, September 22, 1871. On horse injuries in urban areas, see Frederick L. Brown, The City Is More Than Human: An Animal History of Seattle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016): 128-130. On animals and cities more generally, see Andrew A. Robichaud, Animal City: The Domestication of America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019). 612 Pioneer and Democrat, February 4, 1854 317 number of steamers operated on the Willamette River — the artery of Oregon’s valley population centers — at any given time, putting serious restrictions on passenger capacity. Until the development of the Willamette Falls Locks in 1873, ferries could not descend the river beyond Oregon City, which limited the transport of goods down to the Columbia. While local ferries throughout the valley offered more affordable cross-river transport, regular intraregional travel via commercial steamer was not affordable for the average settler, rendering them far more useful for transporting cargo than people. Few settlers lived directly next to navigable rivers, especially because the bottomlands were perceived as an unhealthy and undesirable place to settle a claim or establish a community; this meant that they still had to move goods, and themselves, to an embarkation point, which often necessitated traveling in wet weather and mud.613 The rainy season did allow steamers and other large boats to travel farther upriver owing to higher water levels: their range was deeply restricted in the dry season. Yet this seasonal navigability was countered by frequent weather delays during heavy rain and the occasional lowland snowstorm, in some ways reinforcing the rainy season’s negative impacts on regional mobility and commerce.614 Canoes were a more accessible form of everyday waterway transportation. They were also of far less utility to farmers transporting agricultural products or merchants moving large quantities of goods than they were to earlier fur traders who traveled in small crews and carried only what supplies were necessary. Some settlers used canoes to travel short distances, especially when the rains had swollen the rivers, but the average colonist also lacked the emplaced knowledge and canoe skills that enabled many Indigenous people to move quickly and regularly in poor weather. Colonists were frequently delayed or endangered by rainstorms while out on the water, and like 613 See Howard McKinley Corning, Willamette Landings: Ghost Towns of the River (Portland: Binfords & Mort, 1947). 614 In 1855, it cost $6 to ferry a single horse between The Dalles and Portland; this equates to about $215 in present terms. Winther, The Old Oregon Country, 115, 160, 162-163. 318 James Swan, were often “glad to get safe on shore.” Not all of them could swim, and drownings were a regular occurrence.615 Canoe design also mattered. Native-built canoes, which were the most efficient and well- crafted, were not in great supply in most places: Indigenous groups had typically exchanged them with fur traders, but population decline and their forced removal to reservations mostly severed this particular trade link. Many settlers who did own Native-built canoes had stolen them; Clara Munson recalled her father stealing a local Native man’s funerary canoe, a major transgression for which he was later confronted by the man’s kin and coerced into offering recompense.616 In many areas, but especially in the border regions of the Salish Sea, local citizens and merchants hired Native canoe navigators as postmen and ferrymen, in recognition of their superior skills and ability to make sound judgements about whether to head out in inclement weather.617 These logistical limits seriously impacted the livelihood of most colonists, who were subsistence farmers that only sold to market whatever surplus they made after providing for themselves and their families. Isolation created in large part by rain and mud often limited their ability to make any profit even in years with excess production, and sometimes forced them to store part of their fall harvest in sheds and barns until conditions allowed for transport. The Northwest’s mild winter temperatures, combined with incessant rainfall and high humidity, often rotted some 615 James Swan diaries, March 3, 1859; a drowning is recorded on October 28, 1862. Accession 1709, James Gilchrist Swan papers, Box 8, Folder 2, pp. 6; Box 8, Folder 5, pp. 277, UWSC. 616 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 115, 164. Irene Calbreath recalled that canoes were used in rainy season in the Willamette Valley, but she is not totally clear whether they were used by settlers or whether Natives were hired instead. Reminiscent Paper by Mrs. Irene Smith Calbreath, MSS 1029, OHS, 617 See for instance Anderson, William F. Tolmie at Fort Nisqually, 103, 182; Klein, “Demystifying the Opposition;” Jette, At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, 46-47; Lancaster Pollard, “Journal of a Voyage on Puget Sound in 1853 by William Petit Trowbridge,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 33, no. 4 (Oct. 1942): 391-407. James Swan noted Makah canoe skills and judgements of weather conditions, see Accession 1709, James Swan papers, Box 8, Folder 3, pp. 63-65; Folder 4, pp. 171; Folder 7, pp. 334, UWSC. 319 of these crops in storage, exposed them to pests taking shelter from the weather, or degraded stores so that they were of poor quality on delivery and thus fetched less money on the market.618 This is a contrast to wheat storage in eastern England, where farmers generally dealt with less rainfall by volume and a less concentrated annual distribution. They often stored wheat outdoors in stacks, sometimes for multiple years.619 Some farmers had difficulties initially raising a barn because of incessant rainfall, which further reduced their ability to shelter livestock and preserve crop yields in their first years on a claim.620 In 1866, the Oregon City Enterprise summarized the state of the roads as “absolutely disgraceful,” argued that “the interests of the city and county have sustained greater damage in consequence of the want of a few good roads than from all other causes whatever, combined,” and further noted that “our farmers who have large quantities of grain on hand are unable to carry it to market… therefore they suffer great loss.”621 Even though California offered a significant and growing market for agricultural exports, it mattered little if product could not be reliably and profitably transported. Throughout the 1800s and into the early 1900s, then, the rainy season was a significant influence behind the continual poverty of most agrarian settlers, as it often limited the salability of the autumn and sometimes spring harvests. Rainfall contributed to commercial isolation and impeded the growth of a burgeoning mass-market economy that relied on the overland transport of large quantities of goods, exacerbating the pressures of fluctuating commodity prices and the 618 This was a complaint made by the Russians against the HBC in the 1840s, see Winther, The Old Oregon Country, 69-70. 619 Liam Brunt and Edmund Cannon, “English farmers ’wheat storage and sales in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,” Economic History Review 75 (2022): 932–959 620 Edward Evans Parrish diary, entry for April 25, 1854, MSS 648, Edward Evans Parrish papers, OHS. 621 Oregon City Enterprise, November 24, 1866. 320 region’s increasing reliance on global markets. From the perspective of a subsistence farmer eager to make some kind of profit, rainfall could result in wasted seasons and years of labor. Although poor roads had perhaps the most extensive impact on agricultural production, the rainy season also impacted settlers in many other aspects of their everyday lives, touching nearly every facet of regional culture and mundane existence. For instance, muck and frequent high water often delayed postal service for days or weeks in rural areas. Poor mail service was a broader, year- round problem throughout the Pacific states until the 1870s, but in the Northwest it was particularly bad during the rainy season. Emily Burrows of Perrydale, Oregon, writing to a cousin in Canby in November of 1873, explained her situation: “I do not know how soon I can get to send this off it is seven miles to Amity. [T]here is a P.O. two miles from here but it is on the other side of salt creek and when wet weather commences we can’t get across or we would have the letters come there.”622 Many settlers found themselves unable to access a post office due to high water or wet terrain — as Burrows noted, even seven miles on foot was a significant trek when the weather was bad. In remote areas such as the heavily sodden Queets River Valley, mail came in at most once a week and could take up to three weeks in poor weather.623 Letters from the eastern states sometimes took two or three months to arrive in Oregon. When rainfall lightened up and rivers subsided and settlers were able to at least send letters out, they frequently blamed rain for delays in communication, and sometimes explained in their correspondence that inclement conditions 622 Emily Burrows to Mary Stevens, MSS 1500, correspondence collection, Box 1, Folder 65, OHS. Also see Winther, The Old Oregon Country, 141. On the role of the postal service in integrating vast distances in the American West, see Cameron Blevins, Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); and Devin Leonard, Neither Snow Nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service (New York: Grove Press, 2016). 623 Wray, River Near the Sea 82; Pioneer and Democrat, February 4, 1854 321 prevented them from heading into town or making a visit to see a friend.624 Some mail probably never made it to its destination or became damaged in transit because of rainy weather, which could result in lost connections between relatives living thousands of miles apart. Also of note was rainfall’s possible impact on electoral calendars: at least through 1896, some elections in Oregon were held in June, and the editors of the Lincoln County Leader argued against switching all elections to November because they believed early winter rainfall would keep rural voters away from the polls.625 Rainfall frequently impeded outdoor choring, too, both agricultural and non-agricultural. One anonymous settler wrote in his diary in January of 1882 that he had gone out and “Tried to work on the road got wet and came home.” Several weeks later, he went outside to cut down trees but “could not do much to[o] rainy;” he was able to burn brush and tree roots, however, indicating that colonists who had established a permanent home and acquired the right tools had fewer issues starting fires than travelers and newcomers.626 Other settlers took advantage of clear mornings to do work, waking up early and attempting to wrap up their day’s business before rain set in later in the day. Peter Holt Hatch, who operated a house-moving business in the 1880s and sometimes hosted new emigrants coming over the travels, wrote in his diary in January of 1887 that when “it commenced raining hard… we had to quit.”627 Because the average settler was a poor subsistence farmer, many had to endure rainy weather regardless of inconvenience or discomfort. For instance, John R. Jackson noted in his diary in the spring of 1870 that, during a period of five days of heavy rain, his “boys [were] turning up the manure at the barn yard” nonetheless because they needed to 624 See for instance a letter from George H. Armitage to Philip Foster, December 26, 1861, in MSS 996, Folder 7, OHS. 625 Lincoln County Leader, July 30, 1890. 626 Anonymous diary,1881-1883, MSS 1509, DR, card file box 1, OHS. 627 Peter Holt Hatch diary, January 14, 1887, MSS 1124, Peter Holt Hatch papers, Box 1, Folder 2, OHS. On Hatch’s aid to emigrants see Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 143 322 fertilize the fields during the planting season — a muddy, sopping, smelly job if ever there was one. Some tasks, like pulling out stumps and ploughing furrows, were probably made easier — if rather messier and more unpleasant — by rainy spring days, when the soil was wet but the temperatures were very mild.628 One common kind of positive spin that settlers and promoters put on the rainy season argued that although the rains were “a damper on our enterprising people for several months in the year,” this was to be expected, as “one has to become acclimated before any country will suit him in every sense of the world.”629 Others argued that most of the Northwest’s rainfall fell overnight, which frequently allowed colonists to conduct work during the day as long as they could deal with the leftover difficulties posed by mud and standing rain water. J. Quinn Thornton, an early settler and promoter who later wrote an unpublished manuscript called “The Climate of Oregon,” used daily weather tallies collated by a neighboring farmer to make this differentiation between rainy days and rainy nights. Similarly, in promoting the region to potential emigrants, the Hillsdale Whig Standard of Indiana referred to daily weather tallies published in the Oregon Spectator of Oregon City, and concluded that in Indiana most rainfall came during the day whereas “in Oregon about two-thirds of the rain fell during the night.”630 Settlers such as Alvah Davis and Silas G. Kelly noted in their daily weather records hat rain tended to fall overnight; Kelly’s diaries, for instance, show that he woke up early in the morning, loitered inside as it rained, and then went outside when the weather cleared up. Doubtlessly, many settlers stayed awake at night listening to the pitter-patter 628 John R. Jackson diary transcripts, entries for April 7-12, 1870, Accession 1949, Edmond S. Meany Jr. collection, Box 1, Folder 2, UWSC. 629 Oregon Spectator, April 14, 1854. On acclimatization in colonial contexts globally, see for instance Michael A. Osborne, “Acclimatizing the World: A History of the Paradigmatic Colonial Science,” Osiris 15 (2000): 135-151 630 J. Quinn Thornton, Climate of Oregon manuscript, pp.10, MSS 371, J. Quinn Thornton papers, Box 1, Folder 14; Hillsdale Whig Standard, April 30, 1850 323 — and sometimes a drip-drip through cracks in the roof — as they considered their situation in life and reflected on their journeys and hardships.631 Other times, they sat in bed sick and miserable and listened to the incessant rainfall, like one anonymous settler who suffered from severe diarrhea in November of 1882.632 Wealthier and well-educated colonists who could afford a private library frequently devoted their rainy winter days to reading, as they generally had no need to personally labor outside on their farms or participate in the daily operations of any other business they might own. William Fraser Tolmie, who served in the upper echelons of the Hudson’s Bay Company from the mid- 1830s into the late 1850s, made regular notes in his diary of what books he read on rainy, “dismal” days; these titles included collections of Scottish poetry and a volume about Iceland.633 Granville O. Haller — a wealthy former army Colonel who owned a storefront, farm and cannery on Whidbey Island near Coupeville — often stayed inside and read, wrote letters, or restocked his store on rainy days in the 1880s. He sometimes ventured outside to oversee his various enterprises’ laborers, including several Chinese workers who slept in his barn among horses and piles of wet hay. One of his satisfactions was opening the farm’s sluice gate during periods of heavy rainfall, allowing water to drain out through ditches; he was pleased at the semblance of order and control that such ditching seemed to bring to the rainy season.634 Other elites kept weather records in order to make sense of the region’s climate. James Swan, who served as an Indian agent on the western coast of the Olympic Peninsula in the 1850s 631 Silas G. Kelly diaries, MSS 871, Kelly family papers, Box 4, Folders 1-5, OHS. 632 Anonymous diary, 1881-1883, MSS 1509, DR, card file box 1, OHS. 633 See Tolmie’s diary entries for October 29, 1833, and February 15, 1835 for book titles. Many other entries mention staying inside all day reading as it rained outside. Tolmie diary transcript, Accession 4577, William Fraser Tolmie papers, Box 2, Folder 6, UWSC. 634 Granville O. Haller diary, 1888-1889, Accession 3437, Granville O. Haller papers, Box 4, Folder 3, UWSC. 324 and 1860s, made meticulous daily notes about the weather; he also kept a makeshift rain gauge made out of a can that formerly held “pressed meats.” One note in December of 1861 observes a change in wind direction overnight, evidence that Swan sometimes stayed awake tossing and turning as mighty rainstorms blew in from the Pacific Ocean. Other times there was “rain all day” and he spent “all day drawing and reading.” Swan inputted his notes both into his diary and onto standardized forms that he had ordered from the Agricultural Bureau and the Smithsonian Institution; he sent his observations back east each year, contributing to attempts by the federal government and scientific communities to establish meteorological legibility over the Pacific Northwest (Figure 5.2).635 The Northwest’s prolonged rainy season was a source of particularly common complaint for settlers who were older, injured, or less mobile. While a taking a trip to the general store on an average day of mist and drizzle certainly wasn't pleasant, it was not an enormous undertaking for a young, healthy settler. Older colonists, however, often found themselves shut up inside for much of the winter, sometimes isolated in both body and mind and unable to venture safely and comfortably beyond their homestead unless the weather was decent. Many of them were farmers who had spent most of their lives laboring outside in the Northwest’s damp weather-world and, in doing so, had suffered injuries and illnesses exacerbated by exposure to weather. Inflammation of the joints, especially the knees, was a frequent rainy season complaint among older settlers like Granville O. Haller, who would often “feel a touch of rheumatism” on cold, rainy winter days. 635 James Swan diary typescript, pp. 195, 197, 292, in James Swan papers, Box 8, UWSC. On the role of the Smithsonian Institute in soliciting meteorological records from lay observers, see James Rodger Fleming, Meteorology in America, 1800-1870 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 325 Figure 5.2, map of mean annual rainfall, in inches, for Oregon and Washington. 1888. Published in the U.S. Congressional serial set, Y 1.1/2: serial 2511 map 1. Washington State University Special Collections. Note that rainfall is displayed in sweeping bands, which do not capture complex topographical variations. 326 Arthur Denny also complained of winter as a time of isolation and loneliness, and directly attributed his rheumatism to the wet climate.636 Newspapers commonly published columns or advertisements for supposed rheumatism cures; one such column in the Oregon City Enterprise contained testimony from a colonist praising bath treatments given by a Dr. Bourne of San Francisco, and offered free consultations by mail with the promise that Bourne’s recommended treatments “are not bogus, but given by well-known and responsible individuals.”637 Of course! While Haller and Denny were wealthy men who could afford to spend their later years as local statesmen, most older settlers were poor. Some relied on family support as they could not work their own farms; others felt the need to continue to labor outside to support their families, who were usually no better off materially. This sometimes did not end well. Isaac Smith, in a letter in the early summer of 1856, informed his siblings that their father had died of sickness “brought on by fatigue and exposure,” the latter probably to late-season rainfall, after trying to build a fence on his claim in the Willamette Valley. Isaac Smith’s father “said himself that [exposure] was the cause of his sickness.” While no one seriously expected that moving to the Pacific Northwest would bring them immortality, promoters touted the region as a land devoid of regular sickness and epidemic disease, and emigrants genuinely hoped that moving their families to the Northwest would grant them longer, more comfortable lives. Isaac expressed his disappointment that this regional reputation for good health had not saved his father, writing that “we now know for truth that people can die here as well as other places.”638 636 Arthur Denny letterpress copybook, typescript, Accession 2343, Arthur Armstrong Denny papers, Box 2, Folder 2, UWSC. 637 Oregon City Enterprise, November 3, 1866. On medical debates and uncertainty regarding rheumatism and the weather, see Chapter 1, note 133. 638 Isaac Smith to siblings, July 20, 1856, MSS 2623, Butler-Smith family papers. 327 Many promoters and colonists continued to praise the region’s mild winter temperatures and the gentle drizzling rain of the intermontane zone for allowing men to work outside all winter in shirtsleeves, but even younger settlers frequently blamed ill winter health on excessive rainfall and dampness. The Umpqua Weekly Gazette advised its readers to “keep in ‘out of the wet’” when at all possible, but sickness was common anyway.639 Dexter Horton was only thirty when he “was confined to his bed much of the time with inflammatory rheumatism” during the winter of 1852- 53 in Salem; his horses ran away while under the care of a friend and never returned, possibly dead due to exposure during a period of unusually cold weather that included snow and rain. Horton then “found himself reduced to poverty… with a family to care for,” the result of an extended illness of a kind that many settlers attributed to the rainy, humid climate.640 Even young Russian priests in southeastern Alaska complained that the incessant rainfall was deleterious to their health, and were often sharply reminded by their superiors that Siberia’s subzero cold was much worse.641 Settlers interpreted highly local differences in climate and health, with one settler from Amity, Oregon insisting that “the climate of McMinnville” — a city scarcely five miles north at the same elevation and no closer to a major river — “would not agree with him.”642 One early 1850s promoter, complaining in a letter to Michigan’s Hillsdale Whig Standard that the Pacific Northwest had a bad reputation in the Midwest as a humid, rainswept land, accused “gentlemen of high repute… [of] making untruthful representations” and insisted that negative accounts of the region’s rainfall were the product of people who “come here in the Fall and remain at the upper end of 639 The Umpqua Weekly Gazette, March 10, 1855. 640 Horton’s story is recounted by Clarence Bagley. See Bagley, “The Bethel Company,” in The Acquisition and Pioneering of Old Oregon 2, Accession 0036, Clarence Bagley papers, Box 1, UWSC. 641 Sergei Kan, Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999): 31-32. 642 Telephone-Register, April 26, 1887. 328 Oregon City in the spray and fog of Willamette Falls during the Winter.” This emphasis on local climatic variation as the cause of unfavorable press coverage reveals the importance placed on minor differences in how rainfall manifested on particular landscapes, even as it also reflects ongoing arguments between promoters and the national understanding of the Northwest as a sodden and unpleasant region.643 Children, who often played outside or were assigned to help with outdoor choring, also often became sick in the winter. In 1854, Issac Smith’s wife, Margaret, wrote in a letter that “many children died this winter with a sore threot. There is a great deal more sickness here than I expected to find.” She also noted that a relative in Oregon had experienced a three-week bout of rheumatism.644 Perhaps most devastating to the young was diphtheria, a bacterial disease which commonly spread among neighbors and siblings who spent time indoors in close proximity during the rainy season. One early colonist recalled that children in the Northwest often fell sick with diphtheria in quick succession, frequently resulting in one funeral closely following another. Attendance at funerals, in turn, only exacerbated the spread of the infection. Mothers sometimes lost multiple children to diphtheria: one remembered losing three within a single week. Far from being a place where families could raise children without any fear of serious illness, the chill, rainy winters of the Pacific Northwest were both directly and indirectly responsible for the same sort of premature loss of life that was so common among the poor elsewhere in the United States.645 Rainy weather also shaped the lives of young people in other important ways, for instance by dictating the rhythms of local schools across the Pacific Northwest. While rural children often had many siblings and at least a few neighbors to play with during the rainy season, the Northwest’s 643 Hillsdale Whig Standard, April 30, 1850. 644 Margaret B. Smith to unknown, February 8, 1854, MSS 2623, Butler-Smith family papers, OHS. 645 On diphtheria, see Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 122, 162, 203. 329 rainy weather-world sometimes hindered them from making connections outside of a highly local sphere and often forced them to stay indoors for extended periods between October and April.646 In the same letter to her cousin in which she complained of slow mail service, Emily Burrows noted that the local “subscription school” was poorly attended during periods of significant rainfall, in part because “when there aint many [students] there the rest will have to pay about 40 cts a day.”647 Until the 1880s and 1890s, most day schools in the Northwest required a tuition payment.648 Many students had to travel more than a mile or two on foot to get to school each morning, cancellations could not be communicated on short notice, and attendance typically cost money that the average family could ill afford to pay if not necessary. It was thus common in the Northwest for rural schools to simply not hold session at all during the rainy season; summer sessions were typical, especially before the turn of the twentieth century.649 Boarding schools more frequently held session during winter, their attendance often driven by the movements of seasonal laborers. Marianne D’arcy’s parents boarded her and one of her sisters at a school in Portland as they tried their hand at building a sawmill upriver at Washougal in the winter of 1847, when the rivers flowed heavy with rainfall and it was thus easier to float logs and operate water-powered equipment.650 Despite having the company of other students, D’arcy was extremely lonely in the absence of most of her family, and was terrified that her parents would 646 Women in particular learned domestic indoor tasks during the rainy season, such as how to cook or, if their family owned sheep, how to knit woolen socks and clothes from homespun fibers. These homemade garments were sometimes sold locally. 647 Wray, River Near the Sea, 82 648 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 61-62; Arthur Denny, Pioneer Days on Puget Sound (Seattle: The Alice Harriman Co., 1906): 72. Urban schools usually the first be organized as free, public institutions in the late 1800s and early 1900s. 649 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 101; Bessie Gragg Murphy, “The 1878 Journey From Benton County to Elsie and Back in 1900,” Cumtux 25, no. 4 (Fall 2015): 14; and Bessie Gragg Murphy, “An Early Day Teacher in Clatsop County, Oregon,” Cumtux 36, no. 4 (Fall 2016): 9. 650 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 197. 330 not return.651 Another young emigrant recalled that her “most vivid recollection of that first winter in Oregon is of the weeping skies… I was homesick for my schoolmates in Chicago and I thought I would die.”652 Many children thus came to cherish the arrival of summer, when cloudy weather cleared and the rain-rippled rivers dipped low enough for them to easily cross on stepping stones or makeshift log bridges; then they could visit friends and family, explore the town or countryside, receive visitors, and sometimes take odd jobs to earn money.653 When classes were held in the winter in rural areas, teachers sometimes taught only a handful of students each year, in some instances only siblings from the same family. Especially in remote locales, this could result in especially close and impactful connections between teachers and students. One teacher in Northwest Washington, Ingeborg Lundgren, boarded with a local family in the winter of 1900 when the rivers were too high for children to safely cross to get to the schoolhouse. She had taken the job because her instructor at the state normal school had suggested to her that “The happiest times of a teacher’s life is sometimes spent in the far backwoods,” and she later recalled that her students “provided the wood for the schoolrooms in all kinds of bad weather, never even expecting [me] to build the fire.”654 Lundgren’s experience as a teacher shows that the travails of mud and rain and wet created significant isolation for settlers both young and old, yet also inspired the generous hospitality of many settlers in rural areas, who out of necessity forged strong local networks of aid, kindness, and social cohesion. The Pacific Northwest was not, however, a region of exceptional peacefulness and prosperity, and communal and domestic conflict were no less abundant in the Northwest than they were in other parts of the United States. Violence was central to the establishment of Northwest 651 Lockley, 200-201. 