Persistent Callings: Seasons of Work and Identity on the Oregon Coast 2019029670, 9780870719837

Citation preview

Persistent Callings

Persistent Callings Seasons of Work and Identity on the Oregon Coast Joseph E. Taylor III

Oregon State University Press   Corvallis

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Taylor, Joseph E., III, author. Title: Persistent callings : seasons of work and identity on the Oregon Coast / Joseph E Taylor III. Description: Corvallis : Oregon State University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019029670 | ISBN 9780870719837 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Nestucca River Watershed Region (Or.)—History. | Tillamook County (Or.)—History. | Tillamook County (Or.)—Economic conditions. | Tillamook County (Or.)—Rural conditions. Classification: LCC F882.T5 T39 2019 | DDC 979.5/44—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029670 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). © 2019 Joseph E. Taylor III All rights reserved. First published in 2019 by Oregon State University Press Printed in the United States of America

Oregon State University Press 121 The Valley Library Corvallis OR 97331-4501 541-737-3166 • fax 541-737-3170 www.osupress.oregonstate.edu

To my brothers and Lou

Contents Maps and Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . viii ROOTS .

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SEASONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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RESETTLEMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 ELMORE . NADIR .

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PIVOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 SEAWARD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 CYCLES .

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GENTRIFICATION .

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CALLINGS .

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Appendixes .

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Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 Notes .

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Index .

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Maps and Illustrations Map 2.1 Map 2.2 Map 4.1 Map 8.1 Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2

Southern Tillamook County . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Nestucca Bay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Oregon’s 1927 Special Election . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Productive Flats for Anadromous Fish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 Leaving the Beach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Land Clearing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Ole Redberg Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 July 4, 1924 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Cannery and Dock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 A Very Good Haul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Non-Fishing Identities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 The Family Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 A Community of Oars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 For Sale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Vote 322 X YES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Empty Resort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Syd and Walt Fisher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Brick Gilman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 The Steel Drum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Identification Cards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Rowing through Surf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Milk Deliveries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Beach Rig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Dory Derby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 A Vast Fern Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Kiwanda circa 1970 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Sand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 The Unpacific Ocean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 Collisions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Going to Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

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This place has changed for good Your economic theory said it would. . . . We matter more than pounds and pence Your economic theory makes no sense —Sting, “We Work The Black Seam”

Roots My earliest memory of Pacific City is a jagged piece of stained and painted plywood that hung in a family cabin. Its facetious poem served as a reminder of the shack’s roots: Behold The Fisherman He riseth up Early in the morning And Disturbeth the whole household Mighty Are His Preparations he goeth forth full of hope, and when the Day is Far Spent He returneth, Smelling of Strong Drink and the Truth is not in him. Probably erected by Aunt Frances, the plaque harkened to a time when she, her husband Harvey, and my mom’s parents fished for salmon and drank bathtub gin. It was the only proper way to deal with the long, awful slump that haunted South County from 1927 to 1946. The cabin itself was much older. A wooden box on the bank of the Nestucca River, it had neither foundation nor insulation. Holes had to be drilled through the floor to drain water out after winter floods. The shack’s first career was as a storehouse for cannery boats. The lean years after the cannery closed in 1927 left it vacant. My aunt and uncle bought the building and two lots at a county auction in 1942. They refurbished it as a two-bedroom, one-season vacation home. Even with a mammoth woodstove to heat food, water, and interior, the structure was habitable only in summer. Even in July, it was hard to warm up on foggy mornings. The sign is a mnemonic trigger. At Frances’s invitation, my parents visited each summer starting in the late 1950s, dragging along yet another boy every other year. I cannot count the times I awoke in a damp sleeping 1

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bag, peered through a warped-glass window at the river and, depending on its speed and direction, knew where we were in the ebb-flood cycle. There was also the less-pleasant sensation of breathing deeply and, depending on whether I smelled kelp or cows, knowing which way the wind blew. The rest of the day was a blur. Our mom practiced what we now call free-range parenting. She would feed us, kick open the keyless door, and declare she did not want to see us for hours. My brothers and I obliged by fishing for bullheads, salmon, and trout, exploring Cape Kiwanda’s flanks and caves, climbing dunes as if they were Mount Everest, and setting land speed records upon descent. Every year we gathered clams on the tide flats and berries along the Coast Guard Road. Assuming the role of Great White Hunter, our dad rented a boat and rings from Mayes Resort and ferried us to the bay for a day of crabbing. We spent less time pulling traps than building driftwood forts, and we always ate more than our fair share. We savored life: tracking the prints of bears, cats, deer, and elk; stalking fish and sea lions; and gazing at buzzards, cormorants, eagles, gulls, hawks, plovers, and terns. Returning upriver each afternoon, the underpowered boat fought current and wind. It was usually a cold, wet journey that tested parental patience. My five-year-old brother Chris once screamed nonstop for an hour. We all felt sorry for him, and we all wanted to use him as crab bait. One saving distraction was a landmark that fascinated me. There, lying on the east bank of Nestucca Bay, were the scattered footings of an old cannery. I wondered what the building had looked like, what went on inside, who caught the fish and how many, and who canned them. I queried relatives and neighbors. No one knew much, and my curiosity went unquenched. With so much to do in those too-short summers, I soon forgot until the next time I spied those footings. Pacific City, the Nestucca River, and Cape Kiwanda were the backdrop to Huck-Finn-like summers. As time passed the pull of fishing, crabbing, and clamming grew ever stronger. Yearning deepened every time an uncle took my brothers and me out in his sport dory. During angling trips and while scrambling around the cape, I was drawn to the commercial dories, marveling at their technologies and much larger catches; by high school I wanted my own. I admired how fishers made a living from the sea, their relaxed banter in coffee shops and fish companies, even how they wore their hip boots: it all seemed so cool. I spent summer 1977 pulling for my

ROOTS 3

first old man of the sea. I rose early, worked all day, and scrubbed the boat each night. I earned little but learned much, and I was hooked—sometimes literally. I read books and pestered neighbors for information, got a loan, bought a boat that I rechristened Tuition, and then dropped out of school. My family was not pleased, but my business model was to catch enough fish to go climbing. I had begun a passionate affair with fishing, adventure, and South County. This book is an outgrowth of that time, but of much more as well. It also reflects an enduring curiosity about the past that got a kick-start in 1986 when I discovered two books. Peter Matthiessen’s Men’s Lives recounted his time as a commercial fisher off Long Island, while Art McEvoy’s The Fisherman’s Problem detailed the interplay of ecological and social structures in California’s fisheries. I have read McEvoy’s book five times. I still regard it as a watershed moment in the field of environmental history. Both books helped me realize that what I had witnessed on the Oregon coast spanned time and space. What I previously regarded as local problems were in fact structural forces plaguing striped bass fishers in New York, sardine fishers in California, and many others around the world. All were bound up in historical and geographical processes. The power of Matthiessen’s prose opened possibilities for narrating events in South County, and McEvoy’s analysis showed me to how to link local stories to regional, national, and global contexts. Both books rekindled a passion for research and writing, as well as the smoldering curiosity of a boy’s unanswered questions. I quickly read what was at the time a surprisingly limited amount of historical research on Oregon’s salmon fisheries. Next, I turned to every neighbor I could corner. My interrogations began as quick chats but soon evolved into formal interviews, especially after Edwin Bingham prodded me to write an honors thesis. Conversations took place in living rooms and front porches, in taverns and a fish locker, even in the cab of a pickup hurtling down a Forest Service road. My method was simple: I asked open-ended questions about fishing, farming, and logging, and then I listened to people’s stories. I buttressed this information with evidence gleaned from articles, books, newspapers, and archives. Slowly, South County’s dim past began to take shape. Then during spring break 1990, I locked myself in a dorm hall, turned on Randy Lindsey’s CD player, and wrote the first draft. It took twenty-nine more years to revise it into present form, but in a larger sense,

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I have been working on this story since first spying a silly sign in a rustic shack many decades ago.

Seasons I wish I was a fisherman tumblin’ on the seas far away from dry land and its bitter memories casting out my sweet line with the band of men I love no ceiling bearing down on me save the starry sky above —The Waterboys, “Fisherman’s Blues”

Wind on face Salt on tongue The sun rises A line quivers My pulse jumps

Go!

Friends who saw me when I fished said I resembled a machine. They had a point. Every bite triggered a programmed response: engage hydraulics, collect gear, stop gurdy, grab net, scoop fish, repeat. I spent so much time on workboats that my actions became automatic, yet a helluva lot more was going on inside my head. Moreover, what friends could not see made all the difference. Balancing on a pitching, heaving sea, navigating currents that flowed in multiple directions from seafloor to surface, and coaxing fish into boats: fishing was a fully enveloping experience. Where I stopped and the boat, sea, and sky began was never quite clear. At times nature, technology, and I merged as a seamless rhythm. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly gave a name to this psychic state; he called it “flow,” but Columbia River gillnetter Bill Gunderson put the matter far more poetically and to the point when he called it “a marvelous oneness.” This is the romance of fishing. The intense relationships between humans and nature make the rest of world melt away; only the elements remain (fig. 1.1).1 No literary work captures this interplay more lyrically than The Old Man and the Sea. Santiago’s death struggles with the marlin and sharks 5

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Fig. 1.1. Leaving the beach, early morning in 1978. The 327-foot Haystack Rock looms in the background, a half mile offshore. The Kiwanda fishery is one of the very few in the world that goes to sea through the surf.

bare the phenomenological complexity of fishing, but elemental battles are not the only tales Hemingway tells. Around the edges of his novella lurk other stories, relationships mostly only alluded to. Deeper understanding comes from the implications of technology, community, and consumers. They are the sinews that bind and explain a greater whole. Risking life and limb to capture and defend a fish makes no sense without an awareness of the restaurant next to the dock and the costs that inhere in boats and gear. Santiago would be truly idiosyncratic if we did not see him as but one of many in a port full of fishers who only reemerge in the last pages to tend to the old man, his boat, and that skeleton. The confused diners and waiter stand for landlubbers’ mute ignorance of life beyond the shore, but also for the markets that give material substance to Santiago’s quest. The fullness of The Old Man and the Sea also bares a paradox. Santiago’s fight with the marlin, or any similar struggle to land the big one, produces intensely private moments, yet it is these deep experiences in nature that bind fishers together. Sharing tales over radios, along wharves, and in tackle shops, the Santiagos of the world find each other across space and time. Stories of toil, loss, and victory, when told with flair and self-effacement, consecrate like few oral performances can. The teller will caution, however, that even the best-told story never quite equals the original moment, nor are such events the only things that matter.2

SEASONS 7

The Waterboys’ epigraph opening this chapter implies that fishers seek escape from the trials of “dry land,” but actual fishers would scoff at such an idea. Far from an escape, fishing and other rural labors mostly compound their burdens in ways the uninitiated rarely see. That is why I wrote this book. I wanted to trace these challenges through a history of the Nestucca Valley in order to show how ecological and social events within the watershed were deeply and problematically linked to each other and to the wider world. Six families drive the narrative. The Redbergs, Fishers, Learneds, Gilmans, Monroes, and Wenricks all fished to pay bills, but their full lives and many strategies for living in a marginal place illustrate the complex dynamics of rural economies in ever-changing ecological, market, technological, and political contexts. Moreover, like Santiago, none were truly alone. Family, friends, and the communities of Beaver, Blaine, Cloverdale, Hebo, Oretown, Pacific City, and Woods faced struggles similar to many rural places. All sought stability in a world where markets and modernity constantly disrupted life. This part of Tillamook, called South County (see map 2.1), depended on farming, fishing, logging, and tourism for a very long time, and contrary to current formulations, work and play once complemented each other. Moreover, most everyone thrived or suffered alike. Ecological shifts, speculations, cycles of boom and bust, hardball politics, and government policies took turns enabling success and wreaking havoc. The worst episode, on the cusp of the Depression, unleashed a form of political-economic colonialism that still plagues much of the rural West. Tug-of-wars between urban and rural interests over who should enjoy the benefits of nature are not new. Nestucca history demonstrates how jarring and sustained those disruptions have been, but the history of the six families also illustrates the importance of persistence. Residents adjusted by diversifying and innovating. In the process they remade themselves repeatedly—sometimes to sustain a calling, sometimes to seize new opportunities.3 Dynamic adjustment, in other words, is a through thread. Adaptation was less an episodic necessity, something to fall back on, than a basic strategy of life. This is the significance of seasonal labor, something that often escapes historical attention even in stories about market agriculture and specialty industries such as the Carolina turpentine trade. Tramp laborers were “part of tens of thousands of neighborhoods and outcasts from all communities” according to historian Frank Higbie. “Indeed, seasonal

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laboring men helped make stable communities possible by arriving at times of peak labor demand and then moving on at season’s end.” Such work was no less important to South County, but it had a very different structure. Rather than relying on a rootless working class, residents themselves shifted from occupation to occupation and, sometimes, identity to identity across the calendar. Life in South County required a kind of SwissArmy-knife approach to making ends meet. There were no forty-hour-aweek, fifty-week-a-year jobs. Nor, for half of this history, did almshouses or relief work, unemployment or welfare or disability insurance provide a safety net. A farmer in one season had to be a fisher or logger or laborer in another season. When cows dried up and fish stopped running, or forests turned to mush and tinder, work had to change. The key thing is that South County’s seasonal labor force comprised not a mob of itinerants but local residents who were often also property owners.4 Nor is that world past tense. There was a time when seasonal labor was the norm. It is a thematic backdrop to pioneer history, mostly in the sequential tasks that made up the annual work of farming. We spy these rhythms on colonial Chesapeake tobacco plantations, pioneer midwestern corn farms, and twenty-first-century California organic fields. By the nineteenth century, the need for cash had complicated farm life. Moneybased economies and capitalistic investments were increasingly integral to economic success. Illinoisans periodically left the land to take work that helped pay off high-interest mortgages. Then, more conspicuously at the start of the twentieth century, homesteaders asked Congress to grant leaves of absence so they could earn money to buy equipment. It was the only way to remain competitive in a globalizing industry. The need for specie, and the accompanying importance of credit and seasonal labor, has informed other marginal contexts such as 1920s Appalachia, 1970s Alaska, and millennial mushroom pickers. This can seem anachronistic in a modern market economy, but such stories are less from a different time than from a different space, emerging at the edges of market economies, places less integrated into urban networks. Equally important, while the shapeshifting identities of seasonal laborers can madden governments seeking legibility and tractability, this mode of work was and remains the only way some people in some places can thrive.5 In this book I trace this pattern of adaptation from aboriginal times to the present. Two key moments marked the Nestucca basin’s transition.

SEASONS 9

The first was the coerced expulsion of aboriginal residents in 1875, the accompanying social and ecological reorganization of the valley, and, a decade later, the arrival of Linenwebber and Brown Packing Company. Farming and the cannery diversified an economy and fortified burgeoning communities in ways that, when the cannery closed, inspired locals to find ways to persist. Fishers learned to sell their catches directly to consumers, establishing a pattern of local innovation in response to distant events. The second transition came a century later when another generation had to adjust similarly. When local brokers stopped buying salmon, fishers sold directly to consumers, retailers, smokers, and restaurants. Similar challenges emerged in dairying, logging, and tourism, all exacerbated by a rush of gentrified development. Adjusting to changing economic, political, and administrative disruptions was a constant across time. When governments terminated river netting, fishers learned to catch salmon, bottomfish, and shellfish at sea. When lumber markets crashed, loggers and millers became construction workers. When regulatory agencies required milking parlors and waste management, or the co-op demanded greater productivity, dairy farmers acquired additional equipment, switched buyers, and found new ways to make their lands fungible. Underlying this dynamism was a remarkably resilient sense of self and an ever-deepening wariness of outsiders and the state, but how it all played out was complicated. After Oregon outlawed river netting in 1927, through a bill sponsored by Willamette Valley anglers, fishers and farmers spent a decade trying to restore their fishery. Their failure fulcrumed both a revolution and a determination to never to let down their guard. Most local disruptions began outside South County, and government often only seemed to make matters worse. Nestucca residents learned to be thorns in the sides of administrators and regular presences in policy makers’ offices, hearings, and forums. They organized mass demonstrations and published critical studies. Local wariness paralleled a more broadly felt distrust of government, yet residents never disengaged from policy debates. In truth, they could not afford to do otherwise.6 Eventually, neighbors mobilized against each other. Since the 1970s, natural resource workers have been ever more marginalized by rival economic and aesthetic agendas. Ecological and regulatory changes squeezed the margins of rural industries. Developers reimagined nature as a playground. Merchants catered to outsiders. Second-home owners made parts

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of South County unaffordable for blue-collar residents. Recent arrivals relegated farming, fishing, and logging to a nostalgic past.7 One irony was how these events united commercial and sport fishers. By the 1990s, these two tribes of fishers, who had long warred over technologies and allocations, found common cause in their shared marginalization. Here again, local gentrification merged with developments across the rural West as natural resource workers were displaced to make room for a class of amenityseeking tourists, retirees, and telecommuters. The efforts of South County residents to remain economically and politically meaningful bared another through thread. Since the nineteenth century, farmers, fishers, loggers, and merchants have tried to preserve what they saw as intimately and uniquely lived lives, but there was never consensus on what that meant. “Local” was not a homogeneous category. Residents debated among themselves and with outsiders, often disparagingly called “flatlanders,” what South County was and ought to be. The stakes were dear, amounting to a fervent desire among residents to preserve their homes, yet to do so they often had to adapt to and even assimilate that outside world. Again, they had no choice. Ever since resettlement, the Nestucca Valley has been integrated into a market economy. In choosing to be part of that wider world, residents had to tune their labors to external demands. Some embraced it with alacrity, others grudgingly, but all struggled to find a balance between home and away.8 That challenge remains, but sustaining rural resource communities has grown ever more difficult. Gentrification discounted blue-collar work, and the flow of capital has so remade some parts of the North American West that nature is now reserved exclusively for play. South County exemplifies the patchy, uneven effects of these transitions, but what makes it unusual is how part of it was born a resort destination: gentrification was always the goal for Pacific City, yet recreation was for a very long time merely one of several local industries, none of which fully sustained residents and all of which took turns complementing and undermining each other. Through it all boosters tried to lure visitors. Hal Rothman called such efforts a “devil’s bargain.” Entrepreneurial attempts to shape communities so they fit tourists’ fickle demands involved, as historian Bonnie Christensen puts it, “living with, fighting against, and tweaking around the popular imagery” of what a place should be. How much of that South County residents actually bargained for is debatable. Like freedom-of-contract ideology, heavily

SEASONS 11

capitalized forms of gentrification raise important questions about the relative agency of different actors, especially in marginal places such as the Nestucca Valley. To get at these problems, though, we first have to cross more than a century of events, so let’s get started.9

Resettlement A long time ago came a man on a track Walking thirty miles with a sack on his back And he put down his load where he thought it was the best Made a home in the wilderness —Dire Straits, “Telegraph Road”

The Nestucca bottomlands of grass and salal are deceptive. The stretch of highway that winds along the Nestucca River is limned by pastures that, like most of Tillamook County’s west end, are milch cow heaven. Indeed, the rain-soaked fields underscore why Tillamook is known for its cheese. Only north of Hebo does the valley narrow, and even then big meadows open regularly around Beaver and Blaine. North of the vale of Hemlock, a brief wiggle between two hills leads to the vast prairies of central Tillamook County. At the bottom of the valley, just past the Little Nestucca River and Oretown, rolling hills link to another bottomland around Neskowin. Only at the very southern end of the county does the road veer steeply uphill. For the uninitiated, the grade over Cascade Head is an abrupt departure from the dairy landscape; for the knowing, this sharp incline offers a brief glimpse into the heart of the Nestucca basin (map 2.1). Rising rapidly from the western edge of Oregon’s Willamette Valley, the Coast Range is a rugged maze of crests and canyons that in some places runs forty unbroken miles to the sea. South County’s highest point is Mount Hebo. Cresting at 3,157 feet, the peak is not the highest in the Coast Range, but for decades a military radar station there recorded the strongest winds in the American West. Powerful storms sweep in from October to May, leaving the basin a soggy and disheveled mess, but in summer the basin dries and bakes for months at a time. The heavy precipitation and temperate climate made the Nestucca, like much of western Oregon, a seeming paradise for midwesterners plagued by winter snow and ice and summer hail and tornadoes. Mount Hebo’s main significance, 13

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Nestucca River Watershed Tillamook

Communities & Reserves

Nehalem River

Nestucca River

Rivers Federal Lands

Siletz River

TILLAMOOK COUNTY Hemlock

Cape Lookout a ucc

state park

Hebo T ee Cloverdale s R i ve r Pacific City

L Oretown i le Meda N s t uc Neskowin Nes ko wi n C ree k

McMinnville

YAMHILL COUNTY

e

ca

R iv

Dolph

er

Cascade Head

r Riv e

Woods

tt

federal wildlife refuge

Blaine

hr

Cape Kiwanda

Beaver

N es t

Sandlake

LINCOLN COUNTY

Sheridan Willamina

POLK COUNTY

Map 2.1. Southern Tillamook County. Darkened areas are federal lands. The western portions belong to the Forest Service, the eastern portions are former Oregon & California Land Grant lands overseen by the Department of the Interior after 1916 and the Bureau of Land Management after 1947. The white spaces roughly trace the dairylands of the river bottoms. Map by Joseph E. Taylor III.

though, is its representativeness of the basin’s steep, heavily forested terrain. The trees that eventually became the focus of the lumber industry also gave shade to creeks that cleave every flank of the watershed and drain into one of three main tributaries. Aside from a reservoir that diverts some waters to the inland municipality of McMinnville, the basin tributaries are unregulated. The canyons are so rugged that the main river was designated a National Scenic Back Country Byway. Every winter streams become torrents that rush westward. When those waters reach the bottomlands, they slow, leap their banks, and recharge pastures with soils that enable all those Holsteins and Jerseys to be ruminating, pooping, milk-producing machines. This is why South County’s population has concentrated along

RESETTLEMENT 15

the lower reaches of the Nestucca, Three Rivers, and Little Nestucca, and why cows have long outnumbered humans there.1 The Nestucca’s other great treasure is its salmon runs. Five species of Oncorhynchus—chinook (O. tshawytscha), chum (O. keta), coho (O. kisutch), cutthroat (O. clarki clarki), and steelhead (O. mykiss)—colonized the watershed well before the last ice age. Of the five, coho predominate. What makes Oncorhynchus ecologically significant is their anadromous and semelparous nature. By maturing at sea but spawning in freshwater, the species function as energy transfer units, metabolizing the nutrientrich ocean and delivering that latent energy back to nutrient-poorer watersheds in the form of tasty muscle and fat. And by dying and decaying after spawning, these species recharge riparian ecosystems. Animals and humans scattered fish carcasses and transformed fish flesh into excrement that fertilized meadows and forests. Decomposers finished the job by converting fish remains into nutrients that have cycled through plants and insects back to juvenile anadromous fish.2 The first people to exploit this nutrient recycling system were the Nestuccas. The band was a subset of the Tillamooks, a Salishan-speaking people who had colonized the coast from the Nehalem to the Siletz. Like other Northwest Coast culture groups, they lived in large, protected villages in winter and ranged widely in other seasons. The Nestuccas traveled in every direction, moving inland to gather berries and camas and to hunt bear, deer, and elk, and along the coast to harvest the rich aquatic resources of estuary and beach tidal zones. Each summer they journeyed farther to raid or trade with rivals, exchanging fish, seal oil, and slaves for wapato tubers, camas bulbs, obsidian, and weaving grass. Like most Indigenous groups around the region, the Nestuccas relied heavily on fish, shellfish, and sea mammals. Salmon were central to their diets and culture. The fish’s importance was expressed in an oral tradition about a young man who catches a salmon but, instead of eating it, buries the magical being as an act of respect. The man then ritually fasts for weeks, and the fish responds to his act of veneration by transforming into a pile of dentalium shells, a form of Indigenous currency that makes the young man “rich.”3 Acts of veneration mediated Northwest Coast Indians’ relationships with salmon. Like other regional groups, the Nestuccas (pronunciation of the last consonants was between “cc” and “gg” according to anthropologist John Peabody Harrington) engaged in a form of restraint tied to the

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rhythms of summer. Warren Vaughn, who settled just north of the Nestucca Valley in 1850, noted that the Tillamooks abstained from fishing in bays and rivers until pelicans arrived in late July. The taboo was based on a belief that if humans caught salmon before the birds arrived, “every salmon would ‘get up and get’ and never return.” What Vaughn witnessed was a local variation of the First Salmon Ceremony, an annual rite of abstention every group performed to propitiate the spirits who controlled their staple food. In general terms, the first salmon caught each year triggered a retreat from the river. The ceremonial fish was prepared and eaten by an individual or an entire group, sometimes while an appointed figure recited a scripted litany. After eating the fish, villagers ceremoniously returned its unsevered spine and sometimes its heart or its eyes to the stream, always before nightfall, to thank its guiding spirit. Each village had its own rites, but all evoked what anthropologist Erna Gunther called “a reverential attitude toward the fish and a desire to treat it in such a manner that it will come in great numbers.” These were spiritually informed acts, yet they had material effects. By allowing many salmon to pass upstream during taboo periods that lasted up to two weeks, Indians ensured that enough salmon escaped to spawn the next generation. In the case of the Nestuccas, their dependence on the fish “that determines future destinies” begat acts of respect and restraint that moderated harvests.4 Indigenous dependence on salmon was real. When the ceremonial period ended, so did restraint. Winter rains, wind, cold, and high waters made fishing and hunting difficult and dangerous, so, like other groups, the Nestuccas harvested huge amounts of fish each fall and then retreated to their winter villages. Dried salmon enabled them to hunker down for five months, and to use that time to tell stories, produce art, and perpetuate their history and values. For these reasons fall fishing was a serious affair. It was also strongly gendered. Men owned individual fishing sites that they bequeathed patrilineally to sons. They also passed on their knowledge of how to build weirs, nets, and spears, and how to catch fish. Women controlled the processes that converted fish to food. They cleaned, preserved, and distributed salmon. Only by combining these sexually divided labors did the whole group survive the long winters of dearth. Given that Indigenous peoples innovated fish preservation techniques at least 2,500 years ago, Nestuccas likely followed this seasonal cycle for millennia. The prevailing estimates of human populations and dietary consumption suggest

RESETTLEMENT 17

they and other Tillamook-speaking people annually consumed nearly two million pounds of salmon flesh.5 These social and ecological relationships did not cease with EuroAmerican encounters, but they did evolve. It is impossible to know exactly how many Indigenous people inhabited the Nestucca basin before contact, but archaeological and archival evidence suggests the first exotic epidemic, probably smallpox, hit the coast in the 1770s or early 1780s, likely spread by visiting maritime traders and explorers. Other epidemics followed, including a devastating wave of malaria in the late 1820s and early 1830s. When John Frost rode through the valley in August 1841, remnant Nestuccas, Tillamooks, and Alseas still pursued their ancient rhythms along the lower river. The Methodist missionary described “wretched looking huts,” concluding that the Nestuccas “had but little of any thing else.” Frost liked the word “wretched.” He wrote it four times in one paragraph, but his dismissive prose hid a more complex reality. One man could not be troubled to help Frost’s party cross the stream because he was too busy fishing. When the man did land a large chinook—he was the only fisher during what even Frost recognized as the early run—the village served Frost’s party a “choice piece.” The hosts treated their visitors cordially, but in an unusual move, they did not offer the travelers extra food. This suggests that Frost likely arrived during the ceremonial period, during which one widely held taboo mandated that humans had to eat and dispose of the day’s catch before sunset. Indigenous fishers would strictly control access to salmon to avoid offending the spirits, and they were still enforcing these proscriptions on Euro-Americans in the 1840s. Seen from this angle, with the fate of future runs hanging in the balance, the Nestuccas were likely relieved to see their visitors depart that same afternoon.6 In the 1850s, aboriginal control of the watershed weakened. As Indigenous populations neared their nadir, federal officials began to segregate Indians onto isolated tracts to free land for resettlement. In Oregon Territory, Anson Dart, Joel Palmer, and Isaac Stevens negotiated treaties with many groups. Congress did not ratify the treaty with Coast Indians, so by executive order President Franklin Pierce established a reserve in November 1855, stretching 105 miles from Cape Lookout to the Siltcoos River. The Coast Indian Reservation was a sump. Western Oregon Indians were dumped into it, and poor support led to terrible mortality rates. For the Nestuccas, though, the redefinition of their homeland as a reservation had

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little immediate impact. Agency posts were located outside the watershed, and agents rarely visited. Even when President Andrew Johnson reduced the reservation’s size in 1865, and President Ulysses Grant further shrank it to a tiny footprint around the Siletz Agency in 1875, distant policy decisions did not immediately alter local rhythms. Yet in no simple sense were the Nestuccas a people apart. For decades they had traded with EuroAmerican settlers around Tillamook Bay, and a Catholic priest visited the area to baptize Indigenous children in the late 1860s. A group of Nestucca women also traveled north to Netarts Bay to harvest oysters—shellfish being controlled by women in Salish culture—that they then sold to maritime traders.7 The first newcomers arrived in 1870. A small group brought 150 head of cattle, interacted briefly with the Indigenous residents, and departed by the following spring. Five years later a larger and more consequential invasion began. The federal government opened the reservation’s northern section to homesteaders in 1875. Settlers quickly followed the South Yamhill “over the old Gauldy Trail to file on homesteads.” In June an agent and a former superintendent harangued the remaining Indigenous residents to depart, intimating the government would not otherwise protect them. Tillamook and Nestucca leaders resisted. They knew their rights and stated their intent to file homesteads, but federal officials were unwilling to uphold the law in this instance. A group of fifty to one hundred Native people nevertheless stayed another six months before negotiating an agreement defining the terms of relocation to the south bank of the Salmon River, just south of Cascade Head. A special agent promised land and supplies, but, as usual, the agency lacked the resources to fulfill its obligations, and the government did not compensate refugees individually or collectively for the appropriation of their homelands. Many Nestuccas settled on the lower Salmon River, including members of the Bilkawanda, Chiliwis, Klanashaw, Tootly, Kiawanda, and Iskia families. Others filtered back to the valley, maintaining as best they could their pre-1876 fishing, gathering, and hunting sites. Neither option went well. Those who moved to Salmon River faced violence from white livestock thieves, and many were later forced to relocate to a radically reduced reservation immediately around the Siletz Agency. Those in the Nestucca Valley saw their resources steadily appropriated by homesteaders. Indians worked as fishers, guides, hunters, and laborers. Some may have married newcomers. How many

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stayed and for how long is unclear. Article I of the Constitution exempted Indians from taxation and representation, so census takers ignored them. Nestuccas became figurative ghosts, haunting in an anonymous way the edges of settler tales such as one that Victor Learned Jr. related about how the last Nestuccas simply “disappeared” from the valley in the 1940s, unnamed to the end.8 In the meantime, ever more newcomers arrived. By 1877, there were enough to build a small school near the lower Little Nestucca River. The next year they established the first post office at Oretown. By June 1880, federal census takers had divided the Nestucca Valley into two precincts— Nestucca and Union—and F. M. Lamb counted 206 residents in forty-eight households. All but seven heads of household were farmers, and one of those seven was a stock raiser. The six others included three artisans (cooper, shoemaker, wagonmaker), a minister, and a widowed housekeeper. Like other early Oregon Country settlers, most hailed from the middle border of Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. There were only a few Europeans, one family each from England, Scotland, Germany, Denmark, Finland, and Portugal. Ages ranged from infant to sixty-eight, but most adults were in their thirties or early forties with large families. Again, like the general pattern in the Pacific Northwest since the 1840s, immigrants mainly came as nuclear households with unusual gender balance compared with other western North American settlements.9 Resettlement’s initial effect on salmon was minor. The forced expulsion of the Nestuccas likely eased salmon harvests. Unlike Indians, EuroAmerican farmers transplanted the grains and livestock that were the base of their diet and economy. Reorganizing the local ecosystem to support agrarian production involved tremendous upheaval, but the transformations took time and were spatially confined to the lower valley. Newcomers initially claimed only the most accessible bottomlands near the Nestucca and Little Nestucca Rivers. Much of this land was fit for pasturage and plowing, but it was flat, boggy, and dominated by willow and alder groves. Relying on fire, which didn’t work well in damp conditions, and human and animal labor, tree clearing went slowly and did not affect upriver spawning habitat. The combination of ethnic cleansing, few pioneers, and confined ecological alterations meant that Nestucca salmon runs likely flourished during the early resettlement period (fig. 2.1).10

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Fig. 2.1. Resettlement’s most extensive ecological impact was land clearing. For many decades, human and animal muscle power did the work of chopping, cutting, and hauling trees to create dairy pastures. In the early twentieth century, farmers innovated homemade winches to assist the removal of the Nestucca bottomlands’ huge stumps, but it was still a massive task.

That respite lasted a decade. Then in 1887, Linenwebber and Brown Packing Company decided to extend its operations beyond the Columbia River. Their construction of a cannery on Nestucca Bay was not an isolated event. The salmon industry had been expanding all along the Pacific coast since the 1860s. Andrew Hapgood and William and George Hume had first canned salmon commercially in 1864. Their first modest effort, on the bank of the Sacramento River, was poorly timed. Fifteen years of hydraulic mining and stream obstructions had damaged salmon habitat throughout central California. Hapgood and Hume’s net fishers simply accelerated the demise of once-prodigious runs. By the fall of 1866, faltering harvests had driven the trio to the Columbia River. The Humes’s ensuing success at marketing “Royal Chinook” triggered a boom. By 1873, seven canneries were operating on the Columbia. Two years later there were fourteen. By 1883, there were forty, and the salmon fishery was again an unstable mess.11 In 1876, the youngest Hume brother, Robert Deniston—commonly called RD—foresaw the effects of industrial expansion. Fearing the Columbia canneries “threatened soon to destroy the fish,” in 1877 he relocated to Oregon’s largest coastal stream, the Rogue River. And, like that of his brothers, RD’s success inspired another rush. By 1888, thirteen canneries

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were operating along the Oregon and Washington coast. Meanwhile, plummeting runs winnowed Columbia River canneries from thirty-nine to twenty-one. Industry consolidation was part of that reduction, but so was a very intense El Niño in 1877 that depressed runs all along the Pacific coast. Some canners responded to this instability by diversifying onto smaller, more distant streams. Linenwebber and Brown was one coastal pioneer, but although their cannery was part of a regional trend, it was also an important local story. Before 1887, the lower Little Nestucca Valley had been a farming center. Cannery construction incubated new services. Several families took on boarders. Sarah Boxley let her two-story house to men and women (segregated by floors), and Anna Christensen served meals for the “cannery workers, boat crews, fishermen and people living in the neighborhood.” Farmers took seasonal employment as fishers and carpenters. Carpenters found additional work building shacks along the bay and rivers for fishing families.12 Fishing was not an entirely new occupation, but the cannery heightened its importance. The last non-agrarian resident in the 1880 census was James Upton. Upton came from Michigan, his wife from Missouri, but based on the ages of their four children, all born in Oregon, they had been in state for a decade. Upton called himself a “fisherman,” so the census tells us that at least one non-Indian was fishing for settlers, and that he was “unemployed” nine months the previous year—an issue we will revisit. Thus, it is unsurprising that Upton and his sons Charles and Willie were among the first to fish for Linenwebber and Brown. The members of the other local family working for the cannery were Christopher Christensen and his sons Will and Fred. They too were regular netters on Nestucca Bay, yet Christensen called himself a “farmer.” Unlike Upton, he had to learn to weave linen, attach floats and weights, and manage nets. None of this was easy. The mesh had to be large enough for salmon to swim into but not through. That way the twine would entangle the fish’s gill plates— thus the term “gillnet”—but weaving a net that lay straight with consistent meshes required skill. Christensen also learned to pile his net in the stern, find reaches where the net would float and salmon were present, feed out enough net for resistance, and then, as Walt Fisher put it, “row like hell.” Christensen would lay his net in straight or L-shaped patterns and let the current carry it along a cleared stretch known as a “drift.” Christensen’s farm fronted the Little Nestucca, so he might have attached a “set net” to

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Nestucca Bay Communities Rivers X

Bottomfish Reefs

Cape Kiwanda

Woods

Nes tuc ca

Ri

r ve

Landmarks Hills

Haystack Rock Turnaround

X

Pacific City

Central Cheese Factory X

Li t

t le Ne st u c ca River

Cannery “The Jaws” Oretown Cheese Factory

X

Oretown

Map 2.2. Key sites in the dairy and fishing history of Oretown, Pacific City, Woods, and Cape Kiwanda. Map by Joseph E. Taylor III.

wooden posts in the river. Either way, after an hour he would pick the net, sell his catch at the cannery or to a tender, and then reattach the net to posts or row back upstream for the next set (map 2.2).13

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Federal censuses and state records provide some details about the Nestucca fishery, but they tell us little about people’s experiences—what it was like to be on the water and to handle boats, nets, and fish. For that we have to listen to the fishers. From their stories we learn that Indigenous and industrial fishing changed little over time. A narrow set of hooks, nets, weirs, and light were used for millennia. “Sport” techniques were reserved for those who did not depend on nature for food and cash. We also learn that fishers labored in the dark. A linen net might seem crude compared to modern monofilament, but it was effective when used at the right place, time, and tide. The problem was that grass or cotton twine was thick and conspicuous, so fishers timed their departures from shore to coincide with the nightly high tide. Salmon tended to migrate upstream during outgoing tides. This was when they reacquired the scent of their spawning grounds. To reach a place to set their nets, however, fishers had to row backward through the pitch black, aided at most by weak lanterns. The darkness only grew thicker in fog or rain. The Christensens and Uptons had to reach out with their other senses, feeling swells and listening for oars, seals, fish, and water lapping the shore or debris. And because they fished the lower river and estuary, where salmon were bright and firm, they always had to gauge their distance from the waves crashing across the river bar. Rowing, setting, retrieving, and cleaning nets with numbed hands, stiff legs, and aching backs—these intense environmental engagements reveal the limits of the word “work” for capturing how residents conceptualized their labors. Settlers did have options; there were other ways to make ends meet. Thus, while everyone fished for the money, many held additional motives for fishing. Their labors held meaning in ways that “occupation” or “livelihood” never fully conveyed.14 Fishing was hard, unglamorous work, but no more or less so than dairying. Every farm was a family operation. Census tallies recorded ever more farm laborers, but often these were adult family members. The enumerators did not track milch cows even though these beasts were becoming the economy’s backbone. Pioneer cows had to be hardy, but the amount of cream and butterfat they produced varied considerably. Work began before sunrise, and most of the family labored. In the idealized gender division, men worked the barns and fields and women the houses and gardens. In practice, boundaries blurred. Women and girls helped milk and hay when labor was scarce or fields needed mowing; men and boys

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churned and cleaned when outside work slowed. All labor was organic. Milking, chopping, splitting, digging, nailing, mowing, and stacking were done by hand. Animals performed some heavy tasks, but materials still had to be assembled and distributed by hand. Given the caloric output, feeding workers was a Herculean task of cooking, serving, and cleaning. Everyone endured the same landscape. Farm grounds blended dirt, excrement, and grass, mostly dry from July to September and a soggy, shitty mess the rest of the year. Every day milk had to be cooled, collated, and rushed to the cheese factory before it soured. The moment farmers returned, they had to dung barns, tend cows, and fix fences. Calving season was three months of sleepless, anxious nights, and a call for help—in reality a fast ride on a horse—meant another bill to pay. Relief came only when cows ceased lactating each fall, but the smell of ammonia was an inescapable feature of life on the farm.15 Little wonder some farmers rushed to the river for salmon season, but the attraction was more than escapism. In 1894, Ole and Eleanora Redberg arrived in Oretown with an infant son, also named Ole. Like other early settlers, the Redbergs were agrarians. Life centered on the farm, which the

Fig. 2.2. The Redberg family (left to right, back to front): Ralph, Louisa, Elma, Carl, Roy, Ole Jr., Ruth, and Willie at Ole Jr.’s homestead in the Meda area of the Little Nestucca River Valley. The bat-and-board construction and moss-covered shakes were typical of early buildings, as was the lack of ornamentation or landscaping—these were working landscapes. Photo by Clyde Hudson, courtesy Lorraine Eckhardt collection.