652 Lockley, 115. 653 Wray, River Near the Sea, 255. 654 Wray, 343-344. 331 settler society; agrarian life was hard and dangerous; and poverty and tenancy were common despite exceptionalist narratives to the contrary. By the late 1800s, settlers in the Pacific Northwest faced both declining socioeconomic prospects and the burden of nationalistic pioneer mythologies that expected them to be self-sufficient and expected Northwest landscapes to provide easy wealth.655 Rainfall indirectly contextualized and enabled this violence and conflict by reinforcing pioneer poverty, by acting as an agent of environmental hardship and travail, and, in some cases, by framing ideologies of climatic and racial exclusion that called on settlers to dispossess Native peoples and maintain Oregon’s status as a “White” state. Rainfall and its accompaniments, like cloud-cover, also played a role in the creation and pervasion of precursory atmospheres of gloom and isolation that enhanced rates of alcoholism, depression, and other disorders associated with increased rates of violence. Rainfall itself is an underdetermining factor: it can influence but is it not sufficient to cause violence. There is, however, ample evidence that rates of depression, alcoholism, and Seasonal-Affective-Disorder (SAD) are higher in climates with fewer sunshine hours, and that such disorders can increase the likelihood of violent behavior against oneself or others by between 5% and 10%, depending on the disorder. Alcohol abuse is the most significant source of increased violence; historical rates of alcoholism in the Pacific Northwest have not been determined, but alcohol abuse is more common in cool, cloudy, dark locales.656 655 On violence in settler society in the Pacific Northwest, see Peter Boag, Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022); and Peterson del Mar, Beaten Down. For the reminiscence of a woman who complained about her first husband’s alcoholism and remembered him beating her on a regular basis, see Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 136-137. 656 This observation should be taken with caution for several reasons. First, how we define mental disorders today does not necessarily reflect how such conditions were experienced and perceived in the past, if they were at all. Second, people suffering from depression are not, by any means, exceptionally violent. On SAD and climate, see Andres Magnusson, “An overview of epidemiological studies on seasonal affective disorder,” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 101 332 Rainfall had a more direct influence on other hazards and life tragedies. Many, both young and old, suffered from life-altering injuries or died of illnesses exacerbated by exposure, contributing to familial hardships and personal bitterness. Children, especially, often drowned in the rushing waters of streams and rivers, or in millponds created to harness the flow of rainwater.657 One new settler lost three-hundred and sixty head of recently purchased sheep during a rainstorm while rafting them down the Columbia River, and subsequently lost the mortgage on his farm.658 Even mundane tasks and experiences could become unexpectedly dangerous because of how rainfall pervaded everyday landscapes and materialities. For instance, the Willamette Farmer published a warning in the spring of 1872 about a supply of paper shirt collars sold on the West Coast which had been manufactured with arsenic, advising people not to wear them out in the rain or else risk developing painful rashes and sores.659 Just as settlers on the Great Plains sometimes experienced a windswept “ prairie madness,” so too did a kind of rained-on, fog-encompassed cabin fever develop in the context of the Pacific Northwest, contributing to loneliness and, in some cases, perhaps even violence or suicide.660 Phoebe Judson, who often engaged in rosy retrospection in her popular memoir A Pioneer’s Search of the Ideal Home, nonetheless recalled how gloomy her sister’s home in the forest was, engulfed in fog and shade and darker tones of green, and described the Northwest’s rainfall and mists as (2000): 176-184. On violence and mental disorders, see Daniel Whiting, Paul Lichtenstein, and Seena Fazel, “Violence and mental disorders: a structured review of associations by individual diagnoses, risk factors, and risk assessment,” The Lancet Psychiatry 8, no. 2 (Feb. 2021): 150- 161. On alcohol and cold climates, see Chapter Three, notes 383-387. 657 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 89 658 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 163 659 Willamette Farmer, March 9, 1872. In actuality, the health effects of long-term exposure to arsenic — which is toxic when leached into the soil or groundwater — are significantly more severe than rashes. Young-Seoub Hong et al., “Health Effects of Chronic Arsenic Exposure,” Journal of Preventive Medicine & Public Health 47, no. 5 (Sep 2014): 245–252. 660 Jerry Ramsey makes this observation in Anderson, William F. Tolmie at Fort Nisqually. 333 depressing. Judson described herself as lonely, was passionately thankful that friends and family wrote her letters and that the postman delivered the paper, and eagerly awaited those rare winter days that brought blue skies.661 These sentiments of rain-weariness were widespread, often contextualized by a sense of unease with the initially forest-enclosed nature of many homesteads and the belief that forests created greater rainfall. In November of 1874, the editors of The New Northwest penned a column lamenting how “the rain fell in torrents” from a “cheerless… expanse of gloom,” and, quoting a popular American poet, reluctantly acknowledged that “the melancholy days have come.”662 “A Change of Worlds”: Rainfall, Native Peoples, and Geographies of Settler Fear As in era of the fur trader, gloomy rain and fog contributed to a geography of fear amongst settlers that precipitated and sometimes provided and excuse for violence and dispossession. Although exaggerated descriptions of Native violence and depredation were commonly deployed as a literary device, many settlers in both public and private forums expressed a genuine fear of being attacked by Native peoples whom they perceived as hostile. Settlers often lay awake at night wondering if the rainfall obfuscated the sound of intruders, or stared out into the distant mists in search of people that, the historian David Buerge notes, “had always been described to them as 661 Judson, A Pioneer’s Search for an Ideal Home, 76-77, 86-88, 96. As one example of rosy retrospection, Judson described the overall climate of the Northwest as “tropical,” see Judson, 98- 99. On prairie madness, see June O. Underwood, “Men, Woman, and Madness: Pioneer Plains Literature,” in Under the Sun: Myth and Realism in Western American Literature, ed. Barbara Howard Meldrum (Troy: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1985): 51-63. On homesickness and settlers, see Matt, Homesickness; Dodman, What Nostalgia Was. 662 The New Northwest, November 13, 1874. 334 murdering savages.”663 The gloom of Northwest winters both reflected Euro-American ideas about the region's uncivilized state and reinforced Euro-American perceptions of Native savagery. For a time, many Native peoples in the Pacific Northwest sought to befriend settlers and take advantage of the new markets and goods that colonists brought with them. This had been the case for decades: groups such as the Chinook incorporated the Astorians into their spheres of influence and power; dozens of peoples did the same with the Hudson's Bay Company; and this persisted into the settler era despite the violence of many imperial agents and colonists. There were significant internal disagreements within and between different Native groups about the extent to which colonists should be accommodated, integrated, or expelled, but many had hope that settlers, as with transient imperialists, could be incorporated into the existing frameworks of Northwest society.664 Native peoples in the Northwest had long been accustomed to shifts in group identity and, in some cases, the arrival of new groups in or near their territories. They had experience and protocols to manage such transitions.665 Euro-American technologies and cultural prejudices posed unique challenges, but, from the 1770s into the 1850s, a better understanding of the natural rhythms of the rainy season was often a source of Indigenous leverage. When William Bell and the Denny brothers were on the verge of slaughtering cattle to survive the winter of 1853, Natives directed colonists towards suitable livestock pasture; in many cases, Natives ferried whites to their villages in order to sell them potatoes and other foods.666 One day, when the Dennys instead took their own 663 David M. Buerge, Chief Seattle and the Town That Took His Name: The Change of Worlds for the Native People and Settlers on Puget Sound (Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2017): 109-112. On geographies of fear, see Reid, The Sea Is My Country. 664 Buerge, Chief Seattle; Whaley, Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee; Keith Thor Carlson, The Power of Place, The Problem of Time […] (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). 665 Carlson, The Power of Place; Keith Thor Carlson, ed. A Stó:lo Coast Salish Historical Atlas (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2001): 30-33. 666 Buerge, Chief Seattle, 118. 335 boat across Puget Sound to purchase Native-grown potatoes, they struggled to safely navigate in the inclement winter weather. A rainstorm swept in over the water on their return trip and nearly capsized their boat, spuds and all.667 Whether because of direct aid or because of their rampant exploitation of Native-managed landscapes, settlers were never truly independent of Native society. Well into the 1860s, Natives up and down the Northwest Coast still held significant local power and were sometimes able to directly forestall individual settlers or families from laying claim to important resource gathering sites, or seek successful redress through federal army garrisons.668 This was especially true in areas farther from major Euro-American settlements and towards the beginning of colonization in a given locale, when settlers relied extensively on Native labor and generosity to navigate the privations and obstacles posed by the rainy season. Lay settlers generally tried to get along with Natives out of necessity, and some revised their prejudices after receiving help and assistance. One recalled that “The Indians were mighty good to the whites when we came here,” but were often cheated out of treaty rights by the federal government.669 The Duwamish and Suquamish leader Chief Seattle, who believed perhaps more than any other Native leader on Puget Sound that whites and Natives could peacefully live together and benefit from one another, asked of settlers in the early 1850s: “How then can we become brothers?” Seattle’s beliefs were, of course, not universally shared among other Native leaders in the Northwest. But, around this time, many white children born to new settlers on the Salish Sea were 667 Arthur Denny reminiscence of early pioneer life in Seattle, pp. 5, Accession 2343, Arthur Armstrong Denny Papers, Box 1, Folder 3, UWSC. 668 Buerge, Chief Seattle; Reid, The Sea Is My Country; Alexandra Harmon, Indians in the Making Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Klein, “Demystifying the Opposition;” Judson, A Pioneer’s Search For an Ideal Home, 107-110; Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 108-109. 669 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women 7; quote on 154. 336 called tilikums by Natives, a Chinook Jargon term roughly translating to ‘friendly relations.’ “You were born in our country,” some Natives said, “and you are our people. You eat the same food, will grow up here and belong to us.”670 For a mere little while, many had hope for such a vision. It seemed a future with great promise. As settlers grew in number, however, they began more extensive campaigns of dispossession and engaged in deeper alterations of how rainfall manifested on regional landscapes. Settler conduct became increasingly violent, even genocidal, during the 1850s and beyond. By 1858, most of the Natives of the Salish Sea — and the Pacific Northwest as a whole — had been dispossessed of their lands and belongings. Whether by killing Natives or dispossessing their land, settlers were typically the initial aggressors in conflicts; some of the most ardent proponents of Native inferiority and removal self-styled themselves as “exterminators." A significant portion of the lay settler population did not support the brutal campaigns of extermination waged by colonial militias, but settler society at large continued to perpetuate the extinguishment of Native title to land, itself an act of extensive violence and cultural genocide.671 Dispossession and genocide were thus not inevitable: they were contingent processes. The rainy season sometimes complicated settler warfare. Rainfall bogged up large portions of terrain and provided opportunities for Natives to hide using fogs and morning mists as cover. 670 Quoted in Buerge, Chief Seattle, 118. 671 On exterminators, see Stephen Dow Beckham, ed. “Trail of Tears: 1856 Diary of Indian Agent George Ambrose,” Southern Oregon Heritage 2 no. 1 (Summer 1996): 16. For a detailed study of how settlers conducted genocide of Indigenous peoples elsewhere in the American West, see Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); and Whaley, Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee. Claudio Saunt has noted that not all settlers and politicians were in support of violence and dispossession and had varying views on the ‘Indian question.’ That such varying views existed in historical context deprives the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of inevitability, re-centering the deliberate choices of settlers and government agents. See Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (New York: W.W. Norton, 2020). 337 The dampness of the rainy season could clump up gunpowder, and, although both Natives and whites possessed firearms, settlers tended to be much more disconcerted by this. One local newspaper, in a retrospective about a battle fought in the Cascade foothills east of Salem, Oregon, claimed in an unsurprisingly boastful fashion that “The Indians would have suffered severely, but for the incessant rain which rendered most of the guns unserviceable.”672 Similarly, during the Rogue River Wars of the mid-1850s, American soldiers were prevented from making advances against Native combatants and villages for months because of cold, rainy weather in the coastal mountains and valleys.673 Indigenous people, on the other hand, often found it challenging to procure food from landscapes that had been degraded by settlers and their livestock. Settlers harvested large numbers of salmon, blocked access to resource sites, discouraged traditional burning practices, and did not value the wet prairies and wetlands that were the habitat of many essential plants and animals. Indigenous relationships with rainfall and lay experiences of the rainy season changed were transformed, reflecting the increasing power of colonists and the U.S. government. George Ambrose, a federal Bureau of Indian Affairs official who oversaw the forced removal of the Rogue River peoples to the Grand Ronde reservation in the winter of 1856, recorded the travails Native people faced on their almost month-long march, writing in a letter to his superiors that the inclement season would complicate removal and cause “a vast deal of suffering” because of rain and snow. Having been subjected to the degradation of traditional gathering sites, settler dispossession and thievery, and the loss of traditional knowledge-holders, many of the Rogue River peoples lacked 672 Willamette Farmer, February 23, 1877; Denny also mentions the anxiety of poorly functioning firearms, see Denny, Pioneer Days On Puget Sound, 51, 78-79. Another example is in Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 179. 673 Charles Wilkinson, The People Are Dancing Again: The History of the Siletz Tribe of Western Oregon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010): 124. 338 the traditional winter clothing that would have protected them from the worst of the rainfall in times past. Dozens were unable to walk because of illness exacerbated by exposure, and had to be hauled in wagons along the muddy way.674 Although the U.S. Army provided shoes and blankets, the march was ill-provisioned and traversed steep terrain. Sodden ground and rainfall made for slow travel, caused wagon accidents, and led to serious sickness among many Natives, most of whom had to travel on foot. Eight died along the march; eight children were also born. In the rain, the dead were buried at the side of the trail. As they were forced away from their homelands, the destitute marchers were hounded by a group of white “exterminators” who murdered at least one Native man. Conditions did not improve when they reached the reservation encampment, owing to bureaucratic mismanagement of treaty responsibilities and willful deprivation. One agent assisting in the removal wrote that the suffering “haunts me day and night.”675 Natives who were removed from the southerly portions of the Rogue River Valley to the coastal Siletz reservation in the summer and autumn of 1856 fared little better, enduring substandard rations and finding it difficult to adjust to a climate much wetter and cloudier than many were accustomed to. Tents and homes were few, anguish ran deep, and, in their first winter on the reservation, heavy rains permeated everything; exposure to inclement weather killed hundreds and likely dealt a serious blow to generational knowledge.676 Natives who survived warfare and removal to reservations often came to dwell at the crucial margins of settler society. Migratory labor at canneries, in hop fields or other farms, or in 674 Wilkinson, 152-153 675 Wilkinson, 152-154, 178. 676 Wilkinson, 178; Joanne Kittel and Suzanne Curtis, “The Yachats Indians, Origins of the Yachats Name, and the Prison Camp Years,” (Oregon: Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, and Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians of Oregon: 2010); and Stephen Dow Beckham, Oregon Indians, 241-244. The southern Rogue River Valley is somewhat more sheltered from rainfall than the Willamette Valley and tends to be both warmer and drier year-round than other areas west of the Cascades. 339 logging operations became a primary means of employment. Many whites were unwilling to engage in such dangerous, exhausting, and weather-exposed labor, instead hiring Native and Asian migrants for meager wages. Often, said labor took place in autumn or winter, when fish runs were in full swing, spring and summer crops were due to be harvested and winter crops sown, and frequent rainfall eased the functioning of log rafts and mining sluices.677 Migratory labor was often exploitative, and working conditions were often poor. But Native participation in such labor also reflected conscious choices about how to enact what Keith Thor Carlson has called "change in continuity."678 By cycling between different locations and occupations depending upon the time of year, Native laborers adapted the traditional seasonal round within the frameworks of settler society. They utilized seasonal shifts in work to maintain connections with family and with broader kin networks, often returning to winter villages in the core of the rainy season to participate in traditional ceremonies. Working in natural resource industries also enabled some Native laborers to maintain connections to familiar landscapes and important places, even as their jobs often required them to transform such landscapes in new ways that conflicted with their understandings of what it meant to relate properly to other people and to more-than-human kin. 679 677 Alex Korsunsky, “Putting Workers on the Map: Agricultural Atlases and the Willamette Valley’s Hidden Labor Landscape,” Western Historical Quarterly 51 no. 4 (Winter 2020): 409– 437; Chris Friday, Organizing Asian American Labor: The Pacific Coast Canned-Salmon Industry, 1870-1942 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Diane J. Purvis, Ragged Coast, Rugged Coves: Labor, Culture, and Politics in Southeast Alaska Canneries (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021); Coll Thrush, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing- Over Place (Seattle: University of Washington Press, second edition, 2017); Paige Raibmon, “Picking, Posing, and Performing: Puget Sound Hop Fields and Income for Aboriginal Workers,” in Farming Across Borders: a Transnational History of the North American West, ed. Sterling Evans (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2017): 329-350; CarlsonA Stó:lo Coast Salish Historical Atlas. 678 Carlson, The Power of Place, 27. 679 Carlson, The Power of Place; Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005);; Paige 340 In other cases, migratory labor pulled individuals away from their communities for extended periods of time, severing or straining important cultural and social links. Systems of migratory labor also reflected and reinforced existing divisions within Indigenous societies: those with lower social status, especially enslaved persons, were more likely to either have a need to earn remittances for family or to be assigned tasks that exposed them to inclement weather.680 Winter could thus be a season of arduous labor conducted in cold, wet, rainy weather – and at a distance from established support networks. In a furious, forlorn confrontation with an agent of the U.S. government in May of 1858, Chief Seattle is reported to have emphasized the privations his people had faced during the heart of the recent rainy season: “I am and always have been a friend of the whites… I fear we are forgotten or are to be cheated out of our lands. I have been very poor and hungry all winter and am very sick now. In a little while I will die. I would like to be paid for my land before I die. Many of my people died during the cold, scarce winter, without getting their pay. When I die my people will be very poor — they will have no property, no chief, and no one to talk for them. You must not forget them… when I am gone.”681 Seattle’s words were meant to stir up support from settlers, but they reflect genuine frustration and show that the rainswept winter was no longer predominantly a time of emplaced renewal and social gathering for the Duwamish or Suquamish. For many, it was now also a time of hardship in the context of settler invasion, dislocation, and dispersion. For the Northwest’s Indigenous peoples, the Douglas-firs and salmon runs and mountain peaks have continued to mark the region as their home. They have endeavored to pass down Raibmon, “Meanings of Mobility on the Northwest Coast,” in New Histories for Old: Changing Perspectives on Canada’s Native Pasts, ed. Theodore Binnema and Susan Neylan (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007): 175-195; Peggy Brock, The Many Voyages of Arthur Wellington Clah: A Tsimshian Man on the Pacific Northwest Coast (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011); Colin Murray Osmond, “Logging, Laughing, and Staying Alive: The New Ethnohistory and Coast Salish Reflections on Dangerous Work in the Woods in the Mid-20th Century,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 109, no. 3 (Summer 2018): 120-134; Klein, “Demystifying the Opposition.” 680 Carlson, The Power of Place, esp. 29-30, 139-142. 681 Buerge, Chief Seattle, 186-87. 341 remaining traditional knowledge and maintain relations with more-than-human kin; for instance, tribes removed to the Grande Ronde reservation have continued to engage in traditional weaving but adapted their craft to what Rebecca Dobkins has described as “forms functional for the[ir] newly imposed sedentary life.”682 Natives have strongly resisted settler attempts to exterminate or assimilate them physically and culturally, and endeavored to adapt to their new realities on their own terms. This is well embodied by the story of Arthur Wellington Clah, a Tsimshian man whose diary offers insight into Native migratory labor along the Northwest Coast. Written in pidgin English, a settler language, Clah’s diary survives because it was carried carefully in a traditional bentwood cedar box, weathering wind and rain at sea and on shore for decades (Figure 5.3).683 In some of the rainiest areas of the Pacific Northwest, such as the Olympic Peninsula and the outer coast of British Columbia, Native peoples remained a dominant presence within settler society for longer periods of time following statehood. For the most part, however, they were continually pushed to the margins even as their migratory labor and couriership remained crucial aspects of local life all along the raincoast through the turn of the twentieth century. For those who endured removal to reservations along the Oregon coast, the rain, pitter-pattering on roofs or floors or makeshift beds, signaled not only home, but also the gloom and loss of dispossession, death, and deprivation. There had undoubtedly been what the historian David Buerge has called a “change of worlds.” Native peoples have lived through this change in a multiplicity of ways, often utilizing generational knowledge to situate settler-colonialism into the context of other major historical disruptions experienced by Indigenous societies throughout the Pacific Northwest. Peoples such as 682 Rebecca J. Dobkins, The Art of Ceremony: Voices of Renewal From Indigenous Oregon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022): 121. 683 Brock, Many Voyages, 33 342 the Quinault, for instance, lived through the gradual sea level rise that occurred at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum. Such drastic changes necessitated flexibility and adaptation, and these capacities have been redeployed to resist, contest, and adjust to settler-colonialism. Native peoples have continued to cultivate, hunt, craft, and live on in “moditional” ways that blend modern and traditional materials and ways of life. But they do not experience the region’s rainy season in precisely the same ways as they did before settlers invaded.684 684 Carlson, The Power of Place; Zoltán Grossman and Alan Parker, eds. Asserting Native Resilience: Pacific Rim Indigenous Nations Face the Climate Crisis (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2012); Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O’Brien, eds. Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations under Settler Siege (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021); Kyle Powys Whyte, "Our Ancestors Dystopia Now: Indigenous Conservation and the Anthropocene," in Ursula Heise et al., eds. The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); Coll Thrush and Ruth S. Ludwin, "Finding Fault: Indigenous Seismology, Colonial Science, and the Rediscovery of Earthquakes and Tsunamis in Cascadia," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 31, no. 4 (2007): 1-24. On moditionality, see John S. Lutz, Makúk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009); and Reid, The Sea Is My Country. I have done prior work exploring climate relocation and settler-colonial displacement of the Quinault Indian Nation at Taholah, see Corey Griffis, “At the End of the Highway, At the Edge of the Sea: Taholah, the Quinault Indian Nation, and Planned Relocation,” Occam’s Razor 12, (2022): 28-49. 343 Figure 5.3, c. 1898 bentwood cedar box, of Haida design. This is similar to the kind of box Clah would have preserved his diaries in. British Museum, item Am1898,1020.2.a-b. 344 The Webfoot, the Mossback, the Ditch and the Smokestack Between 1850 and 1900, the population of Oregon swelled exponentially from 12,093 to 413,536; the change was even greater in Washington, which grew from a population of 1,201 to a population of 518,103. As new settlers were born and others arrived from elsewhere, railroad companies lined thousands of miles of track through the Willamette Valley and the Puget Sound lowlands — a process often delayed for months at a time in the heart of the rainy season — and the region’s people and natural resources became increasingly connected to national and global markets and capital. This process of "modernization" happened in the Pacific Northwest at a rate faster than in almost any other colonized region of the world. Accordingly, new emigrants, many old colonists, and outside investors alike intensified their attempts to civilize the region’s rainfall.685 They did this by more drastically terraforming landscapes — both east and west of the Cascades — and importing more of the material trappings of what they understood as "proper" Western society: wood-frame houses, rubber moulding, woolen suit jackets, pianos, ice cabinets, and many other modern amenities. The extraction of timber, minerals, marine resources, and other commodities grew exponentially between the 1850s and early 1900s.686 Agriculture, however, remained the dominant colonial lifeway, especially in the Willamette Valley — and drainage became the most common manner of terraforming the region’s agricultural landscapes. Crucially, the premise of drainage was that there was too much rainfall in 685 On rainfall and rail construction delay, see for instance the Oxford Democrat, May 13, 1870. On the rapid transformation and capitalization of the Pacific Northwest compared to other parts of the world, see Robbins, Landscapes of Promise. 686 General sources here include Robbins, Landscapes of Promise; Williams, The Way We Ate. On transformations east of the Cascades, see Thomas Cox, The Other Oregon: People, Environment, and History East of the Cascades (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2019). On rubber moulding, see the Willamette Farmer, June 28, 1868. On home architecture as a settler symbol of civilization, see R.P. Boise, “Annual Address,” Transactions of the Oregon Pioneer Association (1876): 31 345 the Pacific Northwest, distributed in such a manner so that agriculture could not be profitably practiced without significant alterations to the landscape. Settlers found that despite what promoters claimed, the Northwest’s valleys were not a ready-made Eden. In contrast to much of the American West, where some degree of irrigation remains necessary to farm on arid lands, farmers on the wet western side of the Cascades inextricably linked drainage with their visions of what it meant to live a civilized existence and properly work the land. Indeed, farmland in the Pacific Northwest was often judged as improved or unimproved for census purposes based upon whether some level of drainage system had been implemented to slough off rainfall.687 Attempts to manage the Northwest’s rainy season by draining away stormwater were not new. Indigenous groups had employed drainage strategies for hundreds of years in some of their villages. The Makah of the sodden Olympic Peninsula, for instance, constructed intricate pipe systems crafted from hollow whalebone, which redirected excess rainfall away from dwellings and pathways.688 Settlers, however, concluded that much more extensive drainage infrastructures were necessary to maximize agricultural outputs in the context of abundant rainfall and a prolonged rainy season. This was especially the case on “marginal” bottomlands and wet prairies occupied by emigrants who did not have success claiming more ideal acreage. Post farmers with the HBC were the first practitioners of drainage for such purposes, engaging in small-scale efforts at Fort Vancouver and Fort Nisqually beginning in the late 1820s. But these early efforts were highly localized and did little to terraform the entire region or profoundly reshape Indigenous ecologies: the overhunting of game to feed fur traders had a much more profound impact. As American farmers began dispossessing vast swathes of Indigenous land and establishing agrarian homesteads, however, drainage became a powerful, multifaceted tool of colonialism and 687 Robbins, Landscapes of Promise, 115. 688 Private communication with Joshua L. Reid, June 2022. 346 an example of settler logics of control and Neo-Europeanization. Such drainage generally took one of two forms. The first was called under-drainage, or tile drainage, so named because it involved burying pipes (also called tiles) into the soil, installing periodic drain-holes at the surface, and allowing stormwater to drain off into streams and rivers. Farmers who could afford the necessary equipment and labor usually practiced this technique on a small scale, “a drain here or there on a ten or twenty acre lot.” Although the method was imported from the eastern United States, proponents argued that the method was especially useful in the context of Northwest’s damp climate and prolonged rainy season, claiming that it “allows us to work sooner after rains… admits fresh quantities of water from rains… [and] prevents, in a measure, grass and winter grains from being winter-killed.”689 Winter-killing in the Northwest less because of frost and more because of rain-rot or flooding, and under-drainage was seen as a solution to this. The second form of settler-colonial drainage involved digging permanent ditches on the surface, dredging streambeds, and more comprehensively altering how rainwater flowed across the landscape. This practice took off in the 1870s with the increased availability of relevant technology and a larger labor force, and was often accomplished in the autumn and spring, when rains had wet the soil and farmers could get a better of picture of how deep the water table went and how water flowed through the ditches that they had dug. This kind of drainage was an arduous task, often involving a farmer, his sons, their neighbors, and hired hands if they could be afforded, working for days to weeks at a time to implement a gridded system. Efforts were concentrated in lower- lying areas more prone to over-saturation, such as the bottomlands along rivers or marshy swales, and involved both ditching preexisting farmland and draining small bodies of water, such as swamps or ponds, and then filling them in with earth. Poorer farmers settled for standalone systems 689 Oregon Farmer, November 25, 1859. 347 of ditches or had to resort to communal labor for more extensive projects; wealthier farmers and landowners, however, often also installed sluice gates and retention ponds to allow them more active control over water levels.690 Although most farmers only had the resources to cultivate a fraction of their original donation land claim, even these small chunks of a few dozen or a hundred acres took years of backbreaking, oft-soaked labor to “improve,” and well into the early 1900s only a quarter or so of farmland was designated as such in the census.691 Farmers who managed to claim a full 320 or 640 acres under the Donation Land Claim Act almost never cultivated their full lot. Most farmers were poor, commodity markets were unreliable, and the Northwest offered many environmental challenges; thus, agrarian emigrants could usually only afford to cultivate subsistence levels of acreage. Between 1880 and 1900, the number of acres of land designated as improved declined in the Willamette Valley, because open prairie lands that had formerly been managed by Indigenous peoples were left vulnerable to Neo-European weeds and the encroachment of the region's rainforests. Some settlers divided their lots into parcels and sold the unimproved portions off to new emigrants, either to pay off debt or, on occasions, to establish their own base of wealth.692 In the context of this scarcity, drainage expanded arable land and homogenized and systematized regional rainscapes, allowing farmers some level of control over water levels and soil 690 See Boag, Environment and Experience. On sluices, see Granville O. Haller diary, 1888-1889, Accession 3437, Granville O. Haller papers, Box 4, Folder 3, UWSC. For a note on a poor farmer’s supposedly cheap solution to drainage which turned out to fall apart when rains actually came, see “Correspondence: Underdraining,” in Willamette Farmer, March 16, 1872 691 See Kay Atwood, Chaining Oregon: Surveying the Public Lands of the Pacific Northwest, 1851-1855 (Blacksburg: The McDonald and Woodward Publishing Company, 2008). For statistics on farm size, see Oliver, Homes in the Oregon Forest, 191. 692 On divided lots, see Dean L. May, Three Frontiers: Family, Land, and Society in the American West, 1850-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 261-263. On improved land statistics, see Richard White, “The Altered Landscape: Social Change and the Land in the Pacific Northwest,” in Regionalism and the Pacific Northwest, 114 348 saturation. By reducing how much rainfall soaked into the surface of wet prairies, farmers were able to more reliably plant and harvest according to their preferred seasonal rhythms, enjoying the Northwest’s agricultural advantages and fewer of the rainy season’s drawbacks. In essence, they began to civilize rainfall itself, acting on the dream of bending the climate towards a particular vision of familial agrarianism and market-oriented production. However, despite being universally praised by colonists as a civilizational good, drainage was also a labor-intensive and equipment-intensive endeavor, was environmentally consequential, and was often out of reach for the average farmer, who was poor and focused on subsistence production. Wealthier farmers and landowners had access to larger acreages, better land, and more hirable labor — including migratory workers, non-White laborers, and new emigrants seeking shelter from the rainy season — and were thus able to implement drainage systems on wider and more intensive scales, although in some cases their possession of geographically advantageous land also reduced their need to implement drainage in the first place. This pluvial gentry could better insulate themselves from regional flooding and the rhythms of the rainy seasons. Many had been early emigrants who dispossessed the best Native land available, divided it into lots, and sold it to later emigrants who were unable to find their own desirable claims.693 Most colonists remained impoverished subsistence farmers or migrant workers: a precariat class, existing without a secure income and livelihood. Many of them did not own the land that they worked: tenant farming and sharecropping were common.694 Such laborers were more often 693 Much of the best land had been claimed by 1853. See Robbins, Landscapes of Promise, 82-87. The desire of early emigrants to sell good land was an impetus behind demands that the federal government survey the Northwest, see Atwood, Chaining Oregon. On elite erasure of farm laborers and elite nostalgia for becoming “patriarchs” in the Pacific Northwest, see Korsunsky, “Putting Workers on the Map.” 694 Well into the 1910s, for instance, about ten percent of farmers in Columbia County fell into this category. See Egbert, Homes in the Oregon Forest, 191. 349 exposed to rainfall on a daily basis as they worked outside, were more vulnerable to the destructive potential of floods and heavy rains, and often operated on marginal lands more susceptible to inundation in the rainy season. In contrast to the pluvial gentry, they formed a pluvial precariat: a class of people whose material insecurity emerged partially from their vulnerability to the environmental conditions and events created by rainfall.695 Early on, then, the ability to alter how rainfall manifested upon regional landscapes was a proxy for progress. Yet it was a proxy — and a producer — of uneven distribution and accessibility. This inequity became more important as the region’s population grew and drainage became more widespread and intensive. Intent to increase arable land and commodify larger portions of the Northwest, questions about large-scale terraforming became more salient to larger numbers of people. For instance, the extension of industry and long-distance commerce led to demands for more accessible river transport and attempts to reduce flood risks, with promoters, farmers, and government officials arguing that allowing the annual ebb and flow of the sprawling Willamette River bottomlands to continue hindered economic growth and was unacceptable in a civilized society. Dredging parts of the river and channelizing the flow would, many insisted, allow for more commercial river traffic, reduce flood losses, improve regional health, and open up fertile alluvial soils that were largely inaccessible to farming because of seasonal inundation and saturation from 695 This pattern of land-owning elites deploying underpaid or tenant laborers has darker parallels in the crucial role of enslaved Africans in draining swampland and farm fields in the Southern United States, see for instance S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). The labor and suffering of the Pacific Northwest’s pluvial precariat resulted in agricultural wealth that largely accrued to wealthy landowners; though laborers in the Pacific Northwest were only very rarely enslaved, their situation has parallels with the forced acclimation to disease endured by enslaved Blacks in many parts of the South. See Kathryn Olivarius, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022). On slavery in Oregon, which was extremely rare but not unknown, see R. Gregory Nokes, Breaking Chains: Slavery on Trial in the Oregon Territory (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2013). 350 persistent rainfall. With most existing farmland in the Willamette Valley already occupied or owned, new arrivals were eager to open up new area for land claims rather than purchase divided lots from earlier settlers. Massive efforts to channelize the Willamette River resulted in the drastic shrinking of bottomlands and, on a representative section of river between Eugene and Albany, a reduction in the river’s length from one hundred and ninety miles in 1850 to only one hundred miles by 1960.696 Other efforts to tame the free, seasonal manifestation of rainfall on Northwest landscapes resulted in the draining of lakes in the Willamette Valley and Fraser Valley; the intensified draining of swamps and ditching of wet prairies; and the ditching and diking of fertile river deltas such as that of the Skagit.697 In nineteenth-century Seattle, the challenges of boggy slopes, mudslides, and heavy runoff led to fifty-eight campaigns to “regrade” the city, topping or sometimes demolishing the many hills that rose and dipped alongside Elliott Bay (Figure 5.4).698 696 Benner and Sedell, “Upper Willamette River Landscape: A Historic Perspective,” in River Quality; Abby Philips Metzger, Meander Scars: Reflections on Healing the Willamette River (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2013); and on the channelization of the Umpqua and Rogue rivers, see Robbins, Landscapes of Promise, 127-133. 697 See Reimer, Before We Lost the Lake; Linda Nash, “The Changing Experience of Nature;” Shane Duncan, “‘What the River Gives the River Takes Away:’ Dikes, Drains, and Life on the Skagit Delta,” MA Thesis, Western Washington University, August 1998; and work by David G. Lewis, posted on his Quartux/NDN history blog, for instance “Draining Lake Labish,” December 19, 2021, accessed March 27, 2023. https://ndnhistoryresearch.com/2021/12/19/draining-lake- labish/. 698 David B. Williams, Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015); Klingle, Emerald City; Murray Morgan, Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle (New York: The Viking Press, 1951); Coll Thrush, “City of the Changers: Indigenous People and the Transformation of Seattle’s Watersheds,” Pacific Historical Review 75, no. 1 (February 2006): 89-117. 351 Boosters both near and far were essential to these processes of population growth, resource extraction, landscape transformation, and market connection, and climatic exceptionalism continued to form an integral part of their arguments. This rhetoric often focused on reframing general impressions of the region as damp and rainswept, as such impressions were still the general view of most of the public throughout the rest of the 1800s. Lay settlers often exercised their stake in this process, organizing local business associations, attempting to influence press national coverage by speaking with traveling reporters, and emphasizing the region’s potential for Figure 5.4, “The Leveling of the Hills to Make Seattle.” Asahel Curtis, c. 1910. This photograph captures the tail-end of the Denny Hill Regrade. UWSC, item # UW4812. 352 investment and development. Those who toiled in the rain often omitted, downplayed, or romanticized their hardships in the hope that rhetoric would produce a new reality, full of greater comforts, a heroic legacy, and a less pronounced gap between the material conditions and experiences of the poor and the rich.699 Elite and lay promoters continued to largely portray the Northwest as a region of easy plenty and gentle, drizzling, benign rainfall. Many settlers, however, expressed dissatisfaction with how some of their neighbors and the pluvial gentry cooperated to portray the region’s rainy climate and agricultural potential, arguing that false advertising resulted in disappointment, poverty, and immature visions of development. Phoebe Newton swiped at settlers who loudly promoted their pioneer virtue and exaggerated the region’s prosperity, asserting that “lots of people, the more they talk the more they show what they don’t know.”700 An editor for the Oregon Argus remarked that when he had first arrived in Oregon eight years ago, he had heard “so much in the States” from promoters about Oregon mists that he delayed putting down potatoes until autumn, certain that “it would be pleasanter to encounter the cooling mist than the hot sun.” Instead, come fall, he and his family “waddled through the mud, determined to save our ‘murphies,’ [potatoes] although the cold rain fell on our bended back at such a rate that it only took ten minutes… to convey enough water down into our boots to take up what room there was vacant.”701 An editor for the Oregonian joked in the winter of 1861 that heavy rains had swollen rivers so much that boat traffic was unsafe, and had thus “kept the ladies uncommonly close at home. This is an offset to the injury of commerce.” This 699 Elaine Naylor, Frontier Boosters: Port Townsend and the Culture of Development in the American West (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). A preeminent example is Seattle’s original name, New York Alki. Alki, a Chinook Jargon term meaning ‘by and by’ or ‘eventually,’ was appended to imply that the settlement was destined to become a great seaport, a center of commerce. Such names reflected faith in development, but also an attempt by Arthur Denny and other Seattle founders to make others believe by building expectations. 700 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 156-158. 701 Oregon Argus, December 8, 1855. 353 change in routine, the editor asserted, “has forced from the lips of the oldest Oregonian the confession that it rains. This is the first acknowledgement of that fact we have heard — an “Oregon mist” being the only term heretofore in use.” Indeed, the term “Oregon mist” was adopted in local parlance to describe a state of continuous, steady drizzle, even as it was also widely deployed in promotional materials to instead suggest the predominance of a light, hardly noticeable sort of rainfall. In this way, the term became somewhat of an inside joke among settlers, used to mock the high expectations of many newcomers in contrast to the resigned reality of old settlers.702 As promotional rhetoric intensified and proliferated ever more broadly and brought larger numbers of emigrants to the Pacific Northwest, urban areas grew rapidly — Portland, for instance, ballooned from a town of eight thousand in 1870 to a city of ninety thousand by 1900 — and the regional upper-class grew alongside them. Especially in the late 1860s and onward, class conflicts arose over what role terraforming might play in the future of the region, and, more generally, over the role of rainfall in the settlement culture of the colonial Pacific Northwest. Rich colonists attempted to downplay wealth disparities and disjunctures and construct a narrative of yeomen equality; one early settler, the judge and attorney Reuben P. Boise, insisted at a pioneer association gathering later in life that, in the early days of settlement, “the distinctions of wealth had not then estranged us, and I trust never will.” As part of the region’s pluvial gentry, he owned almost three thousand acres of farmland and employed dozens of poor agricultural laborers, many likely non- white, to engage in the arduous, often rain-soaked labor of harvesting, sowing, draining, and 702 The Oregonian, February 25, 1861. On local parlance and the use of ‘Oregon Mist,’ see Jones and Ramsey, eds. The Stories We Tell, and Helen Pearce, “Folk Sayings in a Pioneer Family of Western Oregon,” California Folklore Quarterly, 5, no. 3 (Jul. 1946): 229-242. One local newspaper in Columbia County was called the Oregon Mist. Examples of the term’s use in promotional rhetoric include an article in the Oskaloosa Herald, July 16, 1885, asserting that Northwest rain is “warm…rather in the nature of a mist… not at all disagreeable, or unpleasant to be out in.” 354 ditching.703 The rains that fell upon his crops and drained into his ditches were “tamed” by the time and bodily exertion of others. Members of the pluvial gentry such as Boise, regardless of whether they had originally been poor and sodden farmers, were insulated from the lay realities of labor in the rainy season. Practically, they could also afford to drain land more intensively and on larger acreage, which further protected them from regional flooding and advanced their visions of civilizational progress. In their later years, they fashioned themselves as the noble patriarchs of a new civilization, variously boasting that they had carried forth the torch of enlightenment and civilization into the dark, rainy night of the Northwest, or that they had seen the promise of the promised land — that they had realized the incredible potential of a mild land with a mild climate, and had cultivated it. Because of their standing in society, they were often the writers or benefactors of pioneer associations and early regional histories, and many retrospectively naturalized a narrative of climatic exceptionalism and societal harmony. Yet as the turn of the twentieth century approached, both old wealth and new wealth in the Pacific Northwest often disparaged poor farmers and laborers who were more focused on subsisting than on selling, and who could not afford to drain large areas of land or participate in significant terraforming on their own properties. Adopting terms coined in the early 1850s by Californian newspaper editors and dejected former emigrants to Oregon to mock the Northwest’s rainy climate, many Northwest elites and outsiders in the last decades of the nineteenth century called poor pioneers webfooters and mossbacks, joking that they had lived for so long in the rain that they had started to grow webbed 703 Boise, “Annual Address,” 33-34. On Boise’s acreage, see Montagu Comer and Charles Erskine Scott Wood, History of the Bench and Bar of Oregon (Portland: Historical Publishing Company, 1910): 259-161. On laborers, see Korsunsky, “Putting Workers on the Map.” On class narratives and elite denials, see E. Kimbark MacColl, The Shaping of a City: Business and Politics in Portland, Oregon, 1885-1915 (Portland: The Georgian Press Co., 1976): 190-192. 355 toes; that they gave birth to babies with fins and duck-feet; and that they had become passive media for the growth of moss and fungal colonies. The use of these terms suggested that old pioneers had grown overly accustomed to the region’s rainy climate and saturated landscapes and were not fully devoted to the advancement of civilization. Webfoot farmers were accused of not “improving” their lands; the practice of drainage was thus wielded as a proxy for morality, and those who did not tame rainfall’s imprint on their lands were labeled by many elites and outsiders as backwards, backwater, washed-up pioneers.704 These discourses extended earlier arguments about settler laziness. For instance, in 1859 the Oregon Farmer’s printer and editor, Albert G. Walling, noted that “all Oregon is complaining bitterly, and justly, of the great scarcity in money and the stagnation in business,” but insisted that the region’s “soil and climate are adapted to the production in the greatest perfection and abundance of every commodity entering into the daily consumption of mankind.” He laid the blame for regional poverty at the feet of settlers themselves, arguing that they were lazy “Croakers” who did not work hard enough to extract a surplus from their land and did not take advantage of “easily accessible markets.” Left out of this analysis was an acknowledgement of the many problems that the region’s rainy climate posed to agricultural production and transportation infrastructure. Croaker was used as a general term for people who grumbled and complained, but it may also have acquired regional relevance as an early play on the duck imagery embodied in the term webfooter, with ‘croaker’ similarly implying that older settlers had spent too much time in the wet and had become noisome frogs.705 704 On the term ‘webfoot,’ see Hazel E. Mills, “The Constant Webfoot,” Western Folklore, 11, no. 3 (July, 1952): 153-164. The observation on the term’s relationship to drainage is my own. 705 See Walling’s editorial in the Oregon Farmer, October 8, 1859. 356 Mocking the skepticism that some agrarian colonists had towards industrialization and globalization, the writer and poet Joaquin Miller made fun of “the sleepy Webfoot, who is afraid his cow will be run over and his grass burnt up by the railroad.” Travelogue author J.H. Beadie directly suggested in 1864 that “the climate adds something to their natural laziness,” and the historian Alfred Lomax, writing in 1914, carried on this tradition into the twentieth century by arguing that the late development of woolen mills in Oregon was in part because of the self-satisfied “mossbackism” of those among the pluvial precariat who were “opposed to progress and remained happy in their isolation.”706 In a letter to the editor of the Oregon Farmer in the fall of 1859, an unknown W.R.D. of Marion County, Oregon wrote that “this thing of just mucking in a little wheat every year, with the calculation that ‘I’ll have enough to do me,’ will never do.”707 Eli Sheldon Glover, an artist and map publisher from the eastern United States, visited the Willamette Valley in November of 1875 and wrote in his diary that “The farmers who have come here from the east, thrifty, energetic men, get rich and live well. It is the old water-soaked pioneer that is rightly styled “webfoot.”708 This kind of argument was common among elites, although it was also made by some lay farmers who were fond of voicing their opinions in newspapers. Most among the pluvial precariat, however, including those involved in local and regional boosterism, seem to have objected to these criticisms, with some, particularly older colonists, reclaiming the terms ‘webfoot’ and ‘mossback’ as signifiers of regional identity and pride. Some did so because of skepticism and apprehension towards industrialization, urbanization, and the growing power of distant market forces, often idealizing rural solitude and the personal character 706 Beadie quoted in Mills, “The Constant Webfoot.” On mossbackism, see Lomax, “The Portland Woolen Mills.” 707 Oregon Farmer, September 21, 1859 708 Glover diary excerpt, entry for November 27, 1875, MSS 1500, correspondence collection, Box 3, Folder 16, OHS. 357 of themselves and their fellow colonists. Catherine Morris, recalling her childhood in the mid- 1800s in Scio, Oregon, claimed that because most of the folks she grew up around were poor, produced many of their own goods, and were focused more on subsistence than on wealth, they “had more time to be kindly thoughtful and considerate than the people of today.”709 Many lay settlers expressed a nostalgic view of the earliest days of colonization as a time without theft or pretension. Other settlers emphasized their personal sacrifices and labors, accusing people such as Glover of being ungrateful and soft. Arthur Denny was a wealthy man at the end of his life, but he had been poor when he first came to Puget Sound. In his memoirs, he referred to those who mocked the webfooters as: “people… who have no good word for the old settler that so bravely met every danger and privation, and by hard toil acquired, and careful economy, saved the means to make them comfortable during the decline of life. These, however are degenerate scrubs, too cowardly to face the same dangers that our pioneer men and women did, and too lazy to perform an honest day's work if it would procure them a homestead in paradise. They would want the day reduced to eight hours and board thrown in.”710 In Oregon, such settlers often embraced an imposed nickname: the Webfoot State. This nickname persisted into the twentieth century, regularly appearing in newspapers both in the Northwest and across the country. Along similar lines, merchants in the Pacific Northwest marketed products such as the “Celebrated Webfoot Plough,” and a group of pioneers gathered home recipes to be published as a collection entitled The Webfoot Cookbook.711 Other settlers, however, objected to the pejorative or positive use of such terms because they perpetuated the still-common national 709 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 98-99. Webfoot is, in this sense, analogous to terms like ‘Yankee’ or ‘Quaker’ in having been reclaimed by those to whom it was appended as a derogatory. 