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young Ole rarely left until 1912. Then Ole Jr. broke free seasonally to gillnet the river and bay. Ralph Redberg, son of Ole Jr., later remembered that his dad was on the water most evenings once “the haying was done and the cows dried up for winter.” For several months each fall, Ole Jr. lived in a shack and fished most nights. The money, Ralph explained, helped “to pay off the farm.” Similarly, each fall John Dunn moved his wife and children from their Little Nestucca Valley dairy to the town of Woods, where the family holed up at their in-laws’ hotel while John went fishing. Farming, fishing, and cannery work were merely local variations of broader settler practices. Seasonal work had been a long-standing way to generate cash, dating to at least the mid-nineteenth-century Midwest, and as it had in those older communities, the influx of specie transformed South County from a subsistence and barter economy into a more complex, cash-driven agrarian, resource, and service economy (fig. 2.2).16 In the two decades before 1900, the population grew rapidly as settlers filed into the upper Nestucca Valley and established several new clusters. Traversing Sourgrass Pass and Dolph Junction, newcomers followed Alder Creek to the confluence of Three Rivers and the Nestucca River. There they founded Hebo in 1882 and, farther downstream, Cloverdale in 1884. John Belleque and Joseph and Mary Woods cleared the last timbered flat on the west bank as the town of Woods, while Thomas Malaney platted the 145acre Ocean Park across the river. The two towns posed a stark contrast. Although Woods grew slowly as a classic pioneer community, gaining a post office in 1886, Ocean Park was a preplanned vacation grid. By 1900, Woods had a general store, drugstore, sawmill, cooper, cabinetmaker, boatbuilder, and two newspapers; Ocean Park was a fleeting memory. Malaney had managed to sell some lots, but then the river jumped its bank in 1894, inundating the entire area. Realizing this would happen regularly, Malaney took on R. C. Magarell as a partner, relocated their plat a mile downstream, and built a tourist hotel. The new site was only slightly higher at river’s edge, but the rest of the plat sloped steadily uphill from the bank. In the next decade, merchants and speculators gravitated to the relocated town, and in 1909 they changed its name to Pacific City (fig. 2.3).17 Ocean Park was not the only casualty of the era. Just three years after opening, the cannery closed in 1889. The cause was unwieldly markets. Like other Pacific coast canners, Linenwebber and Brown struggled to profit in the face of global “oversupply at high prices” and then “unprecedented”

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Fig. 2.3. Even though Pacific City was the closest, easiest to reach beach destination from the Willamette Valley, it was still a small settlement in the 1920s. The plank road was the only local improvement, but extensive changes to the road through the Coast Range enabled many large motor carriages to reach the coast for a holiday weekend at the Edwards Hotel and Restaurant. Photo (July 4, 1924) by Dorothy Nash, courtesy Tillamook County Pioneer Museum.

low prices. The Nestucca’s small, inauspicious fishery seemed to end. Government records showed no cannery harvest until 1899, yet fishers kept fishing. In 1892, Oregon’s Board of Fish Commissioners noted that “on the Siletz, Salmon, and Nestucca rivers no fishing was done except for home consumption,” but the “catch of the streams combined may reach 50,000 pounds.” The report was misleading. Some salmon did go to winter stores, but local brokers actually bought most of the catch. Paying “ten cents apiece,” peddlers hauled salmon to the Willamette Valley, “where they traded them for fruit and groceries.” Closing the circle, the peddlers then returned “to the coast to trade for more salmon.” Without the cannery, the scarcity of cash meant most exchanges were bartered.18 These peddlers further complicate our understanding of seasonal labor and identity. Wilma Rowland noted that, when not milking cows, Heman Miles and Jasper Edwards fished all night “for winter use mostly,” yet they had enough to “[load] their wagon full of those big old chinook and cover them with wet ferns.” Rowland’s grandfather drove a team of horses “straight through . . . at night. They had to come up the Little River and ford all the creeks.” Their destination was Sheridan, fifty miles

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inland. Sometimes Miles and Edwards bartered for goods; other times they received cash, usually the same price as back home, “ten cents apiece.” Profit was less important than cash to buy the “flour and sugar and staples that they needed.” Peddling was less an end in itself than part of a suite of strategies in an exchange economy that only intermittently involved hard currency. Peddling also reveals the complexity of identity. Census records listed a person as a farmer or a fisher or a merchant, but many residents moved among these categories across the seasons. Peddling remained important enough that it continued even after the cannery reopened. In 1900, the Woods Ocean Wave reported that “P. A. Shipley left for the [Yamhill] valley this morning with a load of salmon.”19 By 1900, it took two enumerators to cover the Nestucca basin, now divided into the six precincts of Beaver, Blaine, Dolph, Hebo, Little Nestucca, and Union. Absalom Hembree and Samuel Rock recorded 1,235 residents. Agriculture predominated. There were many farmers, more laborers, and many, many kids, which helps explain why the largest pool of non-agrarian laborers was the valley’s eighteen teachers. The six cheesemakers in the census illustrated the industrial turn of farming. Farmers expanded their herds for butter and cheese production, and farm laborers were critical to this growth. Within a few years dairying became the valley’s main cash generator. The Nestucca’s social and economic geography solidified. Bottomlands across the watershed were cleared to accommodate cows. Seven carpenters and six cooks were spread across the basin, but the seven fishers, three sawyers, two grocers, canner, photographer, cabinetmaker, printer, barber, doctor, and druggist were all located in the two tidal towns of Pacific City and Woods; only there did the economy diversify. Recent emigrants came mainly from the upper Midwest and northern Atlantic, or emigrated from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and, to a lesser extent, from Ireland, England, and Canada. Three ministers shepherded several Protestant churches in the agrarian sector, while a priest from Tillamook arrived every few weeks to serve the valley’s German, Irish, Portuguese, and Swiss Catholics.20 The cannery restarted in 1899, under the new ownership of the Astor Packing Company, another Columbia River–based entity. It ran only three years, but its end did nothing to disrupt the fishery. As before, netting persisted. The state licensed five dealers and sixteen nets in 1902, and one dealer and nineteen nets in 1903. South County residents responded to

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uncontrollable markets by sustaining their fishery with or without the cannery. When wholesale prices tanked, fishers became peddlers. It was a local response to a global problem. Their dynamism was part of rural patterns that arced across continents and centuries. When Euro-Americans arrived, they encountered not a wilderness but a cultured landscape already transformed by people who fished, hunted, and gathered. The Nestuccas had used fire to maintain open prairies and berry and bulb production. They built weirs, traps, nets, and channeled streams to harvest fish. The basin had actually been settled for millennia. The newcomers in 1875 more accurately repeopled and reorganized the landscape. That Protestants, a people who defined themselves by rejecting fish on Friday, continued to harvest salmon suggests the sustained ecological and economic importance of the Indigenous ecosystem. As pioneer Alexandria Rock noted, “The first Industry for profit was fishing.” What was integral to the local economy, however, was only contingently germane elsewhere. Cannery operations from 1887 to 1926 reflected basic market asymmetries. Salmon fed and remunerated Nestucca residents, exemplified by how Ole Redberg fished “to pay off the farm,” but they were a marginal resource for an industry stretching from Monterey Bay to the Bering Sea. Company managers ran plants as markets dictated, but residents needed salmon either way. Conversely, without a persisting local fishery, it would have been far more difficult to restart the Nestucca Bay cannery after each shutdown.21 So who were these persistent fishers? For researchers they are demographically elusive. If we rely solely on decennial censuses, we find in 1880 that thirty-eight-year-old James Upton called himself a “fisherman” and that he was unemployed nine months the previous year. The 1890 census no longer survives, lost in a warehouse fire in 1921, but the 1900 census recorded seven fishers, most of whom were single men, and, again, two were unemployed six months the previous year. But what does this mean? There was no unemployment insurance or welfare or almshouse. There was no support for the idle, and when we add that the Oregon master fish warden reported thirty-two individual commercial licenses on the Nestucca in 1901, we are left with a math equation that cannot be reconciled by official records. The difference between issued licenses and full-time fishers is the dark matter of this history, but farmers such as Ole Redberg and John Dunn illuminate an answer. They bare a poorly documented but crucial feature of Nestucca life: no one occupation could support a person,

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let alone a family, through an entire year. Unfortunately, enumerators had no way to record such dynamism. The state craved legibility. Census takers demanded residents testify to the thing they did. The resulting entry became a simplified identity. Redberg and Dunn were consistently listed as farmers even though they fished each fall and winter. Conversely, Upton and other fishers toiled as farmers, laborers, trappers, and loggers when salmon were absent. Census records obscure as much as they reveal. The farmer-fisher was an impossible category. Seasonal labor remained invisible in the census, an otherwise crucial source for historians seeking to document the past. Paradoxically, we begin to sense this hybrid economy only by integrating government documents to expose the dark matter of life, and then by listening closely to the stories people told about themselves.22 The development of Pacific City after 1894 also illustrates the impact of fishing on South County communities. Malaney and Magarell gained several advantages by moving downstream. The new site avoided the flooding at Ocean Park and was much closer to the beach. The move made eminent sense in terms of enhancing tourism, but it was also a savvy business decision in terms of Nestucca Valley commerce. Pacific City became the closest settlement to the bay and hub of life during netting season. It was the most convenient dock for steamboats coursing the lower river, enabling Pacific City merchants to capture the bay trade from rivals in Oretown, Meda, Woods, and Cloverdale, all of which involved longer and less reliable boat and wagon rides. The Linenwebber and Brown Packing Company cannery diversified South County’s economy and injected cash that fueled growth in several population centers. The one thing the cannery did not provide was stability. It was left to fishers to sustain their industry during most years from 1887 until 1905, when Samuel Elmore & Company arrived to initiate a unique period of interindustry florescence.

Elmore I was a bayman like my father was before —Billy Joel, “The Downeaster ‘Alexa’”

When Victor Learned and Walt Fisher arrived in Pacific City as children in the early 1900s, their parents evaluated the area according to a calculus that was centuries old. Newcomers assessed nature’s bounty and reliability. They needed to know whether there was enough but not too much precipitation, the number of frost-free days, and the availability of game for a growing family. They also had to determine whether it was a barter or cash society, and whether the cost of land and goods provided a margin to thrive. Finally, they mapped the ethnicities, spiritualities, and politics of neighbors, and sussed, as best they could, the community’s future arc and potential contingencies. The primacy of subsistence might seem anachronistic in 1900, but South County was still a pioneer society. The population had grown, but cash still circulated only intermittently because of seasonally impassable roads that shut out the rest of the world from fall to spring. As such, the productive capacity of the household was critically important because the Nestucca Valley was still rooted in nineteenth-century ways. Local time was slower, yet it was also about to hurtle forward. Within a decade fishing and dairying had industrialized. Commerce grew enormously, and the most important spur was a change in cannery ownership.1 In early 1905, the Astor Packing Company sold its dormant plant to Samuel Elmore & Company. This was yet another transfer among Columbia River canners, but unlike the previous owners, Elmore immediately upgraded the facility. He had originally planned to replace everything, but in August he instead chose to refurbish, installing new machinery and a “large dock and tramway from the main cannery out to the channel in the bay.” Moreover, the Nestucca was but one of several acquisitions in a new round of industrial consolidation. Elmore was building a coastal canning 31

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empire that stretched from Grays Harbor to Coos Bay, with plants on the Umpqua, Alsea, Siletz, and Nehalem Rivers, and on Tillamook Bay. This might have confused the Oregon master fish warden, or maybe the state just saw it as a pretext for raising revenue. Either way, the state reclassified Nestucca as a first-class river and imposed a $300 license fee, the same it charged the largest canneries on the Columbia. This was ridiculous. The Nestucca watershed never produced harvests on the same scale as the Columbia basin, and the state quickly reversed its rating (fig. 3.1).2 More to the point, after 1905 the cannery began to operate on the most continuous basis ever. During the Elmore era from 1905 to 1919, it sustained modest packs despite thirty-two years of market fishing. For the decade from 1910 to 1919, the cannery averaged more than 6,500 cases (~455,000 pounds) of packed salmon annually. Most years wavered between 4,700 and 6,600 cases, but there were wild highs of 11,300 and 9,900 in 1911 and 1912 and bleak lows of zero and 369 cases in 1909 and 1913. These fluctuations were not random. The Nestucca was mirroring other streams in ways that signaled how broader ecological and market forces drove good and bad years alike. In 1909, for example, weather plagued the entire coast. Meteorological reports noted that “streams fell rapidly” in July, and August was “droughty.” By September there was so little water that salmon delayed their spawning runs and fishers had nothing to catch. Then, when the rains did come, Oregon’s master fish warden reported “freshets and storms made fishing impossible.” Catches plummeted again in 1913. This could have reflected poor spawning in 1909, since chinooks had a four-year life cycle, but coho had two- and three-year cycles, and their runs fell as well. The likelier but unrecognized cause was a protracted El Niño from 1911 to 1914 that raised ocean temperatures and altered precipitation in ways that suppressed salmon runs across the region. Most coastal streams were at flood stage for much of the 1913 fishing season. Pack records also revealed that coho was the Nestucca’s dominant species—an important benchmark when considering later hatchery practices—and that this was true for most coastal watersheds. The annual pack on the Nestucca averaged 3,463 cases (235,400 pounds) of coho and 2,211 cases (150,348 pounds) of chinook. Catch records also documented a modest decline in harvests. The 1919 season was poor along the entire Oregon coast, but the Nestucca pack was only slightly below its historical average.3

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Fig. 3.1. This undated photo shows the extent of the Elmore Cannery and attendant buildings around the time of its closing. The importance of the 1905 dock extension can be seen during a super low tide in June or July. The Portland-based schooner was stranded until the flood tide refloated its keel. Upriver of the dock, the Nestucca River was inaccessible to deep-draft vessels, and siltation made the watershed progressively less accessible in the 1930s. Photo by Clyde Hudson, courtesy Lorraine Eckhardt collection.

The Elmore era was a model of continuity in other ways as well. Will Penter had managed the Astor cannery during its three-year run. When Samuel Elmore took over, he rehired Penter and his son Harold to supervise workers inside the plant and fish deliveries at the dock. Locals such as Art Edmunds, Lyle Craven, and Jim Burke ran cannery tenders. We can still find their names on the receipts, called fish tickets, that they gave to netters at the point of sale. The most frequent signatures were those of W. Penter, L. Craven, J. C. Dunn, A. Anderson, and D. A. Miles, most of whom farmed in other seasons. The tickets are also our best evidence of fishery rhythms, including the intensity of fishing, size of species and runs, prices paid, and how much fishers earned daily and seasonally. Some nights Ole Redberg delivered three or four hauls to the cannery or a tender; other evenings he had few fish, and whole weeks went by without a sale. In 1912, the Elmore cannery paid 3.5 cents per pound for large chinooks weighing more than twenty-five pounds, 3 cents per pound for chinooks under that split, 2.5 cents for cohos, and a nickel apiece for culls—often classified as “chum”—because the flesh had so browned and softened that it could

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not be canned. A forty-pound chinook, not so rare then, was worth $1.40. A good set could bring $15 to $20. The fishery was not a gold rush, but salmon offered one of the few opportunities for a South County resident to generate cash (fig. 3.2).4 A very different socioeconomic geography unfolded inside the cannery. Elmore imported most of its laborers, relying as other Columbia canners had for decades on an elite cadre with deep experience in preparing and canning salmon. In contrast to its white managerial staff, though, the cannery’s laboring crew were Chinese men from Astoria and Portland, contracted seasonally by a jobber named Wong Jon. They marched in every August and lived at the plant until it closed in January or February. Those who cleaned, butchered, and packed salmon in cans were the highest paid because their skills were crucial to realizing the greatest value from each fish. Those who ran the boilers that cooked and sealed the cans were equally skilled and valued, especially in an era when food safety was a national obsession due to abuses in meatpacking and dairying. Cannery laborers were paid monthly, but they had no opportunity to spend their wages. The Chinese lived communally in segregated barracks, and Penter strongly advised them not to stray. Anti-Asian sentiment in the West peaked in the 1880s, but sinophobia surged again in the 1910s and 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan was at its height in Tillamook County. Parents warned children to avoid the “Celestials,” as they called the Chinese, but that only piqued children’s curiosity. Ralph Redberg and his sisters hiked from Oretown to spy on the laborers as they relaxed near the bunkhouses. The kids marveled at cooking with woks, games of chance, and what Marie Redberg remembered as their “chatter.” What they saw was an aging cohort of men, amputated from family by restrictive immigration policies and from friends by their remote location. During salmon seasons the cannery was their world, so they sustained themselves in ways that seemed exotic but were actually comforting pastimes, even survival strategies.5 This was the world Victor Learned and Walt Fisher entered as boys. Victor was born in Denver in February 1891. By 1902, his family was living in what was still called Ocean Park. The following year they settled upstream from Woods. In 1908, shortly after the Elmore cannery had started up, Victor began to pull nets for a local fisher. Soon enough he and his brother Alva bought a boat and net on credit from the cannery and fished for themselves. By the terms of their loan, they had to sell

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Fig. 3.2. Ole B. Redberg’s fish ticket for 13 October 1912, documented an extraordinary evening. The twenty coho and four culls were typical, but the five large chinooks averaging 36.2 pounds, and sixty-two medium chinooks averaging 23.6 pounds, resulted in a $56 payout, a bit more than three times the weekly wage of a skilled union worker in New York City in 1912. Courtesy Vicki Baker, Ruth Crockett, Louisa Farley, Jo Ann Love, Ralph Redberg, and Susan Strong.

to Elmore, which paid 2.5 cents per pound for fourteen tons of chinook salmon, and 1.5 cents per pound for six tons of coho. The brothers made $880, more than double what a farm laborer would make in a similar sixmonth season—but we should remember that, as cows stopped lactating in fall and winter, there was less work on farms. In the next decade Victor took a homestead, ran traplines, labored in a Coos Bay mill, and used his earnings to buy a soda fountain and pool hall in Cloverdale. Each fall, though, he was back on the river. His only break came in 1917, when he enlisted in the army and trained at Fort Columbia. His unit never left for the Great War in Europe, so he married Grace Edmunds, daughter of a former dairyman who ran a campground, hotel, store, and eatery in Pacific City. After discharge, Victor and Grace ran the confectionery and a sporting goods store for two more years before selling it all and

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Fig. 3.3. Like many Nestucca netters, Victor Learned (left) pursued several activities when not fishing, including wage work, farming, and running a confectionary in Cloverdale with Merton Everest (right). Photo (1919) by Clyde Hudson, courtesy Lorraine Eckhardt collection.

buying land above Woods. There they cleared brush and trees, milked cows, and raised three kids, two of whom would follow Victor into fishing and dairying (fig. 3.3).6 Meanwhile Syd Fisher, originally from mountainous western Virginia, explored the west coast for several years, making five cross-country treks before choosing Pacific City. The crucial factor, son Walt recalled, was the opportunities for “fishin’, and huntin’. . . and trappin’ and the like.” Underscoring the area’s remoteness, in 1912 the family took a train to Tillamook, a stage to Cloverdale, and a boat to Pacific City. Walt said the area was “all a dairy farm.” He was right. Dairying had by then become Tillamook County’s dominant agricultural industry. The wet, moderate climate and fertile bottomlands made for lush pastures. Cows thrived, but poor roads prevented farmers from trucking milk to inland markets. Instead, they developed more durable products. By 1900, local cheesemakers had mastered a recipe brought from Cheddar, England, and Tillamook was Oregon’s third leading cheese-producing county. Then, after several false starts, farmers and cheesemakers formed the Tillamook County Creamery Association (TCCA). The 1909 cooperative was one of hundreds across the continent, all established to protect small farmers from market

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agriculture’s monopolizing trends, yet these were challenging alliances. Members were property-owning capitalists, and at times individual and group interests parted in jarring ways. In 1910, though, Tillamook County climbed to second place in Oregon, and in 1911 a new railroad provided a faster link to the outside world. Syd Fisher wanted none of it. Instead, he lodged his family in Pacific City’s ferry building and began to fish. Like most netters, Syd fished the lower river and bay, making one to several drifts each tide. In between he sold his salmon to the cannery, a tender, or the salt house in Pacific City. Daily tasks such as cleaning and repairing his nets and boat consumed more time. “Soon as you got done fishing,” Walt explained, Syd dunked his “net in a big wooden barrel full of blue vitriol and washed it.” Also called bluestone, the copper sulfate solution helped preserve and darken the linen cords. Otherwise, “they’d rot fast.” It had a pleasing odor but was highly toxic, so Syd hung his “nets out to dry on the racks,” and attended to his other interests.7 It was never nonstop fishing, but rest came at odd hours. Downtimes were dictated by the tides, weather, and runs in a season that ran from September to February. Some days netters made one sale, sometimes as little as one to two fish; other times, when “the run hit all at once,” fishers could make four sales, any one of which could involve as many as 130 fish weighing more than 2,200 pounds. Then, just as quickly, the salmon passed upstream. Five days or a week might elapse before the next sale. Netters complained about the long, irregular hours, but these were minor irritants compared with more objective dangers. In an era before flotation vests, when most Americans still could not swim, capsizing was a death sentence. A tree floating downstream could pitch a rower into the water. Netters could be pulled under by a snagged line, or simply lose their balance while hauling a net. Most fearsome of all was the notorious bar. The Nestucca Bay is shaped like an aged female body facing inland, with breast and tummy defined by a sinuous eastern shore, rump and calves by a sandspit that separates sea from bay. The capacious estuary had many shifting shoals, and the river moved lazily until its last two hundred yards. Then, as the two shores squeezed together, the current accelerated through what locals called The Jaws. River met ocean at a deadly wall of waves. Caught in that breaker line, a heavily clothed fisher in a short freeboard rowboat stood no chance. The first recorded drowning came in 1889. More followed in 1896, 1911, 1914, 1915, and 1925. Inexperience and exhaustion

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were contributing factors. On several occasions, fishers went under while retrieving nets. Some were never seen again; others washed ashore. At least one man died of hypothermia after pulling himself from the surf. Chastened by these events, Walt Fisher followed his dad’s advice and deliberately swamped a rowboat to teach himself to remove boots and coat while treading water.8 Each loss devastated a tight-knit community that lined the shore. Every fall and winter, fishers and cannery workers hunkered in crude shacks along the bay. Most structures averaged fourteen by fourteen feet, with bat-and-board construction of one-by-twelve and one-by-four spruce planks and spruce- or fir-shake roofs. Interiors held a cot or two, a coal oil lantern, and a small woodstove for meals and warmth. Insulation, if any, came from thin wallpaper that covered cracks and, theoretically, shut out the wind. During the season these shacks housed a village, and although the buildings have disappeared, their stories live on. One Learned family tale related the communal nature of fishing life. Victor and Grace returned from Fort Columbia in fall 1919, and Grace bore their first child that November in a shack aside the cannery. Their son later recalled that when he “was a week old, a big freeze come . . . and froze the river over. They loaded . . . mom and me in the basket in the boat on the ice right at the cannery, and pulled it” up to Pacific City. Then a wagon carried Grace and child to her family’s hotel, where they stayed “until fishing season was over.” Victor soon sold his confectionery and bought a farm. One detail mom and dad overlooked was the name. The birth certificate read simply, “Baby Learned.” Born into fishing almost literally, “Baby” became Victor Jr., who spent his youth on the farm or in a boat. This might seem an ideal tutoring, but fishing at first held little attraction. “I used to go out with [my dad] in the river in the wintertime,” Junior recalled, “and dad sayin’, ‘look at all the pretty fish here, look at ’em all.’” Later known as Little Skipper, Victor Jr. eventually became a top fisher, but at that moment the nonplussed boy could only reply, “‘Oh yeah.’ . . . I just wanted to play with my [toy] boats.”9 Most tales dwelled less on fish than on the people who pursued them. The fishing landscape was a densely settled geography. During season, John Dunn and Clint Miles lived in a shack at Green Point, where the Little Nestucca joined the bay. Other drifts, points, and sets were named for people who lived and fished there. McLaughlin, Knoblock’s Drift, Butt’s

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Fig. 3.4. Posed around nets and salmon, Frank Bowles and his children celebrated a particularly good haul of coho and chinook salmon. This catch was likely sold to vendors, who then resold the fish to consumers in Sheridan or another inland town. Photo by Clyde Hudson, courtesy Lorraine Eckhardt collection.

Landing, Barneyville, Sellwood, and Werskul’s were but a few of these peopled spaces. Modern anglers still use some of these names, but the people who inhabited them are forgotten. Downstream from Green Point, McLaughlin featured a rickety shack resting “on a real steep hillside there, and it sat on pilings.” Dunn, Learned, Miles, and other men “used to get a bottle of whiskey or two and all gather up there at McLaughlin’s and start drinkin’.” These were rowdy affairs, and participants tossed empty bottles “out on the rocks and break all over. Pretty soon it was cuttin’ people’s boots.” After that the crew agreed to “throw ’em over your head backwards.” Women are absent from most stories, yet the narrator of this tale was Victor Jr.’s wife, Alice Learned, daughter-in-law to Grace Learned. Grace had met Victor Sr. through her brother Art, who had fished with Victor Sr. long before the couple wed, and her brother Ernest became a prominent fisher in the 1920s. The more we listen, the more crowded the shacks become, and the more we interrogate these tales, the more those shacks resemble an extended family. The year before Stella Miles married John Dunn, she had worked as a cook for Dunn and her brother Clint.

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Stella later told her stories to her eldest daughter Wilma, who retold them in ways that further expand our sense of community. John Craven, another dairy farmer who fished every winter, had an Uncle Jess who was deaf. To relieve the tedium of silence, Jess threw “rocks on a fifty gallon drum just to feel the vibrations.” Wilma knew this only because it “used to drive [Stella] crazy.” Conversely, Stella was amused by another woman who “used to sit in her chair out under the tree smoking her corncob pipe.” Each tale was merely a piece of a puzzle that, when combined, revealed a multigenerational village limning the lower Nestucca every time salmon arrived (fig. 3.4).10 The fishing village’s entangled genealogy was the leading edge of a diversifying valley. Population growth slowed once the bottomlands were claimed. By 1920 there were 1,634 valley residents, only 399 more than in the 1900 census. The main occupational categories were still “farmer,” “laborer,” and, largest of all, “none,” by which enumerators meant children, but the growing array of occupations illustrated how the cannery contributed to local industrialization. Cheese factories employed ten cheesemakers, and the TCCA crested $1 million in sales. In South County two other industries employed even more wageworkers. One was timber. More than thirty loggers and millers labored at three sites. Mobile platforms in Meda and Woods occupied four men each. The modest mill in Beaver was the largest ever in the valley. It employed five loggers and more than twenty mill workers. Some hauling and cutting was done with steam power, but most jobs still depended on organic energy. Work was brutal. Loggers had to hack their way to trees, beating back decades of devil’s club, salal, and salmonberry that had grown since the Nestuccas stopped burning the bottomlands. Handsaws and axes brought down the last mature trees. The operation was low budget. It likely did not use cutting-edge high-lead lines to yard timber. Instead, horses and oxen dragged logs to a steam donkey that reefed them to the mill. Injuries were normative, maimings regular, and nearly everyone in the woods had witnessed death. As a result, bodies constantly cycled in and out, and boarding houses in Beaver thrived. The entire operation was land-based. They used the river only to move finished lumber in small boats that carried milled boards to Cloverdale, Woods, and Pacific City merchants and consumers. There is no evidence of raw log shipments, nor did loggers

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build the sort of splash dams that scoured fish habitat with periodic flash floods. This was a break for the valley’s other major industry.11 Officially totaling thirty-eight individuals, the salmon fishery was the single largest wage payer. The census recorded only three people working directly for Elmore as managers. Those who labored inside the cannery, including all the Chinese laborers, are absent from the census, so the official data is clearly an undercount. Conversely, the enumerators did record thirty-five fishers—including Olga Fouts, married to Earl and the only female fisher census takers ever noted—who sold to the cannery or to other local salmon buyers. Some fishers were young itinerants, there for a season and gone; others such as William Redberg, Ernest and Arthur Edmunds, and Clarence Dunn were the sons of fishers who, in the census, still called themselves farmers. Conversely, Victor Learned, who owned a farm, always called himself a fisher. This one entry opens up a huge historical problem. Although we know much about the Christensens, Learneds, and Redbergs, they were not the only farmers who fished. The problem is that we do not know how many other farmers, loggers, and trappers made similar adjustments. Victor Learned’s census entry reminds us that knowing how many worked in South County’s many seasonal industries is an unsolvable riddle. That we know even this much, though, is wholly due to a glitch in the census. Previously, enumerators tallied in spring, a schedule they returned to in 1930. In 1920, however, census taker Alexandria Rock, daughter of a pioneer family, tallied the Cloverdale, Little Nestucca, and Union Precincts in January and early February, when coho and steelhead were still running.12 Rock’s census captured many nuances. South County’s economy still relied heavily on seasonal industries, but it was rapidly evolving. Again, the fishery exemplifies this dynamism. When the Redberg brothers moved from their farm to the river to set nets, or Art and Charles Edmunds holed up in a shack above Woods, they paid a rent to farmers to fish from their bank. Netters with means leased the right to run a set-net from the shore to posts in the riverbed. Such transactions stabilized a fishing claim, the kind that resulted in naming a particular place for a particular someone, but the transactions were also additional income for farmers. The census also noted three ministers shepherding Baptist, Nazarene, and Friends congregations, and immigrant French, Polish, and Swiss families—the Choperds, Heidingers, Hurlimanns, Jenks, Rusts, and Schneiters—led Archbishop

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Alexander Christie to build St. Joseph’s Church in 1921 during the Portland Diocese’s expansion phase. Nestucca towns gained hotels, boardinghouses, and many merchants, proprietors, blacksmiths, carpenters, clerks, cooks, launderers, salesladies, servants, and waitresses. Cloverdale’s business district reflected its agrarian setting, with a banker, barber, butcher, dressmaker, general store, feed store, pharmacist, physician, pool hall, and printer. Pacific City’s businesses bespoke its seasonal trades. The cooper supported fish buyers, and the baker and hotel served vacationers. Tourism had grown steadily since R. C. Magarell relocated Ocean Park, partly because the new location was drier and partly because road improvements over Sourgrass Pass made Pacific City the closest, most accessible beach from the Willamette Valley. That January a census taker noted a large work crew further improving the roads. By the 1920s, Pacific City also had several private campgrounds. In addition to their hotel, restaurant, general store, dock, and ferry, Dwight and Cornelia Edmunds ran a camp atop the aptly named Tent and Camp Streets; Fred Beals and Samuel Warnock ran another on Pacific Avenue.13 The 1920 census charted South County’s incremental embrace of modernity. In addition to the state highway crew, two steam shovel crews and a rock crusher were transforming the valley. Automobility was manifested in seven “chauffeurs”—really truck drivers—compared with four draymen, as well as several auto mechanics. Three people plus an electrician worked for the local telephone service in Cloverdale. Government was personified by a forest ranger in Hebo, state fire marshal and county road supervisor in Beaver, and a county commissioner in Cloverdale. Conversely, the Fisher family demonstrated the limits of modernity. Animals were still a main mode of transport, so Syd ran a pasturing service for tourists’ horses and draft animals. His sons were integral to this and other family ventures. Across the seasons Walt and his brothers hauled nets, penned animals, and cleared timber. Walt noted that a “fisherman usually was a fisherman; that’s about all he did,” but Syd “didn’t see it that way. When the fishin’ wasn’t good we had a job slashing brush, clearing the land. We got fifty dollars an acre and the wood for cutting and clearin’.” He added ruefully, “It was all hand work.” For all the newfangled machinery, most residents still relied on organic energy. Human and animal muscle turned the earth and downed trees. There were also still at least four full-time trappers. Life was marked by sweat, aches, cuts, and sores. Walt thought

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himself exemplary, but most South County settlers shared his work ethic and patterns, if not his ambitiousness.14 Like Victor Learned, Walt Fisher left home at sixteen, and like Victor and Syd, he always had several irons in the fire. Walt worked drift and fixed nets each fall and winter. Each summer, he and brother Louis raked crabs in the lower bay. They would “[row] down on weekends and fill up our fishbox full of crabs, perhaps two hundred, and bring ’em back” to Pacific City, where tourists bought them “for a nickel a piece.” Walt also went to sea. Back in the 1890s, William Scott, George Miles, and Rufus Whiteman found a way to fish offshore that avoided the dangers of the Nestucca bar. They hiked a mile northwest from Pacific City to Cape Kiwanda, a tangle of sandstone spits that jut a quarter mile into the ocean. Summer winds blew mainly from the north, so fishers rowed through moderate swells on the leeward south side. Their destination was the nearshore reefs teeming with lingcod and rockfish. Peddlers sold catches to mink ranches as feed or packed fish in ferns and raced to inland grocers. By 1910, tourists were an additional market. Walt was one of several commercial fishers. He once delivered three loads in one day, but he also rowed tourists to sea, charging two dollars a head and guarantying salmon when “I knew they was around.” Delivering fish inspired Walt to start his own mink ranch, and he built an icehouse to store surplus fish and dead calves that he hauled from nearby dairies. Bertha Hurliman later marveled, “Walt was always a step ahead of everyone else around here.”15 Walt’s stories foregrounded initiative and risk taking, but underlying his success was a physicality that also mattered. Early-twentieth-century male bodies now seem exotic. Rural American men were generally lean, wiry, and under five foot nine. Walt Fisher was exceptional. Photos show a burly, six-foot-tall man, and stories underscore his strength. Many times Walt rowed from Kiwanda to Cape Lookout’s south wall, twelve miles northward. This was an extraordinary distance, given that the return trip included a boatload of fish—but there were fish to catch and no other way to reach them. Oars in fact propelled residents everywhere. When John Dunn courted Stella Miles, he rowed a mile down the Little Nestucca, two miles up the main river to Woods, and hiked another mile to the Miles homestead. Similarly, when Walt was eighteen he courted a girl from another fishing family by rowing three miles downstream to the cannery and then hiking another mile over the hill to Oretown. The return trip

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“made a pretty good night out of it,” he recalled, “and sometimes the tide wasn’t right.” His wife Si was not that girl, but she still admitted that it had “to be true love.” Even at the age of eighty-two in 1989, the legacy of constant rowing was evident in Walt’s tall and weathered frame (fig. 3.5).16 Rounding out the symbiotic relationships between fishing and other valley industries was the transport arm of Samuel Elmore & Company. Wagon roads from the Willamette Valley and central Tillamook were serviceable for tourists and peddlers, but even after crews improved the route from Dolph to Hebo, roads could not support heavy freight, especially in winter. Shipping in to or out of South County was too expensive for surface transport. Steamships were the only alternative, but even vessels were constrained. The Della, Gerald C, and Olsen served the lower Nestucca after 1890. They ferried freight as far as Cloverdale, operated as salmon tenders during fishing season, and ventured to Tillamook in summer, but these were light craft with shallow drafts, not built to navigate the rough and dangerous Pacific in winter. The heavy lifting was left to the Sue H. Elmore, a ninety-foot, 232-ton steamer that ran between Astoria and Tillamook Bay after 1900. In 1905, the ship added Nestucca Bay to its itinerary after Elmore rebuilt the cannery dock and tramway to accommodate a large ship. Upstream from the dock, the river was too shallow to reach Pacific City. Even with the dock, river conditions had to be just right. Each August the Sue H. Elmore waited for high slack tide to unload machinery, supplies, and goods at the cannery. Each January it left at high slack with a boatload of canned salmon. In between, all these vessels delivered mail-ordered goods to merchants and consumers, and freighted fish, dairy, and lumber products to Tillamook, Astoria, Portland, and more distant markets.17 During the Elmore era, Nestucca Valley industries reinforced each other in ways that bared their ties to outside markets, but South County’s economic resilience began to unravel in 1920. Shortly after salmon fishing closed in February, Samuel Elmore & Company shuttered the plant, again because of distant events. Sam Elmore had died in a car crash in 1910. He had been an industry leader for thirty-five years as a canner and founder of the Columbia River Packers Association. His company carried on for nine years, but the death of another family member in 1919 spelled the end. No Elmore cannery ran in 1920. Will Penter’s grim task was to dismantle every plant on the coast. He spent six months mothballing the Aberdeen facility, then continued south to Nehalem and Siletz. It took two years to prep

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Fig. 3.5. This circa 1900 photo underscores the centrality of the Nestucca River in everyday life. As Walt Fisher remarked, “We didn’t get anywhere except by rowin’ or walkin’.” In the background is the settlement of Woods, with its unpainted, board-and-batten stores and houses, and the fire-scarred hills, a legacy of conflagrations that denuded the basin in the nineteenth century. Photo by Clyde Hudson, courtesy Lorraine Eckhardt collection.

everything for sale. In the meantime the Alsea plant burned to its piers, and an industry-wide shutdown left only Taft and Wedderburn operating in 1922. Next, the Penters moved to Reedsport, where Will managed the Arthur Anderson Packing Company on the Alsea River, and a full-page advertisement appeared in the May 1922 Pacific Fisherman listing for sale Elmore’s surviving canneries at Aberdeen, Nehalem, Nestucca, and Siletz (fig. 3.6).18 The cannery’s closure, coming on the heels of a broader economic downturn at the end of the Great War, further imperiled the local economy. For fifteen years salmon fishing had been a stable seasonal revenue engine for netters, farmers, and merchants. Elmore’s exit narrowed the means for sales and rents, but residents had weathered previous crises. Starting in 1920, they did so again. Art Edmunds had been buying salmon in Woods for years, and Bill Gage, working for Portland’s Burke Fish Company, ran a salt house upstream from the ferry building. Instead of packing cans, buyers salted salmon in barrels and peddlers continued to transport fish to inland markets. Tourism also carried on. Norwegian immigrant Hans Brooten had a vision of helping sick people. For decades he had mined a

46

JOSEPH E. TAYLOR III

Fig. 3.6. The liquidation of the Samuel Elmore & Company’s Nestucca Bay cannery and other properties required two years of preparation. In the meantime, Nestucca netters reverted to selling their catches to vendors, peddlers, or the local saltery. Pacific Fisherman, May 1922.

ELMORE 47

hillside east of Pacific City, certain he was part of a prophecy, and eventually he struck an emerald substance that turned out to be mineralized kelp. In 1905, he built a bathhouse and promoted the medicinal properties of “kelp ore.” As tourism grew, Brooten’s treatments became popular. He built more bathhouses. By 1920, twenty-plus bath- and guesthouses sprawled across the south side of Brooten Mountain. A Portland doctor opened a rival treatment center, and for a time patrons to both resorts further boosted the summer fortunes of fish mongers and ocean charterers.19 Nor was the cannery permanently idled. In 1926, the Nestucca Bay Canning Company, based in Oretown, restarted the plant. The pack was minimal, amounting to 600 cases of chinook and 550 cases of coho. The timing was lousy. An intense El Niño in 1925 had wreaked havoc on ocean conditions, and the 1926 fishing season was atrocious all along the coast. The Pacific Fisherman Yearbook reported that “the run in most Oregon streams was light and went mainly to the fresh fish market and into mild cure.” There would be no 1927 season, but the poor pack was not to blame. For forty years the Nestucca River had supported steady, sometimes large, commercial harvests. Coho were the most numerous species, chinook a distant second, and chum and steelhead negligible. The Elmore cannery bought most of the catch during its era, but netters never fully depended on any one outlet. When the plant was idle from 1890 to 1898, 1902 to 1904, in 1909, and from 1920 to 1925, netters turned to or became salters, brokers, and peddlers. Tourists were an important summer market, and an evanescent community thrived along the river and bay. Netters and cannery workers inhabited shacks, found ways to earn money, and occasionally slept. Tragedy struck. Romance blossomed. Families grew. At least once they all gathered for a Grand Fisherman’s Ball at the Independent Order of Odd Fellows Hall in Woods. From 1899 to 1919, the only years for which we have cannery records, the fishery seemed to decrease coho and chinook stocks only slightly. The few years when local harvests dropped sharply, the falloff was coastwide and stemmed from regional ecological and market forces rather than from local overfishing. Equally significant, ensuing runs always rebounded. The evidence strongly suggests that the Nestucca watershed produced stable salmon harvests across decades without much depletion. This important fact would be overlooked in 1927.20

Nadir



I don’t want the world. I just want your half. —They Might Be Giants, “Ana Ng”

The Fisher family was a model of entrepreneurial adaptation. Selling salmon, penning stock, chartering tourists, supplying fishmeal, raising minks: Syd and Walt worked hard to cover the contingencies. Economic diversification was a survival strategy in a marginal economy, but South County was never truly a world apart. The cannery, peddlers, and tourists, and the Della and Sue H. Elmore were sinews linking periphery to core. These ties were crucial for the Fisher family, but each strength was also a vulnerability. When Elmore closed its cannery and sold the Sue H. Elmore, market connections attenuated. When tourists stayed away, belts tightened. At each downturn, self-sufficient locals learned anew how dependent they were on strangers. In 1927, residents experienced a particularly wrenching lesson. On January 27, state representatives Arthur McPhillips and Walter Russell introduced a measure that struck at the heart of South County. The language of House Bill 282 was clear and succinct: “It shall be unlawful to take or fish for salmon or other food fish in Nestucca bay and its tributaries at any time, by any means whatsoever, except with hook and line, commonly called angling.” McPhillips and Russell sought to destroy a critical cog in the Nestucca Valley’s cycle of seasonal industries.1 The bill was not the first effort to regulate fishing. Oregon had tinkered with the spaces and timing of netting since 1903, when the legislature established a boundary upstream from Woods, a “deadline” past which commercial fishing was illegal. Deadlines were a spatialized version of the cannery’s policy of pricing culls at five cents apiece; both protected ripening salmon, which were worthless except as spawners. Adult salmon deteriorated as they moved from saltwater to freshwater. As they migrated upstream, surging hormones triggered complex physiological transformations. Males and females changed color, browning and reddening. Male 49

50

JOSEPH E. TAYLOR III

spines distended into grotesque arches. Alimentary tracts shriveled, and energy shifted from muscle and fat to rapidly maturing gonads. Flesh rotted before they procreated, which is why most Pacific salmon are semelparous, spawning once and dying. Similar to the aboriginal first salmon ceremonies, state legislators in 1903 also delimited the timing of harvests so early arriving salmon could escape upstream to spawn, and a 1915 measure restricted the length of nets to one-third the width of any stream.2 Additional adjustments over the decades had steadily restricted netting on the Nestucca, but because these were conservation measures meant to sustain the fishery and community, South County residents had supported each restriction. What Russell and McPhillips sought in 1927, though, was a very different agenda, one that had been lurking at the edges of state fishery regulations for an equally long time. One feature of the 1903 statutes had been a twenty-four-hour net-free period from 6 p.m. Saturday to 6 p.m. Sunday. The weekly hiatus had been a custom for commercial fishers. The break allowed them to clean and chemically treat nets, attend church, and reconnect with families. The legislature transformed that industrial break into a statutory accommodation of angling, establishing one day a week when sportfishers ruled the river. The Nestucca provision was not unique. Anglers and hunters had enacted similarly exclusive access laws across North America. The 1927 bill by McPhillips and Russell simply expanded a weekend privilege into a permanent monopoly.3 McPhillips’s and Russell’s attraction to the Nestucca, and their hostility to netters, reflected long-standing geographical and cultural biases. As the state paved the road over Sourgrass Pass in the 1920s, Pacific City grew ever more accessible. Some Willamette Valley residents began to covet Nestucca salmon, but this does not fully explain their animosity to nets. Anglers’ hostility exploded in a very public way with HB 282, but the disagreement had little to do with the specifics of the watershed. Rather, the conflict between commercial and recreational fishers reflected a cultural division in how people knew nature, through work or through play. “Sporting” first arose among European gentry. Fishing with inefficient rods and reels bespoke the standing of people who did not need to capture food, and exclusive claims to “game” reinforced the privileges of landowners. In 1613, John Deny first heralded this new pastime in The Secrets of Angling, but it was Anglican minister Isaak Walton who, in 1653, asserted its spiritual side. The Compleat Angler comprises a set of homilies

NADIR 51

about communing with nature and exercising genteel restraint. Across the next quarter millennium, the book shaped a pastime that evolved from a sinecure of privilege to one of middling leisure. The only constant was its classist equation of restraint with moral superiority. Only those who gave nature a chance were worthy of their prey. In North America, where government lands widened access to fish, “sport” became a consumerist activity. By the 1890s, even blue-collar laborers owned rods and guns, and cars and interurban trains made rural nature ever more accessible. By the 1920s, Portlanders viewed the coast as their playground, and sporting culture placed a premium on unmediated interactions with nature. The mere presence of working people, especially when pursuing the same prey with more efficient technologies, was antithetical to the recreational experience. “On the Nestucca River,” writes historian Lawrence Lipin, “the leisure and productive economies would not march hand in hand; the development of the former would require the abolition of the latter.”4 For all the sins committed in the ensuing battle for the Nestucca, we should remember that anglers did not start this allocation tug-of-war. Commercial fishers had been trying to block their rivals since the first expulsions of Indians and Asians in the 1870s. Their pitched battles peaked in 1908, when lower- and middle-Columbia commercial fishers sponsored two initiatives to outlaw each other’s gear. Then, in a rare instance of poetic justice, both measures passed. For a brief moment, commercial fishing was outlawed on Oregon’s side of the river. That debacle and similar skirmishes in Salem led Oregon’s Fish and Game Protector to complain that salmon management was “a football to be kicked about and traded for a vote for any political job or personal scheme that members or lobbyists desired.” Anglers simply expanded the war to include all commercial fishers. In Washington state this gained a racial cast when fish commissioner H. L. Darwin waged “a personal vendetta against Indian fishing.” In Oregon, anglers first tried to eliminate nets on the Rogue River in 1910. The effort failed, but anglers succeeded in closing the lower Willamette River in 1919. West Linn’s G. G. Green expanded the assault in 1922 with a voter initiative to outlaw “the use of seines, traps and fishing wheels for catching salmon in any water of the state.” Green lost his battle, but the war carried on. A month after Russell and McPhillips introduced HB 282, Seattle anglers asked merchants to help eliminate nets on the Green and Duwamish Rivers and Elliott Bay. The Sportsmen’s Association of Seattle vowed that if

52

JOSEPH E. TAYLOR III

they got sufficient support, they “shall not stop until the nets and traps are driven not only from our rivers but from Puget Sound . . . making our district a sportsmen’s paradise.”5 Salmon policy was transitioning from an era focused on industrial concerns to one tuned to sporting demands. As with contests among commercial fishers, conservation remained a pitched allocation battle, but the political balance tilted toward urban voters even as motives remained fuzzy. Among the facts not widely known in 1927, for example, was that Arthur McPhillips, co-author of HB 282, had extensive real estate holdings in South County. In 1912 he inherited deeds to many hundreds of acres of land on and north of Cape Kiwanda and along the Nestucca River. The value of his property might have increased substantially in a sportsman’s paradise, but this was hardly a sure bet. Profit hinged on a sequence of events that did not unfold, in no small part because of the effect of his closure bill. Nor was McPhillips the only sportsman with a material stake in the outcome. Polk County lawyer Edward Piasecki, Salem banker William Walton, and other real estate speculators had tried since the early 1920s to close the Nestucca to commercial fishing. Their interests remained masked within Tillamook County, however. McPhillips’s lands were not registered in the county deed books until November 1927, many months after the Nestucca’s fate was decided. The only fully transparent actor was campground owner Fred Beals, who, as the Garibaldi News explained, had backed HB 282 because “it might work to the benefit of Beals’ summer resort.” The bill strained the seams of South County’s seasonal industries, but the diverging interests of farmers and fishers versus speculators and proprietors had been a latent tension for decades.6 The legislative history of HB 282 illustrated how fishing interests had balkanized salmon policy. The first order of business was to decide which House committee would review the bill. Although the measure concerned commercial fishers, Speaker John Carkin from southern Oregon sent it to the Game Committee, a bastion of inland sporting interests. Eight days later, the committee recommended passage. Tillamook County representative George Winslow then moved HB 282 to the Fisheries Committee, which oversaw commercial fishing. The committee referrals mirrored an institutional rift between Oregon’s Fish Commission and its Game Commission. The two agencies had long served mutually hostile clienteles, controlled separate streams and hatcheries, and managed species in ways that

NADIR 53

undermined each other’s interests. The Fish Commission favored commercially targeted chinook and coho; the Game Commission promoted trout and steelhead, which were statutorily restricted to anglers. In the coming decades, as the Game Commission gained control of ever more coastal streams historically dominated by coho, it did its best to reengineer each watershed to promote its favored chinook, steelhead, and trout. In January 1927, though, anglers focused only on controlling HB 282. The day after Winslow moved it to the Fisheries Committee, co-sponsor Walter Russell motioned the bill back to the floor to prevent commercial interests from tabling the measure. It was a close vote, but Russell prevailed, twenty-nine to twenty-six. Resistance then collapsed, each subsequent motion failing by a greater margin. S. P. Pierce from the southern coast tried to “indefinitely postpone” HB 282 but lost, thirty-nine to eighteen. Final passage prevailed forty-one to seventeen. The six coastal representatives voting nay were more than offset by fourteen Portland-area yeas.7 Events accelerated in the Senate. The president immediately referred HB 282 to the Fishing Industries Committee. A decade earlier this committee had nurtured commercial interests, but by 1927 only two members represented coast districts: Marshfield’s Charles Hall and Astoria’s Albin Norblad. Norblad was chair, but most of his members were from The Dalles, Grants Pass, Oregon City, and Portland. The committee, in other words, had few connections with blue-collar fisheries, and it summarily recommended passage. Then, in an unusual move, Norblad took to the floor to criticize his fellow members and motion HB 282 back to committee. He only delayed the end. Three days later, Fishing Industries confirmed its support, and the senate passed the bill, twenty-one to six. Eight days later, Governor Isaac Patterson, from Polk County, signed the measure into law. In all, it took McPhillips and Russell twenty-nine days to outlaw the net fishery. Legislators gave little thought to local residents, but others took notice. C. C. Chapman, the editor of the Oregon Voter, a weekly periodical covering the statehouse, stepped outside his nonpartisan posture. He credited sporting clubs and the Game Commission for passing the bill, but their rationale troubled him. “It is argued,” he began, “that the interest of the entire people of the state, represented, we presume, by the interests of sportsmen, is paramount,” but he questioned “why the right of some people to make a legitimate living should be cramped by the desire of a relatively few men to flick a fly or cast a spoon.” Again in microcosm,

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the Nestucca exemplified the broader collision between knowing nature through work versus play.8 The bill passed, but its fate was undecided. Incensed residents immediately blocked anglers’ ability to enjoy the fruits of their victory by barring entrance to their pastures and, by extension, to the rivers and bay. By the end of March, the first trespasser was in court. William Martin of Portland pleaded ignorance about the “measures being taken by the Nestucca people.” He insisted he had not seen the no-trespassing signs, and testimony revealed that many warnings had been vandalized, presumably by outraged anglers. Tillamook County judge E. W. Stanley was unsympathetic. Miller had to pay a fine, and angling organizations had to regroup. The battle lines were shifting. Among Oregon’s Progressive Era reforms was a provision enabling citizens to refer bills to the ballot for voter approval. A referendum required a show of support, however, so the Nestucca local of the Tillamook County Fisherman’s Union and Cloverdale’s Grange No. 355 sponsored a petition drive to repeal the Nestucca Bay Fish Closing Bill. Union officers H. W. Southmayd and John T. McLaughlin, and the Grange’s G. D. Sanders and Adella Jensen, underwrote the drafting of a referendum measure and then coordinated the signature campaign.9 Hiring a lawyer to write a legal challenge was straightforward; gaining enough signatures was not. The coast was lightly populated, so petition circulators had to venture inland to gather enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. This meant working enemy terrain. Southmayd and Ernest Edmunds began to solicit in Salem, Oregon City, Portland, and other inland towns. They got a boost in April, when two labor organizations publicly backed their efforts. Support from the State Council of Fishermen was expected but not demographically significant; the Portland Central Labor Council was decisive. The PCLC’s endorsement gave circulators access to many labor-friendly voters. In late May the Tillamook Herald worried that “the fishermen are still having a hard job getting names enough to get the Nestucca Fish Closing Bill on the ballot,” but the following day Oregon’s secretary of state certified the petitions. The referendum had qualified. Next, a coalition of unions and granges—the latter underscoring the importance of the fishery to the farming community—drafted arguments to be printed in the state voter pamphlet. They called the bill “one of the freaks of the 1927 legislature,” blaming it on “horsetrading,” and emphasized the themes of work, home, and conservation. Closure would

NADIR 55

cast eighty men out of jobs, “most of whom have families and many are small farmers.” The measure would destroy a $100,000 annual industry and investments in buildings and equipment. It would also deprive the Fish Commission of fees that funded a local hatchery. In a pamphlet full of statements about tax and constitutional measures, the grange and union critiques were the only arguments on the Nestucca closure; there were no rebuttals.10 Sportsmen’s groups astutely decided instead to wage their battle in the press. They knew the election would turn on urban votes, and they possessed a war chest and ties to sympathetic editors. The result was a campaign that thoroughly marginalized Nestucca residents. In early June, anglers inundated Willamette Valley papers with letters, articles, and ads. One thrust focused on the economic rationale for closure. Hillsboro resident R. B. Denny argued that the “average fisherman on Nestucca Bay did not make as a gross return to exceed $275.” Claiming such wages would never be missed was simple, simplistic, and deeply rooted in urban assumptions. Denny misunderstood or ignored the critical role that seasonal work played in rural economies. The Portland Oregon Journal underscored the importance of editorial support in its large header proclaiming: “Says fishermen few and that the income of those few is meagre; State better off with Nestucca a sportsmen’s resort.” A week earlier the paper had editorialized for closure with a bit of doublespeak, insisting the law was “an instance where closing really means the opening of the river for all time. . . . How far may commercial fishing go before destroying the resource?” The editor also hailed the Multnomah Hunters and Anglers Club for its “devoted” efforts to conservation. The McMinnville News-Reporter ran a similar front-page article insisting the “commercial industry brings no direct revenue to the state, while tourist vehicles pay license fees and gas taxes to pay for roads.” The writer added, “Commercial fishing is fast exterminating one of Oregon’s greatest resources and drawing cards for tourists.”11 Ecological concerns were another campaign theme. One oft-repeated claim was that a one-hundred-thousand-pound decline in the 1926 pack signaled the imminent destruction of Nestucca runs. The actual reduction was eighty thousand pounds, but the entire coast suffered similarly. No one recognized it at the time, but a severe El Niño in 1925 had devastated 1926 runs. The extermination claim was even less persuasive when surrounding years are considered. The 1925 run had been above average, and

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harvests on other streams rebounded in 1927. The accusations of decline were an abuse of statistics.12 Anglers also claimed the Nestucca could become a “seed stream.” They imagined the river as a genetic bank: like interest, excess fish could be invested in other watersheds. Two days before the special election, a letter published in both the Portland Oregonian and Portland Oregon Journal vilified “the ruthless destruction of our fish” and asked the rhetorical question of whether “the people of Oregon want to adopt a constructive policy of conservation and protect this great brood stream capable of producing nearly 100,000,000 salmon eggs annually.” The number was pure fantasy; the seed stream project had been around for decades. Oregon’s master fish warden had first mentioned it in 1902, but he got the idea from President Benjamin Harrison, who was inspired to set aside Afognak Island in Alaska Territory in 1892 as a Forest and Fish Culture Reserve after federal fish culturalist Livingston Stone proposed the idea in 1889 .13 There were good reasons to protect Afognak Island; fish culture was not one of them. The first Pacific salmon hatcheries were established in the 1870s. They were hailed as saviors, but there was no evidence that they had any effect on nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century runs. Research later cast further doubt, especially once scientists established that salmon do return to their home streams, that transplanted eggs and juveniles fare poorly, and that homogenized gene pools reduce a population’s ability to adapt to varying river and ocean conditions. As one 1989 study noted, “Few of these early coastal releases . . . produced returns of adults.” The Nestucca hatchery, which began only in 1924, lacked the capacity to incubate more than a tiny fraction of the imagined hundred million eggs. Even Oregon’s largest facility, the Central Hatchery at Bonneville, could handle only a third of that amount. In any case, state hatcheries were funded by commercial license and poundage fees, which would evaporate on the Nestucca if the fishery was closed. An article titled “Salmon for All” nevertheless concluded that the “Nestucca is an ideal seed stream and should be used as such.” The Douglas County Sportsmen Association implored Roseburg News-Review readers that closure was necessary so “one of Oregon’s great natural resources may be conserved and perpetuated for the use of all our citizens.”14 From there the arguments turned toxic. A letter in the Portland Oregon Journal called Nestucca fishers “a small group who profit by keeping

NADIR 57

the stream open.” In the writer’s fevered imagination, nets were “so thick across the lower stream that it is almost impossible to take a boat through them.” Netters called this practice “corking”; it was meant to thwart a rival netter, not to exterminate fish, and corking was rarely done because it almost always triggered a fight. If the writer’s dark fantasy were actually true, then almost no one would have caught salmon. Another letter published in several Portland papers harped on “ruthless” fishers and “tommyrot” arguments. When a former warden criticized closure, the Portland News called him “criminal.” The Douglas County Sportsmen Association portrayed netters as “a small coterie . . . looking only to their own pecuniary interests,” whereas anglers were “loyal, patriotic citizens.” The Roseburg News-Review urged all “true and loyal citizen[s] to use their influence” against the netters, and a Klamath Falls Evening Herald editorial asked “every red blooded citizen who likes to catch a fish” to vote for the bill.15 At a time when Oregon voters strongly supported the Ku Klux Klan and antiimmigrant legislation, such rhetoric was designed to stir visceral hatred of Nestucca netters. Newspaper editors collaborated in this agitation. The Portland Telegram, Portland News, Salem Oregon Statesman, McMinnville News-Reporter, Banks Herald, and Roseburg News-Review reiterated angler themes in editorials favoring closure. Several papers placed pro-closure letters on the front page, while opponents were relegated to the letters section or worse. The Portland Oregonian and Portland Telegram twice ran letters for closure with large headlines on pages one or three, while the Telegram placed an opposition letter at the bottom of page twelve on the evening before the vote.16 Money, institutions, and a few individuals were conspicuous in the angler campaign. The Douglas County Sportsmen Association bought large ads in the June 24 and 25 editions of the Roseburg News-Review. The paper also reprinted a long letter about an association meeting just before the election. Spearheaded by Chairman David Robinson, the Oregon State Sportsmen Association purchased large ads in the same paper, as well as an ad on the Portland Telegram’s front page reprinting another editorial. Edward Piasecki, the Polk County lawyer who speculated in South County real estate and had lobbied for closure since 1920, published letters in several Portland papers. Salem’s Rod and Gun Club and the Multnomah Anglers and Hunters Club enjoyed favorable coverage in area papers, while groups opposing closure were aggressively discredited. The Portland

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Fig. 4.1. One of many advertisements that appeared in Willamette Valley newspapers just before the special election on June 28, 1927, the Oregon State Sportsmen’s Association emphasis on recreational “assets” was a hallmark of an emerging urban aesthetic, as were its simplistic claims about destruction and economic insignificance. Roseburg News-Review, June 24, 1929, page 2.

Oregon Journal singled out the opponents of closure, including the Oregon Sportsmen Club of Waterloo, the Tillamook County Pomona Grange, and the Oregon State Grange, which it called “ignorant” (fig. 4.1).17 Words like “loyal,” “patriotic,” and “red blooded” oozed nativism, but like so much else in the campaign, such insinuations were confused. Oregonians had long railed against unworthy people taking salmon from authentic Americans, by which they meant white Protestants. Threats to home always ran close to the surface. Home was where men supported and protected wives and children; it was a racialized, patriarchal font of republican values. Deviants threatened not just individuals but the nation, and the menace amounted to an ever-growing litany of negations, including nonwhite, non-Protestant, non-propertied, non-married, non-heterosexual, and, hence, un-American. Xenophobia in the fisheries began well before 1887, when two scientists noted an “unwritten law of the Columbia that any Chinaman daring to fish for salmon is to be killed

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on sight.” During the 1919 red scare, officials hounded immigrant fishers on the Columbia. In the early 1920s, voters favored candidates who would narrow immigration to western Europeans, and in 1923 the legislature passed the Oregon Alien Land Law to restrict ownership to citizens. A rising tide of nativism had catapulted Ku Klux Klan members into power at the county and state levels, yet ironies abounded. Most Nestucca fishers were second- and third-generation citizens. Tillamook County was actually a KKK stronghold, yet consensus eluded Klansmen. While Fred Beals supported closure, his fellow South County Klansmen refused to allow his red-blooded patrons to cross their pastures to the banks of a supposedly foreign-tainted fishery.18 Closure opponents struggled against dumb bigotry, but their strategy lacked focus. Ten days before the election the Oregon Voter repeated its views on HB 282, warning that anglers “may spite themselves” by killing the local hatchery. “Out of the Nestucca district,” it noted, “the state fish commission receives between $4000 and $4500 during an average year in poundage fees and licenses.” Without those funds “the Nestucca hatchery will be forced to close, and the supply of chinook salmon will accordingly suffer.” Whether the shutdown actually harmed salmon is doubtful, but the Oregon Voter accurately mirrored popular faith in the efficacy of fish culture. The Oregon Journal did publish the Oregon Sportsmen’s Club of Waterloo’s critique of closure. The club did note the hardship on local fishers, but it worried less about South County than the “hordes of ‘wealthy sportsmen’ from every state and corner of the world camp[ing] along the stream until the last fish is caught.” Ernest Edmunds, one of the spearheads of the signature campaign, published two letters in Portland papers. Eleven days before the election, he appeared on the front page of the Oregon Labor Press, informing laborers that “eighty brother union men will be deprived of a gainful occupation.” Beyond calling Ed Piasecki a wealthy snob, Edmunds did not truck in class conflict. After all, although he, his brother Arthur, and his brother-in-law Victor Learned fished, Edmunds’ family owned Pacific City’s dock, hotel, ferry, store, and rec hall, all of which catered to tourists. Ten days later, the Telegram published his other letter detailing hatchery funding and the size of Nestucca runs. The closest Edmunds came to an insult was when he said it was “ridiculous” that anglers could catch enough salmon “to justify the closing of it to commercial fishing.” That Ernest Edmunds was the best-informed letter writer mattered little,

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especially when the Telegram buried his letter on page twelve under the small, dismissive leader, “Claims Commercial Fishing Doesn’t Hurt Sport Fishing.”19 Nestucca netters found greater sympathy beyond the Willamette Valley, but the spatial distribution of this support was problematic. Editorials against closure were fewer and mostly in papers from similar places. The Tillamook Herald, Garibaldi News, Sheridan Sun, and Coos Bay Times all backed repeal. The only Willamette Valley papers to oppose closure were the Eugene Daily Guard, Oregon Voter, and Oregon Labor Press. Editors in eastern Oregon were detached. The Bend Bulletin weakly favored closure but admitted ignorance. The Baker Herald deferred to the Oregon State Game Commission, which “had studied the matter,” yet the editor expressed frustration that they had to address it at all, perceiving only a local spat of no concern to eastern Oregonians. The Dalles Weekly Chronicle expressed a similar sentiment, but it also wondered why legislators had not restricted netters to Nestucca Bay. Distance left editors with little feel, but it also fostered considerations sorely absent closer to home. Unfortunately for South County, the political geography of endorsements and cautions flagged a critical weakness: greatest support for closure came from the state’s most populous quadrant. Commercial fishers hoped brethren laborers would turn out on election day, but “it was not clear,” Lipin notes, that rank and file “support would be as unwavering” as its leadership (map 4.1).20 When the polls opened on June 28, participation in the special election was predictably light, and voters and the press paid far more attention to the ten ballot measures on property and income taxation than to the fate of a fishery on a small stream that most Oregonians could not locate. The final tally sustained closure by 53 to 47 percent. As with the signature petitions, netters needed strong inland support to defeat the measure, but election abstracts revealed their demographic weakness. First, although Nestucca netters won in twenty-two of thirty-six counties, nine of the fourteen opposing them were in the Willamette Valley. Overwhelming resistance came from Clackamas, Marion, Multnomah, Polk, Washington, and Yamhill Counties. None had a stake in South County’s rural economy, and several key antagonists came from those counties. Second, counties backing closure coincided with newspapers that criticized netters. Notable were Lane and Linn Counties, both of which voted against the closure and both of which had papers backing repeal. The Eugene Daily Guard was

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Astoria 1

Garibaldi Tillamook Pacific City

4

Portland

5

2

McMinnville 6 Sheridan

19

Oregon City 11

Bend

Eugene

27

32

14

17

Grants Pass

1. Clatsop 2. Tillamook 3. Lincoln 4. Columbia 5. Washington 6. Yamhill

Medford 7. Polk 8. Benton 9. Multnomah 10. Clackamas 11. Marion 12. Linn

31

Baker City 34

33

Ontario

36

35

26 18

30

La Grande

24

Rosesburg

15

29

28

23

13

16

Pendleton 21

22

12 8 Corvallis

Coos Bay

The Dalles 20

10

Salem

7 3

9

COUNTY MAJORITIES ON NESTUCCA CLOSURE BILL, 1927 SPECIAL ELECTION

25

Eugene 27. Gilliam

Klamath Falls 13. Lane 14. Douglas 15. Coos 16. Curry 17. Josephine 18. Jackson

19. Hood River 20. Wasco 21. Sherman 22. Jefferson 23. Deschutes 24. Crook

25. Klamath 26. Lake 27. Gilliam 28. Morrow 29. Umatilla 30. Union

Cities and towns Counties Majority for closure

31. Wallowa 32. Wheeler 33. Grant 34. Baker 35. Harney 36. Malheur

Map 4.1. County map of the 1927 Oregon special election. Darkened counties supported closing the Nestucca River to net fishing. Most counties in Oregon opposed closure, but the concentration of support in the northern Willamette Valley tipped the balance against the local fishery. Map by Joseph E. Taylor III.

the only major inland paper to support reversal. Third, vote totals bared the political power of the Portland area. Outside the Willamette Valley, closure lost by 6,132 votes, but it passed by a margin of 6,028 just in Multnomah County. Nestucca fishers lost at the ballot because of editorial biases and poor rank-and-file union support in the northern Willamette Valley. Lipin concludes that the “mass of workers seemed to have been, at best, uninterested in the matter,” but more than apathy may have been in play. Urban laborers were torn by the choice “between productive and leisure understandings of fish and streams.” Given that core support for later stream closures came from blue-collar voters in Multnomah and Clackamas Counties, the fate of the Nestucca netters presaged a long, drawn-out eclipse of rural, working-class fishing communities all along the coast and Columbia River.21

Pivot Can’t make a living as a bayman anymore —Billy Joel, “The Downeaster ‘Alexa’”

A few days before the special election in 1927, The Dalles Weekly Chronicle wondered whether the legislature might have done better by barring netters from upriver areas but letting them “ply their trade in Nestucca Bay.” The bill had passed, however, so editor Ben Liftin, a Minnesotan and staunch Republican, advised voters to give it “a trial, at least.” He peppered his endorsement with contingencies. If the state learned that commercial fishing can be done in the bay “without threat to the fish supply in the river,” then “it should be easy to amend the law.” Liftin was naive. Salmon politics was a blood sport. Once a harvest was reallocated, winners never let losers back in the game. The Nestucca was an object lesson. During the next eight years, netters tried repeatedly to reestablish their fishery. They failed, and little but wreckage followed. Anglers’ predicted boom fizzled, but every feared outcome came to pass: the hatchery closed, fishers became outlaws, local businesses died, and people left town. Like elsewhere in the rural West, the Great Depression began in South County well before the Wall Street crash, and closure only exacerbated the next two decades of hard times. By the end, though, residents had reinvented themselves, pivoting from river to ocean while innovating a fishery like nothing ever seen on the Pacific coast.1 Attempts to restore netting began in 1931. Tillamook representative George Winslow introduced House Bill 225 to permit nets in the Nestucca’s tidal waters during October and November. The bill severely limited the fishing season, but fishers and farmers were willing to concede a lot to bolster their economy. As in 1927, committee referrals and Willamette Valley votes determined the outcome. Speaker Frank Lonergan, from Portland, sent HB 225 to the Fisheries Committee. The committee had only two coastal representatives from Astoria and Port Orford, and it reported without recommendation nine days later. Winslow re-referred 63

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to lobby further and got his recommendation the next day, but inland representatives swatted down the bill on the floor.2 Two years later, Tillamook County’s state senator Peter Zimmerman submitted SB 170. This “emergency measure” declared it “necessary for immediate preservation of the public peace, health and safety.” The “peace” issue, as will become apparent, was real. Senate president Fred Kiddle from central Oregon sent the bill to the Game Committee. The bastion of sporting interests quickly rejected it. The floor then adopted the report, twenty-four to six. All three coastal senators rose in opposition, but they were outnumbered by the Willamette Valley’s sixteen senators. Just in case anyone thought this was about conservation, the same legislature passed a “depression measure” to allow anglers to sell their catches. Both chambers approved the bill, but provisions for the Nestucca and most other streams were eliminated in conference. The bill’s urban angler bias was underscored when the final text allowed commercial angling only in the Willamette River at Oregon City and the Willamette Slough in Salem, two reaches that had been among the first to be closed to commercial fishing in the 1910s.3 Sporting groups tried to preempt any pro-netting bill in the 1935 session. Portland clubs repeated all their arguments from the 1927 campaign: greedy netters wanted to destroy salmon runs; nets blockaded streams; fishing was economically negligible; angling added “more than $2” per fish to the economy. One writer hailed “the splendid work which had been done by the state game commission” to keep Oregon as a “sportsman’s paradise.” None of it was true. The crisis Senator Zimmerman described in 1933 was real. Ole Redberg, the dairy farmer who had paid off his farm as a seasonal netter, told Oregon’s state grange master that local businesses that had “worked for the closing of the bay to comerciall [sic] fishing . . . thinking that it would help their resort, now admit that it was a mistake and are asking for the reopening.” Each fall cash dried up with the cows. Angling’s supposed multiplier effect never materialized. Redberg’s neighbor Curtis Carver owned “the fishing resort at the bridge on the Little Nestucca.” Carver “built about a dozen boats at the closing of the bay,” but the angler invasion never arrived. In the years since, Carver had not “taken in enough on the rent of those boats to pay for them.” Carver, other businesses, county granges, fishing unions, the Tillamook County Creamery Association, and a petition of residents all “asked for the opening of the Nestucca to Comerciall fishing.”4

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Representative Jack Caufield tried again to legalize nets, this time conceding even more. His proposed season ran from July to November, but sportfishers got the river to themselves all weekend and nets were confined to the bay, which meant losing several miles of known drifts on the lower Nestucca and Little Nestucca. As usual the bill triggered a tug-of-war over committee referral. Speaker John Little of Toledo on the Oregon coast sent HB 191 to the Fisheries Committee, this session filled mainly by coastal representatives. Six days later the committee chair submitted a favorable report, so Portland representative Charles Leach re-referred the bill to his Game Committee. The next day Caufield motioned HB 191 back to Fisheries. A member of the Game Committee from Milwaukee tried to block the move, but Caufield won, thirty-three to twenty-six. Later that day another Portland representative challenged the motion but lost, thirty to twentyseven. The bill survived, but its margin shrank with each roll call. A week later Fisheries reported HB 191 back to the floor for a final vote, and once again Willamette Valley representatives defeated a Nestucca measure, thirty to twenty-seven. The sense of déjà vu only deepened when the editor of the Oregon Voter complained about how the “Ruthless selfishness of sportsmen prevailed over the desire of farmer fishermen to earn their livelihood.” C. C. Chapman seethed, “Multnomah sportsmen . . . resent letting commercial fishermen have the right of way.” Anglers were “determined to defeat this bill” and any other on every “stream within their touring range.” Anglers succeeded in killing the net fishery—the consequences of which they never owned—but the responsibility was not theirs alone. Urbanites of all classes increasingly believed that rural resources belonged first and foremost to cities.5 HB 191 was the last effort to restore commercial netting. Walt Fisher later remarked that “We was mostly just stubborn,” but he also recalled that “a lot of people left.” The reasons were many. The completion of the Salmon River cutoff in 1929 made Highway 18 to Lincoln County a safer, faster route to the coast; the road down the Little Nestucca still required fording streams. Ole Redberg noted that South County’s tourist industry largely died. Hans Brooten’s and Dr. Jackson’s kelp ore baths and bottled elixirs thrived in the early 1920s, but medical debunkers and patent lawsuits damaged their brands. A tubercular patient then delivered the coup de grace by infecting the Brootens. The resort closed in 1933. Most of the family died within a decade. Oretown shrank to a church and cheese factory. Woods