710 Denny, Pioneer Days on Puget Sound, 33-34. 711 Advertisement from the Oregon City Enterprise, October 19, 1867. Recipes collected by the First Presbyterian Church of Portland and the San Grael Society of Portland in The Web-Foot Cookbook, (Portland: W.B. Ayer & Co., 1885). 358 portrayal of the Pacific Northwest as a rainswept mud-bog — a portrayal which they worried would further hinder development, and which they printed reams upon reams of paper in an attempt to overturn.712 Some were worn down by the hardships of life, and resented being taken to Oregon as children. Matilda Delaney self-identified as “bitter and vindictive;” Phoebe Judson expressed contentment at the solitude she had known on her homestead but remarked that “only the spiritual is real.” She awaited finding her true home beyond the mortal coil.713 Settlers who embraced an identity as Webfooters often looked back upon their lives with a sense of satisfaction. In common with elites like Denny, they often emphasized their contributions to an ideal of civilizational progress, painting themselves as the agrarian vanguard of proper society. Unlike elites, they emphasized the contentment of having lived a life where one could at least farm enough to feed one’s family, even if one never became rich. Susan P. Angell, of Portland, Oregon, remarked at ninety-two years of age that she would “leave to my loved ones no heritage that may be inventoried or appraised,” but would pass on “homely virtues and moral principles… Friendship, truth, honesty, loyalty, reverence for God, mother love…”714 Settlers like Angell often celebrated having endured the on-arrival and every-day-afterward difficulties posed by rainfall and the damp climate west of the Cascades, touting their success at establishing some degree of personal independence, generally through smallholding subsistence farms. Rainfall was thus something that they had overcome through toil and travail, and to be a Webfoot was to have become acclimatized and adjusted to the rhythms of the rainy season in a way that reflected grit, hard work, and, often, community values. To be a Webfoot or a Mossback was to have made a commitment to live on the 712 Naylor, Frontier Boosters. For an example of a paper column in support of modern changes such as railroad extensions, see the Oregon City Enterprise, February 23, 1867. 713 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 1; Judson, A Pioneer’s Search for an Ideal Home, 308-309. 714 Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women, 130 359 wet side of the Cascades, where one told jokes and sang songs about rainfall and deployed proverbs and vernacular stories mockingly acknowledging the damp climate’s challenges.715 In contrast to many elites and outsiders, who were focused on larger-scale terraforming, proud Webfooters drew on their own experiences over many decades and believed that their efforts to transform smaller parcels of land in support of creating a white agrarian Arcadia deserved praise and recognition. W.L. Adams — in a promotional pamphlet that both portrayed Oregon as a place with less rain than its reputation suggested and argued that other promoters had been far too hyperbolic about the region’s easy prosperity — celebrated the smallholding farmer, arguing that too many new settlers at first tried to work large parcels of land and ended up sowing their seed poorly. Farmers who focused on several dozen acres but tended to it carefully, he asserted, would have great success, be able to feed their families, and have enough of a surplus to take to market.716 Most of these settlers still wholeheartedly supported the construction of railroads and the opening of resource markets, and appreciated the increased availability of various goods that came with regional development. Some blamed the pluvial gentry for hoarding wealth, paying meager wages to laborers, and impugning the character of lay agriculturalists. For instance, one writer in the Oregon Farmer took issue with those who disparaged “The Lazy Farmer,” arguing in favor of increased funding for transportation by asserting that “Ten years of almost uninterrupted success in trade has enriched many, and now we would gladly see a small portion of their gathered wealth applied to relieving the difficulties labored under by those who lavishly placed the money in their 715 For examples of rainfall in Pacific Northwest folklore, see Jones and Ramsey, The Stories We Tell; Suzi Jones, Oregon Folklore (Eugene: Randall V. Mills Archives of Northwest Folklore, 1977); Suzi Jones, ed. Webfoots and Bunchgrassers: Folk Art of the Oregon Country (Salem: Oregon Arts Commission, 1980); Tom Nash and Twilo Scofield, The Well-Traveled Casket: A Collection of Oregon Folklore (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992). 716 See W.L. Adams, Oregon As It; Its Present and Future By a Resident For Twenty-five Years (Portland: “Bulletin” Steam Book and Job Printing Rooms, 1873): 17. 360 purses.”717 This argument reflected the average farmer and laborer’s support for regional development, but also the sense of pride and triumph that many had in what their work in the rainy weather-world had accomplished. Conclusion: "The World and its Shams." At the turn of the twentieth century, settlers rich and poor had varying understandings of the Pacific Northwest’s climate and proclivity for rainfall. This variation in understanding only became more kaleidoscopic as the region’s economies continued to diversify and the growing introduction of industrial technologies and infrastructures further transformed the manifestation of rainfall upon the land.718 At the turn of the century, however, as those among the first settler generation who were children along the overland trails grew old and became the subject of oral histories and regional hagiographies, rainfall’s role and contested place in discourses of regional identity and history might best be summed up as “bittersweet.” One popular Pacific Northwest folk song, “The Old Settler,” encapsulates this, telling the story of a poor man, disillusioned with mining, who decides to try his hand at farming. Assured by others of the region’s abundance, he moves to the lowlands of the Salish Sea. “Arriving flat broke in midwinter,” he finds the fog and heavy timber “so gloomy,” and labors for two years — but “never g[ets] down to the soil.” He tries “to get out of the county, but poverty forced me to stay until I became an old settler — then nothing could drive me away.” 717 Oregon Farmer, January 13, 1860. 718 See for instance William G. Robbins, Landscapes of Conflict: The Oregon Story, 1940-2000 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004); Kenneth O’Reilly, Asphalt: a History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021). 361 Looking back on his life, the older settler asserts: “now I’ve got used to the climate, I think that if man ever found a spot to live easy and happy, that Eden is on Puget Sound.” Content, he celebrates his life: "no longer the slave of ambition I laugh at the world and its shams as I think of my pleasant condition surrounded with acres of clams.” — clams being considered a poor man’s food by many whites.719 The song reflects all stages of the classic emigrant’s life: the hard times they had before settling in the Pacific Northwest, their high expectations of the region’s potential, their disappointment upon arrival, their oft-fruitless toil and impoverished inability to leave, their adjustment to the rainy climate, and their eventual acceptance of what the region had to offer them. In all stages, the everyday and seasonal rhythms of rainfall play prominent, important roles. At first, the rainfall and fog is oppressive: it complicates the task of establishing a land claim, permeating the everyday and seasonal rhythms of life. Isolated in a heavily rural area, the average emigrant farmer found that rainfall’s impact on transportation networks and personal health often made it difficult to improve the land, build a durable home, or turn a profit. Too poor to emigrate elsewhere, settlers, particularly farmers, focused instead on feeding their families, and were usually able to at least eke out a living, over time transforming smaller portions of land into successful subsistence farms, occasionally selling their surplus crops, and engaging in other odd pursuits to make ends meet. Eager to encourage regional development, the settler sometimes pushes a rosier view of the Northwest’s climate for promotional purposes, even as he, more exposed to the weather- world than the region’s wealthy residents, perhaps grows more and more accustomed to the rhythms 719 These lyrics are from the version printed in the Washington Standard, April 14, 1877. On razor clam culture, see David Berger, Razor Clams: Buried Treasure of the Pacific Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019). 362 of the rainfall. And, in time, wind whistling, fire burning, children playing, rain falling, the Pacific Northwest becomes home to them. 363 EPILOGUE: "THE VITAL, MUFFLING GIFT."720 “What I’m hoping: things indifferent to us will save us in the end.” — Robert Rice, “Cantus for Still Water.”721 My parents both grew up in white families in the Southern United States. One side of the family are the descendants of tenant farmers in eastern Arkansas; the other side are the descendants of plantation and slave-owners in Tennessee. As they began to consider having children, my parents moved to Oregon in 1987, leaving behind their home in suburban Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas. At first, they lived in less-than-ideal circumstances. From the small coast-range settlement of Eddyville, my father commuted two hours each way to work in Gladstone, a suburb of Portland; this was followed by a stint renting a prefabricated home out in the Holcomb area. Soon, they bought a parcel of about 2.5 acres of second-growth rainforest in the lowermost foothills of the Cascades, and, in 1989, the contractors finished building the house. My parents, their dogs, and the cat moved in. Long before my parents came to Oregon, and long before this parcel of land was even known to the world as Oregon, the place where my childhood home now rests was touched by the lives of human beings. This land has a deep history: not one of the romantic, static Indian, but a long, complex, epic interplay of human and more-than-human life. For thousands of years, it was part of the traditional territories of the First Peoples; at various points, human beings walked upon 720 Douglas Coupland, Life After God (New York: Pocket Books, 1994). 721 Robert Rice in Frank Stewart and Trevor Carolan, eds. Cascadia: The Life and Breath of the World (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013): 67. 364 it, gathered from it, cultivated its plant and animal life, lived upon it, perhaps fought over it, and died upon it. They saw the blue sky in summer, and the gray sky during the rainy season. People knew this small part of the world, sensed it, imbued it with meaning. Perhaps it had a name — or many names. There were no global empires beneath the cedars, nor are there any grand buildings left over to remind us of them. But life happened, day by rainy day; it took place on that parcel of land, as it did on every other spot of land in the Pacific Northwest. The surrounding environment, and the particularities of human relationships with that environment, changed again, and again, and again. Located in a dell and largely on a Quaternary landslide deposit, the parcel is heavily sloped; the soils are a deep mix of clay and silt, and some areas are very poorly drained. All these elements — slopes, ample groundwater flow, deep soil – are suitable to rainforest understory vegetation, Western redcedar trees in the wettest areas, and, in better-drained places, Douglas-firs. The dell thus may have been a heavily timbered patch amongst sprawling flame-burnt oak prairies or open woodland. Ten times over, old-growth timbers may have seeded, sprouted, towered, and tumbled in the misty night, their branches and needles and bark crafted into the baskets that cradled newborns, the hats that shaded travelers from showers, and the coniferous tea that warmed people in their winter homes along the creeks and rivers. At the time that American emigrants first came to the Willamette Valley, the parcel was occupied by the Clackamas, who are one of the Kalapuyan peoples. A mere mile from the front door of my childhood home, emigrant wagon trains advanced haltingly through the mucky surface of a hillside, avoiding the rain-swollen creek in the swale below. One by one, settlers established homes in the area around the parcel; they dispossessed the land from Native peoples, sowed their wheat and their vegetable gardens, and labored in the drizzle and the downpours. Sheep mired; crops sometimes drowned; shoes wore through their linseed oil coating and started to leak rainwater from puddles and muddy fields. Toes and fingers grew cold; toes and fingers dried by the fire. 365 People wrote about the weather in their diaries, trying to make sense of this valley where it rarely snowed and crops sometimes broke, brittle and dry, in a summer season that they had only ever experienced as being humid and wet. Sometimes, settlers walked out in the rain, looked up at the cloudy sky, and felt grateful. Other times they huddled inside, cold and wet, poor, tired, disappointed, and sick, wondering why they ever came; wondering where the land that they were promised lay. Settlers often feared and disliked the rainscapes and ecologies that Native people had managed, created, or adapted to live alongside, and many found the rainy climate disagreeable. The rains were often seen as agents of environmental stagnation: here was a new land, and it was not yet what they wanted it to be. Rainfall was a force that could bring life, greenery, and gratitude, but it could also bring deprivation, dreariness, and death. Settlers valued rainfall’s power in ways different from Indigenous peoples, and believed that Northwest rainscapes needed to be remade, or civilized, for rainfall to at last be put to a proper, righteous, productive purpose. Climate, land use, and morality were intertwined. The parcel that my parents now own was not considered prime land by early settlers. Its position on a slope — likely heavily forested – that advanced down towards a creekbed was not encouraging. It offered little potential for Western agriculture and was probably seen by settlers as an unhealthily wet spot. On the 1860 General Land Office plat map of settler land claims in Clackamas County, it appears as a blank spot, undesired despite the rush of two decades of emigration and the dispossession of land not a quarter mile away by multiple settlers. Eventually, a settler named W.H. Grasle laid claim to a much larger lot that included the small parcel I grew up on. What precisely he did with the land is yet a mystery to me; there is a small pioneer cemetery up the hill, a little ways, but there seem to be no remnants of dwelling structures. Any that may have existed were constructed of wood, and probably rotted away in the rain or were repurposed by neighboring settlers. In time, the area became heavily forested — either 366 it was already so, or else the rainforest encroached back in upon an abandoned prairie, the Clackamas people forbidden by settlers from caring for it. Nearby colonists may have wandered through the woods, plucking thimbleberries and Oregon grape, or hunting for deer. The last Clackamas elders to remember some of the specific details of what had happened on this small parcel of land — people’s names, their personalities, their stories — passed on during the latter half of the 1800s, most of them forcibly removed from their homelands by the federal government. Some of them may have died in removal camps along the coast, bereft of clothing as the rains fell on and on. Others survived to pass down their knowledge to their children and grandchildren, who have now reclaimed traditional ownership of one of the lower Willamette’s most sacred sites: the basalt-cliffed Willamette Falls. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the parcel of land that I grew up on was logged. Some of the loggers may have been Indigenous laborers, perhaps even the descendants of the Clackamas. They came in with axes, saws, and machinery, and toppled the rainforest giants. They got wet; they slipped in the muck and fell; they were injured, bruised, even broken. They hauled the massive logs down the creekbed and towards the Clackamas River, probably in winter or spring, when the rainwater ran swift and they could more readily raft the timber to Oregon City; to Portland; and load it onto barges, who would take it California or China. Strong and rot-resistant in the wet winter weather-world of the Pacific Northwest, the timber was used to build homes in other places, and people far and wide benefitted from material proclivities honed by rainfall. Timber companies made a profit; the laborers, not so much. By the 1980s, one of the locals used the parcel of land as a source of game — to fill the chest freezer — and as a hidden spot to grow marijuana. We’ve found cisterns buried in the ground and we are fairly confident they were used to capture rainwater and direct it towards the cultivation of cannabis, which was illegal at the time in Oregon. When my parents bought the parcel, it was a 367 small, shaded remnant of second-growth rainforest, largely undeveloped, used for marginal purposes. The contractors knocked down some of the Douglas-firs, paved an asphalt driveway, carved out part of the hillside, and constructed a log home. Early settlers built such homes because there were no other materials around, and they scrambled about for months with slippery logs trying to construct some semblance of shelter. In contrast, my parents built a log home because the style was aesthetically pleasing to them, and they imported beautiful, red-tinted lodgepole pine logs from Idaho. They installed a steel roof, rather than cedar shingling. The architectural books that inspired these choices sit on shelves in the basement, above the natural gas stove. As my parents carved out their modern-day homestead, rainwater that once would have made the soil muddy or percolated down the dell was redirected across the asphalt into culverts and pipes, which funneled it away, out of sight. The gutters got mucky with coniferous needles. Slugs started to eat my father’s tomato plants. Up went the woodshed, a place to season firewood during the autumn, winter, and spring. Down the hillside came an enormous boulder, loosed from the earth during heavy rain; it barreled over the horse fencing, and almost killed the goats as they slept in their lean-to. The dogs tracked in mud on the floor, and my parents mopped it up with the Swiffer. The rainforest shed tree-sized limbs during storms, and my parents turned it into bark dust using a gasoline woodchipper. Up went the steel carport canopy, to protect the RV from moisture and mold in the rainy season. Down came the rain, again and again and again. Somewhere in the middle of it all, I was born — in December, and thus probably on a rainy day. I was, from the first moment, a settler, one among we whose homes here are younger than the rings on the trees. I went to sleep and awoke to the sound of rainfall, pitter-patter, from metal roof to muddy ground. I was warmed and soothed to hear the rain, outside, a source and substance of life, falling, at once distant, external, and at once inside, a part of me, the source from which the flesh of my flesh grew. I lived in a heated house, had hot water showers, and I used a rain jacket. 368 In summer, I went out and ate the thimbleberries and the Oregon grape. I plodded around in the mist and the drizzle, the ground slipperier than a banana slug's slime trail. I acquired many years of experience dodging semisolid dog turd pancakes during the wintertime. Through listening to the rain, I found home. But I do not know the bounty of a wetland camas field; or the rhythms of paddling a canoe in a squall; or the muddy furrow of the plough in wintertime. I know rainfall in different ways — not necessarily better or worse ways. I know rainfall through a tightly sealed window, with no draft and no leaking moisture. I know rainfall against car wipers; rainfall on a GORE-TEX jacket; rainfall on bare feet, walking down the driveway to get the mail and coming back cold and ready to put on wool socks. I know rainfall as a member of a modern society that has often tried desperately to insulate itself from the elements, and to live somewhat placelessly. I grew up in a home that was a bounded environment, and in a household that saw recreation as an “escape” from that bounded environment. We spent far more time outside than most families, but we controlled precisely how much we got wet. To many of us, there are no other possible ways to live. Rainfall has pervaded the imperial and settler-colonial history of the Pacific Northwest both as an object of gratitude and as a source of misery and unhappiness. People have been enraptured by rainfall in the Northwest as much in fear as they have been in love and admiration. Settlers have tolerated rainfall, disliked rainfall, and adored rainfall; they have been enriched by it, impoverished by it, and killed by it; and they have attempted to control it, enclose it, and redirect it. They have succeeded in these attempts — and failed. Some successes will become failures in the future. And this mission has largely been carried out by people on the margins, who have labored in inclement conditions and created capitalistic prosperity for a smaller elite by implementing modern infrastructures of weather manipulation and resource extraction. 369 We have largely forgotten the role of rainfall in our history. Through at least the turn of the twentieth century, the average person in the Pacific Northwest was far more exposed to rainfall — and weather in general — on a daily basis than the average person is today. Living more of our lives indoors has perhaps changed our physical sensitivity to weather and has certainly helped to obscure rainfall’s historical agency. In past as in present, not everyone perceived rainfall in the same way — but they perceived it more often, and more seriously. As more people have become more and more insulated from everyday exposure to weather, rainfall’s role in the Northwest's regional identity has shifted from a serious matter towards one of aesthetics. Romantic images of the rainforest, foggy valleys, and stormy coast have turned rainfall into a backdrop, and this sense of rainfall’s aesthetic value has naturalized it as a largely harmless part of the region’s self-image.722 Rainfall has become something that people in the Northwest complain about half-seriously, rather than sincerely. For most, rainfall has become, at worst at mere annoyance; a source of gloom, perhaps, but not a danger, not something which frames the rhythms of life in a meaningful way. For many, rainfall is adored, loved, adopted as a symbol of selfhood. People, myself included, are attached to the very act of staying inside, cup of tea in one's hand, reading, cozy, protected from the rain as it falls outside — and from the moisture, stopped by rubber moulding and carefully applied caulking between the timber beams. This coziness is an old, fundamentally human comfort, made more airtight than ever by modern architecture and temperature control systems. But the romantic rainscapes that are embedded in regional culture and have helped formulate the Northwest’s contemporary identity as a place of beauty and recreation are not timeless, static natural wonders. They are the anthropogenic results of the continual establishment 722 On environment and Northwest identity in the modern day, see Paul Bramadat, Patricia O'Connell Killen, and Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme, eds. Religion at the Edge: Nature, Spirituality, and Secularity in the Pacific Northwest (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022). 370 of settler life rhythms in a colonial space, and the historical establishment of those rhythms has been linked to perceptions of preceding rainscapes as uncivilized and undesirable. The modern rainscapes of the Pacific Northwest are the result of historical settler attempts to grapple with an unfamiliar climate and control the manifestations of rainfall: our current proclivity for nature and environmental consciousness is rooted in rainscapes that have been terraformed. It is a proclivity for the environment as settler society has remade and been remade by it, both in terms of how rainfall manifests upon the land and in terms of everyday bodily experience. My embodied experience of weather is in many ways incommensurable with past experiences. Like almost everyone else, I experience rainfall from the perspective of a modern, industrialized, elementally insulated body. For me, getting rained on is a hobby, or at worst an inconvenience — not part of my livelihood. But despite strenuous efforts, rainfall finds its way through our modern barriers and boundaries. It is often symbolized in literature as a transient presence; as something that comes, shrouds, dampens, and moves on, clouds dissipating, rivers flowing onward towards so many horizons. It is a poetic portrayal, not without some truth. Yet rainfall also lingers; it remains; it returns, to be back again, and again, and again. The rains fell long before human beings were here, and they will continue to fall long, long after we are gone.723 Rainfall resists human attempts to repel it; to channel it; to develop cultural and material infrastructures that control it. Though it may not seem obvious to each of us on the average day, the everyday and seasonal rhythms of our lives are still dependent on the everyday and seasonal rhythms of weather. And, just as it has been in the Pacific Northwest’s past, some people today are more vulnerable to 723 This is not, of course, to imply an unchanging climate. The Northwest has had its fair share of dry periods in deep time, including during the Last Glacial Maximum. But there are reasons why the redwoods and the Douglas-firs evolved here: it's wet. 371 the weather than others. The rain does not fall upon all equally. As the Pacific Northwest becomes warmer and wetter, rain will fall in heavier bursts. Atmospheric rivers will become more frequent, with less spacing between belts of moisture. There will be more mudslides, more communities stranded by high water, and more livelihoods severely damaged or lost. In the 2021 floods in British Columbia and Washington state, for instance, five people died, six hundred thousand farm animals drowned on the Sumas Prairie — the remains of a postglacial lake drained by settlers in the early 1900s — and economic damages in B.C. amounted to at least $17 billion (Figure E.1).724 Clear-cut timber stands and wildfire burn scars became oversaturated, and, with no vegetative matter to stabilize the soil, mass wasting events multiplied. The Lummi Nation's reservation lands temporarily became an island again, as they have during serious flooding events in the past. City streets were inundated six feet deep not half a mile from the basement apartment that I once lived in as a college student in Bellingham, Washington — an apartment where, for a period of about two months in the winter, I regularly stepped out into the hallway and into an inch of rainwater, because my landlord dawdled on installing a sump pump and refused to fix cracks in the building foundation. Such disasters will become more common, and so will flooded basements.725 The matter of climate adaptation in the Pacific Northwest is personal to me. I am from a modern settler family, and the rainforest has become a home to me. I hope, one day, to live in my own log house beneath the redcedars and the Douglas-firs; to fret about windstorms, black ice, and 724 On Sumas Lake, see Reimer, Before We Lost the Lake. 725 Dalton, Mote, and Snover, Climate Change in the Northwest. 