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lost its post office and most of its businesses. Wilma Rowland recalled Pacific City bottoming out at seven residents. The census data suggests a less bleak picture, but there were marked disparities across the basin. The fishing community vanished, as did most tourists. The Blaine and Pacific City census precincts had lost a sixth of their populations by 1930, yet Beaver, Cloverdale, and Hebo grew. There were in fact more workers at the valley’s three modest sawmills in 1930, and more employed at schools, road crews, post offices, the state hatchery, and the Forest Service. Dairying was still the largest and most stable industry. Half again as many cheesemakers produced ever more cheddar at the six cheese factories. There were also more truck farms and stock and mink ranches. The watershed’s population rose by ninety-six people in 1930, the increase solely due to mother’s wombs. Immigration had ceased after 1924, and there had been no official record of a Nestucca Indian in the valley for decades. Indigenous presence was always complicated, however. Reservations were porous. Residents came and left at will, often by invitation, visiting South County to work as seasonal laborers, to gather berries and shellfish at accustomed places, and even to play arranged games with local baseball teams. More and more, though, they were visitors in their homeland. Indigenous people did not lose hope of returning to, or at least being compensated for, the lands taken from them. Members of the Siletz Reservation filed several Court of Claims cases to secure payment for the unratified 1855 treaty and for later reductions in the size of the reservation and extreme allotment policies, but court decisions in the 1930s and 1940s either denied their claims or drastically undervalued their losses (fig. 5.1).6 For those who still lived in the Nestucca Valley, the loss of the net fishery ramified in predictable yet complicated ways. The state salmon hatchery was the most overdetermined casualty. During the referendum campaign, the Oregon Voter pointed out the many fallacies of anglers’ “seed stream” scheme, noting especially that hatcheries were funded by commercial license and poundage fees. Anglers denied the problem, insisting funds and hatcheries were “state resources” that belonged to everyone, not just “greedy” netters. The inference, because sportsmen never really elaborated their theories, was that the state would surely reallocate funds. They seemed to assume that net fishers on other streams would happily subsidize a user group intent on their destruction. Anglers would not or could not acknowledge funding structures, the political implications of

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Fig. 5.1. In the years after the Brooten family closed their kelp ore business, the sprawling complex of baths and guesthouses began to decay. By the end of the 1930s, South County’s campgrounds and health resorts had collapsed, and the tourist industry had begun to reinvent itself as an angler haven. Photo by Clyde Hudson, courtesy Lorraine Eckhardt collection.

their agendas, or the effects of lost revenues. The fiscal effects of closure were immediate. The Oregon Fish Commission had begun hatchery work in the Nestucca basin only in 1924. The first site was located upstream from Hebo on Three Rivers. The next spring workers relocated to nearby Little West Creek, spending “considerable” sums to build and landscape. The hatch of spring-run chinook in 1925—not the river’s dominant species—resulted in 2.5 million fry. This sounds impressive, but releases fared poorly. Birds and fish ate most fry. Hatch numbers in 1926 jumped to ten million. Workers also cultivated more species, including fall chinook, coho, and steelhead. Releases fell in 1927 because of the poor 1926 run. Then work ceased. Without funds, workers closed the facility and transferred eggs to a hatchery twenty miles to the north. In spring 1929, Trask Hatchery workers transplanted some fry back to the Nestucca, but the fish were a mix of parentage from several Tillamook streams. Transplants were sporadic through 1934. From 1935, when a Portland angler complimented the state Game Commission’s “splendid work,” to 1949, the state of Oregon planted zero salmon in the Nestucca basin.7 The hatchery’s early death was not all bad news. By the mid-1930s, fishery biologists had reached consensus on several points, all of which

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suggested that existing fish cultural practices were not just incompetent but damaging. As early as 1922, Willis Rich, a Stanford University zoologist who also worked for the US Bureau of Fisheries and Oregon Fish Commission, conducted a systemic review of salmon hatcheries on the Pacific coast. Rich concluded that there was no evidence to support claims that fish culture had ever improved runs. Further work by him and other American and Canadian researchers culminated in a 1939 paper that definitively established that all anadromous species of Oncorhynchus mainly returned to their natal spawning grounds, or redds, what Rich called the “home stream theory.” By that point Canadian scientists had reproduced Rich’s findings and demonstrated that transferring eggs from stream to stream had no positive effect. Later research suggested that moving fish across watersheds—in essence the seed stream scheme—actually undermined local resilience by homogenizing genetic diversity. In retrospect, much of what had passed as scientific fish culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was bunk. In a perverse way, the Nestucca hatchery’s very haplessness was its saving grace. Operations were so short-lived, and plantings so small, that hatchery workers never got a chance to wreak havoc. Defunding was a sort of ecological mercy killing.8 In retrospect, the loss of netters may have been more damaging. Commercial fishers had a vested interest in large salmon runs and clean rivers. Every year they voluntarily patrolled the lower Nestucca to clear log jams and remove snags that fouled nets and damaged boats. They also watched for changes in stream turbidity that signaled problems with pollution or siltation. Their attentions flowed from self-interest, but they benefited other residents and fish. Clearing snags eased passage for the supply boats that traveled the lower river, thus aiding producers and consumers who relied on shipping. Removing sunken logs and trunks also helped prevent log jams that flooded pastures and blocked fish passage. Large woody debris in tidal areas did not play the same ecological role that it did upstream, where downed trees formed pools for juvenile and adult fish. The effects became apparent once the fishing community dispersed and logging began to accelerate. The lower watershed steadily silted. Each year more snags appeared. Eventually ships could no longer even reach Woods except at high tide. When legislators shut down the fishery, they undermined the interests of other industries and residents who depended on the river. Most bitter of all, two Oregon Fish Commission researchers

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eventually concluded that “the elimination of commercial fishing on some coastal streams has by no means resulted in any phenomenal increase in the runs or improvement in the recreational fishery.”9 Other coastal watersheds shared the Nestucca’s fate, and anglers were behind every disruption. The initiative process dragged voters back into the ugliness of salmon politics in 1932, 1941, and 1946. In the 1932 general election, Oregonians decided by a wide margin to overturn a law that had closed the Rogue River to nets. Depression-era suffering played a role in this referendum, but Willamette Valley voters also seemed apathetic. The Rogue was too far away for many to care. Only urban voters in southern Oregon’s Jackson and Josephine Counties, and in the far eastern counties of Union and Wallowa, voted for closure. In November 1941, voters similarly rejected an initiative to close many coastal streams. The angler campaign was not well funded, and the Depression was still a concern. Coastal economies had not yet recovered. The reprieve lasted half a decade. In the 1946 general election, Portland sportsmen spent lavishly on a newspaper campaign to end netting in every coastal stream. Their investments paid handsomely. The final tally showed only Clatsop, Morrow, and Wasco Counties opposing closure; Multnomah County single-handedly negated this margin.10 Oregon was merely a chapter in a long history of dispossession. Conserving nature to enhance economic, recreational, and scenic values began in the twelfth century. In Britain and Europe, lands were cleared via a process called enclosure that was sanctioned by parliaments and crowns but effected by property holders. In North America, governments owned most lands and all wildlife, so the state took the lead. The means varied, but the ends were identical. European peasants were evicted and their ancient rights to resources severed; North American Indigenous people were incarcerated to create parks and wildernesses. White supremacists in the American South used conservation as a pretext to extend Jim Crow restrictions to forests and streams. Midwesterners used conservation laws to persecute ethnic hunters, and sporting groups pushed lawmakers to redefine subsistence and market hunters and fishers as poachers in the Northeast, Rockies, and Southwest. Commercial fishers and anglers worked together to eliminate Indigenous fisheries in New Brunswick, the Great Lakes, British Columbia, and the Pacific Northwest before battling each other over who would catch the last fish. Ernest Edmunds, Walt Fisher,

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Victor Learned, and Ole Redberg were merely the most recent targets in an eight-century environmental pogrom that deracinated landscapes of their humans and histories.11 Pushed to its extreme, an ideology that equated authentic nature with untrod spaces regularly blurred into misanthropy, but the dispossessed did not meekly accept their fate. The European countryside was beset by riots, vandalism, and poaching, and parliaments eventually curbed property rights to accommodate a wide range of customary practices that never ceased with enclosure. In North America, violence was conservation’s most predictable outcome. Game and fish wardens shot poachers, and poachers shot back. Guerilla warfare engulfed blue-collar hunters, fishers, and loggers in Adirondack Park for decades. Scholars and courts only belatedly recognized that poaching crimes were embedded in histories of class and spatial oppression, and that these conflicts were a helluva lot more complicated than simple tales of greed. Yet, although Indigenous fishers were targeted across the continent, they have also been the most successful at persuading American and Canadian courts to overturn restrictions. Federal agencies overseeing parks and monuments in both countries have also learned to accommodate aboriginal people to enhance equity and ecological stability.12 These insights still lay in the distant future in the 1930s. The only thing Nestucca netters knew was that they had been torn from a calling. Walt Fisher recalled that “after they closed the river there was none of us that made a living, but,” he added with a conspiratorial wink, “some of us fished.” Netting was still legal on other coastal streams, so Fisher, Learned, and others tried to work Tillamook Bay and Siletz River. It was not easy. Each river was its own ecological puzzle. It took years to learn a drift, and the best sets were jealously guarded. The more they struggled on distant waters, the more they were tempted to ply their home stream. A rogue cadre quietly emerged with Fisher, Learned, Charlie Edmunds, Wayne and Floyd Franklin, Vern Jackson, and Clarence Holley. Setting nets under cover of darkness, poachers were secretive and disciplined because the risks were great. Some of their tales are hilarious, others harrowing. On one occasion a group tried to retrieve a snagged net in daylight. Fisher and Edmunds set up blockades to stop traffic. Then Hank Weiss exploded dynamite to divert attention while a fourth man entered the water to dislodge the net. Victor Learned Jr. recounted pulling nets for his dad, earning fifty cents

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Fig. 5.2. This circa 1920s photo shows Syd and Walt Fisher rowing to shore with a boatload of fish. A teenage Walt was filling into his large frame, and the debris in the background is a reminder of the dangers that lurked in the dark for netters. Photo by Clyde Hudson, courtesy Lorraine Eckhardt collection.

on some nights or a “couple bottles of pop” on others to hunker down on a riverbank. His job was simple: if he spied anyone snooping about, he had to “torch off the shotgun.” It might sound like farce, but Victor explained that this was how everyone “got by, and probably would never even made a go of it if it hadn’t been for their fishin’” (fig. 5.2).13 The fear of wardens was hard earned. The 1930 census lists one warden in South County; by 1940 there may have been five. The decennial census recorded one warden and four workers on state or federal fish hatcheries, but the watershed’s sole hatchery had not operated since 1927. More likely

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they were wardens, listed under different titles but tasked with chasing an elusive quarry. Many times netters were “run off ” by patrols. Getting caught meant fines, loss of boat and gear, and jail time, all of which would have devastated poor families. Their desperation was underscored one night when wardens cornered Fisher and Pat Baker netting below Woods. Pat surrendered, but Walt bolted. “I figured if I come up[stream] they’ll catch me sooner or later because they could follow the river all the way.” Thus he “headed for the bay.” As Walt rowed under the bridge in Pacific City, his pursuers took up positions and began to fire. Walt “could see spurl away where the bullet hit the water.” The wardens were either very bad shots, or, more likely, they wanted to intimidate Walt to the bank. Either way, a nervy Fisher kept pulling at the oars until he disappeared into the darkness.14 Catching salmon without getting caught was hard enough. Equally difficult was selling contraband. Poachers needed buyers, but receiving illegal fish invited trouble. Yet there were customers. Walt and several comrades sold bootleg salmon to Bill Gage’s fish company in Tillamook, or to the cannery on Tillamook Bay. Curtis Carver, the resort owner who could not pay for his boats, was listed as a crab and clam merchant in the 1940 census, but neighbors said he sold fresh salmon too. Other netters looked farther afield, selling under-the-counter to inland fishmongers and restaurants. Many market connections dated to when the river fishery had been legal, and all sympathized with Nestucca residents. Outlaw netters risked jail time. Occasionally their lives were in jeopardy, but they continued to fish for the same reasons as always. They had to pay bills and to eat, but they also cherished a meaningful calling. Across the decade, though, their means narrowed. Markets shrank, and fewer numbers made it harder to maintain drifts. By decade’s end, the cost-benefit ratio had turned against illegal fishing.15 The sea was the only remaining option. Trolling was old hat to Walt Fisher and Victor Learned. For Ernest Gilman, the ocean was more: it was home. Called “Brick” for his red hair, Gilman grew up in Willamina, a small milltown on the South Yamhill River. In 1912, at age twenty, he hiked over the Coast Range to work on George Miles’s ranch. He stayed because of Miles’s daughter. Courting Elsie left a lot of free time, so her brothers Clint and Dick filled the hours by taking Brick fishing. They netted the river and fished the reef north of Cape Kiwanda “when you could make money.” Brick decided to switch career paths. He quit the ranch, bought a boat, and

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worked the reefs and river. Elsie married him in the mid-1910s, and the two spawned four kids. Son Jack recalled that all his dad ever seemed to do “was fish out in the ocean in the summertime”; he was also “one of the first guys to start guiding on the Nestucca River,” yet that was not all he did. Like other South County residents, in downtimes Brick was “a jack-of-alltrades. He could carpenter a little. If he needed to . . . buy some groceries he could go help somebody build a house.” Even for this full-timer, fishing was but one job in a seasonal round of labors that made up the annual cycle. Census enumerators actually captured Brick’s dynamism, but it is only apparent by considering decades of records. In 1920, for example, Brick was listed as a logger; in 1930, he was a carpenter; by 1940 he was a guide. In reality, Brick did all that and more, yet he always saw himself first and foremost as a fisher (fig. 5.3).16 For decades Brick, Victor, and Walt shifted from river to ocean and back again, but by the end of the 1930s, a wholly novel fishery had emerged at Cape Kiwanda. Like Pat Baker, Pete Belleque, Louis Fisher, Elmer Hunter, Al Kangiser, Al Southmayd, Enis Turner, and Jake, Norman, and Elwood Reddekopp, they occasionally rowed through the surf each summer. To do so full time, though, their boats had to change. River craft were death

Fig. 5.3. The only local whose income came mainly from fishing and guiding, Brick Gilman nevertheless worked many jobs in winter and spring. This photo also reveals the caulked seams and low freeboard of early boats. Photo by Clyde Hudson, courtesy Lorraine Eckhardt collection.

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Fig. 5.4. Hauling wet dories back to the creek at Kiwanda was a group chore. The image also contains the notorious steel drum used one summer. The creek that kept the caulking wet between trips can be seen to the left of the men. Photo by Clyde Hudson, courtesy Lorraine Eckhardt collection.

traps in even mild swells. Thus someone—by the late 1980s no one could remember who did it first—built a craft that resembled the high-raked, double-bowed dories that had been used for centuries on the Atlantic cod banks. Each spring since the 1920s, crews hauled their boats across the sand peninsula that separated the Nestucca River from the ocean beach, storing hulls at Cape Kiwanda all summer and retrieving them only in fall when the weather dictated the end of fishing. The first Kiwanda dories were made of spruce planking from a box factory near Hebo. The assembly was horrifying. Planks were crudely butted and caulked, and they had to be kept wet to swell and stay tight. This led to comical struggles. A small creek leaked from a dune into the surf, and Jack Gilman explained that fishers would “pert near fight just to get to putting [their boats] in the crick.” It was the only way to prevent the hulls from drying out. Each morning fishers hiked or rode from town and transferred their boats to the surf. Someone brought a steel drum so they could roll the water-soaked boats across the soft sand. Walt Fisher remembered that it was “good for about a week or two, but then somebody’d hit a rock or something . . . and get a dent in it, and, boy, by the time summer was over . . . you couldn’t hardly roll it.”

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Within a few years outboard motors fulcrumed further changes. Someone built a well for the motor, but the early outboards had little power. Nor were hulls designed to plane, so every day fishers had to uninstall their motors to row through the surf (fig. 5.4).17 Calling these boats “dories” was fitting. Like Atlantic cod fishers, Kiwanda fishers first targeted demersal species such as rockfish and lingcod, and their labor led to a similar intimacy with the sea. The first challenge came once a boat floated. Teams of two rowed through surf. The stern man faced forward, watching for a small set; the bow man, with back to the waves, “would pull like hell” when the order came. The journey out was only slightly stressful. A dory was light and rowers could always choose not to go. When conditions were dicey, the guys would “pitch pennies by the hour” waiting for the surf to lie down or fog to lift. Still, in all but the flattest oceans, rowing out required timing a couple waves just right to prevent the dory from filling and foundering. Once through the crisis zone, fishers installed the outboard and set three cotton lines, baited and weighted with three-, four-, and five-pound leads. They worked by feel. Their senses recorded wind and water temperature. Fingers detected nibbles. When a fish bit, they killed the motor and hauled by hand. Working in boats with eighteen- to twenty-four-inch sides was treacherous. There were no radios, flares, or life preservers—just a handheld compass at most. Exhaustion eroded safety. Tired bodies and poor judgment invited disaster. A top-heavy man could pitch overboard. Still, on good days two fishers could fill a boat with rockfish, lingcod, or coho, but returning to shore laden down meant a riskier row through the heavier afternoon surf. An accident was a lonely crisis. There was no way to summon help, so dories stuck together when fishing and rowing. Romantic notions of carefree fishing ignore the dangers of working at sea.18 Once ashore, the group transferred catches into pack saddles or onto a cart “with an old white mule” owned, not surprisingly, by Walt Fisher. Walt explained that the first thing they did was “load the fish in that cart and start the mule down the beach.” They then hauled dories to the creek and turned for home. They could “catch up with [the mule] before he ever got down to the bridge. . . . He poked along.” For most of the 1930s, dory fishers’ main consumers were local mink ranches, but two events killed that market. Ocean trolling—that is, hook-and-line fishing from large vessels— began on the Pacific in 1893 near Monterey, California. Trolling reached

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Astoria in 1912 and other ports soon after. By the late 1930s, larger vessels from Astoria and Newport were using trawl nets to scrape the ocean floor, seining many more lingcod and rockfish than dories could catch on their best days. Bottomfish prices plummeted to one-half cent per pound. Then mink ranchers consolidated their feed purchases through the Oregon Mink Ranchers Association, buying huge lots of fishmeal from Astoria and Newport processors. Priced out of the bottomfish market, dory fishers had to turn more exclusively to salmon.19 This was Brick Gilman’s wheelhouse. He was a model for what was later called the art of “scratching,” or, as another saying put it, “stick and stay and make it pay.” Mink ranchers such as Fisher, Forrest Kellow, and the Reddekopps could consume their own catches, but Gilman was strictly a supplier. He had to tune his harvests to others’ demands. The growth of mink ranches meant there was some spot buying for bottomfish, but this was a fickle market. When buyers evaporated, Brick’s sons had to step in. Lingcod retailed for 2.5 cents per pound; salmon were fifty cents apiece, but when local consumers vanished, eldest son Warren, born, like Victor Learned Jr., in a fishing shack next to the cannery, drove to Sheridan to “sell” fish. In the 1930s, Warren more often had “to give half of them away or trade for corn or strawberries or something. The people didn’t have fifty cents.” Warren’s younger brother Jack remembered his family “made their livin’ however they could.” The same held for Andy Kershaw, who grew up with Brick in Willamina and followed him to the coast. Andy first fished a dory in his teens. By 1933, he was a regular, catching for mink ranches and taking tourists to sea. “When the wind wasn’t blowing and there wasn’t much current,” he explained, “we jigged for cod and red snapper with hand lines. When the wind would come up or the current was runnin’ strong we’d troll for ’em.” It sounded like a lark, but Kershaw “lost a lot of gear. We never had any money.”20 Kershaw’s plight was part of a general struggle. Merchants, proprietors, and laborers all suffered through the Great Depression. The towns of Blaine and Hebo grew slightly that decade; the rest stagnated or imploded. The Beaver and Little Nestucca Precincts changed only slightly, the latter having already lost a sixth of its residents by 1930. Cloverdale shrank by 10 percent, and Union Precinct, comprising Pacific City and Woods, lost another 15 percent. The timber industry grew in the upper valley, but there were a third less mill workers by 1940.

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Only the dairies seemed untouched. The closure deprived some farmers of supplemental income, but Tillamook County cheese production, already second in the state by 1925, continued its rise. From 1927 to 1940, only the Central Cheese Association failed to grow. Serving dairies closest to Pacific City and Woods, Central’s production dropped across fourteen years, falling nearly every year from 1932 to 1939. The decline was complicated, however, because some or most of Central’s loss seems related to the growth of the nearby Cloverdale and Oretown cheese factories, both of which saw milk deliveries expand. Oretown production actually quadrupled after 1927. Even as other industries staggered, Tillamook became Oregon’s leading dairy county by 1940. Nestucca cheese factories hired eight additional cheesemakers during the decade, and Cloverdale’s feed store thrived across the Great Depression.21 Assessing the impact of the 1930s on other Nestucca residents is even more complicated. There was no single Depression experience. With fewer single men working in mills, local hotel and boarding jobs fell but tourism work grew, albeit in ambiguous ways. The kelp ore resorts died, yet there were six more resort jobs. Vince Neel built a line of cabins on Thomas Malaney’s original ill-fated Ocean Park site. The area still flooded, and Neel’s cabin and boat rentals barely paid the bills. Deciding to milk anglers if he could not beat them, Syd Fisher built his own resort that did not flourish. Still, there were twenty-three more retail and service jobs by 1940. Much of the growth occurred in the upper valley thanks to the expanding timber industry, but the most dynamic sector was government spending. State and federal employment doubled from 56 to 111 jobs. Schools hired many teachers and janitors in the 1920s but only two after 1930. The post office added a few mail carriers, and the Forest Service more than doubled its work force. The largest gains, though, were funded by the Public Works Administration (one), Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) (six), Works Progress Administration (seventeen), and state and federal road crews (twenty-seven). All told, federal, state, and county agencies employed nearly one in three residents by 1940, and that excludes the valley’s three large CCC camps. Even though no resident noted it then or later, the New Deal gave a huge boost to the Nestucca Valley’s Depression-era economy.22 The infusion of government funding contrasted with prevailing memories of legislators’ unwillingness to reconsider policies that made people’s lives harder. Despite the fact of both, the dominant psychic experience

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only deepened mistrust of government. Hard times hit city and country alike, but historian David Kennedy notes that unemployment “fell most heavily on the most predictably vulnerable: the very young, the elderly, the least educated, the unskilled, and especially . . . on rural Americans.” Effects were complexly gendered. Employers initially fired women, but women were also rehired sooner because they could be paid less. Meanwhile, husbands, brothers, and sons endured chronic unemployment and underemployment. New Deal work relief focused mainly on men in a patriarchal effort to help households and defuse potential political unrest. Less changed inside the household. Even as women became breadwinners, their traditional gender roles held firm. Women were still responsible for domestic duties such as cooking, washing, cleaning, gardening, and child care. Everyone had fewer resources at their disposal, and the devastation was comprehensive. Even Nestucca Valley farmers, the one sector that seemed impervious, saw income halve and halve again. Although electricity came to some buildings in Cloverdale, Hebo, and Beaver, most of the valley remained in the nineteenth century until the 1950s. No one needed to be told that South County was a marginal, largely disregarded corner of Oregon. It is understandable that the political decision to end commercial netting, which only exacerbated the Great Depression, became the dominant memory of the era.23 Yet the effects of the Depression remained patchy and uneven, and Victor Learned Jr. provides a sense of the relative buffer that dairying provided for some South County families. The Learneds were hardly wealthy, yet Victor Jr. had a lot of spare time and resources in his teens. In the summer of 1937, he and a friend went camping. One afternoon, while exploring a beach, they chanced upon one of Walt Fisher’s expeditions to Cape Lookout. That evening Fisher’s partners Floyd Franklin and Vern Jackson offered to take the boys out to sea. More than fish were hooked the next day. Victor recalled, “Man, oh man, we’d never seen such great fishin’ in all our lives!” This from a boy who was born in a fishing shack and pulled for his dad. Victor knew the working end of a net and hook. He also knew how hard a fisher’s life could be. He had watched four uncles depart South County after 1927 to continue their fishing careers, and he had shared in the risks of poaching. It did not matter. When he graduated from high school in 1938, Victor and two cousins rented a boat, bought a commercial license, and spent the summer at sea. They paid the rental when they

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returned the boat in fall, but they “never sold a fish.” Mostly they “took a lot of friends out sportfishing.” Victor told his stories in a self-effacing manner, but his tale revealed the resources available to some farm kids but to very few local merchants or laborers.24 The following summer, in 1939, Andy Kershaw and Brick Gilman established a formal partnership. For years they had fished as friends, but Kiwanda had been a piscatorial swinger’s scene. Everyone got along, partly because everyone needed a backup if things went bad but also because partnerships were loose associations. Kershaw remembered that if “somebody didn’t want to go [fishing] and somebody else did, well, you just took off.” The decline of the mink ranch market pushed Gilman and Kershaw into a more permanent alliance. Pacific City still had no local buyer for commercial catches, so networking was necessary. Pooling catches enabled them to offer larger deliveries to distant buyers. The duo also chartered angling trips for salmon and bottomfish. Charging customers $2.50 per trip, they actively boosted each other to potential customers. Over the next several years, Cape Kiwanda’s evolving fishery managed to survive the Great Depression, but no one struck it rich and the trials were not quite over.25 The next few years posed different challenges. In the weeks after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, fears of invasion inspired residents to form ad hoc militias. Walt Fisher volunteered to patrol the beaches in winter 1942. His militia disbanded in June, and that November the Coast Guard arrived. To allay fears and establish control, the Coast Guard issued identification cards, and Kiwanda fishers had to contend with layers of wartime bureaucracy. Every fisher had to fill out reams of paperwork. Kershaw and others “had to carry [a card] with us at all times.” Each day Kershaw had to clock in at the beach and at the Coast Guard station. He also had to carry a plywood board in his dory to signal his identity. Every morning officers “told us how to align the signal board in the boat so the planes and the blimps” from the naval base in Tillamook could see it. One side was black and white; the other numbered. “They’d tell you which side was up and whether to put it crossways or lengthways.” Most thought it “a damned nuisance.” Hiring a crew was another headache. Kershaw had to fill out more forms to obtain an ID card, and “once you had a crew that was it.” The paperwork was more grief than a poor worker. Brick and Andy were especially hard hit when the Coast Guard decided that chartering anglers

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was a national security risk. The Coast Guard patrolled the beaches until July 1944. The station closed five days later. In the words of a museum curator, “Nothing ever happened” (fig. 5.5).26 And yet much did happen. By war’s end South County fishers had pivoted from river to sea. Anglers had won the Nestucca, but salmon lost in the bargain. Victor Jr. insisted the runs “were just as thick in the river in 1926 as they were in 1919 or 1915.” He noted that netters had harvested salmon for generations, and he was sure the nets “weren’t even affecting ’em, because there were just masses of fish” and that “the fish never did get any thicker after” closure. Some of this remembrance was too sanguine. Cannery records charted lower packs across the decades, but the drop was slight and inevitable. One unavoidable fact of fishing is that fish die. It is statistically impossible for a run not to shrink from harvesting, but the Nestucca Bay cannery records chart only a moderate decline across the decades, suggesting that the net fishery was sustainable during this period. Victor also downplayed the precipitous 1926 harvest, yet nets were not to blame for that falloff. Where he was correct—far more so than were sportfishers—was that prophesized bounties did not follow. The seed stream scheme died with the loss of commercial revenues, and runs deteriorated all along the coast in the coming decades. Ocean harvests of coho fell sharply in the late 1930s and remained subpar into the 1950s. The decline was due partly to the effects that dams, logging, mining, and irrigation had on spawning and rearing habitat, and partly to shifts in the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation, a set of atmospheric and oceanic circulations that make the sea more or less fecund for maturing salmon. In the mid-twentieth century, the North Pacific turned decidedly less hospitable for Oregon coho.27 The bitterness caused by closure faded only partly. Faced with the challenge of making ends meet, fishers fought mounting pressures, first defying authority and then innovating novel solutions. Those who held on through the Great Depression never forgot the ordeal of anglers’ political and economic colonialism. Residents gained a clear-eyed sense of their marginality. The same week that the House defeated HB 191 in 1935, the legislature passed a bill to reclassify steelhead as a trout. The change ignored all science, then and later, showing that “trout” was not a scientifically relevant category in western North America, that steelhead belonged to the same genus as coho, chinook, and other salmonids, and

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Fig. 5.5. The fear of a Japanese invasion led South County residents to form several “guerrilla” vigilante groups to guard beaches in early 1942. The patrols ended when the Coast Guard established federal protocols for Andy Kershaw and other fishers at Kiwanda. Cards courtesy of Walt Fisher and Andrew Kershaw.

that steelhead’s complex life history differed little from other Oncorhynchus species. Then again, science never drove salmon policy. In this and many other instances, political calculation was the root motive. The aim of calling steelhead a game fish was to make netting impossible. There

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was no way to tune nets to avoid capturing steelhead. In claiming the fish for themselves, anglers made steelhead a fulcrum for outlawing nets on every stream. South County fishers understood the agenda only too well. Everyone who weathered 1927 learned the importance of never depending solely on fishing, or on elected officials. Andy Kershaw returned to his cattle ranch each fall. Walt Fisher, Forrest Kellow, and the Reddekopps never neglected their mink ranches. The Learneds and Redbergs always maintained their dairies. Brick Gilman alone relied mainly on fishing, toggling between ocean fishing and chartering each summer and river netting and guiding each winter, but as his census entries show, even Brick cultivated other revenue streams to support his family year-round.28 Seasonal shifts in South County work remained important after World War II, but the pivot from river to sea altered the sites and timing of fishing in crucial ways. The rhythms of cow lactation and salmon runs had once meshed for farming families. Milking began only after winter runs ended, and cows dried up as the fall salmon runs arrived. Netting was a seamless second job for Lyle Craven, Victor Learned, Ole Redberg, and many other farmers, but the summer fishery conflicted with milking, and nationalizing markets turned dairying into a twelve-month industry. Logging’s timing and ecological effects also clashed with fishing. Before 1927, the social and environmental patterns of South County’s industries reinforced each other, but the river closure was the first of several political, industrial, and ecological disruptions that initiated a new era in which local ways increasingly conflicted with external forces. South County residents spent much of the early postwar period scrambling to find a balance. Life and economy, as always, were entangled with each other in complex seasonal rhythms.

Seaward There ain’t much future for a man who works the sea —Billy Joel, “The Downeaster ‘Alexa’”

One can be excused for regarding Kiwanda’s postwar fishery as an idyll. Although making money from fishing and guiding seemed fun, the income was only supplemental, with no obvious future. Nevertheless, in ones and twos a few more joined each year. Men like Victor Learned Jr. and Jack Gilman—farm kids, ex-soldiers—made seasonal hegiras to the cape. The fleet grew slowly, and Kiwanda remained an intimate affair. On the surface little seemed to change, but a structural revolution was slowly unfolding. By 1966, crucial innovations had transformed an ad hoc fishery into an industrial port. Without those changes, the ensuing boom could not have happened. Similar shifts were occurring on land. Logging accelerated after the war. Dairying became a year-round industry. Tourism reemerged as an economic engine. Each development reflected forces beyond the watershed. Depleted private forests, horrific fires, and federal laws opened western Oregon to logging. Technological developments extended milking seasons and triggered a wrenching era of capitalization. New Deal programs built infrastructures for outdoor tourism. Cold War economics fueled startling growth. North American industries were the sole survivors of World War II. The United States controlled vast supplies of gold and pent-up savings. Americans were incredibly productive, and postwar policies made them agents of global development. Buying power, disposable income, leisure time, and standards of living rose for most workers during a unique era of good times that ran almost unbroken from 1946 to 1973.1 With so many resources at their disposal, Americans rushed to exploit and play in nature. Their intensified consumption became a global force, what historians John McNeill and Peter Engelke call “the great acceleration.” During the next quarter century, city and country alike prospered. 83

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Impacts varied by locale, but South County is as good a place as any to chart the economic and ecological legacies of postwar consumption. Growing demands for dairy products led to more milk and manure. Suburban expansion fueled an unprecedented timber boom and a desire to sacralize forests. Postwar tourists flocked to nature, turning the Nestucca basin into a source of cheese, lumber, drinking water, recreation, and a waste conduit. Salmon paid the price. Coho had it worst, as logging silted their spawning grounds in small streams and creeks, but chinook, steelhead, and juvenile salmon also suffered from rising coliform levels. The result was irony. Anglers had seized the river as their exclusive sporting paradise, but poor runs deflected them into dories and onto the ocean.2 This was the world Jack Gilman entered as an adult. Brick and Elsie’s third son was born in Woods in 1926. His youth coincided with the hardest times, yet, except for World War II, Jack never left the coast. Like his dad he always fished, and like Victor Jr., he started at the age of six. Across two tough decades Jack had helped his older brothers Warren and Cal cut wood and sell fish. After release from the army, he crewed on Warren’s salmon troller in Newport, Oregon. That winter he built a dory, having learned that skill also from his dad, and in summer 1947 Jack took a cue from Warren and added wooden outriggers—really, debarked alders—to spread the gear on his dory. Jack had noticed how Warren’s troller lines rarely tangled. This was not true of Kiwanda dories, which were limited to two or three lines “hanging off the oar locks.” At first other fishers mocked Jack: “Look at this kid; he thinks he’s got a troller!” The laughing quickly stopped. By summer’s end, many dories had outriggers.3 These small innovations slowly reshaped Kiwanda. In summer 1948, Victor Learned Jr., his brother Edmund, and his brother-in-law Walt Caspell paid the princely sum of $285 for Cal Gilman’s dory and outboard. Unlike in 1938, Victor Jr. was now serious about making money. The challenges were also serious. “Boy, we didn’t fish for about two or three days,” he recalled, “and we got lost in the fog.” That made them “stop and think awhile,” but the trio pressed on, learning bit by bit. Among their not insignificant problems was figuring out how to catch fish, preferably many. They started with standard plugs and spoons but caught little, so they consulted Dutch Shermer, owner of the sporting goods store, itself a sign of Pacific City’s evolving economy. “Old Dutch” told them to “take your fishing poles and put on some tuna jigs and go out there and fish.” So

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Fig. 6.1. By the early postwar era, double bows and plywood made Kiwanda dories more seaworthy. The flat-bottom hulls could float in two inches of water, but fishers—or in this case charter operators with a boatload of tourists—still had to row through the surf, which on this summer day was a tiny swell. Photo by Clyde Hudson, courtesy Lorraine Eckhardt collection.

they did, racing around with their 8.5-horse motor, hoping salmon would bite a lure meant for another species. Weirdly enough, it worked. Victor boasted, “We started out-fishin’ the other guys.” The rest of the fleet was incredulous. Guys shouted, “You can’t catch fish that way!” They gave “us heck for it,” but like Gilman’s outriggers, “Pretty soon they were using these dog-gone tuna jigs, out runnin’ ’round wide open” (fig. 6.1).4 Getting fish to bite was half the battle; landing them was the other half. The standard method was to pull a fish to the boat by the line and spear them with a gaff, but gaffs could dislodge hooks and always left gashes. Ed announced, “We need a dip net!” Victor looked blank. He had never seen a deep-netted hoop with handle, but Caspell found one in Tillamook. Victor remarked, “Man, we got that thing and started throwin’ them fish [in the boat].” “Warren Gilman and Jack come by one day, and he says, ‘What in the hell are them guys doin’ now?’” Just then, “Walt slung a great big old fish on the floor, and said, ‘That oughta answer their question.’” Within a week the Gilmans had a dip net, and the changes kept a-coming. Most fishers had used whole herring. Third-generation Terry Learned recalled “cutting bait all day long. Every time a fish would bite you’d have

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to take off the bait and put a new one on.” It was tedious and costly. Then someone tried a “little plastic squid-lookin’ thing.” The originator, now lost to memory, called the mass-produced items “Hoochy Kootchies.” Draped over a hook, the lure was especially effective with coho. Skeptics again converted, shortened the name, and hootchies became a staple technology for decades.5 Victor Jr.’s partners left after 1951: Ed took a job at Boeing; Walt went back to farming. Others took their places. Some fished only a season. The Williams brothers ran a bee business in Portland. In 1948 they tried fishing, replacing cotton lines with wire on hand-crank spools called “gurdies.” Until then only large trollers had gurdies, but wire lines could carry more weight for deeper fishing. Combined with outriggers and floats, they allowed dories to fish more lines and hooks. But the costs outweighed the advantages for many, so few adopted gurdies until 1956, when the state mandated fixed gear, outlawing commercial rod-and-reel fishing. Norman Reddekopp and Al Hoffman were among the first to transition, buying war-surplus cranks for ten dollars apiece. According to Paul Hanneman, the cranks came from B-24 Liberators, on which they operated antennas “or the bomb doors or something.” In fact, a gurdy was similar to an angling reel. “It had a brake on it like a star drag . . . to slow it down when you let out the wire,” but the drag could be released when reeling in gear.6 Other fishers were remembered for their personal qualities. Ralph Snipe and Bert Rolf fished in the late 1940s and early 1950s. They were “fun fishermen,” who formed friendships that lasted decades and generated stories that lived even longer. Through it all fishing remained a seasonal supplement. Jack Gilman said, “[I] always thought I could catch about as many fish as anyone,” but he “never tried to make a living at it.” Three months at sea generated income, but he always had other jobs to round out a year. More accurately, fishing complemented his regular pay. Jack drove logging trucks until 1955, when he and Victor Jr. got jobs at a plywood mill in Tillamook. The pair commuted daily most of the year, but in summer Jack worked swing shifts so he “could at least get a morning’s fishing in every day, which helped out with bills after a summer.” When the mill closed in 1961, Jack took work at the high school until he retired in 1985. Fishing also supplemented Victor’s income. After the war he and Alice bought a ninety-seven-acre dairy farm in Woods. Both milked, but

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Victor also worked odd jobs, felled timber, fished summers, and trapped winters. None of it made them wealthy, but, he said, “it didn’t take you a whole lot to live then—ten dollars then instead of a hundred now.” He fished when he could, especially on weekends and holidays, but every other month he worked the day shift, missing large swaths of the summer. He did not even buy a commercial license in 1956. When the mill closed, Victor and Alice expanded the dairy. Jack put it all in perspective: “If I was gonna make [fishing] my number one source of income, I’d of never done it in a rowboat.”7 Neither Jack nor Victor did it alone. On the Learned farm, Victor and Alice began the milking before dawn, still by hand and still on a dirt floor in the 1950s. Victor listened to a two-channel walkie-talkie as he milked, tracking the morning bite. Alice noticed “Victor would be feeling at the bits ’cause he wasn’t out there.” Usually by the time he hit the beach, “the bite was over,” leading to his boat’s self-mocking name: Too Late. What remained hidden in this story was that Victor usually left before milking was done. Alice and Terry had to clean up, load cans in a truck, and deliver the milk to the Central Cheese Factory. Speed was still imperative for farmers without cooling technology. Product had to be delivered fresh or the cheesemaster would reject it. While Victor fished, Alice tended the garden and pastures and Terry did chores (fig. 6.2). Similar dynamics unfolded in the Gilman household. Jack met Norma Phelan when she moved to Pacific City. After they wed, Norma waited tables and clerked until the babies came. At that point it was a one-paycheck household. Jack hustled from boat to mill and back. Norma kept him fed. This was hard work. Until the early 1960s, Norma recalled, “we never even had a telephone.” She crossed a dune each day to see when Jack came ashore. “Then I’d head home real quick and put the food on the table.” Norma made it possible for Jack to transition from job to job, but she “didn’t see him very much.” Later their labors flipped. When the kids started in school, Norma went back to waiting tables and Jack cooked the evening meals.8 The Gilmans and Learneds typified how South County households changed yet remained seasonally flexible. Gender roles altered across the day and calendar, but there were emotional asymmetries. To some, going to sea was just a job. Norma thought it was “kinda neat bein’ a fisherman’s wife.” She didn’t “sit at home and worry.” She assumed Jack “[knew]

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Fig. 6.2. Still lacking electricity in the 1950s, most Nestucca dairies were still Grade B producers without vacuum milking machines and coolers. Warm milk had to be delivered immediately to cheese factories such as the Central Cheese Association, located between Woods and Cloverdale. The vintage trucks and milk cans underscore the low capitalization of valley farms. Photo by Clyde Hudson, courtesy Tillamook County Pioneer Museum.

what he was doing or he wouldn’t a kept goin’ back out there.” When she checked up on him, it was “to see how many fish he had—just like everybody else.” Often Alice felt only terror. When Victor Jr. was “starting out from scratch on knowledge,” she “didn’t trust those guys’ safety” and “wore out the trail to the cape . . . to see if they was alright.” She did not learn much on these treks, “but at least I wore out my frustrations.” This was “[her] exercise for several years, all summer long lookin’ to see where they were and why they weren’t home when they’s s’posed to be.” Actual answers could make her feel worse. One day she spied “a little thing . . . bobbing along.” Victor and Terry had run out of fuel, so they put up “a little canvas sail.” The sight of the dory, “like a little chip of wood floating along,” alarmed Alice. Her main recollection of those years was “a lot of stress.” The anxiety only ebbed when boats got radios. At first she wondered, “Is this necessary?” but soon she realized that radios were “as important or more than the motor.” Victor Jr. could call for help and, equally important, she could check on loved ones.9 Alice never stopped worrying, but across the years the contexts changed enough that her litany of fears diminished. In the early 1950s the fleet stood at about twelve to fourteen boats, but the regular contingent

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was only six or seven, the same on weekdays as it was in the 1920s. Beyond the simple numbers, however, was a world of change. Dories were increasingly produced by professional builders, and plywood had replaced planks, lending greater torsional strength. By 1955, Andy Kershaw and Warren Gilman had dories made by Siletz Boat Works. Jack Gilman still built his own, but he too had switched to plywood. By 1960, fifteen- to twentyhorse outboard motors were available. The greater power enabled dories to keep up with the swell, which meant they could motor through the surf without swamping. The sticking point was the hull. Double-bow dories were crucial for rowing through surf. Their raked hulls worked fine for slow trolling, but the boat would not plane when engines throttled up. The propellers instead sucked the dory down into the water. When Lloyd Boylan ordered a double-ender in 1960, boatbuilder Howard Kellow suggested a flat-bottomed, square-sterned design that could house bigger outboards. No fan of rowing, Boylan agreed to try it. As usual, other fishers were skeptical. Paul Hanneman, who rowed double-enders into the 1990s, “told people it wouldn’t work,” but within two years he too had a square-sterned dory. Gilman soon emulated Kellow’s design. With a powerful engine, the new design offered other benefits as well. For decades fishers had clung to Haystack Rock and the Kiwanda reefs. By the early 1960s, they were venturing farther north, south, and west. Walkie-talkies enabled them to stay in contact even when out of sight, a tiny change that vastly improved Alice Learned’s mental state.10 Reaching the cape in the early 1950s still required crossing the sand west of Pacific City at a place called the Turnaround, where the pavement ended. At first fishers and tourists walked the last mile because cars bogged down in the soft sand. In the 1930s fishers began to strip their vehicles of excess weight and add big tires. Not surprisingly, Walt Fisher built the first “beach rig.” Fitting an old Dodge with airplane tires, he rumbled across the dunes, transporting fish to buyers faster than competitors. After the war other fishers added dual rear wheels or balloon tires to old Chevys and Fords. As rigs rusted, plywood replaced disintegrating bodies. Victor Jr. drove his “beach car down there every day,” but his dory stayed at the cape even though it was no longer necessary to keep plywood hulls wet. Instead, boats sat on trailers. “Nobody took ’em home” because of a steep slope at the Turnaround. They waited until “it rained real hard so [the sand would] harden up, because you had to take a wiiiild run at it to get up” (fig. 6.3).11

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Fig. 6.3. As dories grew in size and weight, especially with ever more powerful outboard motors, fishers needed vehicles to move boats up and down the beach. Leaving beach rigs at Kiwanda led to rapid corrosion, however, and most soon contained a mix of decaying metal and wood. Photo by Paul Hanneman, courtesy Sandy Hanneman collection.

Beach rigs eased and accelerated access to the cape, and to consumers. Fish were fresher at the point of sale. Access improved when the county laid a one-mile gravel road in 1957 and paved it in 1958. The new road eliminated the crazy dune runs, but convenience proved double-edged. What eased fishers’ burdens also increased access for everyone else. Security broke down. Paul Hanneman recalled, “Freddy Kuenzi went down one morning, and both wheels and tires” had been stripped from his trailer. “We said, ‘well, that’s the end of an era.’” Some fishers removed poles and motors each evening; others “trundled our boats up the rock road and come clear on home.” By 1960, the twice-daily reverberations of passing trailers became a common experience. The thump of tires hitting potholes and tinkling pole bells annoyed some residents; for others, these were the sensations of a working community. For all, the summer fishery made South County a place unlike anywhere else on the Pacific coast.12 The social landscape grew more complex as work and play intersected at Kiwanda. The fleet grew on weekends as anglers returned to the beach. Brick Gilman had run charters for decades, and another entrepreneur repurposed a surplus navy DUKW amphibious vehicle for sightseers, but ever more anglers brought their own dories. This partly reflected a booming postwar economy, but improved roads and boosting also mattered.

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Merchants advertised South County as a recreational haven with the slogan, “The Land of Cheese, Trees, and Ocean Breeze.” In 1950, Pacific City also turned a seven-acre pasture into a landing strip. Volunteers filled holes and mowed grass, and three planes landed for a ceremony. The state took possession in 1951, and the local Chamber of Commerce hosted a salmon fry to attract pilots. The first “fly-in” drew one hundred planes and three hundred people. A second event in 1952 attracted sixty-five planes, and two hundred people ate one thousand pounds of fish. The fly-in became an annual gathering. The state paved the strip in 1955. Then in 1959 the chamber held a Dory Derby to celebrate the Oregon centennial. A thousand visitors came to Kiwanda to watch dory races pitting rowers, either singles or in teams, in races through the surf, around a buoy, and back to shore. Motorized dories covered the same course. A few boats capsized, but the worst injuries were bruised egos. The success of the first derby turned it into an annual event. Sponsors added a beauty contest, parade, and dances. Lost in the success, though, was how merchants were transforming a blue-collar fishery into spectacle. The veiling of work altered how

Fig. 6.4. A key attraction of the early Dory Derbys were rowing and motorized races. Here Paul Hanneman, back to camera, and nephew Craig Hanneman near the beach after rounding a buoy in a messy ocean on a windy day. Spectators in the background stand on one of Cape Kiwanda’s sandstone shelves, and the 327-foot basaltic sea stack Haystack Rock looms a mile beyond the beach. Photo by Sandy Hanneman, courtesy Sandy Hanneman collection.

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later residents understood the community and history of Cape Kiwanda. Among the things people missed was the continued relevance of seasonal work for full-time residents, and the continued plight of aboriginal people, still invisible to nearly everyone: Congress sold off the remaining reservation land in 1954 and terminated the Confederated Tribes’ status. In the words of the congressional resolution, they had been “freed” into destitution (fig. 6.4).13 Meanwhile, South County business was booming. Improved roads and the derby drew more tourists and enhanced the outward flow of goods. Dairying grew with wartime contracts, and artificial insemination, selective breeding, and feed innovations enabled farmers to milk all year. At their high points in the 1950s, each of the six cheese associations produced at least 50 percent more cheese, but the annual totals also varied more. Most of the associations experienced more down years than they had during the Great Depression. Instability took a toll when the East Beaver Cheese Association closed in 1955, but the Tillamook County Creamery Association, as a whole, did better. Tillamook had long since passed other Oregon counties in dairy production. Much to the dismay of Willamette Valley dairy companies, the TCCA used a railway connection established in 1911 and a highway built during the Great Depression to muscle into Portland’s milk market and to make Tillamook a national brand.14 The railroad, which took a circuitous northern route, also aided heavy industry in central Tillamook. Foremost was timber. In the first half century of resettlement, little logging occurred beyond farm clearing, especially in South County. The reason was fire. Although Northwest Indians had used fire for millennia, Tillamook County was unusually scorched. From the 1820s to the 1860s, holocausts denuded a fifty-mile swath of the coast from the Nestucca to the Siletz. Fire returned in the 1890s and 1910. The upper basin was a barrens of snags and grass. Settlers called one area Mount Baldy; an early forester described Mount Hebo as a “vast fern field.” Two decades later a series of fires consumed central and northern Tillamook County. Ironically, the previous devastation spared the Nestucca, enabling a novel policy to reach fruition. In 1907, the president set aside some of the basin as a national forest; Congress gave the rest to the Interior Department in 1916. Normally, federal foresters relied on natural seeding to regrow a burned or logged site, but the Nestucca fires had wiped out the seed trees. Thus, in 1910, foresters began to replant by hand. The work

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Fig. 6.5. This photo of decayed stumps and extensive brush, taken during a survey of Mount Hebo, illustrates the ecological legacy of the great fires that ravaged the Oregon coast in the nineteenth century. Massive conflagrations denuded the Nestucca Basin before resettlement. With so few trees surviving, federal foresters took the extraordinary measure of replanting rather than relying on natural reseeding, thus delaying the start of extensive commercial logging until the 1950s and 1960s. Courtesy Tillamook County Pioneer Museum.

continued into the New Deal, assisted by Civilian Conservation Corps camps above Blaine, Hebo, Cloverdale, and Neskowin. Congress also passed the Oregon and California Lands Act in 1937, mandating sustained harvests on Interior Department lands in western Oregon. At the end of the Depression, the timber industry began to harvest western Oregon forests. The Nestucca was Tillamook County’s most forested area, federal agencies controlled most of the Nestucca timber, and a new federal law was spurring logging (fig. 6.5).15 Unlike in most of western Oregon, though, South County logging built slowly. Prewar harvests were modest, limited to private lands adjacent to Beaver, Hebo, Cloverdale, Woods, and Meda. The Forest Service and Interior Department did not make timber sales until the late 1930s, and then only to remove old growth, salvage burn sites, and thin replanted areas. The largest sales were a few thousand MBF (an MBF is a thousand board feet); most were tiny, no more than three-, two-, or single-digit MBF contracts. One cedar sale amounted to two truckloads. The Forest Service opened logging on replanted stands in the 1950s. The Interior Department waited

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until the 1960s. Most sales were made to distant outfits that operated on a new scale. Logging had entered the petroleum age. Chainsaws replaced two-man whipsaws. Two fallers could now do the work done by ten in the old days. High-lead cables yarded logs to central landings, and trucks transported timber to mills on freshly dozed roads. A yarding operator and choker setter (a laborer who attached cables to logs) replaced a whole teamster gang. The Nestucca’s only mills specialized in making boxes and cedar shakes, so most logs were trucked out of the basin to Carlton, Tillamook, Willamina, and Yamhill. These sawmills differed from most in Oregon. They could process the smaller logs coming from the northern Coast Range. The result was a slowly growing industry with few jobs and less locally circulated wealth. The restrained harvests of the 1950s had one upside: salmon habitat remained relatively intact. The greatest impacts came from logging roads. Poor drainage increased siltation, and culverts blocked migrating salmon. Gravel mining was another concern. Although there is no documentation of its extent in the Nestucca, decades of logging and mining had wreaked havoc in many coastal watersheds, especially southern Oregon’s Sixes River basin.16 The effect on Nestucca salmon is less than clear. Oregon’s Fish Commission began to record port catches in 1952. In the next fifteen years the Kiwanda fleet never caught more than 7,000 salmon. Annual harvests varied from 1,500 to 3,000 coho. Only in 1965 and 1966 did the catch rise to 7,000. The average chinook harvest was about 350 fish. The steadiness of these figures demonstrates how ocean fisheries, targeting homogeneous schools, obscured the fate of individual runs. The two exceptions were the outsized significance of very large basins such as the Columbia, Fraser, Sacramento, and Yukon Rivers, and the even larger influence of the ocean (a key factor in the “Cycles” chapter). Poor marine conditions continued into the 1960s, but the effect on Kiwanda was muted, partly because most of the catch came from California streams that were less affected by northern Pacific conditions, but also because the fishery really was small. Year in and year out, a few dories caught and sold just enough to help households through the long, slow winters. We know this because the state tracked ocean fishing, but the state could do this only because of one final change. Without licensed buyers to gather data, the economic and ecological contours of the postwar fishery at Kiwanda would have been as obscured as the poaching years of the Great Depression.17

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Typically, the first wholesaler was a resident. Spying yet another opportunity, Syd Fisher bought the catch in 1947. Jack Gilman mused, “I don’t know what he done with ’em. There was only just a few of us that would bring any in to sell,” but the sales helped Jack survive the winter. Syd stopped buying wholesale that fall, most likely because it was unprofitable. Three years later Bob Stacy built a custom cannery and fresh fish market aside the river between Pacific City and Woods. Gilman remembered that Stacy “canned and sold [salmon] and had a display counter inside for the fresh fish,” but this was odd. Columbia canneries had been folding for decades, and most troll-caught salmon went to smokers, fish markets, and restaurants. A new cannery in a tiny port was truly idiosyncratic. Fishers were nevertheless grateful. Similar to Brick Gilman’s relationship with mink farmers, Jack tuned his catch to Stacy’s demands. “He’d tell me he wanted some [lingcod]. If I’d catch them for him he’d give me two bits a pound.” Twenty-five cents was huge—it was the going rate for coho. If Stacy wanted one hundred pounds of lingcod, Jack said, “Why, that’s the first thing I’d go for.” Such orders were doubly appealing because lingcod were “a lot easier to catch than silvers. You could go up off the reefs and catch a hundred pounds of lingcod in ten or fifteen minutes.”18 Fishers’ options expanded in 1951. Harvey and Edith Smith and the aptly named Al Roe also set up shops. The Smiths used a cinder-block hut near the airport. Roe was a block father east. In half a decade, fishers had gone from peddling fish to having several wholesalers compete for their catch. In the next few years all profited, but the hours were hell. Roe quit in 1954, the Smiths a year later, but another buyer replaced them. In the mid-1950s, Ivan Kober ran a dance hall at the Turnaround—still the end of the pavement—called The Dunes, one of several businesses that catered to tourists. On the side, literally, “Ink,” as Ivan was called, bought fish next to the hall. He quietly wholesaled the catch for the rest of the decade. What did this mean monetarily? Salmon prices in the 1950s ranged from 18 to 22 cents per pound. Lingcod and rockfish paid 2.5 cents per pound, and minks ate a lot of this harvest because operations had grown faster than Astoria and Newport processors could supply. The number of Tillamook mink ranches had actually halved from fifty-four to twenty-six by 1964, but pelt sales trebled from $165,692 to $463,803. Salmon prices rose similarly to 60 cents per pound by 1969.19

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When Kiwanda Road opened in 1957, merchants and fish buyers followed the crowds to the cape. Guy Watts and Keith Delaney took over Kober’s station, moving it to a new cluster of shops adjacent to the rutted path that fishers and tourists took to the beach. Delaney said he “felt there was a need and we could make some money doing it.” The change in ownership went unnoticed because it was behind Kober’s new restaurant. One side issued hamburgers, the other took in fish. It was an odd design, with “a showcase window that stuck halfway out and halfway in the building.” By 1961, there were nineteen dories, and Delaney and Watts “bought all the fish and sold all the fish right there.” Their smokehouse processed “a ton of fish a week.” Fishers were quality control testers. As they “weighed in they’d eat smoked salmon.” Delaney and Watts paid 36 cents per pound, two cents more than the other ports. They resold coho for 45 cents a pound, but the few chinook they bought went to a fresh fish market in Lincoln City. One thing that did not change were the hours. Delaney opened at 4 a.m. and often did not close until 10 p.m.20 Burnout followed. In 1963, Harry Kester took over for Delaney and Watts. Like Kober, Kester already had a local business. He owned Fred Beals’s old campground, now a trailer park where summer fishers camped, so he converted his garage into a buying station. Then Jim Imlah bought Bob Stacy’s cannery. Pacific City still had two fish buyers, but Imlah’s operation was different. All previous buyers had retailed their purchases. Imlah instead bought for Hoy Brothers, a central Tillamook County processor. Similarly, when Jack and Marlene Hogevoll bought out Kester in 1967, they contracted with Astoria and Eureka processors. The grueling pace did not change. The couple’s workdays began when the first fisher arrived for bait, often as early as 4 a.m. They could not close until the final sale each night. Jack took the early and late shifts; Marlene managed the business midday and kids morning and night. Their equipment was crude. The weighing scale was linked to a wooden bucket on which they “had to pull the pin” and load “by hand.” Marlene needed “two husky guys to pick up the iced river boxes to load ’em on a truck.” Their first year, thirteen regulars fished weekdays, twenty-seven to thirty on weekends.21 If a Kiwanda fisher had suddenly been teleported from 1946 to 1967, he would have been stunned. Rather than a couple Model A’s and five or six oar-powered, double-ended dories sitting in a creek, every square-sterned dory was now powered by a forty-horse motor, carried to and from the

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beach daily on a trailer pulled by a beach rig. Most boats had multiple hand-crank gurdies, and fishers had switched from cotton to wire lines. They had also stopped rowing. They even had walkie-talkies. Buyers competed for the catch. Salmon remained integral to South County’s seasonal economy, but more and more people came to Kiwanda to watch the spectacle or charter a trip. Many fishers now rented cabins or camped in trailer parks. For the first time since 1926, fishing and tourism both contributed to the economy. Pacific City was flourishing as a fishing village and a tourist mecca. Even the salmon seemed bigger and more numerous. The innovations of the Learneds, Gilmans, Kellows, and others had become standard equipment, yet fewer and fewer fishers knew these names. There were so many boats. The postwar fishery that Jack and Victor Jr. had grown up in, from the end of poaching through the double-ended dories, had passed. A new world was dawning, and no one was looking back.

Cycles The kids are grown up but their lives are worn —The Offspring, “The Kids Aren’t Alright”

By all accounts, 1967 transformed Kiwanda. The coho harvest grew an incredible 734 percent, yet that was not the most remarkable part of the story; rather, it was the size of the salmon. Jack Hogevoll called them “the biggest damn fish I’d ever seen.” In itself this was anecdotal. It was Hogevoll’s first year as a buyer. He had little basis for comparison, yet many fishers echoed him. Jack Gilman said they were “remarkable.” Victor Learned Jr. replied, “Gosh, they were so big.” Word of the bonanza spread. Portland Oregonian writer Don Holm raved about a “get-rich-quick” scene on the coast, and a rush of dories ensued. “From 1967 to 1968,” Gilman remembered, “I bet that the number of boats doubled.” Given that the fleet stood at twenty in 1966, this might not seem impressive, but it was just the start. Within a decade nearly four hundred dories crowded the beach. The quiet fishery that had endured since George Miles and William Scott first rowed through the surf in the 1890s was drowned out in a sea of roaring motors. Just like in 1927, outsiders stormed South County. This time, though, there seemed to be enough salmon for everyone.1 The boom radiated in many directions, but the most immediate result was an unquenchable demand for dories. Gilman and Howard Kellow still built hulls each winter. Victor Jr. and his son Terry also entered the trade, but the main producer was Victor Ferrington. Originally a builder in Costa Mesa, California, Ferrington moved to a Kiwanda cinder-block in 1965. His Pacific City Boatworks was a grand enterprise. Ferrington created jigs to mass-produce hulls. His design was equally innovative. The Vic’s Craft had a lower-raked, more rounded bow. The hull didn’t so much plane as plow, but it settled softly in rough seas whereas Kellow’s raked bow slapped the water. Most impressively, Ferrington could crank out more than a hundred 99

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dories a year. When he took ill, assistant Mel Potter, a fellow boatbuilder from Costa Mesa, assumed the company reins. With his son Verle, Potter built the majority of dories in the 1970s. His customers were markedly different from the prototypical farmer-fisher. School teachers, professionals, and ex-military predominated. Some seemed to expect salmon to jump into the boat, but neophytes learned quickly or went broke. Information analysis was crucial. Fishers had to adapt to a market beset by fluctuating prices and harvests; accelerating changes to electronics, engines, and gear; and rapidly rising costs. To the uninitiated, wholesale prices seemed arbitrary, yet for complex reasons fishers still ended up ahead most seasons. The longer the boom ran, the more resourcefulness itself became the most important resource.2 One of those new fishers was Ray Monroe. Born in Santa Monica in 1957, Ray grew up in suburban southern California, excelling at competitive judo. In summer 1968, he traveled to Spokane for a tournament. On the return leg, he detoured to Pacific City and boarded a dory for the first time. That summer was “playtime,” but the experience became relevant when his parents moved to Woods in spring 1969. Ray’s stepdad Darrel Landingham tried to dory fish. Granddad “Redeye” Wilson hired Ray to pull gear. Ray started at 1 percent of gross, rising to 3 percent by summer’s end. Ray was eleven. The next year he earned 6 percent. “That’s how we made money when we first came,” Ray explained, but like other South County residents, the Landinghams and Wilsons shifted with the seasons. In winter Darrel and Redeye worked construction, Judy Landingham managed the household, and the kids attended school. Come summer, life revolved around fishing. Ray pulled until 1971, when he leased “a little eighteen-foot scow.” The dory “liked to leak and the engine didn’t run very good.” Ray was thirteen and captaining his own dory. Although he wasn’t “old enough to drive across the street,” he nevertheless steered an old station wagon to and from the beach every day. The fleet paid no mind. In 1974, Ray leased a better dory and, in 1975, made enough to buy his own. One reason the adults gave Ray a pass was his home life. By the time Ray was running his own dory, he was also contributing to the family coffer and saving for college. “Some days we all ate with that money”; when Darrel and Judy separated in 1975, the family consumed “almost all of it.” Only when Ray left for college did he keep more of his earnings, but each summer he was again sharing “whenever anybody needed any money.”3

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Ray’s first years coincided with accelerating change. Fishers were still switching from cotton to wire line. Many still toggled between commercial and charter fishing, but technology was making the commercial side more appealing. Hydraulic power, introduced by an Oregon State University extension employee in the early 1970s, was a key innovation. Paul Hanneman recalled that a “kooky guy” named Barry Fisher “wanted me to get a whole bunch of dorymen together. He had a new idea on how to get power out of the flywheel of a motor to run hydraulic gear.” A traditionalist at heart, Hanneman was skeptical, but Fisher, who was an inventive and talented teacher and fisher, attached a pump to the top of an outboard motor and, “by God, the thing worked.” Tapping the kinetic energy of the flywheel, pumps and valves applied hydraulic power to gurdies. Fishers could use heavier weights to run gear deeper and retrieve it faster, easing and accelerating catching. Then fishing theory evolved. The standard lure was a colored hoochie tied to a flasher, a shiny piece of metal that oscillated through the water. Every fisher had their favorite setup, but differences were overstated because salmon have poor color perception and mainly respond to scent and movement. Flashing metal drew attention, but salmon—as Victor Jr.’s tuna gear experiment proved—were fickle. In 1971 someone added a chunk of frozen herring for scent. According to Monroe, fishers debated “whether it was worth the money,” but those who used chunks caught more fish and spent less on bait.4 South County’s market, financial, and supply infrastructures also matured. In 1970, Jack and Marlene Hogevoll purchased Jim Imlah’s building at the cape and renamed it Cape Kiwanda Fish Company. They added gear and fish shops and carried on for two decades. Other buyers followed. In 1974, Julio and Jean Gogas converted Vic Ferrington’s boat factory into a wholesale and retail station. In 1977, Jack Crider bought Bob Stacy’s old cannery, which had also been run by Hoy Brothers and Barbey Packing Company. Each owner discovered capacious job descriptions. In addition to buying fish, they had to supply gear and bait, provide credit, rescue boats and trucks, and wet-nurse the clueless. Couples shared labors when kids were old enough. Buyers wielded power over fishers, but they in turn were beholden to processors. In the early days, buyers had been retailers. Portland markets, Barnacle Bill’s in Lincoln City, and the New England Fish Company absorbed surplus fish in the 1950s and early 1960s. By the mid-1960s, harvests had grown beyond local demand even at the height

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of tourist season, so buyers began to contract with larger processors in Astoria, Newport, and Eureka. Barbey, Bumble Bee, Hallmark, Hoy, Lazio, Oregon Coast Seafoods, and Point Adams Seafood were the main outlets. Processors steadied the market but also tilted the balance of power. It was an old tale. Similar to the way Boston’s T-Wharf strangled New England fishers, Manhattan’s Fulton Fish Market attracted organized crime, and Oregon canneries monopolized coastal rivers, salmon processors were choke points that enabled a few companies to impose prices on many fishers. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, netters had responded to the cannery trusts by forming unions and striking for higher prices, but trollers had no similar solidarity. Thus in 1971, when processors refused to buy coho for more than 36 cents per pound—half the 1969 price—the dory fleet had no alternative but to accept it.5 With no organization to protect them, each fisher had to master many details. Newcomers such as Monroe needed expertise in markets, electronics, motors, hydraulics, and accounting. Like all businesses, Ray had to know his costs, especially during the Great Inflation of the 1970s. Fuel prices soared during OPEC embargoes. Bait, tackle, and gear costs jumped as the consumer price index rose from 1.07 percent in 1965 to 13.7 percent in 1980. Hulls also cost more as their average size stretched to twenty-two feet. Fitting them out required buying motors, pumps, hydraulic lines, and gurdies. The military eased restrictions on advanced electronics. Fishers gained access to citizen-band and VHF radios. Sound navigation and ranging (SONAR) was miniaturized as depth finders that detected reefs, pinnacles, and schools. Long range navigation (LORAN), first used by World War II flyers, could locate position horizontally, and in the 1980s microprocessors and global positioning systems (GPS) automated geospatial data in ways that made previous devices obsolete. The costs of technology were offset by fishers’ enhanced ability to locate prey three-dimensionally and then stay on a patch of water with ever-greater precision.6 Albacore fishing exemplified how these developments came together. Kiwanda fishers caught tuna only occasionally in the 1950s and 1960s, and only in the warm months of July and August. Tuna fed on schools of anchovies and sardines in the company of porpoise and seabirds, but only rarely did schools migrate close enough to shore for Kiwanda’s doubleended dories. In the late 1960s, however, a few intrepid souls began to steer their more powerful dories westward in search of blue water. Where there

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were flocks of birds on the surface, there might be bait schools underneath; and where there was bait, there might be tuna. Nothing was guaranteed. Some sorties were long, expensive snipe hunts, but occasionally a few fishers returned with huge catches. Then, as long as conditions lasted, more dories ventured the twenty to forty to sixty miles offshore. Paydays could be significant, especially in the dog days of hot weather, calm oceans, and scarce salmon, but cost-benefit ratios were tricky. Prerequisite to any expedition was the ability to navigate beyond the horizon, a capacity few dories possessed until the late 1970s, plus the willingness to burn a lot of fuel—especially difficult after the 1973 embargo. In practice, tuna prospectors came from the margins, either the very successful or very desperate, all of whom hoped a bonanza would make or salvage a season.7 Technology empowered fishers and altered how they knew the sea. Previous generations relied mainly on their senses to gauge wind direction and speed, water temperature and color, and fish belly contents. Eyes and skin told them how deep to run gear and how fast and in which direction to troll. By the 1970s, though, an array of tools mediated their perceptions of nature. In addition to marking the ocean floor, depth finders measured water temperature and “pinged” schools. Still, even objective data required interpretation. In one sense, humans had to learn what their tools were telling them; in another, it was but another stream of information that depended on environmental experience to match pings to biota. Similarly, LORAN and GPS devices provided greater certitude about where a dory was on a map, but devices could not tell fishers the direction of schools or what they were biting. That required reasoning based on experience with how fish responded to winds, currents, seasons, and feed. For all its precision, hard data still required contextual reasoning. The machines had hardly taken over.8 The boom was uneven, but the coastal slice of South County thrived with fisher earnings. In 1970, the Kiwanda fleet made $281,000 in sales; this translates to about $1.8 million in 2018 dollars. Rising harvests were only the tip the economic iceberg. Most commercial fishers lived locally during the season, so a portion of their earnings flowed back into the local economy—what economists call the multiplier effect. Cash and credit circulated in bait, gas, groceries, and tackle purchases. The spending bolstered jobs for grocery clerks, restaurant workers, gas station attendants, and wholesaler employees, all of whom recirculated a portion of their

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wages as well. In the 1970s, locally generated and locally spent summertime income was crucial to a rural economy that was still dormant from October to April. Local merchants understood the dory fleet’s importance, but its actual effects varied by year. Ray Monroe explained that in 1971, processors offered a low price of 36 cents per pound, nearly half what they paid in 1970, but because the fleet landed 111,561 coho, nearly double the 1969 harvest, the season was still “real good.” Similarly, in 1974, the 99,753 coho offset a mediocre price. The boom crested two years later. Monroe recalled that, in 1974, “God, I don’t think there was 150 boats.” By 1976, “there was over 300 or 350, 400 rigs on the beach every day, triple stacked” a quarter mile, from the cape to the boat ramp. “Some guys even had to park in the parking lot.” Kiwanda was the largest salmon port on the Pacific. Dory fishers landed 169,810 coho—the most ever—but the huge fleet meant that the per-vessel catch was less than it had been in 1970 or 1974. It did not matter. High prices and many fish led to $1,054,000 in salmon sales, about $4.6 million in 2018 dollars (fig. 7.1).9 Money flowed through a community that, by the 1970s, had grown in size and complexity. The Union Precinct population had long since rebounded from its 1940 nadir of 215. By 1950, the area had 422 residents, and it topped 500 in 1960. By then the census lumped Cloverdale, Pacific City, Oretown, and Woods into what was called the Neskowin Division. The population totaled 1,783 residents. The rest of the valley trended similarly. From a low of 2,069 in 1940, the basin population rose to 2,418 residents in 1950 and 3,558 in 1960. Then growth stalled. By 1970 the Neskowin Division had added only forty-eight people, and the entire watershed lost ninety-four. Stagnation reflected a timber recession. Logging had remained modest across the 1950s. Then Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management harvests rose from 67,168 MBF in 1962 to 99,951 MBF in 1968, but fell to 55,480 MBF in 1969, 63,356 MBF in 1970, and 50,893 MBF in 1971. Those numbers chart South County’s ongoing economic instability, but they miss a crucial shift in its seasonal rhythms. A few tourists returned to the valley in the early 1940s. Some bought property. Frances and Harvey Orcutt hailed from West Linn, Oregon. They had been regulars since the 1920s, and in 1942 they bought several plots on the Nestucca River, partly from an estate sale and partly at a foreclosure auction. They also bought a dilapidated shack once used by Samuel Elmore & Company as a winter boatshed. The couple remodeled the building as a one-season

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Fig. 7.1. Looking southeastward from the top of Cape Kiwanda about 1970, the presence of so many non-trailered vehicles and crowds milling about the dunes, beach, and surf confirms that this was Dory Derby. In the background, several handfuls of buildings surround the edges of the county parking lot at the end of the dune in the left center. Photo by Bob Hill, courtesy Sandy Hanneman collection.

cabin. Other second-homers with greater means built ­Craftsman-style houses on Hill Street, locally known as McMinnville Heights. All added to a seasonal and weekend presence that further expanded the summertime multiplier effect.10 Photos of Pacific City reveal modest growth in the 1950s, largely confined east of the Nestucca River, but the rush of commercial and sportfishers rapidly accelerated expansion. The crowd grew as whole families arrived to share the summer fishing season. Some returned in fall to angle the river. At first fishers stayed in trailer parks or rentals, but as fortunes improved, they bought or built summer homes in Pacific City, Woods, and

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Tierra del Mar. The decennial census still missed this seasonal presence, but we can trace its impact through employment data. With the exception of the very poor year of 1964, Tillamook County’s contract construction averaged 70 to 110 jobs annually in the 1950s and 1960s. Then, in 1972, employment rose especially in summer, the peak season for second-home building. By 1980, average annual job figures had doubled to two hundred. Timber work also rebounded beginning in 1972 and 1973, when the cut reached 114,063 MBF and 152,000 MBF, respectively. In most years South County’s economy was very strong. Many residents were producing and consuming, and the carryover to the off-season economy and tax base led local businesses to expand and stay open longer across the day, week, and year. Merchants hired more seasonal and permanent employees (fig. 7.2).11 What the statistics do not show is how the boom shaped household labor. Data highlights male work—construction, dairy, fishing, timber—but women and kids also worked. This trend is often tied to 1970s feminism, but it had been the blue-collar norm since 1900. By 1940, 36.4 percent of all married women were in the workforce, rising to 52.1 percent by 1950,

Fig. 7.2. This photo, looking northwestward at Pacific City and Cape Kiwanda, was likely taken in 1950, just after an airstrip was marked off in the grass in the right center of the image. A sea of sand, undeveloped river banks, and shoals still dominated the lower Nestucca River in the early postwar period. Photo courtesy Lorraine Eckhardt collection.

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59.9 percent by 1960, and 63.4 percent by 1970. In South County, where seasonal labor remained crucial, women had worked in paid and unpaid roles since the pioneering era. One invisible category was dairying. The work done by Alice and Terry Learned was typical of farm families who moved in and out of the laborer category depending on time of day and whether school was in session. Service work as tellers and clerks, often ignored in the census, was the province of farming, fishing, and logging wives and daughters. Summer work in fish companies, on boats, and at construction sites occupied many kids. Governments tracked some of this labor, but a lot of it was done sotto voce, off the books, under the table, and invisible to the state.12 As fishing wound down in September 1976, a large bounty of chinooks punctuated the season. Most fishers settled accounts in the black. Many ordered new Gilman, Kellow, Learned, and Potter hulls, as well as electronics and beach rigs. Good times had never been better, yet the problem with booms is that they always end. The cycle was endemic to South County. The only question was when, not whether, the bust would come, but it was not a crushing worry. Residents had seen hard times before, and the economy did not seem different. Fishing was still a fair-weather business. Timber and construction slowed each fall. Every industry drew more seasonal and permanent residents. Most were net contributors as long as they saved enough to carry them through the slow times. Undergirding this lifestyle was the assumption that, like the boom, the bust would end. In short- and medium-term perspective, market ebbs had been moderate and brief. Downturns in timber and construction were not drawn out. Few, though, had experienced the hard times of the Great Depression. Thus while many knew the high times would end, few also seemed to recognize that all those seasonal workers posed a huge, if latent, problem should the work not return. Even dairying, long the most stable sector, producing on average more milk every year, contained structural weaknesses that imperiled some farmers under some circumstances. Even worse, no one expected a set of mostly unrelated factors to unfold simultaneously to slow every industry. In the next few years, atmospheric and oceanic climate fluctuations, monetary inflation, government regulations, environmental reforms, and industry policies would wreak havoc along the entire Oregon coast, exposing once more the precarity of living on the margins of a larger, largely unwieldy urban-oriented political ecology.