3 7 2 Figure E.1, November 16, 2021 satellite image of the November 2021 floods in the Fraser/Nooksack river drainages. This image displays the U.S. side of the flooding, centered on the Nooksack River. Image courtesy of NASA. 373 whether the chest freezer is stocked up in the event of a power outage. But the process of researching the role of rainfall in the region's past has made me more conscious of the settler- colonial legacy that I inherit, and very cautious about my place in continuing it. One thing that has been especially striking to me is the nature of initial settler-colonial emigration to the Northwest. I would argue that it was in many ways a climate migration, spurred by an intertwined combination of environmental, sociocultural, and political circumstances in the eastern U.S. These circumstances were significantly tied to the role of weather and climate in the rhythms of life in the Midwest and New England, and it was precisely an embedded vulnerability to these rhythms that made settlers hopeful for the Pacific Northwest's promise as an alternative locus of agrarian ideals. Yet many early settlers in the Pacific Northwest found themselves wet, disappointed, poor, and exploited by a pluvial gentry. Their impoverishment and dearth were rooted in material sensation and suffering, viscerally felt, sometimes with each falling raindrop. Emotion, in history as in the present, has never been nebulous and detached from material circumstances. And one of the central ways that Euro-American settlers grappled with their disappointment was by violently dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their land, in the hopes that they would yet be able to make real a white, yeoman Arcadia that could never be, has never been, and never will be. Their dreams were not unique in human history, nor were the consequences of those dreams. But, far from being inevitable, their disproportionate exposure to the Pacific Northwest weather-world was exacerbated by wealth inequality, the forces of national and global capital, communication networks that spread misinformation, and knowledge and value systems that placed certain ways of living above others. Thus far, settlers have largely approached the Northwest’s rainy climate by trying to civilize and tame the rain, the climate, the very ebbs and flows and stirrings of planetary systems themselves as they manifest in this part of the world. The result has been the making of a inequitable and unstable sense of settler-colonial belonging, accomplished through ecological degradation, 374 cultural genocide, and profound, emplaced societal change. The many cultural and material infrastructures that settlers have developed to try and control weather or insulate themselves from it have been both representative of and reinforcing of deeper inequalities: yet more evidence that climate injustice has roots in the past. As climate change infiltrates and, in some cases, demolishes the boundaries we have tried to erect between ourselves and the weather-world, we will need to reevaluate our relationships with the elements — and with each other. We must respond to climate change in ways that are humble and compassionate, rather than domineering; in ways that are emplaced, rather than impositional; in ways that are sustainable, rather than dangerously arrogant. Climate resilience and justice cannot be about putting up fortresses and walls against punctuative disasters, or against other people.726 We have to learn to build societies that are flexible, fluid, that can align and realign with the flows of weather and climate; societies that let the wind pass through, that let rainwater ebb and rush; societies that no longer borrow recklessly from geologic time at the expense of both the lives of others and the richness of our own lived experiences.727 Of course, what ‘alignment ’means is not a natural, universal term. There is no one proper definition, no one right way. There has never been a human society that has harmonized with nature 726 See for instance Ashley Dawson, Extreme Cities: the Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (London: Verso, 2019); Sonia Shah, The Next Great Migration: the Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020). 727 Bruno Latour, in Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), emphasizes climate and climate change broadly, but also calls on us to consider the importance of dwelling — living deeply in a particular place, while resisting insularism — in alleviating our global political and ecological crises. On how fantasies of growth contribute to unhappiness, see Kate Soper, Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism (London: Verso, 2020); Stephen J. Macekura, The Mismeasure of Progress: Economic Growth and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020); Lynne Segal, Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy (London: Verso, 2017). Demuth, Floating Coast, 227 is the source of this observation about borrowing geological time. Robert B. Marks refers to a variation of this process as an escape from the “biological old regime.” Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: a Global and Environmental Narrative […] (London: Rowman & Littlefield. 4th ed., 2020). 375 because there has never been an abstract, separate, static nature with which to harmonize. There never will be, and equilibria never last forever. But what we have been doing has not been working. We — and “we”, in this context, is a term whose inclusion is freighted with nuance — must find new ways of living and being with one another that allow us to better react and adapt to fluctuations in climate, to extreme events, and to shifts in our everyday senses of place. We may need to wear different clothes; to design different homes; to spend our time differently, live in different places, and find different sources of happiness and fulfillment. Although the responsibility for climate change adaptation does not rest with the individual person desperately avoiding that errand to the supermarket for comfort food, adaptation does involve not only structural shifts, but personal adjustments to the visceral realities of mundane sensorial and emotional existence. To adapt to climate change seems, often, like a burden. It is a serious matter, entangled with thorny questions about global inequality, colonial legacies, neocolonial extraction, the industrialization of the developing world, and what Dipesh Charkrabarty has called the “democratization of consumption.”728 Certainly, in the Global North, we ask ourselves what we might have to give up by adapting to climate change.729 Many people in both in the United States and elsewhere have already had so much taken from them, and will lose more in the future. Most of them have been on the margins of the Western world's attention and, as inequality grows both 728 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222; Elizabeth Chatterjee, “The Asian Anthropocene: Electricity and Fossil Developmentalism,” The Journal of Asian Studies 79, no. 1 (Feb. 2020): 3-24; Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); Romain Felli, The Great Adaptation: Climate, Capitalism, and Catastrophe, trans. David Broder (London: Verso, 2021). 729 See for instance, Cara Daggett, “Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47, no. 1 (2018): 25–44; Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden, eds. Oil Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 376 between the Global North and Global South and within the Global North itself, the margins are unfortunately inclusive of more and more of us. But we must be careful to not let disaster and a fear of loss completely dominant our efforts to adapt to climate change, and we must not allow a desire for physical insulation — not inherently a bad thing — to translate into careless societal organization. Weather and climate, and thus climate change, are lived day to day. Status quo societal infrastructures that create and perpetuate climate injustice are lived day to day, in the form of a lack of clothing; or poor access to water; or brutal exposure to heat in a farm field. The damages and losses inflicted by climate change’s entanglements with broader issues are lived day to day in the form of a flooded home; an exploitative government; a malnourished child.730 And the very understandable appeals of what Elizabeth Chatterjee calls “fossil developmentalism” are lived day to day, in the form of electricity shimmering over a kitchen table; street lamps flickering along a city street; the purchase of a family’s first-ever automobile.731 To emphasize weather, then, is to reach deep into the roots of our relationships with the material world, to glimpse anew the daily dignities and indignities of human life, and to understand how a vast array of other societal problems are interconnected with the rhythms of weather, climate, and the seasons as they emerge in the places that we call home. In reaching towards the roots of these material relationships, we might ask ourselves: what could we have to gain by becoming more aware of, and attuned to, the rhythms of weather? I am not a techno-optimist or cornucopian. I do not believe in the inevitability or the geoengineered desirability of a “Good Anthropocene," 730 Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015); Mike Hulme, “Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism,” Osiris 26 (Klima, 2011): 245-266. 731 Chatterjee, “The Asian Anthropocene.” 377 nor in a romantic ecological past.732 Extreme heat does no humane good for anybody; nor does abject poverty. I do believe, however, that climate change is an opportunity for, and necessitates, radical societal change: it is a chance to acknowledge mistakes that we have made, and to explore how we might live differently. Imagining alternative worlds is an urgent task. I believe that there is a special value to the everyday scale. Climate change cuts across vast scales of space and time, and unifies certain matters at the planetary levels. But, even if climatic problems and their solutions are often global in scope, their implementation must be made in careful dialogue with local environments and residents. Justice, as with injustice, is lived day by day. It is vital that we pay greater attention to the weather-worlds we are losing — and entering — with the passing of each of our days, and that we are more attuned to how our senses of place co-evolve with changes in the climate. Re-centering the daily and the mundane and how they both construct and are reflective of our larger realities can help us see inequities, injustices, and moments of beauty that we might miss otherwise. By reshaping the material infrastructures that compose our everyday lives and relationships to weather, we can change how we feel through the world; how we relate to and think about our sensorial environments. If we are entirely insulated from and armored against the weather and the climate, we will see them as antagonists; as forces whose destructive powers come from a place beyond our ken. If we grapple with weather and climate in a more embedded manner, we will perhaps come to see them not as enemies, but as inextricable realities of life whose destructive powers are to a great degree framed by the structures and foibles of human society. 732 For a brief summary of ecomodernist portrayals of the Anthropocene as an opportunity to further transform and dominant Earth systems, see Clive Hamilton, “The Theodicy of the ‘Good Anthropocene,’” Environmental Humanities 7, no. 1 (2016): 233-238. 378 In the Pacific Northwest, we must be deliberate about how we develop our societal relationships with rainfall, rather than simply treating it as another aspect of the environment that can be controlled and dominated. It is not inherently destructive or foolhardy to alter environments to change how rainfall manifests, or to innovate new technologies to insulate ourselves from it. It is, however, important that we consider more carefully how we want to live in the weather-worlds of the present — and the future. Learning to understand and appreciate rainfall more fully as a part of place can help us find more value in the weather, and in the lively assemblages of life and death that surround and encompass us. We can learn better how to live with rainfall, rather than against it; how to better flow with the changes, rather than try to fashion a world for our own impossible ends. We can co-become into a better world alongside rainfall, and the rainscapes it creates.733 In this new-but-old land, the first settler-colonialists learned both the joys and sorrows of gray skies and plentiful winter rains and idyllic summers full of sunshine. All of us will encounter many new worlds. In the past, rainfall has represented and reinforced inequality and has been transformed into an ambivalent accomplice of settler-colonial dispossession. But rainfall, even as the falling changes, can instead help us realize a more inclusive, resilient, and adaptive vision of home. How we adapt to new worlds is not just about minimizing extreme loss and harm: it is also about trying to ensure that people can stay dry; that they can stay warm; and that they can find a sense of home and belonging in a changing world. Rather than considering how we might remake the rain, let the rain remake us. 733 This is especially important as the region becomes a probable destination for climate migration. Some activists and authors who have tried to imagine some alternative visions of environmental justice in the Northwest are collected in Nik Janos and Corina McKendry, eds. Urban Cascadia and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021). 379 REFERENCES CITED Abbreviations Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition JLCE Oregon Historical Society OHS Overland journeys to the Pacific collection OJP Diaries and reminiscences collection DR University of Washington Special Collections UWSC Primary and Archival Sources Adams, W.L. Oregon As It; Its Present and Future By a Resident For Twenty-Five Years. Portland: “Bulletin” Steam Book and Job Printing Rooms, 1873. Allen, A.J. Ten Years in Oregon: Travels and Adventures of Doctor E. White and Lady West of the Rocky Mountains. Ithaca: Mack, Andrus, & Co., Printers, 1848. Ambrose, George. “Trail of Tears: 1856 Diary of Indian Agent George Ambrose.” Edited by Stephen Dow Beckham. Southern Oregon Heritage 2, no. 1 (Summer 1996): 16–21. Anderson, Steve, ed. The Journal of Occurrences at Fort Nisqually. Tacoma: Fort Nisqually Association, 2016. Ball, John papers, MSS 195, Oregon Historical Society. Banks, Louis Albert. An Oregon Boyhood. Boston: Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1898. Barlow, William. “Reminiscences of Seventy Years.” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 13, no. 3 (1912): 240–86. Barlow, William, and Mary S. Barlow. “History of the Barlow Road.” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 3, no. 1 (1902): 71–81. Beals, H. K., ed. Juan Pérez on the Northwest Coast: Six Documents of His Expedition in 1774. North Pacific Studies Series, no. 12. Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1989. Beattie, Judith Hudson, and Helen M. Buss, eds. Undelivered Letters to Hudson’s Bay Company Men on the Northwest Coast of America, 1830-57. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003. Beckham, Stephen Dow, ed. Oregon Indians: Voices from Two Centuries. Northwest Readers. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2006. 380 Bennett, Robert Allen, ed. A Small World of Our Own: Authentic Pioneer Stories of the Pacific Northwest from the Old Settlers Contest of 1892. Walla Walla: Pioneer Press Books, 1985. Boise, R.P. “Annual Address.” Transactions of the Oregon Pioneer Association, 1876. Bolton, Herbert Eugene, ed. Fray Juan Crespi : Missionary Explorer on the Pacific Coast 1769- 1774. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1927. ———. Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916. Brauner, David. “National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form: Early French-Canadian Settlement, Marian County, Oregon,” 1991. Burnett, Peter H. Recollections and Opinions of an Old Pioneer. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1880. Burney, James, and Henry Roberts. Captain Cook’s Final Voyage: The Untold Story from the Journals of James Burney and Henry Roberts. Edited by James K. Barnett. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2017. Butler-Smith family papers. MSS 2623. Oregon Historical Society Calbreath, John F papers. MSS 1027. Oregon Historical Society. Chapin, Jane Lewis. “Letters of John McLoughlin, 1805-26.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 36, no. 4 (1935): 320–37. Clark, William, and Meriwether Lewis. The Definitive Journals of Lewis and Clark, Vol 5: Through the Rockies to the Cascades. Edited by Gary Moulton. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. ———. The Definitive Journals of Lewis and Clark, Vol 6: Down the Columbia to Fort Clatsop. Edited by Gary Moulton. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. ———. The Definitive Journals of Lewis and Clark, Vol 7: From the Pacific to the Rockies. Edited by Gary Moulton. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Coe, Nathaniel family papers. MSS 431, Oregon Historical Society. Colnett, James, and Robert Galois. A Voyage to the North West Side of America: The Journals of James Colnett, 1786-89. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004. Cook, James. The Three Voyages of Captain Cook Round the World. Vol. VI. Being the Second of the Third Voyage. London, 1821. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/62507. Coupland, Douglas. Life After God. New York: Pocket Books, 1994. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/62507 381 Correspondence collection. MSS 1500. Oregon Historical Society Curtis, Edward S. The North American Indian, Volume 11: The Nootka, The Haida. Cambridge: The University Press, 1916. David, Andrew. “John Sherriff on the Columbia, 1792: An Account of William Broughton’s Exploration of the Columbia River.” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 83, no. 2 (1992): 53– 59. Davies, K.G., ed. Peter Skene Ogden’s Snake Country Journal, 1826-1827. London: Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1961. Denny, Arthur Armstrong papers. Accession 2343, University of Washington Special Collections. ———. Pioneer Days on Puget Sound. Seattle: The Alice Harriman Co., 1906. Diaries and reminiscences collection. MSS 1509. Oregon Historical Society Dixon, George. A Voyage Round the World; but More Particularly to the North-West Coast of America: Performed in 1785, 1786, 1787, and 1788, in the King George and Queen Charlotte, Captains Portlock and Dixon. London: Geo. Goulding, 1787. Douglas, David. Journal Kept by David Douglas During His Travels in North America, 1823-1827. London: William Wesley & Son, 1914. Eakin Family Scrapbook, n.d. MSS 2556, Eakin family scrapbook. Oregon Historical Society. Ebey, Winfield Scott papers. Accession 0127, Winfield Scott Ebey Papers. University of Washington Special Collections. Elliott, Thompson Coit papers. MSS 231. Oregon Historical Society. Ellison, Joseph W. “Diary of Maria Parsons Belshaw, 1853.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1932): 318–33. Espinosa y Tello, Josef. Atlas para el viage de las goletas Sutil y Mexicana al reconocimiento del estrecho de Juan de Fuca en 1792. Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1802. Executive Office of the President. “Lewis and Clark Bicentennial.” Federal Register, July 3, 2002. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2002/07/03/02-16965/lewis-and-clark- bicentennial. First Cow. A24, 2019. First Presbyterian Church of Portland and the San Grael Society of Portland. The Web-Foot Cookbook. W.B. Ayer & Co., 1885. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2002/07/03/02-16965/lewis-and-clark-bicentennial https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2002/07/03/02-16965/lewis-and-clark-bicentennial 382 Floyd, Charles, and John Ordway. The Definitive Journals of Lewis and Clark, Vol 9: John Ordway and Charles Floyd. Edited by Gary Moulton. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Fones, Wilbur diary. MSS 408, Wilbur Fones diary, 1855-1866. Oregon Historical Society. Foster, Philip papers, MSS 996, Oregon Historical Society. Franchere, Gabriel. Adventure at Astoria 1810-1814. Edited by Hoyt C. Franchere. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967. Franklin, I. MSS 1512, I. Franklin letter to Morritz Langsdorf, 1852 August 26. Oregon Historical Society. Fraser, Simon. The Letters and Journals of Simon Fraser, 1806-1808. Edited by W. Kaye Lamb. Toronto: Macmillan, 1960. Frémont, John Charles. The Life of Col. John Charles Fremont, and His Narrative of Explorations and Adventures In Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon and California. Edited by Samuel M. Smucker. New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1856. Gass, Patrick. The Definitive Journals of Lewis and Clark, Vol 10: Patrick Gass. Edited by Gary Moulton. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Gilbert, George. Captain Cook’s Final Voyage: The Journal of Midshipman George Gilbert. Edited by Christine Holmes. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1982. Griffin, John Smith papers. MSS 1075, Oregon Historical Society. Guthrie-Smith, Herbert. Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. Haller, Granville O papers. Accession 3427. University of Washington Special Collections. Hastings, Lansford W. The Emigrants’ Guide, to Oregon and California. Cincinnati: George Conclin, 1845. Haswell, Robert, John Box Hoskins, and John Boit. Voyages of the “Columbia” to the Northwest Coast, 1787-1790 and 1790-1793. Edited by F. W. Howay. North Pacific Studies Series, no. 13. Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1990. Hatch, Peter Holt papers. MSS 1124. Oregon Historical Society. Henry, Alexander. The Journal of Alexander Henry the Younger, 1799-1814: Vol II. Edited by Barry M. Gough. Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1992. “Horace Lyman.” Transactions of the Oregon Pioneer Association 14 (1886). 383 Hunt, Wilson Price. The Overland Diary of Wilson Price Hunt. Edited by Franchere Hoyt C. Ashland: The Oregon Book Society, 1973. Irving, Washington. Astoria. Portland: Binsford & Mort, 1967. Jackson, Donald. Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with Related Documents, 1783-1854. Second edition. 2 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. Jones, Robert Francis, ed. Annals of Astoria: The Headquarters Log of the Pacific Fur Company on the Columbia River, 1811-1813. New York: Fordham University Press, 1999. Judson, Phoebe Goodell. A Pioneer’s Search for an Ideal Home: A Book of Personal Memoirs. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Kelley, Hall J. A General Circular to All Persons of Good Character, Who Wish to Emigrate to the Oregon Territory. Boston: William H. Wheildon, 1831. ———. A Geographical Sketch of That Part of North America Called Oregon. Boston: J. Howe, 1830. Kelly family papers. MSS 871. Oregon Historical Society. Lee, Jason papers. MSS 1212. Oregon Historical Society. Lewelling, Seth papers. MSS 23. Oregon Historical Society. Lockley, Fred. Conversations with Pioneer Women. Edited by Mike Helm. Eugene: Rainy Day Press, 1981. Long, Edward. The History of Jamaica or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of That Island: With Reflections on Its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government, Vol. II. London: T. Lowndes, 1774. Lyman, H. S. “Reminiscences of Louis Labonte.” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 1, no. 2 (1900): 169–88. Mackenzie, Alexander. Voyages from Montreal, on the River St. Laurence, through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans, in the Years 1789 and 1793 : With a Preliminary Account of the Rise, Progress and Present State of the Fur Trade of That Country. London: R. Noble, Old-Bailey, 1801. MacLachlan, Morag, ed. The Fort Langley Journals 1827-1830. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998. McLoughlin, John. Letters of Dr. John McLoughlin Written at Fort Vancouver 1829-1832. Edited by Burt Brown Barker. Portland: Binsford & Mort, 1948. ———. The Letters of John McLoughlin from Fort Vancouver to the Governor and Committee: First Series, 1825-38. Edited by E.E. Rich. Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1941. 384 ———. The Letters of John McLoughlin from Fort Vancouver to the Governor and Committee: Second Series, 1839-1844. Edited by E.E. Rich. Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1943. ———. The Letters of John McLoughlin from Fort Vancouver to the Governor and Committee: Third Series, 1844-1846. Edited by E.E. Rich. Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1944. Meany, Edmond S. papers. Accession 1949, University of Washington Special Collections. Meares, John. Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789, from China to the North West Coast of America. To Which Are Prefixed, an Introductory Narrative of a Voyage Performed in 1786, from Bengal, in the Ship Nootka; Observations on the Probable Existence of a North West Passage; and Some Account of the Trade between the North West Coast of America and China; and the Latter Country and Great Britain. London : Logographic Press, 1790. “Meteorological Observations, Taken at the Rooms of the Library Association by the Librarian, Jan. 1870-Apr. 1874,” n.d. John Wilson Special Collections, Multnomah County Library. Minto, John. Memoirs of Middle Life in Oregon, n.d. Morse family diary. MSS 776. Oregon Historical Society. Mourelle de la Rúa, Francisco Antonio. Journal of a Voyage in 1775. To Explore the Coast of America, Northward of California, by the Second Pilot of the Fleet, Don Francisco Antonio Maurelle, in the King’s Schooner, Called the Sonora, and Commanded by Don Juan Francisco de La Bodega. London, 1780. Nesmith, J.W. “Annual Address.” Transactions of the Oregon Pioneer Association, 1880. Overland journeys to the Pacific collection. MSS 1508. Oregon Historical Society. Owens, Kenneth N., Timofeĭ Tarakanov, and Ben Hobucket, eds. The Wreck of the Sv. Nikolai: Two Narratives of the First Russian Expedition to the Oregon Country, 1808-1810. North Pacific Studies Series, no. 8. Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1985. Parker, Samuel. Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains. Minneapolis: Ross & Haines, 1967. Parrish, Edward Evans papers. MSS 648. Oregon Historical Society. PEMCO Northwest Profile 38: Goosebumped Beach Bum. DNA Creates, n.d. PEMCO Northwest Profile 60: Blue Tarp Camper. DNA Creates, n.d. Pinart, Alphonse Louis. “The Hunting of Marine Animals and Fishing Among the Natives of the Northwest Coast of America.” Edited by Richard L. Bland. Journal of Northwest Anthropology 52, no. 2 (n.d.): 231–40. 385 Pollard, Lancaster. “Journal of a Voyage on Puget Sound in 1853 by William Petit Trowbridge.” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1942): 391–407. Preston, Vernon, and American Meteorological Society, eds. Lewis & Clark: Weather and Climate Data from the Expedition Journals. American Meteorological Society Historical Monographs Series. Boston: American Meteorological Society, 2006. Prose and Poetry collection, 1832-2009. MSS 1507. Oregon Historical Society Quaife, M. M. “Letters of John Ball, 1832-1833.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 5, no. 4 (1919): 450–68. https://doi.org/10.2307/1889533. Rees, Willard H. “Annual Address.” Transactions of the Oregon Pioneer Association, 1879. “Report on Deaths Among Presumed Homeless Individuals Investigated By the King County Medical Examiner January 1, 2012-December 31, 2021.” Seattle: King County Public Health, n.d. Ross, Alexander. Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River, 1810-1813. Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1904. Rush, Benjamin collection. MSS 262. Oregon Historical Society. Scholl Family Notebook. MSS 400. Oregon Historical Society. Servin, Manuel P., and Antonio María Bucareli y Ursúa. “The Instructions of Viceroy Bucareli to Ensign Juan Perez.” California Historical Society Quarterly 40, no. 3 (September 1, 1961): 237–48. https://doi.org/10.2307/25155405. Seton, Alfred. Astorian Adventure: The Journal of Alfred Seton, 1811-1815. Edited by Robert Francis Jones. New York: Fordham University Press, 1993. Simpson, George. Fur Trade and Empire: George Simpson’s Journal, 1824-1825. Edited by Frederick Merk. Second edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968. Stewart, Frank, and Trevor Carolan, eds. Cascadia: The Life and Breath of the World/Manoa 25, No. 1. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013. Stuart, Robert. The Discovery of the Oregon Trail: Robert Stuart’s Narratives of His Overland Trip Eastward From Astoria in 1812-13. Edited by Phillip Ashton Rollins. New York: Edward Eberstadt & Sons, 1935. Swan, James Gilchrist papers. Accession 1709. University of Washington Special Collections. ———. The Northwest Coast, or, Three Years’ Residence in Washington Territory. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1857. https://doi.org/10.2307/1889533 https://doi.org/10.2307/25155405 386 Thompson, David, and Barbara Belyea. Columbia Journals: Bicentennial Edition. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. Thornton, J. Quinn papers. MSS 371. Oregon Historical Society. Tolmie, William Fraser. William F. Tolmie at Fort Nisqually: Letters, 1850-1853. Edited by Steve Anderson. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2019. Tolmie, William Fraser. “William Fraser Tolmie Diary Transcription,” n.d. Accession No. 4577, William Fraser Tolmie papers, Box 2, Folder 6. University of Washington Special Collections. Townsend, John Kirk. Narrative of a Journey Across the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1999. Victor, Frances F. Eleven Years in the Rocky Mountains and Life on the Frontier. Hartford: R.W. Bliss and Company, 1881. Vizcaino, Sebastián. “Vizcaino’s Narrative.