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Ray Monroe experienced all these instabilities at a transitional moment. After graduating from high school in 1975, he enrolled at Oregon College of Education. Every autumn he studied criminology and played football; every summer he was in a dory, but Kiwanda was not the same. Harvests fell to 45,646 salmon in 1977, then to 50,840 in 1978, and 41,349 in 1979. All signs pointed toward a future based on his education, perhaps as a truant officer, but his life veered dramatically in his senior year. Ray said he was told by advisers, “I’d make $9,000 a year when I got out of school and be a prison guard. . . . Meanwhile all my friends were making $4,000 to $5,000 every two to three days.” Nine credits shy of a degree, Ray boarded a shrimp boat. At first it seemed the right move. By his own tally he made “a thousand dollars a day” in spring, more in summer from salmon. One day he “had thirty-eight fish for 780-some dollars.” That fall Ray joined a sablefish crew, setting and retrieving traps using high-tension line and a hydraulic power block. The work was rapid. A filled trap could exceed one hundred pounds. Then a loop of rope snagged his right hand. As it fed through the power block, the rope forced his wrist back until his fingers touched the top of his forearm. The carpals were crushed. It took years to regain function, and pain lingered longer. Ray had become a liability. No captain would hire him. Ray had only a “maintenance and cure” payment of eight dollars a day for food, lodging, and travel to medical appointments. He had no choice but to climb back in his dory, but in 1980 salmon were scarce, once more just supplemental income even for the best fishers. Assessing his options after high school, Ray’s brother John entered the woods as a choker setter. Others built houses and boats, or sprayed fiberglass on boats, or went back to teaching. Everyone was again relying on their second seasons.13 Ray’s misfortunes were extreme yet emblematic of a wide range of problems after 1976. One South County industry after another faltered. Many residents suffered. Like so many times before, the roots of misfortune lay outside the Nestucca Valley, but locals had to ride it out. The national inflation rate peaked at 14.7 percent in 1980, throttling credit and, with it, logging and construction. State and corporate regulations forced dairy farmers to upgrade or quit. In the fisheries, the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation shifted, redirecting currents of nutrients away from where California, Oregon, and Washington salmon matured. The result was smaller and fewer salmon and less income. Making matters worse, albacore populations

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shrank as a consequence of international harvests. Kiwanda fishers could no longer wait for salmon. They had to chase the bite, trailering dories to any promising report. Results were mixed. Typically, a few hit it big, but profits were offset by higher fuel and lodging costs. By the time word had filtered back to South County, the bonanzas had passed. Some fishers acquired California permits, driving as far south as Morro Bay to fish the April season, and to southern Oregon in May. Others added hydraulic blocks. Carl Blazer, Terry Learned, Sam Sakamoto, and Don Wenzinger hoped crabbing would expand their fishing income. For Sam and Don, who ran traps only on weekends, high overhead and storm losses proved too much. Carl and Terry lived on the coast and ran gear all winter, but profit still eluded Terry. Dungeness stocks were on a cyclical decline by 1980. Learned discovered that, as in nearly every other occupation, it was a “bad time to get into crabbing.”14 Prospects grew worse as regulators ratcheted back fishing seasons. In 1948, the Oregon Fish Commission warned that salmon conservation was “useless” until “the ocean fishery . . . is also controlled.” Legislators responded by limiting ocean trolling to July 1 to November 15. The next year it shifted to June 15 to October 31. The season remained the same for three decades. In good years and bad, fishers had 139 days to hunt salmon. Only in 1979, after two wobbly years, did Oregon reduce its season to eighty-three days, opening July 10 and closing September 3; even then it had to shut down fishing early and in a way that worsened matters. Runs still fell, so managers set a twelve-day season for 1982. They also imposed a moratorium on new licenses. To accommodate Indian treaty rights, Congress passed a buy-back program to shrink the troll fleet in Washington state. Oregon chose a cheaper solution: let the market winnow licenses. Each year fishers had to pay a fee and sell at least one salmon to maintain eligibility. Poor seasons winnowed participation, and a cap on entry enhanced the value of the remaining commercial licenses. New entrants had to acquire an existing permit to sell fish. This allowed existing license holders to cash out, but future aspirants had to pay a premium. To make matters worse, a strong El Niño spread across the North Pacific in late 1982 and 1983, super-warming the ocean and severely reducing the size and number of salmon. The 1983 harvest was a disaster. Fishery managers preemptively cancelled the 1984 coho season.15

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Failing runs and vanishing seasons made salmon managers appear incompetent. For a century, hatchery advocates had promised something they did not deliver: more salmon. Oregon hatcheries had always been politicized messes. Directors catered first to commercial fishers and then to anglers as the latter gained political muscle. Species became political instruments as fish culturists shifted from coho, the historically dominant coastal species, to chinook, steelhead, and trout, which were ecologically less important but coveted by sportfishers. Hatchery operations were also haphazard. The number of eggs taken and juveniles planted in the Nestucca varied annually. Workers still transplanted fish across streams even though the effectiveness of the practice had been debunked decades earlier. The poor survival of transplants was an ecological saving grace. Then in 1960, the state adopted a new policy of retaining salmon until they smoltified, the stage when juveniles transform to survive at sea. Technicians believed raising fewer fish longer would result in greater returns, and managers congratulated themselves “for the high abundance and expansion of ocean fishing” in the early 1970s. When runs plummeted in 1978, however, researchers began to wonder what had changed and whether other factors might better explain strong and weak runs alike. By 1983, Thomas Nickelson had an answer: rather than feeble, fickle, poorly documented fish cultural practices, cool temperatures and strong upwelling in the North Pacific were “primarily responsible for the rapid success . . . of the hatchery coho program” in the 1960s and early 1970s.16 The stumbling hatcheries undermined confidence in Oregon’s Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW). The more salmon populations declined, the more fishers suspected the state had abandoned them. In 1971, the legislature legalized private salmon ranching, ventures that operated like public hatcheries, raising juveniles until they migrated to sea, but harvesting adults for sale when they returned to spawn. The state tried to minimize conflict with the interests of the commercial fishery by restricting ranches to raising chum, a species trollers rarely caught, on streams without hatcheries. In 1973, though, lobbyists persuaded legislators to permit chinook and coho cropping because chums were unprofitable. In coming years the state licensed several corporate-owned ranches. Then, in what can charitably be called a moment of political tone-deafness, the governor appointed John Donaldson as ODFW director. Donaldson had a problematic pedigree. He held a doctorate in fish biology, had extensive

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experience in fish propagation, and his father had pioneered hatchery science at the University of Washington, but Donaldson was also linked to Oregon Aqua Foods, a corporate salmon ranch. Donaldson’s policies disconcerted fishers. During his watch ODFW supplied salmon eggs to private industry even when public hatcheries were at low production. Worse still, a premature season closure in 1979, during what turned out to be a very good run, appeared to protect ranching interests at trollers’ expense. Fisher anger focused on ODFW science and intentions, and in demonstrations, open meetings, and reports, fishers challenged Donaldson’s policies and credibility.17 Further complicating matters, ODFW was no longer the only entity overseeing salmon. In response to images of Russian “mother ships” hovering just beyond the twelve-mile boundary of American waters, Congress passed the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 to extend sovereignty two hundred miles offshore. The Commerce Department began to administer ocean fishing beyond the three-mile limit of state sovereignty. Pacific salmon had been entangled in international treaties since 1937, but the 1976 law added regional boards that drew Oregon into multistate negotiations with Alaska, Washington, California, Idaho, and the National Marine Fisheries Service. Then in 1980, Congress passed the Salmon and Steelhead Conservation and Enhancement Act, creating another regional framework in which to address the growing salmon crisis. It had a board totaling six voting members from the states of California, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. Commercial fishers gained a nonvoting position on this commission, which was tasked to develop consensus plans for rebuilding depleted fish stocks, but the commission itself was only advisory. It had no decision-making or enforcement powers. There were good reasons for a multi-jurisdictional approach to managing species that crossed many sovereign spaces, but each regulatory layer further distanced Kiwanda fishers from policy makers.18 The results of these developments—smaller runs, shorter seasons, diminished influence—fostered a paranoid yet accurate critique of fishery management. In late July 1979, federal officials halted trolling off northern Oregon and Washington to ensure that treaty Indians got their court-protected harvest. Kiwanda fishers held a solidarity protest, emphasizing how fishery managers were protecting species and tribal rights in ways that were indeed harming non-Indian fishers, but that message was obscured when

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racists hung an Indian in effigy. Next, David Schlip, Richard Goché, and Paul Hanneman wrote two state-of-the-coho-fishery reports titled ORCO, short for Oregon Coho. Goché had worked at a Tillamook hatchery under the direction of a university researcher, so he knew firsthand all the flaws of existing practices. Schlip was a Kiwanda regular and volunteer in a local fish cultural program. Hanneman was the local state representative on the House Ways and Means Committee, which funded the studies. The trio focused on ODFW policies regarding commercial fishing, public hatcheries, and salmon ranches. They studied the fitness of private salmon, the causes of poor runs, and the efficacy of the smolt program. Their report offered twenty recommendations. One proposal demanded that ODFW present research and policies in layman’s language. Fishers detested scientific and administrative jargon. They yearned for clear, concise, consistent communication. They also suspected ODFW of manipulating data, rearranging figures at different meetings to support contradictory conclusions. In one setting a staff member touted hatchery survival; in another he explained that shrinking wild populations warranted shorter seasons. The two findings were not mutually contradictory, but ORCO ’80 authors’ criticisms honestly reflected a broad distrust of ODFW.19 Even more aggrieved at ODFW were members of the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians. Driven to destitution by termination, tribal members watched as the federal government sold the timber on their former lands at bargain prices so private timber companies could profit fabulously in the 1960s. By the early 1970s, Indians were desperate for basic social services such as education and health care. Their leaders—the Confederated Tribes never ceased as an organization—mounted an effort to have their tribal status reinstated. White resistance erupted immediately over hunting and fishing rights. Sportsmen revived all the stereotypes. The Portland Oregonian feared that Indians would gain “exclusive or unusual hunting and fishing rights,” and an outdoor writer for the Eugene RegisterGuard spun dark fantasies of “nets in the Alsea [River] all fall and winter, from the first of the silvers to the last of the steelhead” and “deer and elk in the coast range under fire all year, day and night.” More adamant and powerful resistance came from the state. ODFW director John McKean and Beverly Hall of the attorney general’s office demanded an explicit denial of hunting and fishing rights—a basic right reserved in the treaty negotiations of the 1850s—as a quid pro quo for tribal recognition. Of the two, Hall

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was the more extreme, but her exaggerated fears of lost state sovereignty were quickly dismissed. Senator Mark Hatfield fully supported the tribes, but Representative Les AuCoin, whose district included the Siletz community, conditioned his support on omitting hunting and fishing rights. The strong-arm tactics left a bitter legacy, but the bill’s passage in November 1977 created a crucial foundation. Tribal recognition enabled the group to stabilize their society, and another agreement in 1980 secured a twohundred-salmon ceremonial fishery that is central to Northwest Coast culture. Still, like the Nestucca netters of the 1930s, Indians were reminded of how far the state of Oregon would go to undermine Indigenous interests.20 For both fishers and Indians, science, policy, and salmon ranches triggered yet another complaint about ODFW’s lack of transparency. State biologists were alarmed by plummeting coho stocks. A crucial signal was the decline of immature males, called “jacks,” returning each fall. Salmon managers regarded jacks as proxies of the future, and they devised a model, called the Oregon Production Index (OPI), to predict the size of the next run, which became the basis for the next harvest quota. The OPI was supposed to protect depleted stocks, and low jack counts triggered an early end to ocean fishing in 1979. The closure disrupted the coastal economy, but all agreed that conserving salmon was more important. At least, that was what people thought at first, but the emergency shutdown—and, by extension, the OPI—turned out to be faulty. As ORCO ’80 noted, the 1979 OPI undershot the number of returning coho “by approximately 1000%.” By the time the error was caught, it was too late for trollers. Already in a conspiratorial frame of mind because of Donaldson’s ties to the salmonranching industry, fishers accused him and ODFW of purposely miscalculating to protect private aquaculture.21 ORCO ’80’s most interesting proposal sought to diversify artificial propagation. When runs began to decline, ODFW’s smolt program lost credibility. The authors argued that instead of subsidizing sea ranching, ODFW should distribute excess eggs to volunteers. The intent was less to kill the smolt program than to empower a grassroots effort to aid wild salmon, which biologists identified as a strategic gene pool. To enhance wild stocks, volunteers built incubation stations, or “hatchboxes,” on small creeks where coho spawned. Workers increased fertilization rates and then released fry to join wild salmon. It was a dispersed, low-cost, low-tech form of supplementation. It also made a local program state

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policy. The Tillamook County Landowner Program, begun in 1973 as “a volunteer egg incubation method employing wooden troughs placed near creeks,” operated under the belief—not science—that releasing juvenile salmon once they had absorbed their egg sacs, and then subjecting fry to natural selection, produced stronger runs. The policy was bolstered by a meeting with British Columbia salmon agencies. Terry Learned recalled Canadians bragging that, in 1977, the province “was ten years behind the United States in salmon production. By 1979 they were ten years ahead of us.” Advances stemmed from stream rehabilitation, an enhancement program similar to hatchboxes, and fidelity to local genetics. Few in Salem understood or cared about the ORCO ’80 proposals, and Donaldson was contemptuous. Fishers suspected, not unreasonably, that administrators, researchers, and technicians feared a loss of power if they had to speak in lay terms and to accept public participation. ODFW stonewalled, but within two years Salem forced it to accommodate most of ORCO ’80’s suggestions. The process by which this happened revealed that fishers were not as marginal as they had feared, and that ODFW was not as monolithic as it seemed.22 Tensions already existed among ODFW scientific and technical personnel, and, like so many issues in fishery management, the divide was long-standing. Since the nineteenth century, researchers had doubted the methods of fish culturists, the latter of whom rarely had data to back their claims. Scientific skepticism reemerged with salmon ranching. Since 1974, private firms had planted more smolts than the state; by 1982, ranches were releasing six times as many. Theoretically, this could have benefited commercial fishers. More smolts could have produced bigger runs, but ranch methods were problematic. The commercial smolt, affectionately called a “zero” by company biologists, was an inferior fish. Grown in warm water and fed special diets, the zero was raised to smoltify a year sooner than fish in the wild. The method accelerated turnaround on capital but invited disaster. In the 1930s, scientists critiqued the practice of transferring salmon across watersheds, yet ODFW was still supplying ranches with eggs from around the state. The mistake surfaced quickly. Ranched salmon homing mechanisms faltered. In one sample, 78 percent of zeroes strayed from their home facility. The problem was pervasive. Scientists also worried that ranches flooded estuaries with zeroes, and that there was not enough feed to support ranched and wild populations. The final

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concern was that straying adults might breed with wild salmon, diluting inherited traits and making wild stocks less resilient. In sum, ORCO ’80’s thesis was that ranches were introducing inferior salmon into a gene pool as an uncontrolled experiment, and Oregon fishers were sacrificed for the sake of corporate profit.23 Kiwanda’s fishing fleet showed how costs were unevenly distributed. As ODFW pared the length of ocean seasons, it was increasingly impossible for salmon fishers, even in low-overhead dories, to make ends meet. The 1982 season lasted twelve days. There were many salmon off Kiwanda that year, so a classic derby ensued. Dories landed more than 55,000 coho, but the price—$1.35 on July 1 and $1.50 on July 12—left a fine margin. Those who fished every day did okay, but part-time fishers were lucky to recoup license and insurance costs. The harvest fell sharply in the El Niño–plagued 1983 season, and the state canceled 1984 and probably should have cancelled 1985, during which Kiwanda fishers landed a mere 1,004 coho. Harvests shrank. Profits evaporated. The 1982 catch generated $494,000 in sales, a third less than the previous year, but that soon seemed like good times. Fishers sold $149,000 in coho in 1983, and $63,000 in 1984. The economic multiplier that had leavened South County in the 1970s now entered a death spiral. Fishers stayed fewer days and spent less. Pacific City merchants cut hours and staff. The economy further decelerated. Even in the best of times, work was seasonal. Unemployment peaked with the rain and cold. Timber sites turned to bogs. Construction took a hiatus. Mills ramped down. Cows dried up. After 1978, though, the bad times elongated across a hard decade. Annual unemployment rates rose from 8 percent in 1979 to 15.8 percent by 1982. Monthly rates shot as high as 20.8 percent. In fact, it was worse. Official data did not include people who had stopped seeking work, were underemployed, or left town. Even more instructive was how long the recovery took. The national unemployment rate crested in 1982 at 9.7 percent but had not even halved by 1989. Tillamook’s rebound was slower and steeper.24 The fate of real estate and home building bared the tangled relationship between South County and national, even global, forces. In the years after 1978, merchants struggled to stay in the black. Local woes were rooted in sometimes very distant problems. Summer traffic declined in the late 1970s as gas prices rose and money grew scarce. The Federal Reserve Bank decided the only way to control inflation and unemployment was to

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tighten the money supply. In early 1978, the discount lending rate was 6.53 percent—now a seemingly astronomical figure—but by late 1979 the rate had risen to 16.16 percent. Then it yo-yoed ever more wildly, bottoming in the low tens and spiking to 19.96 percent in April 1980, 20.5 percent in December 1980, and 21.71 percent in July 1981. National real estate markets froze. South County sales crashed. New home construction slowed as well. Building employment peaked in 1979 at two hundred workers, but, as with other sectors, the figure was an average. Monthly employment figures ranged from 160 in January to 240 in July. By the mid-1980s the annual rate was 130. December totals were lower. Recovery to 1979 levels did not happen until 1991, yet the decline was not as precipitous as fishing. Why is not entirely clear, but as real estate prices cratered, especially on the sand west of the Nestucca River, speculators consolidated holdings and used the downturn to obtain permits for larger units and more expansive development. The downturn of the 1980s set the stage for a breathtaking gentrification of Pacific City and Neskowin in the 1990s.25 Historically, the timber industry had always been sensitive to cycles in construction, but Tillamook County broke free of this relationship in the 1980s. The low year was actually 1975, at 183,086 MBF. The cut then rose above 200,000 MBF most years through 1988. Logging went on even in the depths of the housing slump. Why? A dynamic relationship existed between public and private forests. Crown Zellerbach owned timber lands just beyond the Nestucca basin, and in the late 1970s it began to liquidate its holdings in a five-year spree, converting it all to pulp and then literally unbolting the mill and exiting the county. During that run the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management reined in sales to prevent glutted markets. When the private trees gave out in 1984, federal logging rebounded. The result was a relatively even supply of logs until 1989, albeit from different sources. Timber work thus seemed stable, but as with salmon, the price of wood was critical. In the early 1980s the bottom fell out. From a high of $146.13 per MBF in August 1979, stumpage had dropped to $17.95 by August 1982 and then stayed low in a drawnout trough because of a decade-long decline in the national homebuilding market. Then federal courts restricted western Oregon harvests to protect birds and fish. Timber and mill jobs crashed, and many of the logs that left the Nestucca basin were shipped overseas rather than milled locally. Little in the way of income returned. When the run of good years ended

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in 1989, the costs of unremunerative harvests fell at the feet of the next generation.26 Dairying rounded out this time of troubles. Long South County’s steadiest sector, milk farms were rocked by regulatory and industry restructuring in the 1970s and 1980s. The roots of change dated to the 1930s, when Oregon began to regulate milking. The reforms in turn dated to Progressive Era concerns that, according to historian Sally McMurry, “thoroughly transformed” the dairy farm. After decades of adulteration scandals, consumers demanded sanitary milk. Governments responded by imposing grading systems. In Oregon, Grade A required milking parlors with concrete floors, vacuum-pump milking machines, and cooled storage tanks. The expense quickly sorted the industry. Top farms were large, electrified, and heavily capitalized. Their milk drew the highest prices, but the grade required them to produce all year. This meant even larger herds, and staggered insemination so every cow could still stop lactating at some point each year. Grade B was a more heterogeneous category, ranging from middling herds on semi-improved farms to tiny operations that still lacked electricity in the 1950s. Some herds were as few as five cows, and farmers still delivered cans of warm milk to nearby cheese factories, since that was the only market for Grade B milk. This was South County dairying in a nutshell.27 The diversity in dairying had been a latent tension since the Tillamook County Creamery Association formed in 1909, and it only deepened with Depression-era regulations. The TCCA imposed its own regulations. State dairy and food commission reports were the basis for a self-grading system that disciplined lagging farms and cheese factories. The emergence of Grade A farms in central Tillamook exposed disparities, and for decades the most ambitious farmers pressured the TCCA to market their milk aggressively. The TCCA did so, but it also supported smaller farms by emphasizing cheese production. This enabled even tiny farms in the Nestucca Valley to sell Grade B milk to local cheese factories. The tensions came to a head in 1962, when a group of large farms broke away in “the Big Split.” The TCCA ruptured into rival associations, each trying to drive the other into default. Both nearly succeeded through their own missteps. Dairying nevertheless boomed. South County’s five remaining cheese factories continued to grow until 1968, when a judge forced a settlement that led one side to buy out the other and consolidate all producers. Resolution

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simply deepened bitter feelings when the TCCA shuttered every creamery but one, including all of the South County cheese associations. Nestucca dairies had to rely on TCCA tankers to deliver their milk to the main plant in Tillamook. This increased expenses because every farm had to install cooling tanks. Farmers compensated by milking more, which required more cows, yet many Nestucca dairies remained Grade B producers, more indebted but not enjoying higher prices. Like fishers and loggers, dairy farmers’ margins were tightening.28 Nature, development, and the state created tipping points. Logging silted streams and reduced riparian shade. Foresters sprayed DDT, 2,4-D, and 2,4,5-T onto trees. Growing herds produced more milk and manure. Urban growth left a legacy of leaky septic tanks, and every pollutant worked its way through forests, fields, streets, and pipes to streams. Water temperatures and fecal coliform counts rose; dissolved oxygen crashed. Spawning grounds and estuaries turned toxic. State researchers had documented upstream logging damage by 1966. The lower Nestucca did not meet clean water standards by 1977. Pacific City and Cloverdale had to build treatment plants, and homes had to tie in to new sewage systems, but treated water still exceeded state thresholds. Pollution was systemic, so the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality regulated every factor. Dairy operators had to build holding ponds to store wastes and install irrigation systems to spread manure. That rule, introduced in 1982, winnowed more farms. Some families began to lease their pastures. Then in 1986, the TCCA stopped accepting Grade B milk. Everyone had to build a milking parlor and install vacuum milking systems. This killed the small farm: in 1969, 256 dairies milked 13,250 cows; by 1978, only 198 farms milked 15,906 cows; by 1992, 185 farms milked a staggering 25,580 cows. Farm acreage did not change, so land was utilized far more intensively. We can see the results in national rankings. Tillamook County’s cheese production rose to 120th place in 1978, 66th in 1987, and 54th in 1992, generating nearly $58 million in sales. The result was higher profits for the TCCA and surviving farmers, but some families who had only recently put up “Century Farm” signs, designating one hundred years in business, took them back down and shuttered or sold out. Mink ranchers experienced similar disruptions. The pelt industry was earning $351,000 by 1968, but a county planning committee described it as a “high-risk enterprise” needing “adequate financing” and reliable access to low-cost fish. Few in South

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County possessed those resources, and ranches dwindled from nine in 1969 to eight in 1978 to four in 1987.29 Part of what makes times bad is that choices narrow; people are forced to take the least lousy option. Every summer Ray Monroe was in his dory, but things got so bleak that he had to reboard big boats during the most dangerous season. He scalloped in winter 1983 and worked a crab boat out of Crescent City in winter 1984. The following spring he was on a trawler dragging sand soles, and the next winter he was back on a crab boat, patrolling pots off central Oregon in nasty seas. Then he got hurt again. A steel wire shot through his leg to the bone marrow. Ray spent a week in a hospital with painful cellulitis, a condition that can lead to lifethreatening infections. Recovery took four months, during which he could not work. Ray had other harrowing moments as well. Workboats are edgy workscapes. Fishing is a calling with tremendous psychic rewards, but it is also among the most dangerous occupations on earth. Metal, plastic, and organic matter fly around pitching decks slathered in slime and machinery fluids. Long, arduous hours dull the senses. The average vessel is an Occupational Health and Safety Administration nightmare. It takes creativity to imagine worse conditions, but even if every boat was completely safe, which is never true, there is still the ocean, which is anything but pacific in winter. One January day, while chugging back to Depoe Bay, the approach to which requires threading a narrow, rocky slot to a tiny harbor, a rogue wave deposited Ray’s vessel onto a basaltic shelf. Monroe was helpless, completely exposed to lethal devastation. Then, just as randomly, the next swell flushed the boat back into the channel. Ray gunned the engine and tried not to think about what might have been (fig. 7.3).30 Another part of bad times is the faith that things will get better. Despite a tiny harvest in 1985, strong prices nearly doubled the value of the catch to $105,000. The 1986 season was confined to July, but fishers still landed 63,302 coho. Income and South County’s multiplier rose accordingly. By 1987, Ray was back in the black for the first time since 1982. In 1988, the boom returned. Heavy demand by Japanese buyers resulted in an opening price for coho at $2.50 per pound; chinooks garnered $3.50 per pound. The 68,258 coho and 6,345 chinook that year—second highest ever—helped Kiwanda fishers crest the million-dollar threshold for the first time since 1976. Ray still had back bills, but the bottom seemed to have passed. At the same time, life grew more complicated. Ray, Shelly Brock, and her two

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Fig. 7.3. This sequence records Ray Monroe’s effort to pilot his ship through the narrow slot into Depoe Bay. The top photo reveals a rogue wave pushing the WB toward the rocky shelf. In the middle the ship founders on the shelf, and the bottom image shows the WB being flushed back into the channel. Photos courtesy Ray Monroe.

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kids became a family. Compromises ensued. Ray agreed to pass on another winter at sea and instead to harvest sand shrimp in the nearby tidal flats. Packing shrimp in half-pint boxes, he wholesaled to sporting goods stores that resold his catch to anglers. Ray’s income fell, but so did everyone’s anxieties. Shelly’s wage labor and parental duties went on in ways that typified a growing pattern in South County, in which women were the steadiest breadwinners because men’s work—work in nature—was rarer and less remunerative. By summer 1989, Ray was back in a dory, pushing hard all summer. He highlined Kiwanda, catching more salmon than anyone else, but his achievement was offset by the worst coho price in thirty-five years: $1.00 per pound during most of the season. Even before fishing had ended, Ray was back to pumping shrimp. He could feel his prospects stagnate as the world around him changed ever more rapidly. Ray would have to change too.31

Gentrification The rich build sensitive houses and pass their shit around. For the rest of us, it’s trailers on the outskirts of town —Greg Brown, “Boomtown”

When Ray Monroe first visited in 1968, Pacific City’s population was about 130 full-time residents and shrinking. That vector would not last. By 1990, there were a thousand more people in the valley and five hundred more again by 2000. The census had to disaggregate South County into its Beaver, Hebo, Cloverdale, and Pacific City precincts. By 2010, Pacific City alone had 1,035 residents, but that was not the full measure of change. Housing had metastasized, most of the units owned by people who lived elsewhere. Second-home owners were a ghost presence, invisible in the censuses but key to all growth. Meanwhile, the population had also diversified and aged. There were fifty-six nonwhite residents in 1990, the most numerous being twenty-nine “of Hispanic origin.” Twenty years later the Latino population had doubled, still the largest minority, but the category was collectively outnumbered by Asians, Indians, Pacific Islanders, and people of two or more races. By 2000, there were also nearly three times as many residents aged sixty-five or older as those eighteen or under. Ten years later, half the population was at least sixty-five. This was by design. The economic swings of the 1980s made merchants crave stability. A local private campground drew many retirees, and by fall 1989 their year-round presence had inspired the local Chamber of Commerce to revisit its business model. In open meetings members spoke of aging Boomers the way extractive industries conceptualize natural resources. Old people were the new future.1 The idea was neither new nor crazy. Thomas Malaney had imagined a resort community when he platted Ocean Park in 1884, and Pacific City’s campgrounds flourished for decades; yet not until second-home construction took off in the 1970s did tourism really drive the economy. 123

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With it came gentrification, a process by which capital and upper-middling aesthetics combined to reshape the valley in culturally, economically, and ecologically contradictory ways. South County joined a growing number of natural resource areas seeking to transform themselves into vacation and retirement destinations. Boosters pitched scenery and low-cost living. Nestucca became a place to play. In addition to angling and beachcombing, merchants spieled ecological and aesthetic experiences ranging from bird- and storm-watching to surfing, painting, and hiking. Consumption replaced production as the economic engine, and new cohorts emerged. In summer and on fair-weather weekends, day-trippers careened from cars to beaches and back again, sometimes fueling up with gas and food but mostly keeping to themselves. Along the river, hills, and dunes, now stabilized by planted beach grass, second-home owners brought their stuff and friends for their own self-contained visits. The conversion of Kiwanda’s boatyards into permanent mobile home parks illustrated how businesses pivoted from fishery workers to retirees, who, by the 1990s, were also the valley’s most engaged demographic. Old people were regulars at restaurants and the Kiwanda Community Center—itself emblematic of the graying trend—and the area’s most stable revenue stream. As early as 1969, federal transfer payments constituted 11.3 percent of all personal income in the county; by 2009, government checks had ballooned to 26.64 percent. Social Security was the largest stream at 10.93 percent. Pensions and investments added more. The sum of these transitions redefined South County as a place where work, especially work in nature, was less and less important.2 Changes were qualitative as well as quantitative, and most could be seen at Kiwanda. In the 1960s, development around the public parking lot served a blue-collar geography. The fish companies and Vic Ferrington’s boat factory were working landscapes. The county and private campgrounds housed visitors and fishers. Coffee shops and a bar thrived as eateries and refuges. When fog, wind, or high surf reigned, staff dutifully refilled cups as fishers, still in hip boots, waited out weather and ordered little more than ten-cent coffees. The parking lot was the center of a working world that eventually unraveled. The owner of one restaurant built a pizza parlor that fizzled during the 1980s recession. Then every business sold out to developers who were buying much of the area west of the Nestucca River, including most of the sand and all the restaurants surrounding

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the parking lot. The pizza parlor was refurbished as a brewpub. A hotel and shop complex replaced another eatery, and a larger hotel, girdled by an ugly metal wall, rose above the beach and parking lot. Kiwanda’s gentrification, merely a microcosm of changes all along the coast, epitomized Greg Brown’s line, “it’ll boom just as long as the boom has room.”3 Eventually the growth rubbed people raw. The parking lot became a battleground. Brewpub patrons took up so many parking spaces that few remained for beachgoers. An expanding horde of surfers exacerbated tensions by hunkering in one corner and annoying nearly everyone. Antipathies reached a nadir when a developer ally proposed converting the county campground to overflow parking so brewpub patrons could use the main lot. The proposal backfired horribly. A county commission ordered the brewpub to build additional parking on its own property. Meanwhile, similar if less spectacular changes altered central Pacific City as art galleries replaced a sporting goods store and laundromat. Further evincing the town’s shifting demography, a Mexican restaurant opened at the main intersection. Beyond South County’s coastal slice, gentrification had less impact. Blaine, Dolph, Meda, and Oretown had long since ceased to be towns, but an agrarian, blue-collar conservativism carried on there as well as in Cloverdale and Beaver. Aside from a former dairy farm that was being subdivided along the river just south of Beaver, little seemed to change away from the coast, but that former pasture, and what it symbolized, mattered to a lot of residents (fig. 8.1).4 A wave of retirees, second-homers, and telecommuters had come to the coast for the environmental amenities, and a 1997 law provided a platform for their aesthetics. Formed in 1998 as part of a statewide policy that encouraged local engagement with environmental policies, the Nestucca Watershed Council was tasked with gathering data and identifying problems and agendas. Later expanded to include Neskowin and Sand Lake, the council became a forum for discussing environmental issues. In the process, though, residents with very different visions had to learn to see through one another’s eyes. Everyone desired fresh air, clean water, healthy habitat, and bountiful runs, but early meetings revealed the complexity of such ideals. Upstream residents complained that salmon, which died and decayed after spawning, harmed water and air quality. Loggers feared forest protections would exacerbate job losses. Farmers fretted about riparian protections reducing pasturage and driving more farms into insolvency.

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Fig. 8.1. In contrast to Figure 7.2, trees and houses, owned mostly by people who mainly lived elsewhere, dominate Pacific City and Kiwanda by 2007. The key agents of change were the beach grasses planted in the early-to-mid-twentieth century, and developers who took advantage of the stabilized dunes to gentrify the area. Photo by Don Best, courtesy Sally Rissell.

These fears were not imaginary. Many referenced that subdivided dairy pasture. What once held cows now housed double-wides. Early meetings were tense and argumentative, but people learned to listen and to learn. Members became neighbors. Some common ground emerged, yet the council was hamstrung. A broadly shared antipathy to government made many wary of the council, and kept the council from overstepping its authority, but even when members did reach consensus on issues, the council had no funding or enforcement powers. It lived or died by grants and collaboration with agencies that did not always play well with others.5 A preliminary task was constructing a basin history. To restore salmon, the council had to know the watershed’s past. South County had no incorporated towns or systematic records, so the council hired a researcher to gather county, state, and federal documents. It filled in gaps by interviewing residents about salmon abundance, fire and flood frequency, and grazing, logging, and mining. This built crucial knowledge, but the end product had a double edge. Synthesizing memory and text, the resulting narrative was not rooted in any person or place. That threatened residents. Farmers and loggers did not accept that they had harmed the river. Environmentalists

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refused to believe that current forests were in better shape than those of the past, or that dairying and logging were important to the economy. Town residents grew defensive about their impacts on habitat and water quality. Across two decades, the council nevertheless found ways to help. It teamed with agencies to improve fish habitat through data collection, weed and trash pickups, and culvert replacements. It also tried to ameliorate fish cultural practices, including the beloved but scientifically wanting hatchbox program. Oncorhynchus stocks rebounded, but the people who worked in nature suffered. In fairness, addressing social problems was not part of the council’s job description, and the blind spot was systemic. A federal report on the salmon crisis devoted a single page to the social impacts of regulatory measures. Far more resources went to forest and stream restoration than to helping displaced workers, more and more of whom resembled what Yamhill’s Nicholas Kristof called “the white underclass” (map 8.1).6 Dairying was still a major industry, but ever fewer residents benefited. County production nearly doubled from $57 million in 1997 to $108 million in 2012, but the profits partly stemmed from Tillamook County Creamery Association’s shift from low-margin milk to high-value ice cream and yogurt. County farms actually reduced their footprint by three thousand acres and seven hundred cows. Like the nation as a whole, there were also fewer farms. The number of dairies halved from 185 to 94, and robotic milking machines cut jobs. Tillamook also retreated in state and national rankings as capital exited the county. Morrow County did not even register on the national agricultural census in 2002; by 2007, it had nine “mega-dairies” and 30,590 cows, nearly 3,000 head more than Tillamook at peak production; by 2012, Morrow County’s 41,407 cows were producing $10 million more in milk than those in Tillamook. And yet, it was all still TCCA. The company had bought out a southern Oregon co-op, built a plant 240 miles east in Boardman, and moved its packaging to Idaho and Utah. Then the TCCA moved its headquarters to Portland and laid off workers in Tillamook County. More and more the TCCA was less and less Tillamook. It also wrong-footed itself repeatedly, filing—and losing—lawsuits against businesses that used the words “Tillamook” and “Bandon.” The TCCA was also tied to pollution scandals at its Tillamook and Boardman plants and at two mega-dairies. Farmers began to seek new outlets. Alienation had many roots. Some were driven out by market conditions, some

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Map 8.1. The Nestucca Watershed Council’s first task was to document basin ecology. Map 13 (shown here), produced by researcher Mary Barczak, limned and categorized salmon-rearing habitat. The council scrutinized physical and ecological geography, but, reflecting a general blind spot in environmental advocacy, it paid little attention to the plight of people who worked in nature. Map by Mary Barczak. Courtesy Nestucca-Neskowin-Sand Lake Watersheds Council.

by embitterment dating to the Big Split, some by the physical and cultural distance of executives, and some by distrust after the TCCA endorsed and then banned bovine somatotropin (rBGH), a hormone that enhanced milk production but critics said harmed animals and humans. Some farmers simply quit dairying; others decided instead to sell to an organic co-op in McMinnville.7 Timber workers fared worse. During the 1980s, Oregon’s timber industry was plagued by high interest rates, depleted large trees, and mill restructuring to accommodate smaller, second-growth logs. South County largely avoided this turbulence, but the respite ended in 1990. Federal protections for spotted owls, marbled murrelets, and wild coho stocks reduced the cut in western Oregon. In the Nestucca basin, annual harvests fell to levels not seen since the 1930s, bottoming at zero board feet in 2001. Statewide timber employment had been dropping since a 1970s peak of

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eighty thousand jobs, but losses accelerated, halving from sixty thousand to thirty thousand by 2010. Loggers knew how to ride out downturns, but this was different. The crash devastated timber towns. South County had only two specialty mills, however, so the impacts were more atomized. Families and individuals held on to their logger identity. It was as much a lifestyle as a job, a way to distinguish themselves from those “flatlanders” remaking the coast as an urban outpost, but holding on came at a cost. By 2006, when the cut finally rebounded, work was rarer and less remunerative. The decreasing diameter of third-growth logs meant a Hahn Harvester could cut, limb, and load on level sites, eliminating many jobs. The good news was that humans were still needed in the Nestucca basin; the bad news was that the jobs were on steeper, more dangerous slopes.8 Fishers fared worst. Hindsight made it clearer than in 1926, 1967, or 1983 that oceans and habitats had greater influence on runs than hatcheries and harvests. In the late 1970s, the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation sent regional fisheries into tailspins. Kiwanda’s catch rebounded from 1,006 salmon in 1984 to 65,161 in 1986, then to 74,603 in 1988, and 56,503 in 1989. Ray Monroe saw profits again. Then harvests plummeted to 24,036 and 33,989 in 1990 and 1991, dropped to 3,479 in 1992, and then just ended. From 1993 to 2006, there was no coho season, and only three more from 2007 to 2017. Even chinook fishing was banned in 2008 and 2009. The federal government declared fishery disasters and offered federal relief in 1992–1995, 1998, 2005–2006, 2008–2010, and 2016–2017. There was no single cause. At first Endangered Species Act listings cut harvests to protect wild coho stocks. By the mid-2000s, restrictions focused on a Klamath River run that had been damaged by irrigation diversions. Since 2008, poor upwelling and hypoxic blooms in the Pacific have throttled fishing. The Monterey Bay Aquarium piled on by advising consumers to save California runs by avoiding Oregon troll-caught salmon, ignoring the impact that Alaska harvesters had on those same stocks. Many fishers quit. All absorbed capital losses. From more than three hundred commercial dories in the late 1970s, the Kiwanda fleet fell below two hundred in 1985 and below one hundred in 1992. Since 2000, there have been fewer than forty workboats, usually fewer than thirty—roughly the same as the mid-1960s. The core, those who fished every day, numbered less than two handfuls.9 Global markets exacerbated problems. After 1992, when the coho fishery all but ended, Kiwanda fishers refocused on less remunerative

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bottomfish and crab, but even when they could catch salmon, the price remained depressed. Until the 1980s, the primary outlet for troll-caught salmon had been European smokers. Then in 1987, American fish brokers switched to Japanese buyers compensating for domestic shortages. Prices skyrocketed in 1988, resulting in a boon to Oregon trollers but also unleashing unintended consequences. Europeans balked at the prices the Japanese paid, so they turned to Norwegian pen-raised salmon. It made sense. The fish were less expensive and available all year, thus eliminating storage costs. Then Japanese buyers grew more selective as domestic supplies recovered. North American brokers were stuck with high-priced inventories, in costly storage, and indifferent demand. The 1989 price tanked. A one-year blip in the market would not have been significant except that it had proved the market viability of farmed salmon. Farm tenures expanded globally, most owned by multinationals. Atlantic salmon from Canada, Chile, Japan, Norway, and Tasmania flooded US markets. When adjusted for inflation, broker prices never recovered. Coho have disappeared from fish counters. Ocean- and river-caught salmon have been relegated to niche markets: stores catering to upper-middling consumers sell sockeye and chinook to the health-conscious; middling consumers buy Atlantic salmon; the cost-conscious poor buy canned pink and chum at the budget market.10 As salmon farms squeezed troller profits, Kiwanda became a fishery only for those who could afford it: schoolteachers on summer break, inland laborers and professionals on vacation, comfortable retirees, and experienced fishers who owned their dories. For all, fishing remained supplemental income. To help his margin, Steve Cody revived the tactics of Syd, Walt, and Louis Fisher. Every afternoon in 1990, Cody parked his boat in his front yard and sold fish to tourists. He got a higher price than wholesalers paid, but he had to cease fishing by noon to sell his catch by day’s end. He also needed broker and retail licenses. Jim Allen, Jay Beckman, and Ray Monroe sold to retailers and restaurants. In the next two decades, Craig Wenrick became the most conspicuous fisher-broker. His family had run a local ferry, and his granddad introduced him to dory life. To hear Craig tell it, fishing was destiny, yet his day job was firefighting. Craig tried to find a balance. He and wife Susie moved their family to Kiwanda and formed a company to broker catches. Craig still commuted to Portland, spending twenty-four hours at the fire station and forty-eight

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on the boat. The business replicated old patterns. Susie managed orders; Craig caught and processed fish and handled the books; kids processed and delivered the product. By 2000, this meant many permits and fees, and more than once the Wenricks felt overwhelmed by the regulations driving so many from fishing. Craig explained in 2002 that if all he did was fish, “the bank would own my home,” yet when he retired from firefighting in 2004, fishing became his full-time job. Like Brick Gilman, Craig shifted with the seasons, targeting salmon and then tuna, bottomfish, crab, and back to salmon; unlike Brick, Craig also had retirement income.11 Nestucca residents who did not have the Wenricks’ resources just suffered. The drivers of decline differed across industries, but every local disruption began somewhere else. Like Rust Belt cities and midwestern farms, western natural resource communities were rocked by global forces of capital accumulation, ecological change, consumer preferences, regulatory shifts, real estate inflation, and amenity-oriented development that relentlessly displaced former occupations and residents. We have to document the devastation in South County through statistics, because no one bothered to record the personal stories. From 1989 to 2007, county annual unemployment rates varied from 5.1 to 7.1 percent. Then the Great Recession hit. Jobless rolls rose from 4.7 percent in September 2008 to 11.8 percent by March 2010, falling slowly to an annual rate of 8.4 percent by 2013. Homeowners had to lease their places to avoid foreclosure, but rents were so high that blue-collar residents could no longer afford to live where they grew up. By 2014, fully 38.8 percent of adults were out of work. Retirees were part of that figure, but there was more. The hardest hit became unhealthy. By 2014, more than one-third of residents were obese, 31.4 percent qualified for Medicaid, 21.4 percent needed Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program support, 17.4 percent lived in poverty, and 14.4 percent did not get enough to eat. All of rural Oregon struggled with substance abuse. Tillamook County was worse than the state averages in methamphetamine and opiate abuse. Lightly patrolled South County was a refuge for meth labs in the 1990s and 2000s.12 Several groups fell outside these statistics. One was aboriginal people. The Nestuccas who first settled the valley were forcibly expelled from local history. They were and remain, at best, afterthoughts. The federal agencies charged to protect them instead adopted policies that stripped their resources and liberated them into poverty. Federal courts later adjudicated

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their land claims in cheap, brutally dismissive ways, and the state of Oregon abetted pauperization in any way it could, including impeding the tribe’s efforts to restore its status and rebuild its social services. Oregon fought the tribe on gaming and hunting, and its only saving grace was the incompetence of its attorneys general. In every possible way, newcomers and their governments tried to erase the aboriginal presence, yet Indians are not only still with us but are gaining power. In an ironic twist, the removal of Indians from Tillamook County mainly benefited other places. The Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians of Oregon’s economic revival has turned them into Lincoln County’s single largest employer and one of Oregon’s fastest-growing property holders. Their business ventures have flourished, and they have reacquired some of their lost territory.13 Two other groups also remained statistically invisible. One was those who, after years of futility, gave up. When people go four weeks without seeking work, employment agencies stop tracking them. Literally and figuratively, they no longer counted. The other invisible group was the permanently disabled, including Ray’s brother. Already beat up by decades of work, John Monroe was on a logging site in 1996, tugging cables to the next load, when a yarder backlashed. The force nearly tore his left shoulder from his body. He was rushed to the hospital. It took three surgeries over two years to reattach it all. John never stopped thinking of himself as a logger, but his body was broken; he could no longer work in the woods. A judge approved his permanent disability claim in 1997. Then, instead of taking a desk job, John retrained to be a computer technician. He passed the requisite tests, but an examining board denied his certificate because they deemed his high school diploma insufficient. John says, “I told my wife and cried—I just bawled.” Even if he had been certified, computer makers were transitioning to disposable products. In fact, very few retrained timber workers found decent pay scales. A blue-collar generation lost access to the middle-class lives of their parents. Tillamook pegged high in all the misery categories: disability, unemployment, obesity, substance abuse, suicide. It was a regional curse: the rural West had become unhealthy. From 1999 to 2016, suicides rose 20 percent. The most affected were white, noncollege-educated, middle-aged men from forty-five to fifty-five. They were dying younger than their parents from a suite of plagues researchers called “deaths of despair.” Nationally, Tillamook County ranked in the secondworst quantile for this malady. Blue-collar life turned very grim after 2008,

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but the seeds of this health catastrophe had been sown in the disruptions of the 1980s.14 Whole families were consumed by these tragedies, and the burdens fell inordinately on women. As South County’s natural resource industries crashed, few good-paying jobs survived. The service sector was the sole area of growth, but that work was by design seasonal, part time, and poorly paid. It appealed mainly to wage-working women who valued flexibility because many of them were parents and caregivers. In some cases men left to send money home; in other cases they just left. Either way, “female householder, no husband present” was by 2000 the largest category in the census. In some communities it represented 75 percent of all households. After Shelly Brock and Ray Monroe parted in 1999, Shelly scrambled to make house payments. She soon found herself in the same fix as many single mothers. By 2013, 20.5 percent received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program support, yet Tillamook County was above the state average, ranking twenty-third of thirty-six in terms of SNAP enrollment. Far worse were timber-oriented Josephine County and ag-oriented Jefferson County at 30.4 and 33.1 percent, respectively. The pressures strained even intact, economically active households. In addition to managing fish orders, Susie Wenrick worked as a fitness instructor and waited tables. Residents usually had to leave South County to find forty-hour-a-week, fifty-two-week-a-year jobs with benefits, but far more likely was that such people lived elsewhere and only visited the Nestucca Valley on weekends.15 The economic disparities between coastal and inland South County seeped into political geography. Using the color metaphors of red Republicans and blue Democrats, Nestucca’s four precincts, like all of Tillamook County, were relatively purple through the 1980s. Voters favored both parties, every precinct voting the same way from 1972, when data emerges on congressional elections, to 1986. Then the vote fragmented. By 1990, Beaver and Cloverdale were drifting right, while Hebo and Union tilted left. This followed national trends. Americans of all stripes voted their identities, but rural Americans in particular adopted what sociologist Katherine Cramer calls a “politics of resentment,” harboring place-, class-, and race-based enmity toward policies that seemed to promote other people in other places. Many conservatives also took exception to changing cultural norms, what they called “political correctness,” that censured their views about gender, race, religion, and sexuality. In a place like Tillamook

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County, a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, white Christian nationalism did not die; instead, it adopted what anthropologist James Scott calls the “hidden transcripts” that mark subalterns around the world. Residents internalized values out of sync with the dominant society, speaking candidly only among the like-minded. The media focused on social issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and affirmative action, but in the rural West, where federal agencies control nearly half the land and most natural resources, environmental policies were another source of resentment. Farmers, fishers, and loggers regarded environmental protections as the means of their impoverishment. The electoral expression of this was clearest in Beaver and Cloverdale, which turned more Republican after 1990. Hebo voters actually moved to the left, but this was due in part to the presence of the state hatchery, Forest Service, and retirees who had moved to the area to be closer to nature in their waning years.16 The largest and most telling shift occurred in Union Precinct. The areas around Pacific City, Woods, and lightly populated Sand Lake and the Little Nestucca Valley became South County’s most partisan and divergent precinct, swinging furthest left after 1990. Union Precinct voters were more urban, and the economy more tourist-oriented, yet the area’s economic success was not positively correlated with education. Residents actually had the lowest rates of high school or higher educational attainment in South County. The stronger political tie was between gentrified economics and aesthetics. Pacific City’s aging residents, along with those living in Neskowin, most supported environmental protections, while voters in other precincts more often blamed such policies for their economic woes. Elections since 1990 have documented these cultural, economic, and political disparities, as well as a growing preference for outsider candidates, both nonincumbents and individuals at odds with the dominant political parties.17 The way agencies responded to issues only deepened what was more accurately a nonpartisan antipathy to government. The state has long treated environmental and social problems as jurisdictionally distinct. In practice, natural resource entities such as the Nestucca-Neskowin-Sand Lake Watersheds Council could not respond even when they recognized that environmental policies had social effects. Those mired in what scholars call socio-environmental problems had to advocate for themselves. Paul Hanneman, Tillamook’s statehouse representative from 1965 to 1991,

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counseled farmers, fishers, and loggers to engage policy makers; they had to be in the room to protect themselves. Hanneman’s first protégé was David Schlip, an upholsterer who moved to Pacific City in 1968 to fish and refurbish furniture. Schlip became an assertive industry representative in the late 1970s. Hanneman taught him how to engage effectively, but it did not come naturally. Schlip was old school. His default solution to all fishery problems was to have hatcheries make more chinooks. He also tended to yell louder when people disagreed with him. Hanneman taught Schlip to build alliances, and David learned to represent effectively, testifying at hearings and serving for more than a decade on Oregon’s Salmon Commission. By the early 1990s, though, generational turnover was disrupting representation.18 Put simply, Kiwanda was losing its elders. Jack Gilman, Howard Kellow, and Victor Learned Jr. built boats into the 1980s, but only Victor passed on his skills to his son Terry, who brought his own daughters into the barn for two more decades of boatbuilding. Jack, Victor, and Walt Fisher also conveyed wisdom through storytelling. The last of the Nestucca netters, Walt regaled audiences with tales of eluding wardens and rowing to Cape Lookout. He still had a twinkle in his eye, and his big frame and callused paws still evinced a life of hard work. Victor, who had an impeccable pedigree and the talent to match, would pull aside newbies to explain errors and offer tips. He too spun tales of guerrilla fishing. When he knew someone well enough, he also showed them how to weave and set a net for winter stores. Wife Alice accused Victor of having “scales in his blood,” and when asked how he balanced his roles, Alice replied that he didn’t: “I think he was a fisherman first and a farmer next.” Alice captured the dynamism of rural economics and the importance of Victor’s calling, but this held true for all the old fishers, especially Gilman. Jack was first off the beach every morning and had a boatload each evening. When he sold his gear in 1988, Jack ended the second longest fishing tenure in South County, bested only by Walt. Jack was more quiet than the others but held extremely nuanced ideas about ecology and politics. All were physical wrecks, strong but worn by work on sea and land, yet they generously shared what they knew until the end. Walt died in 1990, David in 1996, and Victor in 1998. Howard passed in 2004 and Jack in 2006. Paul Hanneman continued to advise friends until 2017.19

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Before he died, Hanneman also mentored the next generation. By 2000, Ray Monroe and Craig Wenrick had emerged as community representatives. Guided by Hanneman, Schlip, and Jay Rasmussen, Ray first testified in 1994. By 2002, he was a member of the Oregon Salmon Commission and eventually a board member of Oregon’s Restoration and Enhancement Board. He was still a member of both in 2019. Wenrick began to testify after 2000. Like Schlip and Hanneman, Craig and Ray attended state and federal hearings across the West, and like Schlip they did it on their own dime. Monroe’s paying gig was with the Tillamook County Soil and Water Conservation Service, a job he segued to in the 1990s. Ray was tailor-made to manage its habitat restoration program. The job involved a lot of grunt work, hauling and digging on uneven ground in pastures and streambanks, but the agency also needed someone who could handle grant writing and speak to residents. The program depended on permission from land owners to plant trees and stabilize banks, but precious few at any level of government could liaison with residents who distrusted the state. It was one thing to know the science, quite another to present it in ways that persuaded skeptical farmers. An Oregon Salmon Commission member called Ray “the driving force behind the rebuilding of riparian habitat in the Tillamook System.” His crews installed hundreds of miles of fence and thousands of trees and shrubs. None of it would have happened without local cooperation. Few trusted anyone but Monroe.20 Hanneman also engaged in institution building. In 1996, three dory fishers—Paul, Nancy Bush, and Jerry Buxton—formed the Pacific City Dorymen’s Association (PCDA) in an attempt to organize the fractious port. The implosion of commercial fishing left sport dories numerically dominant, but the PCDA was neither a sport nor an industry group. It stressed common interests, foremost being beach access. At first the PCDA functioned like a watershed council. It acted as a sounding board, identifying concerns and cultivating awareness. An early goal was to instill a sense of history. By the early 2000s, members had raised money to build a memorial. Located adjacent to the beach access for vehicles and pedestrians, a wall panel celebrated fishers and boats. Every day all summer hundreds of visitors stopped to read the text as dories trailered by. In terms of sheer numbers, the memorial was the PCDA’s most effective consciousness-raising effort, and it received serendipitous support when Brenda Devore Marshall, Tyrone Marshall, and Linfield College students

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developed an oral history and theater project to document the fishery. Launching through the Surf took years to complete, but the resulting play, museum exhibit, and online resources taught many more Oregonians about South County’s fishery history.21 Still, the PCDA was a bit clubbish until tragedy gave it substance. Starting in the 1980s, a few surfers toyed with Kiwanda’s break. Word spread about tasty waves, and by the mid-1990s a regular cohort haunted the parking lot. The town gained a surf shop and competition, but fishers foresaw problems. Dories returned to shore by following waves until they broke. Pilots saw little from the bottom of a swell, and once in a trough there was no turning back. Placing surfers on the other side of those waves was a recipe for disaster. The PCDA warned surfers and created protocols to alert people in the water and on the beach before a landing run. Fishers also hoped a long-standing zoning that reserved the beach north of the ramp for boats would segregate waves. Some surfers heeded the advice, but the sport is legendary for its entitled territoriality. An accident seemed inevitable, and one weekend in July 2008, the worst happened. Cole Ortega was on a board in heavy waves when a dory bore down. Neither saw the other until way too late. The boat’s prop severed the fourteen-year-old’s left arm. Surfers rescued Ortega, and a patrolman and doctor life-flighted him to surgeons who performed multiple operations on the arm. Everyone was devastated and angry. Surfers wanted dories gone; fishers wanted surfers barred. Neither prevailed. Instead, the PCDA negotiated a safety plan and the state restricted beach parking to dory fishers, but only after a civil trial awarded Ortega $3.1 million. The jury found the state 70 percent negligent for not posting warnings. Ortega was 30 percent negligent for being in a dumb place. The dory fisher was exonerated because fishing was a historical usage and he had had no option but to continue to shore once he entered the surf line (fig. 8.2).22 The tragedy transformed the PCDA in ways that mattered, because salmon politics is still a blood sport. Venomous rhetoric accompanied salmon conservation from its earliest wars in the 1890s, and as late as 2012, legislators still inveighed against “greedy” netters. Anglers demanded the elimination of unworthies to save nature for a higher purpose: themselves. Bigotry runs like a river through conservation history. A long-standing assumption is that those who work in natural resource industries are few, unimportant, and dispensable. It informed South County politics in the

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Fig. 8.2. Collisions. The challenge of landing a boat has only grown as more visitors flock to Kiwanda. Dories must blow an airhorn to alert beachgoers and surfers, but wind and heavy waves can make it hard to hear and see approaching boats. Falling off a board simply adds another contingency to an already fraught situation. Photo by Sandy Weedman, dory photographer, courtesy Sandy Weedman.

1920s, and it still haunts places like Minnesota’s Boundary Waters and California’s Point Reyes. In 1989, Oregon House Bill 3219 sought to end all gillnetting. The bill’s authors claimed it was “the policy of the State of Oregon that recreational angling is the highest and best use” of salmon, so anglers must “have priority consideration . . . regarding the harvest of fish that may be taken for commercial purposes.” The wording exposed an expansive agenda that implicated all commercial and tribal fishers, but angler principles masked their grubby allocation agenda. Sporting organizations often claimed they generated greater economic value than commercial fishers, but when those claims were independently assessed in 1952, 1965, and 1986, researchers found anglers’ self-survey data anecdotal, biased, and wildly inflated. In claiming sportfishing was in the state’s interest, anglers also scaled issues to obscure the actual distribution of benefits, which overwhelmingly flowed to urban centers.23 Still, every angler-sponsored initiative and bill after the mid-1950s failed. Most voters and legislators refused to kill rural economies. The

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battle seemed high-centered until 2012 when—just as another anti-net initiative was about to be voted down—Oregon’s fly-fishing governor John Kitzhaber bypassed the democratic process to terminate the Columbia’s last non-Indian net fishery. Anglers finally seemed to win their centurylong struggle, but, as usual, victory produced much wreckage and little gain. Researchers later noted that “few aspects of the Policy . . . focused on conservation,” and that actual benefits fell short of projections. Meanwhile, Oregon had forced commercial fishers into areas that led to “losses in all mainstem gillnet fisheries,” while Washington provided neither a space to net nor a way to sell licenses. The outcome was so disastrous that by 2017 Oregon readmitted nets to the Columbia’s main channel. Poetically, the author of this mess had to resign from office because of public-trust scandals that, in Kitzhaber’s own words, turned him into a political “liability.”24 The persistence of “fish fights,” and most people’s reluctance to harm local economies, has had the effect of making the PCDA ever more relevant. By including sport, commercial, and surfer voices on its board, the PCDA became an inclusive body, and by resolving the charged issue of surf safety, it earned a constructive reputation. This matters to policy makers. During the twentieth century, resource management evolved from clientele relationships to a pluralistic balancing of interest group demands. Agency administrators seek, sometimes in vain, for policy sweet spots that seem neither too friendly nor too adversarial. They practice what researchers call “strategic ambiguity” in industrial and legislative relations. Oregon’s Department of Fish and Wildlife has exemplified this tactic. For more than a century, state fishery agencies tried to mediate mutually inimical agendas, hoping not to overly antagonize any interest group. The sole exception was how these agencies responded to unified visions. Policy makers have been openly solicitous toward communities that can speak with a single, coherent voice. This is why the PCDA is politically significant. Unlike fishery or recreational groups, which were historically fragmented by location and gear and often pursued insular ends, the PCDA has figured out how to speak for many sides in ways that command respect. It is the kind of organization that policy makers want to embrace, and it might be Paul Hanneman’s last great legacy to South County.25

Callings I swear I found the key to the universe in the engine of an old parked car —Bruce Springsteen, “Growin’ Up”

If the history of the Nestucca Valley suggests anything, it is that all the parts matter. The arc of events since 1989 has illustrated this truth by producing an era unlike any before. The concentration of power through accumulated capital, and gentrification’s exclusionary vision of nature, marginalized Nestucca’s hardest working residents. Like other parts of the rural West, a carrion economy cannibalized natural resource industries to craft the semblance of an arcadian refuge. The displaced then began to die younger and in greater numbers than at any time since the Gilded Age. Locally and regionally, there has been little more than a collective shrug about this tragedy. The apathy is at least shortsighted. Every industry has faltered repeatedly. Fishers and loggers endured many hard times. Farmers struggled in the 1930s, 1950s, and 1980s. Tourism stumbled in the 1890s, 1920s, 1960s, 1980s, and 2010s. Real estate and construction slowed in the 1920s, 1960s, 1980s, 2000, and after 2008. The entire valley felt each downturn, yet its disparate economic strands and complex seasonal rhythms provided a level of resilience in most crises. Residents thrived or suffered collectively in good times and bad, but only in the worst moments of the 1930s and 1980s did every sector break down, and then only briefly. Now is different. The numbers are staggering but also anonymizing. Statistics on poverty, illness, food insecurity, and suicides only partially illuminate the tragedy. I could list the names of a dozen people I knew who have died way too young, but I prefer to focus on Craig, John, Ray, Shelly, Susie, and the rest who still carry on ways of living that few outsiders grasp.1 Flatlanders’ apathy reveals both ill-concealed contempt and ignorance about what has unfolded. South County’s woes actually cast doubt on a long-standing economic gospel that reaches far beyond the Nestucca 141

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Valley. After World War II, many economists and one very famous biologist preached the wisdom of privatizing natural resources. When it came to oceans, reformers saw little but waste in smallholder and open-access fisheries. They knew—they were absolutely certain—that reducing the number of fishers would maximize rents. This cramped vision of progress became environmental wisdom when Garrett Hardin declared that “the tragedy of the commons . . . is averted by private property.” Reformers largely got their wish in the coming decades. Limited entry and quasiprivatized quota systems did rationalize exploitation; they also destroyed capital and impoverished communities. The concentration of harvests in fewer boats channeled profits to urban centers and corporations, and the federalization of fishery management distanced smallholders from policy formation. This happened as much in South County as in the third world, yet mounting evidence suggests small, locally managed fisheries such as what once existed in the Nestucca River and at Cape Kiwanda were better at adjusting to fluctuating environments. They were also better at circulating money back through communities. Economists who focused narrowly on wealth generation were terrible—genuinely incompetent—at grasping the social, cultural, and ecological implications of their theories. Environmental reformers lacked the capacity to see beyond their own interests, let alone to empathize with people who worked in nature. Governments exacerbated matters by decoupling the social from the ecological in environmental management (fig. 9.1).2 Among the things reformers misunderstood was the functional role of seasonal labor in rural economies. Switching jobs across the calendar might seem dysfunctional and inefficient when “normative” is defined as a single, all-year occupation, but dynamic employment in the Nestucca Valley married labor to place with impeccable logic. When asked why he fished, Jack Gilman replied in part that it was “good supplemental income.” His answer bared the economic and ecological wisdom of seasonal work. From Syd Fisher and Victor Learned to Ray Monroe and Craig Wenrick, South County’s varied industries meshed households and communities into a more resilient whole. When one sector lost steam, residents shifted to other activities; when one resource ran low, they turned to others. Stitching occupations together across the calendar was a pragmatic strategy; it also gave nature a break. That farmers, fishers, and loggers sustained these patterns for generations suggests they knew what they were doing;

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Fig. 9.1. Craig Wenrick is preparing to head to sea. The summer fishing lines have been tied off at the hydraulically powered spools on both sides of the boat, but the crab block is operational and several crab traps are on the deck, waiting to be dropped outside the breakers. The question is whether the heavy surf will calm down enough to allow Wenrick to fish today. Photo by Sandy Weedman, dory photographer, courtesy Sandy Weedman.

that the economy persisted for more than a century suggests a level of sophistication few outsiders recognize. Seasonal labor is still the default in the Nestucca Valley, but now it is less remunerative, more completely tied to the low-wage service sector. Gone is the sense of agency and freedom that came from working in nature; life is also more precarious. Children who grow up in the valley are ever less likely to own their homes or to enjoy the standard of living of their grandparents’ generation. How did they reach this point? It was not intrinsic failings that unraveled local political ecology. Rather, it was distant markets, regulatory structures, ecological changes, and gentrified aesthetics that wrecked a storied landscape. Tectonic shifts in economy and culture displaced rural North Americans, and life expectancies began to fall. Places like rural Minnesota have seen suicide rates rise by 40 percent. Dairy farmers have been particularly vulnerable because of the grueling work, shrinking margins, and emotional linkages between lost farms and lost identities.3 Another failing is a general misreading of environmental history. Long ago, wilderness ideology collided with ecological, archaeological, and

144

JOSEPH E. TAYLOR III

historical data that belied expectations of untouched lands. Humans have altered and managed North American landscapes for millennia. The forests the first Euro-Americans encountered were hardly pristine. Douglasfir, the dominant species in the Pacific Northwest, have thrived because of human and natural fire, and this seems true as far back as scientists can determine. The Nestucca basin epitomized this disruption ecology. Indigenous residents tended nature in ways that selected for fire-tolerant species such as ferns, fir, and salal, and against climax species such as cedar, hemlock, and sitka spruce. Occasionally fires became holocausts. Devastation flared in the 1820s, 1840s, 1860s, 1890s, 1910, and 1933–1951. The ironic effect was an ecosystem that resembled what logging and grazing do; both processes leveled forests, and both selected for the same species. Industrial exploitation differed in ways that led to valid criticisms of how it has been practiced. But here’s the thing: any attempt to portray natural resource workers as intrusions into natural landscapes requires the erasure of a deep human history. Moreover, the removal of workers from coastal forests did not ensure stability. A comparison of Tillamook County’s burned, replanted, and logged hillsides with the Kalmiopsis Wilderness in southwestern Oregon—a preservationist landscape that has burned massively three times since 1987—makes the former look like a model of sustainability.4 Similar complexities inhere in the Nestucca bottomlands. Humans exploited salmon runs for millennia, yet aboriginal and industrial fishers managed to conserve this precious resource via taboos, ceremonies, laws, and artificial reproduction. Each strategy was flawed, yet all helped to sustain a fishery across long spans of time. It was less that inland anglers misunderstood this than that they never really cared. Their reforms did little to save salmon and much to harm people. Dairies offer different lessons about environmental and market reforms. The Tillamook County Creamery Association backed small farms for a half century, but its desire for growth intensified agricultural pollution. Dairy-related fecal coliform levels rose as herds expanded. Regulations to control this pollution did improve water quality, but they also had the effect of intensifying exploitation while wiping out a helluva lot of small dairies. Moreover, criticism of the pastoral economy has tended to obscure the equally problematic history of urban pollution that only worsened with amenity-oriented development. These complications were fully masked when developers, recreationalists,

CALLINGS 145

corporations, and regulators zeroed in on natural resource industries as greedy, inefficient, and degraded. Modernization was a supposed cure, but it instead helped turn South County into a twenty-first-century Dickensian nightmare.5 Most problematic of all was the tendency to regard workers and domesticated animals as pollution. Richard White calls this “problem with purity” one “of the great shortcomings—intellectual and political— of modern environmentalism.” The habit of defining authentic nature as a place apart is an old conceit. Read Isaak Walton’s seventeenth-century paeans to genteel angling, John Ruskin’s nineteenth-century essays on sublime nature, or John Muir’s fin de siècle rant about Indians having “no right place in the landscape,” and you will spy an environmental imaginary that tilts into misanthropy. For centuries nature writers have celebrated, as White puts it, “the contemplative over the active, the supposedly undisturbed over the connected.” Knowing nature through a gaze was supposed to be superior to knowing nature through work, yet the people who toiled in nature possessed their own, often extremely nuanced, understandings of the things hidden to eyes. Trollers and netters detected subsurface currents, and the species and size of hooked fish, by the sensations their feet and hands received from shaking floorboards and vibrating lines. Not all moos were the same to farmers. Their ears were tuned to the sounds of distress that evaded sightseers. Miners tugging at geological seams could explain eons of earth history in ways hikers never gained from guidebooks. John Monroe offered a particularly telling lesson. One day he singled out a spruce tree to explain its life history, how the wind had twisted its trunk, how parasites and fires had weakened it, and what the core contained. When I asked how he knew all this, John replied that it came from a life of disassembling trees. Fishers gained similar knowledge by dissecting salmon bellies to examine flesh and fat and parasites. All this remains hidden from the superficial gaze of people who prefer to love nature from afar.6 Modern environmental culture’s insistence on imagining authentic nature as a world apart leaves it innocent of nuance, unable to acknowledge our consumerist connections to the people who work in nature. The tourists who flock to South County end up resembling the Aleutian geese that winter in a local wildlife refuge, another late-twentieth-century development that withdrew more natural resources from workers. Both swoop into segregated spaces that have been crafted to produce insular experiences.

146

JOSEPH E. TAYLOR III

Fig. 9.2: At the end of a day’s fishing, a commercial dory waits for its trailer with Haystack Rock and Cape Kiwanda in the background. Photo by Sandy Weedman, dory photographer, courtesy Sandy Weedman.

They then fatten up and depart for somewhere else; neither gains much more than what they will excrete. It takes time to learn the logic of place. The writer Ken Kesey, himself a product of the rural West, broached this in Sometimes a Great Notion. In the novel’s only repeated speech, Vivian counsels Draeger, “You must go through a winter to get some notion.” The union organizer never gets it, but then neither do most people who profess to love the Nestucca Valley. For a century South County actually worked—in the dual sense of that phrase—but then it was repurposed for play. Hal Rothman called this a devil’s bargain, warning that “communities and locales welcome tourism as an economic boon, only to find that it irrevocably changes them in unanticipated and uncontrollable ways.”7 Left unsaid was who made that bargain and who then had to live with it. If you want an answer, study cultural geography. Do it on a February weekend because you will see more residents. Hell, make it a pub crawl. Start at Kiwanda. Spend an hour at the brewpub. Take in the milieu, analyze the cars and clothes and menu. Think about what people eat and drink, how consumption marks identity. Then drive one mile back across the bridge

CALLINGS 147

to Pacific City. Spend the next hour at the Sportsman’s Pub. Look. Listen. Record the differences in vehicles, dress, speech, conversations, and drink choices. Then mosey another six miles upstream to Cloverdale. Spend another hour at The Dory. Pay the same attention to how people look, what they think, and what they consume. Listen, really listen. Then make one last stop a couple more miles up the road at the Hebo Bar & Grill. Do it all again. South County is a place of many parts. An evening in its taverns can teach the observant much about social and cultural diversity, asymmetries in education, wealth, and power, and why the rural West has been divided in ways that make it much less than the sum of its parts. Then get to work, because going through a winter is not enough. When asked why he fished, Gilman also remarked, “I done it because I liked to do it.” Jack’s simple declaration articulated a broadly shared sentiment. Even though fishing was rarely even primary income, it was how many people defined themselves. It was so important that when a cannery shut down or the state outlawed netting, residents found new markets, waged political battles, defied laws, and reinvented their fishery. They didn’t abandon their homes or livelihoods; they persisted. To grasp why, we must recognize a calling when we see it. Farming, fishing, and logging were more than occupations; they were ways of life and identities, but the only way to fully understand this is with your hands and feet and back. To really get it, you must commit; you have to spend time laboring on a farm, in the woods, or on a workboat. I know fishing best, so clamber in my virtual dory. Let me offer an outline of what working in nature involves.8 It begins with an alarm jarring you awake long before the first bird chirps. If you are like me, you’re so excited to go fishing that some mornings you rush out the door without eating or making lunch. I did it many times, often for days on end. My surrogate parents resorted to stashing food in my boat to keep me from dropping of starvation. We drive to the beach, warm the engine, secure the outriggers, and drop the boat. One of us turns the bow into the waves; the other parks the truck and awkwardly jogs back in waders. Peering through the darkness, we navigate the breakers and head to wherever we decide to fish this morning. Then, with wind-burned eyes and stiff fingers, you—because you’re junior here—cut herring, bait hooks, run gear, clean lines, play salmon, and gut fish from dawn to dusk. You have to do this all summer to understand. You have to handle frozen, greasy, smelly fish with scarred digits. You need to feel what

148

JOSEPH E. TAYLOR III

it is like to shiver in wet pants because you discovered too late that there was a new hole in your waders. It takes time for your hands to turn brown from ocean fungus and crankcase oil. The discomforts will wear your body and mind. They are as effective an antidote as any to the romanticism of literary fishing. And yet, if you do all this then maybe, just maybe, you will grasp the thing underneath. You will finally get what a calling means and, through it, understand the people driven to provide you, the reader, with the beef, cheese, fish, lamb, lumber, and minerals you consume. You will finally understand why they love what they do (fig. 9.2). To make a living at something you love is like finding the key to the universe. The love of working in nature is not just for the activity but for nature itself. Such labor offers unmatched meaning. Much of it is nonverbal—it cannot be fully articulated—but I can convey bits through moments permanently etched in my brain: watching phosphorescence pop in a bow wave before dawn; setting gear as the sun’s first rays warmed my neck; working lines full of fish as my knees barked from a season of banging gunwales; landing a fifty-pound chinook and waiting for the adrenaline to ebb so my hands stopped shaking; pointing the dory toward shore as the sky burned crimson and shaded to purple; giggling as porpoises surfed my bow wave; anxiously peering into the dusk to ensure I did not hit a surfer or pedestrian or dog; cresting the final wave and sliding to a stop on an empty, darkening beach; tossing salmon onto the scale as Ray’s sister iced the final deliveries; knowing, above all, that my labors fed people. Experience all that and tell me it is just a job, reducible to an abstraction and interchangeable with any other “economic situation.” There is no fishery quite like Kiwanda. The emotion-laced experiences of dory life defy simple description, but that holds for anyone who works on a farm or in the woods or anywhere in nature and loves it. More than most realize, natural resource workers have learned to merge with the currents of wind and water, the properties of soils and minerals, the natures of plants and animals, and the rhythms of time and space. They live hard lives—the romance is fleeting—but the rewards, for those who know, are incomparable. This is what callings look and feel like, and the only sure way to understand why they persist is to bend with nature as you work.