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 10, no. 2 (1930): 204–18. https://doi.org/10.2307/2506525. Warre, Henry J. Sketches in North America and the Oregon Territory. London: Dickinson & co., 1848. Whitehouse, Joseph. The Definitive Journals of Lewis and Clark, Vol 11: Joseph Whitehouse. Edited by Gary Moulton. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Wood, Talmadge B., Letter to Jesse D. Wood, 1844 March 12. MSS 769. Oregon Historical Society. Wyeth, Nathniel J. The Correspondence and Journals of Captain Nathaniel J. Wyeth. Edited by F.G. Young. Eugene: University Press, 1899. Secondary Sources Abbott, Carl. Imagined Frontiers: Contemporary America and Beyond. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. Albarella, Umberto, ed. Pigs and Humans: 10,000 Years of Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Allen, John Logan. Lewis and Clark and the Image of the American Northwest. New York: Dover, 1991. Ambrose, Stephen. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. https://doi.org/10.2307/2506525 387 Amoss, Pamela. Coast Salish Spirit Dancing: The Survival of an Ancestral Religion. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978. Amrith, Sunil S. Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia’s History. First edition. New York: Basic Books, 2018. Anderson, Bern. Surveyor of the Sea: The Life and Voyages of Captain George Vancouver. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1960. Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Anderson, Warwick. Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Andrade, Tonio. The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Andrews, K. R. “The Aims of Drake’s Expedition of 1577-1580.” The American Historical Review 73, no. 3 (1968): 724–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/1870669. Andrews, Thomas. Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Antonelis-Lapp, Jeff. Tahoma and Its People: A Natural History of Mount Rainier National Park. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2020. Archer, Seth. Sharks upon the Land: Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawai’i, 1778–1855. Studies in North American Indian History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316795934. Arno, Stephen F., and Carl E. Fiedler. Douglas Fir: The Story of the West’s Most Remarkable Tree. Seattle: Mountaineers Books, 2020. Atwood, Kay. Chaining Oregon: Surveying the Public Lands of the Pacific Northwest, 1851-1855. Blacksburg: McDonald & Woodward Pub. Co, 2008. Bagley, Clarence. “The Bethel Company.” In The Acquisition and Pioneering of Old Oregon, 2, n.d. Bagley, Will. So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California 1812- 1848. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010. Bailey, Walter. “The Barlow Road.” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 13, no. 3 (1912): 287–96. Baker, Zeke. “Anticipatory Culture in the Bering Sea: Weather, Climate, and Temporal Dissonance.” Weather, Climate, and Society 13, no. 4 (October 1, 2021): 783–95. https://doi.org/10.2307/1870669 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316795934 388 Bakken, Gordon Morris. “The Courts, the Legal Profession, and the Development of Law in Early California.” California History 81, no. 3/4 (2003): 74–95. https://doi.org/10.2307/25161700. Barber, Katrine. Death of Celilo Falls. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. Barman, Jean. French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014. ———. The West Beyond the West: A History of British Columbia. Revised edition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Barman, Jean, and Bruce McIntyre Watson. Leaving Paradise: Indigenous Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest, 1787-1898. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2006. Barry, J. Neilson. “Site of Wallace House, 1812-1814 One Mile from Salem.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 42, no. 3 (1941): 205–7. Barry, Kaya, Maria Borovnik, and Tim Edensor. Weather: Spaces, Mobilities and Affects. Routledge Planetary Spaces Series. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. Barta, Tony. “Mr Darwin’s Shooters: On Natural Selection and the Naturalizing of Genocide.” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 2 (June 1, 2005): 116–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/00313220500106170. Bartra Cabré, Laura, Martin Mayer, Sam Steyaert, and Frank Rosell. “Beaver (Castor Fiber) Activity and Spatial Movement in Response to Light and Weather Conditions.” Mammalian Biology 100, no. 3 (June 1, 2020): 261–71. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42991-020-00029-7. Beckham, Stephen Dow. Requiem for a People: The Rogue Indians and the Frontiersmen. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971. Belich, James. Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783 - 1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Benner, P.A., and J.R. Sedell. “Upper Willamette River Landscape: A Historic Perspective.” In River Quality: Dynamics and Restoration, 23–48. New York: CRC Press, 1997. Bennett, Brett M., and Gregory A. Barton. “The Enduring Link between Forest Cover and Rainfall: A Historical Perspective on Science and Policy Discussions.” Forest Ecosystems 5, no. 1 (February 8, 2018): 5. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40663-017-0124-9. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Berg, Maxine. “Sea Otters and Iron: A Global Microhistory of Value and Exchange at Nootka Sound, 1774–1792*.” Past & Present 242, no. Supplement_14 (November 1, 2019): 50–82. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz038. https://doi.org/10.2307/25161700 https://doi.org/10.1080/00313220500106170 https://doi.org/10.1007/s42991-020-00029-7 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40663-017-0124-9 https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz038 389 Berger, David. Razor Clams: Buried Treasure of the Pacific Northwest. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. Berger, Knute. Pugetopolis: A Mossback Takes on Growth Addicts, Weather Wimps, and the Myth of Seattle Nice. Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2009. Bertram, Carel. A House in the Homeland: Armenian Pilgrimages in Search Ancestral Homes. Worlding the Middle East. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022. Bessire, Lucas. Running out: In Search of Water on the High Plains. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Blevins, Cameron. Paper Trails: The U.S. Post and the Making of the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Blue, Marian. Interpretative Guide to Western-Northwest Weather Forecasts. Clinton: Sunbreak Press, 2018. Boag, Peter. Environment and Experience: Settlement Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oregon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. ———. Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon. Emil and Kathleen Sick Book Series in Western History and Biography. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022. ———. Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past. Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 2012. ———. “The Hauntings of Local History: Peter Boag on ‘Pioneering Death.’” University of Washington Press Blog (blog), May 18, 2022. https://uwpressblog.com/2022/05/18/the- hauntings-of-local-history/. Bogue, Allan G. “An Agricultural Empire.” In The Oxford History of the American West, edited by Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, 275–314. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Bowen, William. The Willamette Valley: Migration and Settlement on the Oregon Frontier. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978. Bown, Stephen R. Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004. Boxer, C. R., and Bernardo Gomes de Brito, eds. The Tragic History of the Sea. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Boyd, Robert. The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874. Second edition. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021. https://uwpressblog.com/2022/05/18/the-hauntings-of-local-history/ https://uwpressblog.com/2022/05/18/the-hauntings-of-local-history/ 390 Boyd, Robert T., ed. Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest. Second edition. Corvallis, Or: Oregon State University Press, 2022. Boyd, Robert T., Kenneth M. Ames, and Tony A. Johnson, eds. Chinookan Peoples of the Lower Columbia. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013. Bradsher, Greg. “Spanish Explorations of the Pacific Northwest and the First Nootka Sound Settlement, 1790-1791.” The Text Message: Blog of the Textual Records Division at the National Archives (blog), October 12, 2017. https://text- message.blogs.archives.gov/2017/10/12/225-years-ago-spanish-explorations-of-the-pacific- northwest-and-the-first-spanish-settlement-in-washington-state-nunez-gaona-neah-bay- 1792-part-ii-spanish-explorations-of-the-pacific-northwest-a/. Braje, Todd J., and Torben C. Rick, eds. Human Impacts on Seals, Sea Lions, and Sea Otters: Integrating Archaeology and Ecology in the Northeast Pacific. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Bramadat, Paul, Patricia O’Connell Killen, and Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme, eds. Religion at the Edge: Nature, Spirituality, and Secularity in the Pacific Northwest. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022. Brantlinger, Patrick. Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Brettschneider, Brian. “Dreary Weather.” Brian B.’s Climate Blog (blog), March 18, 2015. http://us-climate.blogspot.com/2015/03/dreary-weather.html. Brock, Peggy. The Many Voyages of Arthur Wellington Clah: A Tsimshian Man on the Pacific Northwest Coast. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011. Brooke, John L. Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey. Studies in Environment and History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Brophy, Susan Dianne. A Legacy of Exploitation: Early Capitalism in the Red River Colony, 1763- 1821. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022. Brown, Frederick L. “Research Files: Imagining Fort Clatsop.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 107, no. 4 (2006): 590–606. ———. The City Is More than Human: An Animal History of Seattle. Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. Brown, Jennifer S. H. Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Brown, Kathleen M. Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America. Society and the Sexes in the Modern World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. https://text-message.blogs.archives.gov/2017/10/12/225-years-ago-spanish-explorations-of-the-pacific-northwest-and-the-first-spanish-settlement-in-washington-state-nunez-gaona-neah-bay-1792-part-ii-spanish-explorations-of-the-pacific-northwest-a/ https://text-message.blogs.archives.gov/2017/10/12/225-years-ago-spanish-explorations-of-the-pacific-northwest-and-the-first-spanish-settlement-in-washington-state-nunez-gaona-neah-bay-1792-part-ii-spanish-explorations-of-the-pacific-northwest-a/ https://text-message.blogs.archives.gov/2017/10/12/225-years-ago-spanish-explorations-of-the-pacific-northwest-and-the-first-spanish-settlement-in-washington-state-nunez-gaona-neah-bay-1792-part-ii-spanish-explorations-of-the-pacific-northwest-a/ https://text-message.blogs.archives.gov/2017/10/12/225-years-ago-spanish-explorations-of-the-pacific-northwest-and-the-first-spanish-settlement-in-washington-state-nunez-gaona-neah-bay-1792-part-ii-spanish-explorations-of-the-pacific-northwest-a/ http://us-climate.blogspot.com/2015/03/dreary-weather.html 391 Brown, Richard Maxwell. “Bless the Rain.” In Great and Minor Moments in Oregon History, edited by Dick Pintarich, Second edition., 8–13. Portland: New Oregon Publishers, 2008. ———. “Rainfall and History: Perspectives on the Pacific Northwest.” In Experiences in a Promised Land: Essays in Pacific Northwest History, edited by G. Thomas Edwards and Carlos A. Schwantes, 13–27. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986. ———. “The Great Raincoast: Toward a New Regional History of the Pacific Northwest.” In The Changing Pacific Northwest: Interpreting the Past, edited by David H. Stratton and George A. Frykman, 39–54. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1988. Brunsman, Denver Alexander. The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth- Century Atlantic World. Early American Histories. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. Brunt, Liam, and Edmund Cannon. “English Farmers’ Wheat Storage and Sales in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.” The Economic History Review 75, no. 3 (2022): 932–59. https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13133. Buerge, David M. Chief Seattle and the Town That Took His Name: The Change of Worlds for the Native People and Settlers on Puget Sound. Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2017. Bunting, Robert. The Pacific Raincoast: Environment and Culture In An American Eden, 1778- 1900. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. Burge, Daniel J. A Failed Vision of Empire: The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, 1845-1872. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. Burley, Edith. Servants of the Honourable Company: Work, Discipline, and Conflict in the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1770-1870. The Canadian Social History Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Byram, Scott, and David G. Lewis. “Ourigan: Wealth of the Northwest Coast.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 102, no. 2 (2001): 126–57. Cameron, Catherine M., Paul Kelton, and Alan C. Swedlund, eds. Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America. Amerind Studies in Anthropology. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2015. Campbell, John Martin. Magnificent Failure: A Portrait of the Western Homestead Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Carlson, Anthony E. “‘Vast Factories of Febrile Poison’: Wetlands, Drainage, and the Fate of American Climates, 1750-1850.” In Governing the Environment in the Early Modern World, 153–71. London: Routledge, 2017. Carlson, Keith Thor. The Power of Place, The Problem of Time: Aboriginal Identity and Historical Consciousness in the Cauldron of Colonialism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13133 392 ———. ed. A Stó:lo Coast Salish Historical Atlas. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2001. Carr, Anitra C., and Sam Rowe. “Factors Affecting Vitamin C Status and Prevalence of Deficiency: A Global Health Perspective.” Nutrients 12, no. 7 (July 1, 2020): 1963. Castellani, John W., and Andrew J. Young. “Human Physiological Responses to Cold Exposure: Acute Responses and Acclimatization to Prolonged Exposure.” Autonomic Neuroscience: Basic & Clinical 196 (April 2016): 63–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.autneu.2016.02.009. Caviedes, César. El Niño in History: Storming through the Ages. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222. Chapman, Charles E. “Sebastian Vizcaino: Exploration of California.” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 23, no. 4 (1920): 285–301. Chatterjee, Elizabeth. “The Asian Anthropocene: Electricity and Fossil Developmentalism.” The Journal of Asian Studies 79, no. 1 (February 2020): 3–24. Choquette, Leslie. Frenchmen into Peasants: Modernity and Tradition in the Peopling of French Canada. Harvard Historical Studies 123. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Christy, John A., and Edward R. Alverson. “Historical Vegetation of the Willamette Valley, Oregon, circa 1850.” Northwest Science 85, no. 2 (July 2011): 93–107. Clark, Robert D. “The Strange Case of Oregon’s Spring Beauty: Discovery, Abduction, Rescue, Identity.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 96, no. 1 (1995): 80–97. Clarke, Charles G. The Men of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: A Biographical Roster of the Fifty- One Members and a Composite Diary of Their Activities from All Known Sources. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Coates, Colin MacMillan. The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec. Studies on the History of Quebec. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. Cockayne, Emily. Hubbub: Filth, Noise, & Stench in England, 1600-1770. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. Colby, Jason M. Orca: How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean’s Greatest Predator. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Cole, Douglas, and Maria Tippett. “Pleasing Diversity and Sublime Desolation: The 18th-Century British Perception of the Northwest Coast.” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 65, no. 1 (1974): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.autneu.2016.02.009 393 Coleman, Kenneth R. “‘We’ll All Start Even’: White Egalitarianism and the Oregon Donation Land Claim Act.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 120, no. 4 (2019): 414–39. Comer, Montagu, and Charles Erskine Scott Wood. History of the Bench and Bar of Oregon. Portland: Historical Publishing Company, 1910. Connell, Martyn. “A Short History of Spruce Beer in Britain.” Brewery History 165 (2015): 2–14. Cook, Warren L. Flood Tide of Empire: Spain and the Pacific Northwest, 1543-1819. Yale Western Americana Series 24. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973. Corbin, Alain. The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750-1840. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Corning, Howard McKinley. Willamette Landings: Ghost Towns of the River. Portland: Binsford & Mort, 1947. Corton, Christine L. London Fog: The Biography. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2015. Cox, Thomas R. The Other Oregon: People, Environment, and History East of the Cascades. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2019. Crawford O’Brien, Suzanne J. Coming Full Circle: Spirituality and Wellness among Native Communities in the Pacific Northwest. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Cressy, David. Saltpeter: The Mother of Gunpowder. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. First revised edition. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003. Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Culliney, John L. Islands in a Far Sea: The Fate of Nature in Hawai’i. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. Daggett, Cara. “Petro-Masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire.” Millennium 47, no. 1 (September 1, 2018): 25–44. Dalton, Meghan M., Philip W. Mote, Amy K. Snover, and Meghan M. Dalton. Climate Change in the Northwest: Implications for Our Landscapes, Waters, and Communities. NCA Regional Input Reports. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2013. Darby, Melissa C. Thunder Go North: The Hunt for Drake’s Fair and Good Bay. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2019. Daugherty, Tracy. The Land and the Days: A Memoir of Family, Friendship, and Grief. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2022. 394 Davis, Diana K. The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge. History for a Sustainable Future. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016. Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. New York: Verso, 2017. Davis, Randall W., and Anthony M. Pagano, eds. Ethology and Behavioral Ecology of Sea Otters and Polar Bears. Ethology and Behavioral Ecology of Marine Mammals. Cham: Springer, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66796-2_1. Dawson, Ashley. Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change. London: Verso, 2017. Dawson, Jan C. “Landmarks of Home in the Pacific Northwest.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 2, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 1–23. De Danaan, Llyn. Katie Gale: A Coast Salish Woman’s Life on Oyster Bay. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. deBuys, William. A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Deloria, Jr., Vine. Indians of the Pacific Northwest: From the Coming of the White Man to the Present Day. Golden: Fulcrum Publications, 2012. Deloria, Philip Joseph. Playing Indian. Yale Historical Publications. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1998. Demuth, Bathsheba. Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. New York: W.W. Norton, 2019. Deur, Douglas. Gifted Earth: The Ethnobotany of the Quinault and Neighboring Tribes. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2022. Dicken, Samuel N., and Emily F. Dicken. The Making of Oregon: A Study in Historical Geography. Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1979. Dietrich, William. Northwest Passage: The Great Columbia River. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. Dillon, Richard H. “Stephen Long’s Great American Desert.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 111, no. 2 (1967): 93–108. Dillow, Frank. “Connecting Oregon: The Slow Road to Rapid Communications, 1843–2009.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 111, no. 2 (2010): 184–219. https://doi.org/10.5403/oregonhistq.111.2.0184. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66796-2_1 https://doi.org/10.5403/oregonhistq.111.2.0184 395 Dobkins, Rebecca J. The Art of Ceremony: Voices of Renewal from Indigenous Oregon. The Jacob Lawrence Series on American Artists. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022. Dodge, John. A Deadly Wind: The 1962 Columbus Day Storm. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2018. Dodman, Thomas. What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion. Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Douglas, Jesse S. “Origins of the Population of Oregon in 1850.” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 41, no. 2 (1950): 95–108. Dransart, Penelope. “Dressed in Furs: Clothing and Yaghan Multispecies Engagements in Tierra Del Fuego.” In Living Beings: Perspectives on Interspecies Engagements, 183–203. London: Routledge, 2013. Drayton, Richard. Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Driver, Felix, and Luciana de Lima Martins, eds. Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Druffel, Ellen R.M., Sheila Griffin, Desiree Vetter, Robert B. Dunbar, and David M. Mucciarone. “Identification of Frequent La Niña Events during the Early 1800s in the East Equatorial Pacific.” Geophysical Research Letters 42, no. 5 (2015): 1512–19. https://doi.org/10.1002/2014GL062997. Duckert, Lowell. For All Waters: Finding Ourselves in Early Modern Wetscapes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Duffin, Andrew P. Plowed under: Agriculture & Environment in the Palouse. Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2014. Duncan, Shane. “‘What the River Gives the River Takes Away:’ Dikes, Drains, and Life on the Skagit Delta.” MA Thesis, Western Washington University, 1998. Dunlap, Thomas. Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Dunlop, Catherine Tatiana. “Losing an Archive: Doing Place-Based History in the Age of the Anthropocene.” The American Historical Review 126, no. 3 (September 1, 2021): 1143–53. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhab354. Durzan, Don J. “Arginine, Scurvy and Cartier’s ‘Tree of Life.’” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 5, no. 1 (February 2, 2009): 5. https://doi.org/10.1186/1746-4269-5-5. https://doi.org/10.1002/2014GL062997 https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhab354 https://doi.org/10.1186/1746-4269-5-5 396 Edelson, S. Max. Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Edensor, Tim. From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination, and Gloom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Ekirch, A. Roger. At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. Elliott, J. H. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Elliott, John H. Spain and Its World: 1500 - 1700 ; Selected Essays. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Elliott, William P., and R. K. Reed. “Oceanic Rainfall off the Pacific Northwest Coast.” Journal of Geophysical Research 78, no. 6 (1973): 941–48. Ellis, David V. “Cultural Geography of the Lower Columbia.” In Chinookan Peoples of the Lower Columbia, edited by Robert T. Boyd, Kenneth M. Ames, and Tony A. Johnson, 42–62. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015. Enfield, N. J., and Paul Kockelman, eds. Distributed Agency. Foundations of Human Interaction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Ensign, Josephine. Skid Road : On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in Seattle. First paperback edition. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023. Fagan, Brian M. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300 - 1850. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Fahey, John. The Inland Empire: Unfolding Years 1879-1929. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986. Felli, Romain. The Great Adaptation: Climate, Capitalism and Catastrophe. Translated by David Broder. London: Verso, 2021. Fichter, James R. So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Ficken, Robert E. Rufus Woods, the Columbia River & the Building of Modern Washington. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1995. Fiege, Mark. Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. Fienup-Riordan, Ann, and Alice Rearden. Ellavut, Our Yup’ik World & Weather: Continuity and Change on the Bering Sea Coast. Seattle: University of Washington Press and Calista Elders Council, 2012. 397 Fischer, John Ryan. Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i. Flows, Migrations, and Exchanges. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Fischer, Luke, and David Macauley, eds. The Seasons: Philosophical, Literary, and Environmental Perspectives. Albany: State University of New York, 2021. Fisher, Andrew H. Shadow Tribe: The Making of Columbia River Indian Identity. The Emil and Kathleen Sick Lecture-Book Series in Western History and Biography. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. Fisher, Robin. Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890. Second edition. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1992. Fisher, Virginia L., and Michael A. Martin. “Aboriginal Fisheries of the Lower Columbia River.” In Chinookan Peoples of the Lower Columbia, edited by Robert T. Boyd, Kenneth M. Ames, and Tony A. Johnson, 80–105. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013. Fleming, James Rodger. Meteorology in America, 1800-1870. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Follette, Cameron La, Douglas Deur, Dennis Griffin, and Scott S. Williams. “Oregon’s Manila Galleon.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 119, no. 2 (2018): 150–59. Forest, Marguerite S.E. “Searching for Sea Otters.” We Proceeded On 33, no. 3 (August 2007): 18–27. Forest Products Laboratory. “Wood Handbook: Wood as an Engineering Material.” USDA, March 2021. “Fort Vancouver.” Oregon Experience. OPB, n.d. Foster, William C. Climate and Culture Change in North America AD 900-1600. Clifton and Shirley Caldwell Texas Heritage Series, no. 18. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. Friday, Chris. Organizing Asian American Labor: The Pacific Coast Canned-Salmon Industry, 1870-1942. Asian American History and Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994. Galbraith, John S. “The Early History of the Puget’s Sound Agricultural Company, 1838-43.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 55, no. 3 (1954): 234–59. Ghosh, Amitav. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Gibson, James R. Farming the Frontier: The Agricultural Opening of the Oregon Country, 1786- 1846. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985. 398 ———. Imperial Russia In Frontier America: The Changing Geography of Supply of Russian America, 1784-1867. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. ———. Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785-1841. First paperback edition. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. ———. The Lifeline of the Oregon Country: The Fraser-Columbia Brigade System, 1811-47. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997. Gillis, John R. The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Goedel, William C., Brandon D.L. Marshall, Keith R. Spangler, Nicole Alexander-Scott, Traci C. Green, Gregory A. Wellenius, and Kate R. Weinberger. “Increased Risk of Opioid Overdose Death Following Cold Weather: A Case–Crossover Study.” Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.) 30, no. 5 (September 2019): 637–41. https://doi.org/10.1097/EDE.0000000000001041. Gonzales, Jackie, and Morgen Young. “First Year in Oregon, 1840–1869: A Narrative History.” Portland: Historical Research Associates, Inc., October 2021. González-Ruibal, Alfredo. ““What Remains? On Material Nostalgia.".” In After Discourse: Things, Affects, Ethics, edited by Bjørnar Olsen, Mats Burström, Caitlin DeSilvey, and Þóra Pétursdóttir, 187–203. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. Goodman, Nathan G. Benjamin Rush, Physician and Citizen, 1746-1813. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934. Granberg, Per-Ola. “Alcohol and Cold.” Arctic Medical Research 50 (December 1990): 43–47. Grandin, Greg. The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. First paperback edition. Illustrationen. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020. Greer, Allan. Peasant, Lord, and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes, 1740-1840. Social History of Canada 39. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. Griffis, Corey. “At the End of the Highway, At the Edge of the Sea: Taholah, the Quinault Indian Nation, and Planned Relocation.” Occam’s Razor 12 (2022): 28–49. Grinëv, Andrei V., and Richard L. Bland. “Russian Maritime Catastrophes during the Colonization of Alaska, 1741-1867.” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 102, no. 4 (2011): 178–94. Grossman, Zoltán, and Alan Parker, eds. Asserting Native Resilience: Pacific Rim Indigenous Nations Face the Climate Crisis. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1097/EDE.0000000000001041 399 Grove, Richard. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600 - 1860. First paperback edition. Studies in Environment and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Guly, Henry. “Medicinal Brandy.” Resuscitation 82, no. 7–2 (July 2011): 951–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resuscitation.2011.03.005. Haeger, John D. “Business Strategy and Practice in the Early Republic: John Jacob Astor and the American Fur Trade.” The Western Historical Quarterly 19, no. 2 (1988): 183–202. https://doi.org/10.2307/968394. Hahn, Steven. A Nation without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910. The Penguin History of the United States. New York: Penguin Books, 2017. Hamilton, Clive. “The Theodicy of the ‘Good Anthropocene.’” Environmental Humanities 7, no. 1 (May 1, 2016): 233–38. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Harley, J. B. “Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe.” Imago Mundi 40 (1988): 57–76. Harmon, Alexandra. Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound. First paperback edition. American Crossroads 3. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000. Harris, Alexandra. Weatherland: Writers & Artists under English Skies. London: Thames & Hudson, 2015. Harris, Cole. The Reluctant Land: Society, Space, and Environment in Canada before Confederation. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008. ———. The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Geographical Change. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997. ———. The Seigneurial System in Early Canada: A Geographical Study, with a New Preface. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984. Harrison, Mark. “Scurvy on Sea and Land: Political Economy and Natural History, c. 1780–c. 1850.” Journal for Maritime Research 15, no. 1 (May 2013): 7–25. Hatton, Raymond R. Portland, Oregon Weather and Climate: A Historical Perspective. Bend: Geographical Books, 2005. Haycox, Stephen W., James K. Barnett, and Caedmon A. Liburd, eds. Enlightenment and Exploration in the North Pacific, 1741-1805. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resuscitation.2011.03.005 https://doi.org/10.2307/968394 400 Hickman, Clare. The Doctor’s Garden: Medicine, Science, and Horticulture in Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. Hirt, Paul W., and Dale R. Goble, eds. Northwest Lands, Northwest Peoples: Readings in Environmental History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. Hodge, Adam R. Ecology and Ethnogenesis: An Environmental History of the Wind River Shoshones, 1000-1868. Early American Places. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. Holland, Leandra Zim. Feasting and Fasting with Lewis & Clark: A Food and Social History of the Early 1800s. Emigrant: Old Yellowstone Publishing, 2003. Hong, Young-Seoub, Ki-Hoon Song, and Jin-Yong Chung. “Health Effects of Chronic Arsenic Exposure.” Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health 47, no. 5 (September 2014): 245–52. https://doi.org/10.3961/jpmph.14.035. Horowitz, Andy. Katrina: A History, 1915-2015. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020. Howard, Croskery. “Surgery at Sea: An Analysis of Shipboard Medical Practitioners and Their Instrumentation,” May 4, 2016. https://thescholarship.ecu.edu/handle/10342/5347. Howes, David, ed. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Sensory Formations Series. London: Routledge, 2004. Huang, Di, Maie S. Taha, Angela L. Nocera, Alan D. Workman, Mansoor M. Amiji, and Benjamin S. Bleier. “Cold Exposure Impairs Extracellular Vesicle Swarm–Mediated Nasal Antiviral Immunity.” Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology 151, no. 2 (February 1, 2023): 509- 525.e8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaci.2022.09.037. Hulme, Mike. Weathered: Cultures of Climate. London: SAGE Publications, 2017. ———. “Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism.” Osiris 26, no. 1 (January 2011): 245–66 Hundley, Jr., Norris. The Great Thirst: Californians and Water: A History. Revised edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. ———. “Water and the West in Historical Imagination.” In Environmental Problems in America’s Garden of Eden, edited by Brenda Farrington and Gordon Morris Bakken, Second edition., 4:63–89. The American West: Intersections, Interactions and Injunctions. New York: Routledge, 2013. Hussey, John A. Champoeg: Place of Transition, A Disputed History. Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1967. ———. The History of Fort Vancouver and Its Physical Structures. Tacoma: Washington State Historical Society Press, 1957. https://doi.org/10.3961/jpmph.14.035 https://thescholarship.ecu.edu/handle/10342/5347 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaci.2022.09.037 401 Hyde, Anne F. Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West. New York: W.W. Norton, 2022. Hyde, Anne Farrar. Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800- 1860. History of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. Igler, David. The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Ingersoll, Karin E. Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Ingold, Tim. “Earth, Sky, Wind, and Weather.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (2007): S19–38. ———. “Footprints through the Weather-World: Walking, Breathing, Knowing.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16, no. s1 (2010): S121–39. Ingold, Timothy. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Second edition. London: Routledge, 2022. ———. “Four Objections to the Concept of Soundscape.” In Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, Second edition., 168–72. London: Routledge, 2022. ———. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Second edition. London: Routledge, 2022. Ishiguro, Laura. Nothing to Write Home about: British Family Correspondence and the Settler Colonial Everyday in British Columbia. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019. Jacobs, Elizabeth Derr, and William R. Seaburg. The Nehalem Tillamook: An Ethnography. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2003. Janković, Vladimir. Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650-1820. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Janos, Nik and Corina McKendry, eds. Urban Cascadia and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021. Jena, Anupam B., Andrew R. Olenski, David Molitor, and Nolan Miller. “Association between Rainfall and Diagnoses of Joint or Back Pain: Retrospective Claims Analysis.” BMJ 359 (December 13, 2017): j5326. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.j5326. Jetté, Melinda Marie. At the Hearth of the Crossed Races: A French-Indian Community in Nineteenth-Century Oregon, 1812-1859. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.j5326 402 ———. “Dislodging Oregon’s History from Its Mythical Mooring: Reflections on Death and the Settling and Unsettling of Oregon.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 115, no. 3 (2014): 444–47. https://doi.org/10.5403/oregonhistq.115.3.0444. Johannessen, Carl L., William A. Davenport, Artimus Millet, and Steven McWilliams. “The Vegetation of the Willamette Valley.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 61, no. 2 (June 1, 1971): 286–302. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1971.tb00783.x. Johansen, Dorothy O., and Charles M. Gates. Empire of the Columbia: A History of the Pacific Northwest. New York: Harper & Row, 1957. Johnson, David M. “Weather and Climate of Portland.” In Portland’s Changing Landscape, edited by Larry W. Price, 20–37. Portland: Portland State University Department of Geography, 1987. Johnston, Katherine. The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo- Atlantic World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Johnston, Sky Michael. “Accounting for a Fruitful Little Ice Age: Overlapping Scales of Climate and Culture in Württemberg, 1560–1590.” Environmental History 27, no. 4 (October 2022): 722–46. https://doi.org/10.1086/721341. Jonasson, Jonas A. “Local Road Legislation in Early Oregon.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 42, no. 2 (1941): 162–75. Jones, David. “Population, Health, and Public Welfare.” In The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, 413–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Jones, Robert F. “The Identity of the Tonquin’s Interpreter.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 98, no. 3 (1997): 296–314. Jones, Suzi. Oregon Folklore. Eugene: Randall V. Mills Archives of Northwest Folklore, 1977. ———, ed. Webfoots and Bunchgrassers: Folk Art of the Oregon Country. Salem: Oregon Arts Commission, 1980. Jones, Suzi, and Jarold Ramsey. The Stories We Tell: An Anthology of Oregon Folk Literature. The Oregon Literature Series, v. 5. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1994. Jones, Tobias. The Po: An Elegy for Italy’s Longest River. London: Apollo, 2022. Justice, Daniel Heath, and Jean M. O’Brien, eds. Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations under Settler Siege. Indigenous Americas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. Kammen, Michael G. A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.5403/oregonhistq.115.3.0444 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1971.tb00783.x https://doi.org/10.1086/721341 403 Kan, Sergei. Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. Karskens, Grace. “Floods and Flood-Mindedness in Early Colonial Australia.” Environmental History 21, no. 2 (2016): 315–42. Kawano, Satsuki. “Japanese Bodies and Western Ways of Seeing in the Late Nineteenth Century.” In Dirt, Undress, and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Body’s Surface, 149–67. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Keith, H. Lloyd. “‘Shameful Mismanagement, Wasteful Extravagance, and the Most Unfortunate Dissention’: George Simpson’s Misconceptions of the North West Company.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 102, no. 4 (2001): 434–53. Keith, Lloyd, and John C. Jackson. The Fur Trade Gamble: North West Company on the Pacific Slope, 1800-1820. Pullman, Washington: Washington State University Press, 2016. King, William F. “George Davidson and the Marine Survey in the Pacific Northwest.” The Western Historical Quarterly 10, no. 3 (1979): 285–301. https://doi.org/10.2307/967372. Kittel, Joanne, and Suzanne Curtis. “The Yachats Indians, Origins of the Yachats Name, and the Prison Camp Years.” Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, and Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians of Oregon, 2010. Klein, Laura F. “Demystifying the Opposition: The Hudson’s Bay Company and the Tlingit.” Arctic Anthropology 24, no. 1 (1987): 101–14. Klepper, Michael M., and Robert E. Gunther. The Wealthy 100: From Benjamin Franklin to Bill Gates— a Ranking of the Richest Americans, Past and Present. Secaucus, N.J: Carol Publishing Group, 1996. Klingle, Matthew. Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Koch, Natalie. Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia. New York: Verso, 2022. Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Korsunsky, Alex. “Putting Workers on the Map: Agricultural Atlases and the Willamette Valley’s Hidden Labor Landscape.” Western Historical Quarterly 51, no. 4 (November 1, 2020): 409– 37. https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whaa112. Kusmer, Kenneth L. Down and out, on the Road: The Homeless in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Laffan, Michael Francis, and Max Weiss, eds. Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. https://doi.org/10.2307/967372 https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whaa112 404 Laforet, Andrea Lynne, and Annie York. Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories, 1808-1939. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998. Lang, William L. “Beavers, Firs, Salmon, and Falling Water: Pacific Northwest Regionalism and the Environment.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 104, no. 2 (2003): 150–65. ———. “Creating the Columbia: Historians and the Great River of the West, 1890-1935.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 93, no. 3 (1992): 234–61. Lang, William L., and Robert C. Carriker, eds. Great River of the West: Essays on the Columbia River. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. Langston, Nancy. Where Land and Water Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. Laskin, David. “Northwest Climate and Culture: Damp Myths and Dry Truths.” In The Great Northwest: The Search for Regional Identity, 107–20. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2001. ———. Rains All the Time: A Connoisseur’s History of Weather in the Pacific Northwest. Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 1996. Lassoie, James P., Thomas M. Hinckley, and Charles C. Grier. “Coniferous Forests of the Pacific Northwest.” In Physiological Ecology of North American Plant Communities, edited by Brian F. Chabot and Harold A. Mooney, 127–61. London: Chapman and Hall, 1985. Latour, Bruno. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Medford: Polity Press, 2018. ———. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Lawlor, Clark. From Melancholia to Prozac: A History of Depression. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Laxer, Daniel Robert. Listening to the Fur Trade: Soundways and Music in the British North American Fur Trade, 1760–1840. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. LeCain, Timothy J. The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Leonard, Devin. Neither Snow nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service. New York: Grove Press, 2016. Lepofsky, Dana, and Megan Caldwell. “Indigenous Marine Resource Management on the Northwest Coast of North America.” Ecological Processes 2, no. 1 (May 24, 2013): 12. https://doi.org/10.1186/2192-1709-2-12. https://doi.org/10.1186/2192-1709-2-12 405 Levine, Philippa. “Naked Truths: Bodies, Knowledge, and the Erotics of Colonial Power.” Journal of British Studies 52, no. 1 (2013): 5–25. ———. “States of Undress: Nakedness and the Colonial Imagination.” Victorian Studies 50, no. 2 (2008): 189–219. Lewis, David G. “Draining Lake Labish.” The QUARTUX Journal : Critical Indigenous Perspectives, December 19, 2021. https://ndnhistoryresearch.com/2021/12/19/draining-lake- labish/. Lewis, David G., and Thomas J. Connolly. “White American Violence on Tribal Peoples on the Oregon Coast.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 120, no. 4 (2019): 368–81. https://doi.org/10.5403/oregonhistq.120.4.0368. Lewis, Wallace G. In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark: Early Commemorations and the Origins of the National Historic Trail. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2010. Linton, Jamie. What Is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction. Nature/History/Society. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010. Linton, Jamie, and Jessica Budds. “The Hydrosocial Cycle: Defining and Mobilizing a Relational- Dialectical Approach to Water.” Geoforum 57 (November 1, 2014): 170–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.10.008. Lomax, Alfred L. “The Portland Woolen Mills, Inc.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 62, no. 2 (1961): 164–79. Loomis, Erik. Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Lovin, Hugh T. Complexity in a Ditch: Bringing Water to the Idaho Desert. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2017. Lowry, James, Mark Patterson, and William Forbes. “The Perceptual Northwest.” Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers 70 (2008): 112–26. Lutz, John S. Makúk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008. Macauley, David. Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas. SUNY Series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. MacColl, E. Kimbark. The Shaping of a City: Business and Politics in Portland, Oregon, 1885- 1915. Portland: The Georgian Press Co., 1976. Macekura, Stephen J. The Mismeasure of Progress: Economic Growth and Its Critics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. https://ndnhistoryresearch.com/2021/12/19/draining-lake-labish/ https://ndnhistoryresearch.com/2021/12/19/draining-lake-labish/ https://doi.org/10.5403/oregonhistq.120.4.0368 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.10.008 406 Mackie, Richard Somerset. Trading Beyond the Mountains: The British Fur Trade on the Pacific, 1793-1843. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997. Madley, Benjamin. An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873. The Lamar Series in Western History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. Magnusson, A. “An Overview of Epidemiological Studies on Seasonal Affective Disorder.” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 101, no. 3 (2000): 176–84. https://doi.org/10.1034/j.1600- 0447.2000.101003176.x. Magra, Christopher P. “Anti-Impressment Riots and the Origins of the Age of Revolution.” International Review of Social History 58 (2013): 131–51. Maritime Archaeological Society (last). Shipwrecks of the Pacific Northwest: Tragedies and Legacies of a Perilous Coast. Edited by Jennifer Kozik. Globe Pequot, 2020. Marks, Robert B. The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century. Fourth edition. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. Marlon, Jennifer R., Neil Pederson, Connor Nolan, Simon Goring, Bryan Shuman, Ann Robertson, Robert Booth, et al. “Climatic History of the Northeastern United States during the Past 3000 Years.” Climate of the Past 13, no. 10 (October 13, 2017): 1355–79. https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-13-1355-2017. Mass, Cliff. The Weather of the Pacific Northwest. Second edition. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021. Matt, Susan J. Homesickness: An American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Mawson, Stephanie J. “Convicts or Conquistadores ? Spanish Soldiers in the Seventeenth-Century Pacific.” Past & Present 232, no. 1 (August 1, 2016): 87–125. May, Dean L. Three Frontiers: Family, Land, and Society in the American West, 1850-1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. McAlindon, Tim, Margaret Formica, Christopher H. Schmid, and Jeremiah Fletcher. “Changes in Barometric Pressure and Ambient Temperature Influence Osteoarthritis Pain.” The American Journal of Medicine 120, no. 5 (May 2007): 429–34. McCoy, Roger M. On the Edge: Mapping North America’s Coasts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. McNeill, J. R. “Of Rats and Men: A Synoptic Environmental History of the Island Pacific.” Journal of World History 5, no. 2 (1994): 299–349. https://doi.org/10.1034/j.1600-0447.2000.101003176.x https://doi.org/10.1034/j.1600-0447.2000.101003176.x https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-13-1355-2017 407 McNeill, John Robert. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620 - 1914. New Approaches to the Americas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Meinig, D.W. The Great Columbia Plain: A Historical Geography, 1805-1910. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968. Melosi, Martin V. Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Mentz, Steve. Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550-1719. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Mercer, Keith. “Northern Exposure: Resistance to Naval Impressment in British North America, 1775–1815.” Canadian Historical Review 91, no. 2 (June 2010): 199–232. https://doi.org/10.3138/chr.91.2.199. Metzger, Abby P. Meander Scars: Reflections on Healing the Willamette River. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2013. Meyer, William B. “The Perfectionists and the Weather: The Oneida Community’s Quest for Meteorological Utopia, 1848-1879.” Environmental History 7, no. 4 (2002): 589–610. https://doi.org/10.2307/3986058. Meze-Hausken, Elisabeth. “Seasons in the Sun - Weather and Climate Front-Page News Stories in Europe’s Rainiest City, Bergen, Norway.” International Journal of Biometeorology 52, no. 1 (October 1, 2007): 17–31. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-006-0064-5. Mierzejewski, Steve. “Footprints on the Rivers: Weather and the Early Northwest Pioneer: Being an Account of the Greatest Storms, the Deepest Snows, the Coldest Winters, the Highest Floods, Etc., and Their Effects on the Settlers of the Pacific Northwest,” c 1960. MS 0317. Washington State Library. Miller, George R. Lewis & Clark’s Northwest Journey: "Weather Disagreeable!”. Portland: Frank Amato Publications, 2004. Miller, George R. Pacific Northwest Weather: But My Barometer Says Fair!: A Look at Those Changing and Peculiar Weather Patterns in the Pacific Northwest, Large and Small. Portland: Frank Amato, 2002. Miller, Julia. La Niña and the Making of Climate Optimism: Remembering Rain. Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Mills, Hazel E. “The Constant Webfoot.” Western Folklore 11, no. 3 (1952): 153–64. Mills, Randall V. “A History of Transportation in the Pacific Northwest.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1946): 281–312. https://doi.org/10.3138/chr.91.2.199 https://doi.org/10.2307/3986058 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-006-0064-5 408 Mitman, Gregg. Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Mockford, Jim. “Before Lewis and Clark, Lt. Broughton’s River of Names: The Columbia River Exploration of 1792.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 106, no. 4 (2005): 542–67. Monmonier, Mark S. Lake Effect: Tales of Large Lakes, Arctic Winds, and Recurrent Snows. Syracuse University Press, 2012. Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital.. New York: Verso, 2015. Morgan, Murray. Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle. New York: The Viking Press, 1951. Morgan, Philip D., John Robert McNeill, Matthew Mulcahy, and Stuart B. Schwartz. Sea and Land: An Environmental History of the Caribbean. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Morris, Larry. The Fate of the Corps: What Became of the Lewis and Clark Explorers After the Expedition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Morrison, Dane Anthony. Eastward of Good Hope: Early America in a Dangerous World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. Morrison, James V. Shipwrecked: Disaster and Transformation in Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe, and the Modern World. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2014. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Posthumanities 27. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Moss, Madonna. Northwest Coast: Archaeology as Deep History. Washington D.C.: Society for American Archaeology, 2011. Moss, Madonna, and Aubrey Cannon, eds. The Archaeology of North Pacific Fisheries. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2011. Mote, Phillip W. “Trends in Temperature and Precipitation Int He Pacific Northwest During the Twentieth Century.” Northwest Science 77, no. 4 (2003): 271–82. Munroe, Charles E. “Notes on the Literature of Explosives VII.” Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute 11, no. 1 (January 1885). ———. “Notes on the Literature of Explosives VIII.” Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute 11, no. 2 (February 1885). Murphy, Bessie Gragg. “An Early Day Teacher in Clatsop County, Oregon.” Cumtux 36, no. 4 (Fall 206AD). 409 ———. “The 1878 Journey From Benton County to Elsie and Back in 1900.” Cumtux 25, no. 4 (Fall 2015). Nash, Linda. “The Changing Experience of Nature: Historical Encounters with a Northwest River.” The Journal of American History 86, no. 4 (2000): 1600–1629. https://doi.org/10.2307/2567579. Nash, Linda Lorraine. Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Nash, Tom, and Twilo Scofield. The Well-Traveled Casket: A Collection of Oregon Folklore. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992. Neiman, Paul J., F. Martin Ralph, Gary A. Wick, Jessica D. Lundquist, and Michael D. Dettinger. “Meteorological Characteristics and Overland Precipitation Impacts of Atmospheric Rivers Affecting the West Coast of North America Based on Eight Years of SSM/I Satellite Observations.” Journal of Hydrometeorology 9, no. 1 (February 1, 2008): 22–47. Netz, Reviel. Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2009. Neukom, Raphael, Nathan Steiger, Juan José Gómez-Navarro, Jianghao Wang, and Johannes P. Werner. “No Evidence for Globally Coherent Warm and Cold Periods over the Preindustrial Common Era.” Nature 571, no. 7766 (July 2019): 550–54. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586- 019-1401-2. Nicandri, David L. “The Columbia Country and the Dissolution of Meriwether Lewis: Speculation and Interpretation.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 106, no. 1 (2005): 6–33. Nixon, Emily, Ellen Brooks-Pollock, and Richard Wall. “Sheep Scab Transmission: A Spatially Explicit Dynamic Metapopulation Model.” Veterinary Research 52, no. 1 (April 12, 2021): 54. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13567-021-00924-y. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Nokes, J. Richard. Columbia’s River: The Voyages of Robert Gray, 1787-1793. Tacoma: Washington State Historical Society, 1991. Nokes, R. Gregory. Breaking Chains: Slavery on Trial in the Oregon Territory. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2013. ———. The Troubled Life of Peter Burnett: Oregon Pioneer and First Governor of California. Corvalis: Oregon State University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2307/2567579 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1401-2 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1401-2 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13567-021-00924-y 410 Norwood, Dael A. Trading Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America. American Beginnings, 1500-1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Olivarius, Kathryn Meyer McAllister. Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2022. Oliver, Egbert S. Homes in the Oregon Forest: Settling Columbia County 1870-1920. Brownsville: Calapooia Publications, 1983. O’Reilly, Kenneth. Asphalt: A History. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Osborne, Michael A. “Acclimatizing the World: A History of the Paradigmatic Colonial Science.” Osiris 15 (2000): 135–51. ———. The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Osmond, Colin Murray. “Logging, Laughing, and Staying Alive: The New Ethnohistory and Coast Salish Reflections on Dangerous Work in the Woods in the Mid-20th Century.” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 109, no. 3 (2018): 120–34. Ostler, Jeffrey. “Richard Maxwell Brown: (1927–2014).” Western Historical Quarterly 46, no. 1 (February 1, 2015): 131–32. https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.46.1.0131. Ott, Jennifer. “‘Ruining’ the Rivers in the Snake Country: The Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fur Desert Policy.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 104, no. 2 (2003): 166–95. Pearce, Helen. “Folk Sayings in a Pioneer Family of Western Oregon.” California Folklore Quarterly 5, no. 3 (1946): 229–42. https://doi.org/10.2307/1495521. Peck, David J. Or Perish in the Attempt: Wilderness Medicine in the Lewis & Clark Expedition. Helena: Farcountry Press, 2002. Pérez, Louis A. Winds of Change: Hurricanes & the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Cuba. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Perramond, Eric. Unsettled Water: Rights, Law, and Identity in the American West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. Perrine, Fred S. “Early Days on the Willamette.” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 25, no. 4 (1924): 295–312. Peterson del Mar, David. Beaten Down: A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. Pfister, Christian. “Weeping in the Snow: The Second Period of Little Ice Age-Type Impacts, 1570- 1630.” In Cultural Consequences of the Little Ice Age, 31–86. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005. https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.46.1.0131 https://doi.org/10.2307/1495521 411 Pierotti, Raymond, and Brandy R. Fogg. The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Pillatt, Toby. “Experiencing Climate: Finding Weather in Eighteenth Century Cumbria.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 19, no. 4 (December 1, 2012): 564–81. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-012-9141-8. Pintarich, Dick. “The Whining and Dining of Lewis and Clark.” In Great and Minor Moments in Oregon History, edited by Dick Pintarich, Second edition., 30–39. Portland: New Oregon Publishers, 2008. Pleij, Herman, and Diane Webb. Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Pomeroy, Earl. The Pacific Slope: A History of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah and Nevada. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965. Powell, Fred Wilbur. “Hall Jackson Kelley—Prophet of Oregon.” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 18, no. 1 (1917): 1–54. Prince, Amy McFall. “Feds Revoke Tribe’s Status.” Longview Daily News, July 6, 2002. https://tdn.com/feds-revoke-tribes-status/article_0cb40c64-0f2d-5eaf-a8a0- 099e355995df.html. Pritchard, Sara B. Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône. Harvard Historical Studies 172. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Purvis, Diane J. Ragged Coast, Rugged Coves: Labor, Culture, and Politics in Southeast Alaska Canneries. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Raibmon, Paige Sylvia. Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth- Century Northwest Coast. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. ———. “Meanings of Mobility on the Northwest Coast.” In New Histories for Old: Changing Perspectives on Canada’s Native Pasts, edited by Theodore Binnema and Susan Neylan, 175– 95. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007. ———. “Picking, Posing, and Performing: Puget Sound Hop Fields and Income for Aboriginal Workers.” In Farming Across Borders: A Transnational History of the North American West, edited by Sterling Evans, 329–50. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2017. Ratcliff, James L. “What Happened to the Kalapuya? A Study of the Depletion of Their Economic Base.” The Indian Historian 6, no. 3 (1973): 27–33. Ravalli, Richard. Sea Otters: A History. Studies in Pacific Worlds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-012-9141-8 https://tdn.com/feds-revoke-tribes-status/article_0cb40c64-0f2d-5eaf-a8a0-099e355995df.html https://tdn.com/feds-revoke-tribes-status/article_0cb40c64-0f2d-5eaf-a8a0-099e355995df.html 412 Ravalli, Richard, Kirsten Livingston, and Hannah Zimmerman. “A Revised List of Vessels Engaged in the California Sea Otter Trade, 1786–1847.” International Journal of Maritime History 24, no. 2 (December 1, 2012): 225–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/084387141202400210. Rawson, Michael. The Nature of Tomorrow: A History of the Environmental Future. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. Ray, Arthur J. Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Roles as Trappers, Hunters, and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay, 1660-1870. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. Reed, Ronald Keith. “Rainfall over coastal waters of the Pacific Northwest.” Oregon State University, n.d. Reid, Joshua L. The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Reidy, Michael S. Tides of History: Ocean Science and Her Majesty’s Navy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Reidy, Michael S., Gary Kroll, and Erik M. Conway. Exploration and Science: Social Impact and Interaction. Science and Society. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2007. Reimer, Chad. Before We Lost the Lake: A Natural and Human History of Sumas Valley. Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2018. ———. Writing British Columbia History, 1784-1958. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009. Renner, Jeff. Northwest Marine Weather: From the Columbia River to Cape Scott: Including Puget Sound, the San Juan and Gulf Islands, and the Straits of Juan de Fuca, Georgia, Johnstone, and Queen Charlotte. Seattle: Mountaineers Books, 1993. Richards, Kent D. “In Search of the Pacific Northwest: The Historiography of Oregon and Washington.” Pacific Historical Review 50, no. 4 (November 1, 1981): 415–43. https://doi.org/10.2307/3639158. Richards, Thomas. Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Richardson, Brian William. Longitude and Empire: How Captain Cook’s Voyages Changed the World. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005. Ridley, Scott. Morning of Fire: John Kendrick’s Daring American Odyssey in the Pacific. New York: William Morrow, 2010. Robbins, William. Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story, 1800-1940. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. https://doi.org/10.1177/084387141202400210 https://doi.org/10.2307/3639158 413 Robbins, William G. “Introduction.” In Regionalism and the Pacific Northwest, edited by William G. Robbins, Robert J. Frank, and Richard E. Ross. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1983. ———. Landscapes of Conflict: The Oregon Story, 1940-2000. Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. ———. “Willamette Eden: The Ambiguous Legacy.” In Northwest Lands, Northwest Peoples: Readings in Environmental History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. Robertson, James R. “The Social Evolution of Oregon.” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 3, no. 1 (1902): 1–37. Robichaud, Andrew A. Animal City: The Domestication of America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019. Rodger, Nicholas A. M. The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Ronda, James P. Astoria & Empire. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. ———. “Calculating Ouragon.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 94, no. 2/3 (1993): 120–40. ———. Lewis and Clark among the Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Rosenthal, Gregory Samantha. Beyond Hawai’i: Native Labor in the Pacific World. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. Rozum, Molly Patrick. Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Ruby, Robert H., John A. Brown, Cary C. Collins, M. Dale Kinkade, and Sean O’Neill. A Guide to the Indian Tribes of the Pacific Northwest. Third edition. The Civilization of the American Indian Series, v. 173. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010. Sand, Jordan. “People, Animals, and Island Encounters: A Pig’s History of the Pacific.” Journal of Global History 17, no. 3 (November 2022): 355–73. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022821000383. Sarasohn, David. “Regionalism, Tending Towards Sectionalism.” In Regionalism and the Pacific Northwest, edited by William G. Robbins, Robert J. Frank, and Richard E. Ross, 223–36. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1983. Saunt, Claudio. Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022821000383 414 Savage, E. M., D. McCormick, S. McDonald, O. Moore, M. Stevenson, and A. P. Cairns. “Does Rheumatoid Arthritis Disease Activity Correlate with Weather Conditions?” Rheumatology International 35, no. 5 (May 2015): 887–90. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00296-014-3161-5. Scheuerman, Richard D., Alexander Campbell McGregor, and John Clement. Harvest Heritage: Agricultural Origins and Heirloom Crops of the Pacific Northwest. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2013. Schiebinger, Londa L. Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Schlesinger, Jonathan. A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. Schlichting, Kara Murphy. “Hot Town: Sensing Heat in Summertime Manhattan.” Environmental History 27, no. 2 (April 2022): 354–68. https://doi.org/10.1086/719282. Schmidt, Jeremy J. “Historicising the Hydrosocial Cycle.” Water Alternatives. 7, no. 1 (January 1, 2014): 220–34. Schrad, Mark Lawrence. Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Schultz, David M., Anna L. Beukenhorst, Belay Birlie Yimer, Louise Cook, Huai Leng Pisaniello, Thomas House, Carolyn Gamble, Jamie C. Sergeant, John McBeth, and William G. Dixon. “Weather Patterns Associated with Pain in Chronic-Pain Sufferers.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 101, no. 5 (May 1, 2020): E555–66. https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS- D-19-0265.1. Schwantes, Carlos A. The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Scofield, John. Hail, Columbia! Robert Gray, John Kendrick, and the Pacific Fur Trade. North Pacific Studies Series, no. 19. Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1992. Scott, Andrew. The Encyclopedia of Raincoast Place Names: A Complete Reference to Coastal British Columbia. Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2009. Scott, James C. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale Agrarian Studies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Segal, Lynne. Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy. London: Verso, 2018. Sercombe, Laurel. “The Story of Dirty Face: Power and Song in Western Washington Coast Salish Myth Narratives.” In Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America, 34–53. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00296-014-3161-5 https://doi.org/10.1086/719282 https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0265.1 https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0265.1 415 Shah, Sonia. The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move. New York: Bloomsbury, 2020. Sharova, V. Ya. “Precipitation Maps for the World’s Ocean Surface.” Mapping Sciences and Remote Sensing 27, no. 4 (1990): 280-294. Sheil, Douglas, and Daniel Murdiyarso. “How Forests Attract Rain: An Examination of a New Hypothesis.” BioScience 59, no. 4 (April 1, 2009): 341–47. Shmerling, Robert H. “Does Weather Affect Arthritis Pain?” Harvard Health Blog (blog), January 17, 2019. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/does-weather-affect-arthritis-pain- 2019011715789. Silverman, Daniel J. Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016. Smail, Daniel Lord. On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Sobel, Dava. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. New York: Walker & Company, 2005. Soper, Kate. Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism. London: Verso, 2020. “SOD USA Climate Archive.” Western Regional Climate Center, n.d. https://wrcc.dri.edu/summary/sodusa.html. Stark, Peter. Astoria: Astor and Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire: A Tale of Ambition and Survival on the Early American Frontier. New York: Ecco, 2014. Steele, Valerie. The Corset: A Cultural History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Stein, Julie K., Roger Kiers, Jennie Deo, Kate Gallagher, Chris Lockwood, and Scotty Moore. “A Geoarchaeological Analysis of Fort Clatsop, Lewis and Clark National Historical Park,” November 2006. Steinman, Byron A., Mark B. Abbott, Michael E. Mann, Nathan D. Stansell, and Bruce P. Finney. “1,500 Year Quantitative Reconstruction of Winter Precipitation in the Pacific Northwest.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 29 (July 17, 2012): 11619–23. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1201083109. Stepan, Nancy. Picturing Tropical Nature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Stewart, Hilary. Cedar: Tree of Life to the Northwest Coast Indians. First paperback edition. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995. Stewart, Nathan L., Brenda Konar, and M. Tim Tinker. “Testing the Nutritional-Limitation, Predator-Avoidance, and Storm-Avoidance Hypotheses for Restricted Sea Otter Habitat Use https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/does-weather-affect-arthritis-pain-2019011715789 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/does-weather-affect-arthritis-pain-2019011715789 https://wrcc.dri.edu/summary/sodusa.html. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1201083109 416 in the Aleutian Islands, Alaska.” Oecologia 177, no. 3 (March 1, 2015): 645–55. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-014-3149-6. Strangeways, Ian. Precipitation: Theory, Measurement and Distribution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Strauss, Sarah. “An Ill Wind: The Foehn in Leukerbad and Beyond.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (2007): S165–81. Taylor, George H., and Chris Hannan. The Climate of Oregon: From Rain Forest to Desert. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1999. Taylor, George H., and Raymond R. Hatton. The Oregon Weather Book: A State of Extremes. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 1999. Taylor, Joseph E. Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis. Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. Tepper, Leslie Heyman, Janice George, and Willard Joseph. Salish Blankets: Robes of Protection and Transformation, Symbols of Wealth. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Thoennes, Philip, and Jack Landau. “Constitutionalizing Racism: George H. Williams’s Appeal for a White Utopia.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 120, no. 4 (2019): 468–87. Thompson, R. L., and J. S. Hayward. “Wet-Cold Exposure and Hypothermia: Thermal and Metabolic Responses to Prolonged Exercise in Rain.” Journal of Applied Physiology (Bethesda, Md.: 1985) 81, no. 3 (September 1996): 1128–37. Thornton, Thomas F. Being and Place among the Tlingit. Seattle: University of Washington Press and the Sealaska Heritage Institute, 2008. Thrush, Coll. “City of the Changers: Indigenous People and the Transformation of Seattle’s Watersheds.” Pacific Historical Review 75, no. 1 (2006): 89–117. ———. Thrush, Coll. Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-over Place. Second edition. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. ———. Thrush, Coll and Ruth S. Ludwin. "Finding Fault: Indigenous Seismology, Colonial Science, and the Rediscovery of Earthquakes and Tsunamis in Cascadia," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 31, no. 4 (2007): 1-24. Tisdale, Sallie. Stepping Westward: The Long Search for Home in the Pacific Northwest. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1991. Tittensor, Ruth. Shades of Green: An Environmental and Cultural History of Sitka Spruce. Oxford ; Havertown, PA: Windgather Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-014-3149-6 417 Tovell, Freeman. At the Far Reaches of Empire: The Life of Juan Francisco de La Bodega y Quadra. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008. Trivedi, Lisa. Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Turner, Nancy J., and Douglas Deur, eds. Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. Underwood, June O. “Men, Woman, and Madness: Pioneer Plains Literature.” In Under the Sun: Myth and Realism in Western American Literature, edited by Barbara Howard Meldrum, 51– 63. Troy: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1985. Unruh, Jr., John D. The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1860. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Valencius, Conevery Bolton. The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Van Kirk, Sylvia. Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983. Vanderstaay, Steven. Street Lives: An Oral History of Homeless Americans. Gabriola: New Society Publishers, 1992. Vannini, Phillip, Dennis Waskul, Simon Gottschalk, and Toby Ellis-Newstead. “Making Sense of the Weather: Dwelling and Weathering on Canada’s Rain Coast.” Space and Culture 15, no. 4 (November 1, 2012): 361–80. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331211412269. Varnava, Andrekos, ed. Imperial Expectations and Realities: El Dorados, Utopias and Dystopias. Studies in Imperialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Vaughan, Thomas, and Martin Winch. “Joseph Gervais, a Familiar Mystery Man.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 66, no. 4 (1965): 331–62. Ventura-Cots, Meritxell, Ariel E. Watts, Monica Cruz-Lemini, Neil D. Shah, Nambi Ndugga, Peter McCann, A. Sidney Barritt, et al. “Colder Weather and Fewer Sunlight Hours Increase Alcohol Consumption and Alcohol Cirrhosis Worldwide.” Hepatology (Baltimore, Md.) 69, no. 5 (May 2019): 1916–30. https://doi.org/10.1002/hep.30315. Veracini, Lorenzo. The World Turned inside out: Settler Colonialism as a Political Idea. New York: Verso, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331211412269 https://doi.org/10.1002/hep.30315 418 Vet, Eliza de. “Exploring Weather-Related Experiences and Practices: Examining Methodological Approaches.” Area 45, no. 2 (2013): 198–206. Vetter, Jeremy. “Knowing the Great Plains Weather: Field Life and Lay Participation on the American Frontier during the Railroad Era.” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 13, no. 2 (June 1, 2019): 195–213. https://doi.org/10.1215/18752160- 7341700. Vibert, Elizabeth. Traders’ Tales: Narratives of Cultural Encounters in the Columbia Plateau, 1807-1846. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Vickers, Daniel. Farmers & Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Vickers, Daniel, and Vince Walsh. Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Vileisis, Ann. Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of America’s Wetlands. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997. Vogel, Eve. “Defining One Pacific Northwest among Many Possibilities: The Political Construction of a Region and Its River during the New Deal.” Western Historical Quarterly 42, no. 1 (February 1, 2011): 28–53. https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.42.1.0028. Wagner, Henry R. “Spanish Voyages to the Northwest Coast in the Sixteenth Century. Chapter VI: The Voyage of Alvaro de Mendaña; Chapter VII: Juan de La Isla and Francisco Gali; Chapter X: The Antecedents of Sebastian Vizcaino’s Voyage of 1602.” California Historical Society Quarterly 7, no. 3 (1928): 228–76. https://doi.org/10.2307/25177951. ———. “Spanish Voyages to the Northwest Coast in the Sixteenth Century: Introduction and Chapter on ‘Alvarado and Mendoza, Partners.’” California Historical Society Quarterly 6, no. 4 (1927): 293–331. https://doi.org/10.2307/25177904. Warren, Louis S. The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America. Yale Historical Publications. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Warren, Sidney. Farthest Frontier: The Pacific Northwest. New York: Macmillan, 1949. Watson, Bruce McIntyre. Lives Lived West of the Divide: A Biographical Dictionary of Fur Traders Working West of the Rockies, 1793-1858. Kelowna: The Centre for Social, Spatial and Economic Justice, 2010. Webb, Walter Prescott. The Great Plains. Second edition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. Yale Western Americana Series. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. https://doi.org/10.1215/18752160-7341700 https://doi.org/10.1215/18752160-7341700 https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.42.1.0028 https://doi.org/10.2307/25177951 https://doi.org/10.2307/25177904 419 Weiser, Andrea, and Dana Lepofsky. “Ancient Land Use and Management of Ebey’s Prairie, Whidbey Island, Washington.” Journal of Ethnobiology 29, no. 2 (September 2009): 184– 212. https://doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-29.2.184. Wells, Gail, and Dawn Anzinger. Lewis and Clark Meet Oregon’s Forests: Lessons from Dynamic Nature. Portland: Oregon Forest Resources Institute, 2001. Wey Gómez, Nicolás. The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies. Transformations. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008. Whaley, Gray H. Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee: U.S. Empire and the Transformation of an Indigenous World, 1792-1859. First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. White, Richard. “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do Your Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature.” In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William Cronon, 171–85. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. ———. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own:” A New History of the American West. First paperback edition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. ———. Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington. First paperback edition. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992. ———. “The Altered Landscape: Social Change and the Land in the Pacific Northwest.” In Regionalism and the Pacific Northwest, edited by William G. Robbins, Robert J. Frank, and Richard E. Ross, 109–27. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1983. ———. The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. A Critical Issue. New York: Hill & Wang, 2001. White, Sam. A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. ———. “From Globalized Pig Breeds to Capitalist Pigs: A Study in Animal Cultures and Evolutionary History.” Environmental History 16, no. 1 (2011): 94–120. ———. The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. Studies in Environment and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Whiting, Daniel, Paul Lichtenstein, and Seena Fazel. “Violence and Mental Disorders: A Structured Review of Associations by Individual Diagnoses, Risk Factors, and Risk Assessment.” The Lancet Psychiatry 8, no. 2 (February 1, 2021): 150–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215- 0366(20)30262-5. Whyte, Kyle Powys. "Our Ancestors Dystopia Now: Indigenous Conservation and the Anthropocene," in Ursula Heise et al., eds. The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-29.2.184 https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(20)30262-5 https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(20)30262-5 420 Wickman, Thomas M. Snowshoe Country: An Environmental and Cultural History of Winter in the Early American Northeast. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Wiley, Peter Booth, and Robert Gottlieb. Empires in the Sun: The Rise of the New American West. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1985. Wilkins, Mary Barlow. “Samuel Kimbrough Barlow: A Pioneer Road Builder of Oregon.” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 26, no. 3 (1925): 209–24. Wilkinson, Charles. The People Are Dancing Again: The History of the Siletz Tribe of Western Oregon. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. Williams, D. Dudley. The Biology of Temporary Waters. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Williams, David B. Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015. Williams, Glyndwr. The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters, 1570-1750. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. ———. Voyages of Delusion: The Quest for the Northwest Passage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Williams, Jacqueline B. The Way We Ate: Pacific Northwest Cooking, 1843-1900. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1996. Winther, Oscar Osburn. The Old Oregon Country: A History of Frontier Trade, Transportation, and Travel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1950. Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Woodward, Arthur. “Sea Otter Hunting on the Pacific Coast.” The Quarterly: Historical Society of Southern California 20, no. 3 (1938): 119–34. https://doi.org/10.2307/41166265. Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. ———. “The American West in the Age of Vulnerability.” Western Historical Quarterly 45, no. 1 (2014): 5–16. https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.45.1.0005. Wray, Jacilee. River Near the Sea: An Ethnohistory of the Queets River Valley. National Park Service, 2014. Yamane, Motoi, Yukio Oida, Norikazu Ohnishi, Takaaki Matsumoto, and Kaoru Kitagawa. “Effects of Wind and Rain on Thermal Responses of Humans in a Mildly Cold Environment.” https://doi.org/10.2307/41166265 https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.45.1.0005 421 European Journal of Applied Physiology 109, no. 1 (May 2010): 117–23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00421-010-1369-y. Yoda, Tamae, Larry I. Crawshaw, Mayumi Nakamura, Kumiko Saito, Aki Konishi, Kei Nagashima, Sunao Uchida, and Kazuyuki Kanosue. “Effects of Alcohol on Thermoregulation during Mild Heat Exposure in Humans.” Alcohol 36, no. 3 (July 1, 2005): 195–200. Young, Phoebe S. K. Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Zafren, Ken. “Nonfreezing Cold Injury (Trench Foot).” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 19 (October 6, 2021): 10482. Zelinsky, Wilbur. “North America’s Vernacular Regions.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70, no. 1 (1980): 1–16. Zhang, Ling. The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048–1128. 2016: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Zielinski, Gregory A., and Barry D. Keim. New England Weather, New England Climate. Lebanon: UPNE, 2003. Zilberstein, Anya. A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Newspapers The Arkansas Advocate Bloomington Herald Carroll Free Press The Daily Union (Washington, D.C.) The Edgefield Advertiser The Evansville Journal Green-Mountain Freeman Hillsdale Whig Standard The Illinois Free-Trader and LaSalle County Commercial Advertiser Indiana State Sentinel Joliet Signal The Kalida Venture Lincoln County Leader (Toledo, OR) Lynchburg Virginian Morning Daily Herald (Albany, OR) The Morning Oregonian (Portland, OR) The Native American (Washington, D.C.) The New Era (Portsmouth, VA) The New Northwest (Portland, OR) New-York Daily Tribune https://doi.org/10.1007/s00421-010-1369-y 422 The New York Herald The North-Carolina Standard Oregon Argus Oregon City Enterprise Oregon Farmer The Oregonian Oregon Spectator Oskaloosa Herald Oxford Democrat Pioneer and Democrat (Olympia, WA) Richmond Enquirer (Richmond, VA) Richmond Indiana Palladium The Seattle Times Sentinel of the Valley (Woodstock, VA) The States Right Democrat (Albany, OR) The Telephone-Register (McMinnville, OR) The Umpqua Weekly Gazette (Scottsburg, OR) Vermont Phoenix Washington Standard (Olympia, WA) Weekly National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.) Willamette Farmer RAINFALL AND THE RESETTLEMENT OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST DEDICATION ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS – CONTINUED LIST OF TABLES LIST OF FIGURES LIST OF FIGURES – CONTINUED ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION THE BLUEST SKIES YOU'VE EVER SEEN? Recovering the Power of Rainfall “A lovely hour or two occasionally & then it rains again:” Chapter Overview THE PACIFIC NORTHWHERE? A NOTE ON PLACE A PRIMER ON PACIFIC NORTHWEST METEOROLOGY CHAPTER ONE “I ALWAYS WENT TO BED WET FOOTED:” RAINFALL AND THE EARLY MARITIME NORTHWEST, 1543-c. 1805 “Dreary and Inhospitable:” First Approaches to the Northwest Coast Broken Health: The Sailor, the Sea, and the Storm in the 1770s “Savages,” Sea Otters, and Sodden Geographies of Fear in the Maritime Fur Trade Conclusion: Beyond the Sea CHAPTER TWO “NO OTHER CANOPY BUT THE HEAVENS:” ASTORIA, THE CORPS OF DISCOVERY, AND HOW NOT TO PADDLE A CANOE, 1805- c.1821 “Wet and Disagreeable," Or, How the Rains Haunted Lewis and Clark “Incessant Rain:” the Sodden Experiences of the Astorians, 1811-1813 Chasing Pigs and Trapping Beavers: The Astorians in Winter Conclusion: Fleeting Sunshine CHAPTER THREE “I CANNOT SAY THAT I ADMIRE MUCH THIS COUNTRY:” FUR-TRIMMED IMPERIALISM AND DAY-DRINKING IN THE RAIN, 1821-c. 1840 “The Day Has Been Gloomy:” Seasonality, Post Farming, and Servant Life Cross-Cultural Comfort: Company Men, Indigenous Women, and the French Prairie Methodists, Malaria, and Racialized Rainscapes Conclusion: Here Come the Americans! CHAPTER FOUR CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF CIVILIZATION: RAINFALL AND OVERLAND EMIGRATION, c. 1840-1855 The Rains of Empire: Boosterism and the Narrative of Climatic Exceptionalism Out of the Pamphlet and Into the Newspaper Over the Rockies and Into the Rains: Emigrants on the Overland Trails Arrival, Emigrant Letters, and the Persistence of Promoters Conclusion: of Dreams and Disappointments CHAPTER FIVE TO CIVILIZE THE RAIN: SODDEN SETTLER-COLONIALISM IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST, c.1840-1900 Pluvial Geography, Agriculture, and Pioneer (Re)settlement Rainfall and Everyday Settler-Colonialism in the Northwest “A Change of Worlds”: Rainfall, Native Peoples, and Geographies of Settler Fear The Webfoot, the Mossback, the Ditch and the Smokestack Conclusion: "The World and its Shams." EPILOGUE: "THE VITAL, MUFFLING GIFT." REFERENCES CITED Abbreviations Primary and Archival Sources Secondary Sources Newspapers