Appendixes

Appendix A

Nestucca River Commercial Salmon Catch (pounds) Steelhead

Total Catch

1887

Year

Coho  

Chinook  

Chum  

 

301,000

Licenses  

1888

 

 

 

 

350,000

 

1889

 

 

 

 

469,000

 

1899

212,380

77,630

35,910

0

325,920

 

1901

248,710

19,530

27,720

0

295,960

 

1905

70,000

210,000

28,000

0

308,000

 

1906

172,760

183,540

11,550

0

367,850

 

1907

247,800

147,000

10,500

0

405,300

 

1908

210,000

140,000

7,000

0

357,000

 

1910

231,000

140,000

9,800

0

380,800

 

1911

498,680

249,340

44,870

0

792,890

 

1912

432,600

216,300

49,560

0

698,460

 

1913

17,010

8,820

0

0

25,830

 

1914

401,100

247,940

18,550

0

667,590

 

1915

275,100

14,000

56,000

0

345,100

 

1916

283,920

168,000

14,000

0

465,920

 

1917

140,000

266,000

18,200

0

424,200

 

1918

224,420

210,000

15,050

0

449,470

 

1919

168,000

133,000

31,500

0

332,500

 

1923

165,990

171,725

15,932

33,936

387,583

110

1924

271,987

262,709

20,611

65,838

621,145

128

1925

252,571

279,191

30,034

54,478

616,274

150

1926

172,466

164,150

5,161

46,122

387,899

116

1927

122

0

73

18,165

18,360

 

Case figures for the years 1887 to 1908 and 1910 to 1919 from “Pacific Salmon Fisheries,” by John N. Cobb, Department of Commerce, Bureau of Fisheries Document Number 1092, 1930. Conversion of cases to round weight (70# = 1 case) derived from John N. Cobb papers, University of Washington Archives. Catch figures for 1923 to 1927 from “A Summary of Fishery Statistics of the Pacific Coast,” prepared for the Northwest Paper and Pulp Association by Roger Tollefson, December 1959.

151

Appendix B

Estimated Landed Value

Dungeness (pounds)

Albacore (pounds)

Rockfish (pounds)

Pink

Chinook (whole fish)

Coho (whole fish)

Commercial Boats

Year

Pacific City/Cape Kiwanda Landings

1952

 

887

30

 

 

 

 

 

1953

 

1,252

10

 

 

 

 

 

1954

 

749

131

 

 

 

 

 

1955

 

415

199

 

 

 

 

 

1956

 

3,940

1,119

 

 

 

 

 

1957

 

2,785

413

 

 

 

 

 

1958

 

1,219

1,261

 

 

 

 

 

1959

 

1,015

597

 

 

 

 

 

1960

 

456

260

 

 

 

 

 

1961

 

1,589

202

 

 

 

 

 

1962

 

1,944

85

 

 

 

 

 

1963

 

3,094

320

 

 

 

 

 

1964

 

N/A

N/A

 

 

 

 

 

1965

 

6,908

77

 

 

 

 

 

1966

 

6,013

486

 

 

 

 

 

1967

 

44,146

514

 

 

 

 

 

1968

 

65,722

2,121

 

 

 

 

 

1969

 

37,310

1,457

 

 

 

 

 

1970

 

49,095

1,753

 

 

 

 

$281,000.00

1971

 

111,561

1,416

 

 

 

 

$265,000.00

1972

 

60,766

1,772

 

 

 

 

$221,000.00

1973

 

48,744

3,292

 

 

 

 

$289,000.00

1974

 

99,753

2,646

 

 

 

 

$530,000.00

1975

 

61,291

2,552

 

 

 

 

$344,000.00

1976

 

169,810

2,548

 

 

 

 

$1,054,000.00

1977

 

45,646

4,825

 

 

 

 

 

1978

313

50,840

2,443

0

 

94,105

2,727

$428,000.00

1979

251

41,349

944

1,259

67,769

0

0

$662,000.00

1980

284

28,597

1,675

0

8,661

0

15,516

$359,000.00

1981

297

75,445

2,564

2,222

23,827

532

4,510

$774,000.00

1982

269

55,579

1,794

0

90,816

0

0

$494,000.00

1983

239

33,720

1,131

17

78,622

0

0

$149,000.00

1984

65

0

1,060

0

92,641

0

56

$63,000.00

152

Estimated Landed Value

Dungeness (pounds)

Albacore (pounds)

Rockfish (pounds)

Pink

Chinook (whole fish)

153

Coho (whole fish)

Commercial Boats

Year

APPENDIX B

1985

193

1,004

1,151

3,370

65,557

0

17

$105,000.00

1986

194

63,302

1,859

0

71,594

0

474

$352,000.00

1987

195

4,200

7,592

1,846

41,580

0

429

$642,253.00

1988

182

68,258

6,345

0

36,185

0

275

$1,101,141.00

1989

179

52,166

4,337

595

33,142

0

266

 

1990

154

21,750

2,286

0

36,379

0

672

 

1991

146

32,799

1,190

316

45,538

0

901

 

1992

92

2,545

934

0

109,349

0

4,675

 

1993

69

0

1,006

0

67,203

0

9,874

 

1994

44

0

160

0

19,258

2,876

11,289

 

1995

47

0

548

0

73,280

1,097

8,810

 

1996

38

0

601

0

57,582

290

16,044

 

1997

30

0

48

0

58,214

3,635

2,582

 

1998

28

0

26

0

80,067

3,189

7,306

 

1999

26

0

68

0

58,610

1,395

4,140

 

2000

24

0

38

0

35,103

1,649

5,037

 

2001

27

0

155

0

15,152

3,743

3,820

 

2002

24

0

185

0

31,155

0

1,966

 

2003

31

0

538

0

43,349

8,400

3,137

 

2004

32

0

361

0

40,285

5,185

4,738

 

2005

31

0

849

0

32,439

1,172

5,563

 

2006

26

0

79

0

29,765

2,649

4,600

 

2007

27

162

158

0

29,911

6,131

4,737

 

2008

25

0

0

0

32,201

7,727

5,538

 

2009

28

161

0

0

34,932

9,853

7,274

 

2010

26

0

62

0

25,315

5,662

3,540

 

2011

28

0

49

0

12,865

3,081

6,535

 

2012

38

0

212

0

17,183

37,974

3,957

 

2013

27

0

320

0

25,390

3,917

5,126

 

2014

27

57

168

0

30,863

8,481

7,174

 

2015

29

0

98

0

32,924

5,834

9,271

 

2016

26

0

56

0

29,044

2,419

5,225

 

2017

23

0

34

0

32,824

0

8,153

 

For 1978–2017 table: Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (or ODFW) commercial landings statistics, retrieved May 2018 (bibliography: Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife 2018). Commercial landings statistics [Data file]. Available from www.dfw.state.or.us For 1952–1977 harvest figures: ODFW Historical Troll Report for Commercially Caught Coho and Chinook Salmon Landed at Pacific City, Oregon. For dollar figures, yearly publication by ODFW, Estimated Value at Fishermen’s Level of Commercial Food Fish Landings by State of Oregon Administrative District for Calendar Years 1970 to 1988 (1977 figures not available).

Appendix C

1927 Oregon Special Election Vote by County County

Yea

Nay

Approval

County

Yea

Nay

Approval

Baker

700

973

 

Lake

156

243

 

Benton

814

672

*

Lane

3,690

3,984

 

2,476

2,269

*

Lincoln

346

490

 

Clatsop

783

987

 

Linn

1,426

1,483

 

Columbia

547

644

 

Malheur

Coos

748

1,049

 

Marion

Crook

153

162

 

Morrow

Curry

49

74

 

Multnomah

Clackamas

Deschutes

211

310

 

3,565

2,890

*

154

213

 

24,856

18,828

*

470

439

*

Polk

1,183

763

*

1,326

1,219

*

Sherman

163

141

*

Gilliam

158

201

 

Tillamook

394

1,363

 

Grant

186

273

 

Umatilla

835

878

 

Harney

170

209

 

Union

1,175

988

*

Hood River

418

308

*

Wallowa

307

325

 

1,394

1,520

 

Wasco

660

737

 

Jefferson

139

130

*

Washington

1,716

1,000

*

Josephine

387

480

 

Wheeler

Klamath

773

622

*

Yamhill

Douglas

Jackson

TOTALS

105

199

 

1,932

1,172

*

54,565

48,238

 

County Voter Abstracts for the Special Election of June 28, 1927, box 3, Abstracts of Votes, Accession 70A-61/8, Secretary of State Papers, Oregon State Archives.

154

155

213,447

182,471

267,778

291,274

1924

1926

1927

182,426

1923

1925

144,143

160,892

1921

1922

139,976

1920

 

 

146,773

1918

1919

 

 

1917

 

504,405

352,814

282,784

235,337

165,503

153,474

239,144

156,995

226,644

189,799

 

105,045

204,739

1915

104,691

1914

174,572

122,256

69,930

 

108,995

Central

1916

 

 

1911

60,451

 

1910

1913

 

1909

1912

Beaver

Year

399,597

434,914

377,738

415,085

430,057

417,327

278,556

288,301

230,912

 

 

200,064

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cloverdale

114,572

130,167

133,797

129,691

144,550

141,157

143,747

110,649

119,704

 

 

93,403

69,364

58,477

100,356

95,938

67,269

74,105

61,250

East Beaver

Three ­Rivers/ Hebo (1936)

266,722

279,433

276,388

300,370

324,649

243,616

354,835

311,502

267,789

 

 

255,803

 

232,146

233,804

252,314

217,547

180,254

183,917

South County TCCA Cheese Production

Appendix D

157,920

165,466

138,740

249,109

252,691

217,804

223,677

226,475

209,209

 

 

147,652

 

111,634

101,463

 

 

 

 

Oretown

 

132,333

148,442

175,504

160,558

163,160

154,998

144,366

140,021

 

 

121,233

 

 

 

 

 

125,906

91,292

Meda (merged w/ Central 1927)

130,052

125,281

116,232

119,347

129,546

121,936

120,732

112,674

90,405

 

 

100,894

 

97,034

86,074

 

 

 

 

Neskowin

 

39,585

42,885

57,771

61,314

78,300

84,441

69,287

61,992

 

 

85,245

 

 

65,434

 

 

 

 

Upper Nestucca

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

66,739

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blaine

1,734,490

1,630,572

1,391,918

1,543,039

1,499,876

1,334,270

1,384,102

1,233,898

1,201,031

0

0

991,766

69,364

711,687

670,646

470,508

354,746

254,359

354,162

Totals for Six Main* Cheese Associations

633,930

624,543

660,258

661,091

 

1945

1947

1948

1949

553,031

1944

1946

549,121

514,255

1942

1943

498,485

1941

360,006

1938

378,831

362,228

1937

421,267

349,936

1936

1939

281,047

1935

1940

235,260

259,361

1933

1934

289,879

269,843

1931

1932

240,207

271,300

1929

239,455

1928

1930

Beaver

Year

 

479,955

469,706

430,003

471,309

448,984

434,909

518,753

467,059

444,742

416,483

428,997

429,078

450,679

480,703

520,003

430,188

535,086

565,985

546,695

515,046

485,654

Central

 

871,677

853,156

787,737

834,324

785,299

665,769

751,129

726,612

668,021

569,592

580,331

555,489

560,935

582,029

572,431

490,518

539,723

525,896

550,247

530,087

508,843

Cloverdale

 

205,371

191,039

187,058

203,633

195,953

195,548

196,561

178,193

171,785

153,725

136,810

139,086

121,907

112,800

97,940

91,197

109,275

125,422

114,879

96,189

96,294

East Beaver

 

448,515

517,275

506,357

422,035

483,741

401,390

380,216

340,690

299,530

295,430

262,803

313,074

253,268

213,479

174,246

221,324

275,907

281,491

278,980

246,346

235,849

Three ­Rivers/ Hebo (1936)

 

780,356

839,312

841,825

890,242

895,958

870,450

916,439

861,748

767,687

761,603

656,467

604,676

547,408

493,462

446,600

335,131

412,312

277,177

258,968

134,738

119,640

Oretown

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meda (merged w/ Central 1927)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

114,390

118,089

Neskowin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

63,484

61,362

71,078

58,266

 

 

 

Upper Nestucca

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blaine

0

3,446,965

3,530,746

3,377,523

3,455,473

3,362,966

3,082,321

3,312,219

3,072,787

2,773,032

2,575,664

2,425,414

2,403,631

2,284,133

2,163,520

2,070,581

1,803,618

2,142,146

2,065,850

2,021,069

1,762,613

1,685,735

Totals for Six Main* Cheese Associations

156 APPENDIX D

799,518

739,345

807,022

 

831,843

 

 

613,129

594,406

598,568

595,898

587,318

607,224

602,360

637,605

 

577,214

543,948

 

 

Central

1,397,590

1,533,479

 

1,611,389

 

 

974,993

951,292

851,606

894,816

838,154

909,174

851,639

820,168

 

866,881

794,721

 

 

Cloverdale

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

205,001

279,120

 

277,784

242,044

 

 

East Beaver

619,091

621,832

 

564,379

 

 

314,688

347,623

352,172

353,560

361,490

352,645

352,649

379,371

 

389,121

417,510

 

 

Three ­Rivers/ Hebo (1936)

2,095,564

1,932,275

 

1,941,957

 

 

834,001

891,650

935,576

1,007,749

1,018,793

1,022,622

1,106,260

1,070,504

 

1,012,683

961,285

 

 

Oretown

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meda (merged w/ Central 1927)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Neskowin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Upper Nestucca

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blaine

5,651,108

5,664,709

0

5,781,755

0

0

3,246,334

3,371,015

3,350,377

3,468,996

3,378,114

3,496,468

3,628,721

3,709,580

0

3,618,542

3,366,235

0

0

Totals for Six Main* Cheese Associations

NOTE: *Totals reflect production at Beaver, Central, Cloverdale, East Beaver, Hebo, and Oretown. Data from annual TCCA reports provided by Tillamook County Pioneer Museum, Portland Oregonian, Pacific Dairy Review, National Agricultural Library, and Alexandria Rock, p. 16. I am grateful for the help of Brooke Andrade, Sarah Harris, Ruby Matson, and Joseph Melillo. The TCCA chose not to share its collection of annual reports.

770,101

1968

 

1963

1967

509,523

1962

 

586,044

1961

1966

612,455

1960

 

616,973

1959

832,187

572,359

1958

1965

604,803

1957

1964

522,812

510,812

 

1955

494,859

1953

1954

1956

 

406,727

1951

 

1950

1952

Beaver

Year

SOUTH COUNTY TCCA CHEESE PRODUCTION 157

Appendix E

South County Timber Harvests Year

FS (MBF)†

BLM (MBF)

Countywide (MBF)

BLM & FS (MBF)

1925

 

 

159,090

0

1926

 

 

118,350

0

1927

 

 

137,065

0

1928

 

 

150,510

0

1929

 

 

241,870

0

1930

 

 

141,940

0

1931

 

 

190,159

0

1932*

 

 

83,340

0

1933

 

 

51,664

0

1934

 

 

131,950

0

1935

 

 

217,727

0

1936

 

 

197,876

0

1937

 

 

282,298

0

1938

 

 

322,842

0

1939

 

2,165

224,203

2,165

1940

 

1,945

353,016

1,945

1941

 

5,235

403,757

5,235

1942

 

10,679

462,131

10,679

1943

 

10,561

425,771

10,561

1944

 

3,835

Missing

3,835

1945

 

0

197,235

0

1946

 

0

303,926

0

1947

 

40

419,778

40

1948

 

1,930

520,373

1,930

1949

 

0

436,452

0

1950

 

110

515,438

110

1951

 

1,270

572,155

1,270

158

159

Year

APPENDIX E

FS (MBF)†

BLM (MBF)

Countywide (MBF)

BLM & FS (MBF)

1952

 

140

609,624

140

1953

37,800

85

483,899

37,885

1954

23,400

2,477

389,907

25,877

1955

22,500

2,820

404,666

25,320

1956

38,500

3,647

413,642

42,147

1957

54,700

3,789

284,361

58,489

1958

37,000

12,793

276,574

49,793

1959

50,100

16,220

269,433

66,320

1960

37,300

30,617

294,651

67,917

1961

31,600

22,591

205,416

54,191

1962

24,900

42,268

232,305

67,168

1963

53,300

18,383

233,521

71,683

1964

54,700

28,956

239,469

83,656

1965

42,700

26,057

235,752

68,757

1966

35,200

28,072

212,402

63,272

1967

42,700

58,205

253,231

100,905

1968

47,152

52,799

263,844

99,951

1969

34,572

20,908

249,615

55,480

1970

22,098

41,258

212,998

63,356

1971

19,849

31,044

266,236

50,893

1972

67,168

46,895

252,573

114,063

1973

88,624

63,376

340,758

152,000

1974

44,114

40,495

262,440

84,609

1975

22,773

18,502

183,086

41,275

1976

47,768

49,211

262,781

96,979

1977

32,401

41,132

261,370

73,533

1978

19,555

36,937

219,042

56,492

1979

55,224

21,443

251,749

76,667

1980

50,529

32,887

232,840

83,416

1981

17,024

33,366

191,382

50,390

1982

24,937

6,427

134,478

31,364

1983

27,283

36,672

204,269

63,955

1984

77,332

34,127

206,919

111,459

1985

72,612

46,322

200,196

118,934

SOUTH COUNTY TIMBER HARVESTS

Year

FS (MBF)†

160

BLM (MBF)

Countywide (MBF)

BLM & FS (MBF)

1986

55,880

41,020

188,596

96,900

1987

38,478

33,215

162,889

71,693

1988

51,126

58,497

207,093

109,623

1989

33,646

52,285

169,660

85,931

1990

25,989

21,861

139,230

47,850

1991

26,097

26,394

175,032

52491

1992

4,874

16,604

133,026

21,478

1993

8,353

7,558

106,411

15,911

1994

1,157

14

136,636

1,171

1995

6,157

0

115,415

6,157

1996

1,551

1,675

107,135

3,226

1997

7,501

781

108,922

8,282

1998

4,388

625

93,253

5,013

1999

770

329

126,651

1,099

2000

1,245

15

120,992

1,260

2001

0

0

135,265

0

2002

53

82

146,428

135

2003

2,970

0

170,427

2,970

2004

610

1,244

167,089

1,854

2005

1,551

2,744

210,116

4,295

2006

2,873

4,290

210,265

7,163

2007

2,308

5,069

161,500

7,377

2008

5,671

1,906

182,318

7,577

2009

5,250

3,003

142,018

8,253

2010

8,749

1,288

192,361

10,037

2011

3,982

696

179,158

4,678

2012

3,672

1,619

162,785

5,291

2013

6,703

416

201,840

7,119

2014

10,601

4,733

176,507

15,334

2015

12,910

7,644

185,480

20,554

2016

5,814

654

210,280

6,468

Notes: Andrews et al., Oregon Timber Harvests: 1849–2004 (Salem: Oregon Department of Forestry, 2005), 122–125; “Timber Harvest Data, 1942–2016,” https://data.oregon.gov/Natural-Resources/Timber-Harvest-Data1942-2016/9cuv-nijj; “O&C Timber Sale Contracts: 1939–1961, Tillamook County, Oregon.” 2018 electronic record, internal database, Northwest Oregon District, Tillamook Field Office, Bureau of Land Management, accessed May 18, 2018. † MBF = 1K board feet; 5MBF = 1 truckload; *Lincoln and Tillamook combined.

Appendix F

Oct

Census Tract 9608

Sep

Annual

Aug

110

160

160

170

110

110

90

80

110

 

1959

70

70

60

80

100

100

80

80

70

80

70

70

80

 

1960

50

40

60

70

70

70

100

110

90

60

50

40

70

 

1961

60

40

50

60

50

60

80

100

110

110

110

80

70

 

1962

80

60

80

60

90

130

120

130

160

150

70

60

100

 

1963

60

60

60

70

70

100

140

110

80

90

70

70

80

 

1964

20

20

30

40

40

40

40

40

40

30

30

30

30

 

1965

40

40

60

60

60

70

80

100

110

100

70

70

70

 

1966

60

60

60

70

80

80

100

100

110

100

100

70

80

 

1967

70

70

70

70

80

80

90

120

110

100

90

70

90

 

1968

60

70

70

80

110

130

150

150

150

120

80

70

100

 

1969

50

70

100

80

90

100

130

110

100

90

70

60

90

 

1970

60

60

60

60

80

90

80

110

80

70

70

70

70

 

1971

60

60

60

80

100

110

110

130

140

120

90

70

90

 

1972

70

80

90

110

130

130

150

160

160

150

120

110

120

 

1973

100

130

140

160

180

200

180

220

200

200

130

140

170

 

1974

90

90

90

120

130

170

200

210

240

220

130

100

150

 

1975

90

90

80

90

100

110

130

130

130

130

110

100

110

 

1976

90

90

100

110

110

120

160

170

170

160

150

140

130

 

1977

140

140

130

140

160

180

190

200

180

180

160

160

160

 

161

Dec

Jul

80

Nov

Jun

60

Apr

60

Mar

70

Feb

1958

Jan

May

Year

Contract Construction Employment for Tillamook County and Census Tract 9608

Jan

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

Jun

Jul

Aug

Sep

Oct

Nov

Dec

Annual

Census Tract 9608

APPENDIX F

Year

162

1978

170

200

190

180

190

190

230

200

200

200

180

160

190

 

1979

160

160

160

180

210

220

240

230

230

270

200

180

200

 

1980

170

180

180

170

180

200

220

200

220

200

180

170

190

 

1981

180

190

200

180

180

190

200

200

270

200

170

150

190

 

1982

120

120

120

140

170

170

170

180

190

190

170

180

160

 

1983

160

170

160

170

190

190

230

210

190

180

170

160

180

 

1984

150

140

130

120

140

150

190

160

160

150

160

130

150

 

1985

130

130

120

110

140

130

130

160

140

150

130

100

130

 

1986

110

100

110

120

140

150

170

180

150

130

120

110

130

 

1987

120

130

130

130

160

150

170

170

160

160

160

150

150

 

1988

150

150

150

150

150

160

190

200

200

190

180

170

170

 

1989

150

150

150

160

160

170

190

200

200

200

200

180

180

 

1990

140

150

170

190

200

210

200

220

210

200

190

180

190

 

1991

170

180

180

200

210

220

230

210

230

210

200

180

200

 

1992

180

170

160

160

170

170

160

170

180

160

170

170

170

 

1993

150

160

160

170

180

190

200

210

200

220

200

200

190

 

1994

190

190

190

200

200

210

250

250

250

240

220

220

220

 

1995

230

250

250

230

240

250

260

260

250

240

250

240

250

 

1996

250

250

240

270

270

270

270

280

270

270

260

250

260

 

1997

230

250

240

250

260

270

270

290

290

290

270

270

270

 

1998

260

270

290

300

300

320

330

340

330

320

310

310

310

56

1999

300

300

300

290

290

300

330

340

320

320

320

320

310

55

2000

320

320

310

310

330

320

320

320

330

350

360

340

330

59

2001

108

108

100

104

104

101

107

113

107

98

95

98

104

75

2002

97

96

99

101

99

97

105

102

97

100

103

102

100

65

2003

83

90

79

85

87

94

104

102

102

106

105

111

96

69

Apr

May

Jun

Aug

Sep

Oct

Nov

96

103

113

111

111

99

102

108

103

105

96

104

73

2005

97

117

119

116

117

115

121

119

119

141

146

149

123

75

2006

137

142

138

156

160

165

157

153

148

149

149

132

149

84

2007

127

138

134

132

139

144

142

140

144

145

148

146

140

83

2008

133

136

139

148

147

144

151

147

151

151

148

129

144

88

2009

125

129

119

114

115

114

114

116

112

112

105

101

115

54

2010

101

87

94

95

93

97

95

91

85

91

83

79

91

50

2011

81

84

83

82

83

84

82

75

81

89

87

89

83

50

2012

81

73

72

72

75

73

73

84

83

84

85

88

79

58

2013

81

87

84

97

81

70

78

92

86

93

99

90

86

60

2014

88

80

96

88

102

98

98

95

91

112

109

100

96

64

2015

105

97

91

83

92

80

89

91

92

105

112

102

95

59

2016

120

115

118

83

88

97

89

101

97

102

88

75

98

51

2017

97

96

93

104

104

105

109

108

111

113

117

106

105

 

Dec

Mar

100

Jul

Jan

2004

Feb

Year

Census Tract 9608

163

Annual

CONTRACT CONSTRUCTION EMPLOYMENT

Notes: Pre-1990 data courtesy Oregon Employment Department; 1990 to 2018 data from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics/Oregon Employment Department. Construction figures for 1958–1977, “Contract Construction”; for 1978–1988, “Construction”; for 1989–2000, “Construction and Mining”; and 1998–2017, Census Tract 9608.

Appendix G

9.6

9

8.2

0.9

8.6

7.7

9.4

9.7

10.3

1977

9.9

9.8

8.9

7.3

6.1

5.6

5.4

4.5

5.1

5.6

8.2

8.3

7.0

1978

8.4

7.2

6.2

6.1

5.7

5.2

5

4.6

5.6

5.5

7

8.1

6.2

1979

10.8

9.6

8.8

7.7

6.4

6.5

6.1

5.9

5.8

6.4

9.4

12.3

8.0

1980

11.3

7.9

9.4

10.1

10.9

8.3

8.1

7.6

7.4

10.4

11.6

14

9.8

1981

12.6

10.7

10.1

9.9

9.7

9.7

8.2

10.4

10.1

14.0

19.4

22.0

12.3

1982

20.8

20.4

17.6

17.4

15.3

14.6

14.0

12.1

12.0

12.7

15.0

17.5

15.8

1983

18.0

16.2

14.9

12.2

11.0

10.5

10.4

9.6

10.1

10.3

12.2

14.8

12.5

1984

16.0

14.3

13.4

13.0

13.3

11.8

11.7

9.5

9.4

11.3

13.3

14.0

12.6

1985

13.8

14.4

13.6

12.3

9.7

9.4

9.7

8.5

8.0

8.4

11.0

11.7

10.9

1986

12.8

12.5

11.0

10.2

9.1

7.7

7.7

6.7

6.4

7.0

8.5

8.9

9.0

1987

11.6

11.8

10.8

7.7

6.9

6.0

6.5

6.4

7.3

7.5

7.7

8.7

8.2

1988

9.5

9.7

7.8

7.6

5.9

6.1

6.3

5.9

6.0

6.3

7.5

7.6

7.2

1989

9.0

8.8

8.0

6.8

5.2

5.3

6.3

5.7

5.8

5.8

7.7

7.8

6.8

1990

8.7

9.9

7.0

5.6

4.3

4.4

4.6

4.6

3.9

4.3

6.7

6.8

5.9

1991

9.3

7.9

6.7

5.7

5.3

4.9

4.9

5.0

4.6

7.1

7.5

8.2

6.4

1992

8.9

9.3

8.0

6.8

6.0

6.1

5.6

6.1

5.3

5.9

7.3

8.0

6.9

1993

9.9

8.5

7.4

7.6

5.5

5.3

5.7

4.6

4.1

4.2

5.5

6.0

6.2

1994

6.9

6.3

6.1

5.5

3.9

4.5

4.1

3.8

3.4

3.7

4.8

5.2

4.8

1995

6.4

5.7

5.1

4.7

4.2

5.0

4.1

4.3

4.0

4.5

6.2

6.3

5.0

164

Dec

July

Nov

11.4

Oct

Apr

16.1

Sep

Mar

14.1

Aug

Feb

14.9

Jun

Jan

1976

May

Year

Annual

Unadjusted Monthly Unemployment in Tillamook County, 1976–2017

Annual

Dec

Nov

Oct

Sep

Aug

July

Jun

May

Apr

Mar

Feb

APPENDIX G

Jan

Year

165

1996

7.0

7.8

6.1

5.7

5.2

5.0

5.2

5.0

4.5

4.9

6.1

6.6

5.8

1997

8.4

8.7

7.7

6.3

5.5

5.5

5.8

5.5

5.1

5.3

6.2

6.4

6.4

1998

8.2

8.4

8.1

5.8

5.9

5.9

5.5

5.3

5.3

5.9

6.4

6.8

6.4

1999

7.5

7.4

6.1

4.8

4.2

4.5

4.6

4.4

3.9

4.0

4.8

5.4

5.1

2000

6.6

6.3

5.7

4.8

4.7

5.1

4.9

4.9

4.2

4.5

5.3

5.3

5.2

2001

6.5

6.4

6.0

5.5

5.3

5.6

5.9

5.7

5.5

6.2

7.6

7.9

6.2

2002

8.5

8.3

8.0

7.0

5.8

6.3

6.2

6.2

5.3

5.7

6.3

6.6

6.7

2003

8.3

8.1

8.4

8.0

7.2

7.5

7.1

6.8

6.4

6.6

6.8

7.3

7.4

2004

9.1

8.1

8.1

6.8

6.5

6.8

6.5

6.4

6.2

6.5

7.0

6.9

7.1

2005

7.4

7.5

7.0

6.3

5.7

6.2

5.8

5.5

5.6

5.5

5.7

6.0

6.2

2006

6.7

6.6

6.3

5.5

4.9

5.0

5.1

5.1

4.5

4.7

5.8

5.7

5.5

2007

6.3

6.0

5.6

4.8

4.2

4.6

4.5

4.5

4.0

4.5

4.7

5.4

4.9

2008

5.9

5.3

5.3

4.7

4.5

4.5

5.0

5.2

4.7

5.8

7.0

8.0

5.5

2009

9.8

12.2

12.2

9.8

9.7

9.0

8.9

8.5

7.7

8.4

8.9

9.7

9.6

2010

12.1

11.8

11.8

10.6

9.7

10.0

9.8

9.6

9.1

9.7

10.8

10.6

10.5

2011

11.6

11.0

11.1

10.0

9.2

9.6

9.3

9.3

8.9

9.5

9.5

10.0

9.9

2012

10.8

11.1

11.6

10.0

9.2

9.4

9.2

8.9

8.3

9.0

9.2

9.8

9.7

2013

10.6

9.8

9.5

8.5

8.0

8.2

7.9

7.5

7.2

7.6

7.9

7.9

8.4

2014

8.3

8.7

8.2

6.8

6.5

6.5

6.6

6.3

6.1

6.4

6.7

6.3

6.9

2015

6.5

6.4

6.1

5.5

5.4

5.7

5.5

5.2

5.1

5.2

5.4

5.6

5.6

2016

5.9

5.7

5.7

4.8

4.5

5.1

4.9

4.6

4.3

4.6

4.4

4.5

4.9

2017

4.9

4.5

4.3

4.0

3.7

4.2

4.4

4.1

4.0

4.2

4.3

4.3

4.3

Notes: 1976 to 1989 data from Oregon Employment Department; 1990–2017 data from US Bureau of Labor Statistics/Oregon Employment Department.

Appendix H

Annual Unemployment Averages for Tillamook County and South County Year

County Average

Tract 9608 Average

2010

10.5

3.5

2011

9.9

3.3

2012

9.7

3.3

2013

8.4

2.8

2014

6.9

2.3

2015

5.6

1.9

2016

4.9

1.5

2017

4.3

1.3

Note: Tillamook County data from US Bureau of Labor Statistics/ Oregon Employment Department; South County data from the Local Area Unemployment Statistics provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Community Survey for Census Tract 9608.

166

167

0 600,000 540,000 420,000 360,000 300,000 240,000 180,000 0 120,000 180,000 0 0 0 0 0

  5,400,000 100,000 0 400,000 1,000,000 0 0 600,000

1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933

1934 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962

Coho Pre­ smolts

Year

                          60,000 0 0

                 

Coho Smolts

0 200000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 100,000 100,000 100,000 0 100,000 0 0 0

Chum Chinook: Pre­smolts Spring Pre­ smolts 0 2,500,000 0 3,900,000 0 2,100,000 0 0 0 1,600,000 0 1,000,000 0 1,000,000 0 0 0 0

Nestucca Basin Hatchery Plantings

Appendix I

                          0 0 100,000

Chinook: Spring Smolts                   0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 100,000 100,000 100,000 0 100,000 0 0 0

                          0 0 100,000

100,000 450,000 300,000 100,000 200,000 0 100,000 0 100,000 0 0 0 0 0 0 120,000

                          0 100,000 120,000

                          0 0 0

                          0 0 0

Chinook: Chinook: Steelhead: Steelhead: Steelhead: Steelhead: Fall Pre­ Fall Smolts Summer Summer Winter Winter smolts Pre­smolts Smolts Pre­smolts Smolts             800,000   700,000       1,000,000   0       0   0       0   0       0   0       0   0       0   0       0   1,200,000                                      

                 

Rainbow Trout

                               

Cutthroat Trout: Searun                  

Coho Pre­ smolts

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 600,000 0 0 1,077,588 1,859,360 0 0 0 0 164,563 0 0 0 0 0

Year

1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971

1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 48,849 48,742 49,878 50,114 42,312 40,223 40,746 45,459 44,660

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Coho Smolts

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

40,000 150,000 150,000 150,000 0 100,000 0 102,384 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Chum Chinook: Pre­smolts Spring Pre­ smolts 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 100,000 100,000 0 120,000 100,000 120,000 56,000 0 51,698 66,213 44,116 68,281 63,711 53,324 139,991 111,462 115,460 110,764 116,934 106,492

Chinook: Spring Smolts 0 0 0 0 0 100,000 0 100,000 100,000 0 0 0 0 120,000 0 0 85,872 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Chinook: Fall Pre­ smolts 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 100,000 100,000 0 100,000 100,000 100,000 93,518 0 90,075 49,894 93,873 111,673 117,892 115,871 87,441 115,875 122,860 120,617 144,859 127,791

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 243,270 0 66,750 70,523 129,545 1,350 181,549 39,736 15,001 83,632 0 0 25,827

100,000 150,000 100,000 100,000 100,000 150,000 263,169 27,837 232,616 207,487 222,443 212,822 233,157 246,815 155,177 15,001 128,498 127,690 141,504 131,651

0 250,000 0 0 0 0 0 411,369 12,230 89,650 110,439 0 15,300 276,225 59,789 134,380 0 70,345 0 0

200,000 225,000 150,000 200,000 225,000 200,000 422,952 0 323,340 363,189 355,153 443,843 430,519 395,456 494,557 516,063 339,478 343,541 349,929 351,799

Chinook: Steelhead: Steelhead: Steelhead: Steelhead: Fall Smolts Summer Summer Winter Winter Pre­smolts Smolts Pre­smolts Smolts 0 100,000 100,000 0 0 0 0 120,000 0 0 0 0 0 0 150,000 0 0 100,000 100,000 300,000 0 0 100,000 0 150,000 100,000 0 150,000 150,000 150,000 0 0 100,000 0 150,000 100,000 0 100,000 0 250,000 100,000 0 100,000 0 250,000             500 49,698 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

                 

Rainbow Trout

            144,573 224,119 132,370 264,848 361,257 431,815 135,974 354,924 101,012 219,121 191,093 183,402 160,820 95,823

Cutthroat Trout: Searun                  

168 APPENDIX I

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

42,824 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Coho Smolts

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

20,475 16,377 18,800 5,073 14,202 19,040 4,800 21,924 10,900 14,767 9,600 23,115 19,716 12,450 21,781 243,584 0 70,192

Chum Chinook: Pre­smolts Spring Pre­ smolts 0 139,112 0 0 0 41,984 0 10,823 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 11,246 107,636 103,969 110,467 113,395 112,560 113,803 119,230 113,261 115,468 112,977 111,097 111,026 110,682 114,045 239,727 0 239,498 239,965

Chinook: Spring Smolts 0 73,096 102,442 126,338 112,312 120,651 122,222 119,800 113,401 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Chinook: Fall Pre­ smolts 144,550 54,479 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 103,448 39,125 105,085 74,770 104,754 102,840 79,130 31,646 25,073 101,315 103,194 67,306 97,600 110,264 105,116 108,354 102,891 116,875

49,216 42,780 45,920 0 62,100 70,188 26,296 0 0 0 24,254 5,079 0 27,550 0 0 42,325 0

103,786 95,037 44,241 76,174 106,933 110,507 116,723 94,170 89,343 92,573 85,821 94,415 94,668 92,361 94,553 100,782 88,208 106,483

41,025 88,930 177 0 82,008 112,879 41,781 24,565 102,366 11,250 102,189 22,975 7,056 10,575 0 38,699 66,397 157,511

264,757 216,358 100,768 94,866 118,647 95,906 119,449 113,567 116,605 109,179 112,516 116,615 114,696 114,252 138,274 137,611 146,163 141,498

Chinook: Steelhead: Steelhead: Steelhead: Steelhead: Fall Smolts Summer Summer Winter Winter Pre­smolts Smolts Pre­smolts Smolts 0 7,099 143,435 85,792 339,345 61,351 35,524 141,038 52,177 390,520 0 32,214 109,314 46,351 349,166 0 12,102 142,643 16,965 241,375 0 15,170 104,577 20,240 216,063 0 20,323 98,197 27,953 192,593 0 24,420 99,401 0 191,724 0 44,480 85,388 0 186,503 95,852 8,757 75,765 2,210 188,993 51,178 79,966 222 3,545 36 457 305 1,008 2,334 304 401 522 5,684 5,511 5,717 5,568 558 0

0 0 0 0 40,917 41,408 44,537 65,563 57,407

Rainbow Trout

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Cutthroat Trout: Searun 109,863 89,569 91,443 62,756 129 0 0 0 0

Source: Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (or ODFW) commercial landings statistics, retrieved May 2018; Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (2018). Commercial landings statistics [Data file]. Available from www.dfw.state.or.us

Coho Pre­ smolts

Year

NESTUCCA BASIN HATCHERY PLANTINGS 169

170

43.2

52.51

68.02

1990-H

1992-S

26.25

 

47.49

61.37

38.39

1986-S

1988-H

71.83

31.7

68.3

1990-S

64.19

35.81

1984-S

1986-H

1992-H

32.87

67.13

1984-H

55.92

55.98

28.17

 

34.32

40.76

65.68

1980-S

23.88

76.12

61.98

25.97

36.87

1982-H

1980-H

74.03

38.02

1978-H

1978-S

51.67

47.33

51.19

1974-S

1976-H

33.45

66.55

1974-H

73.97

57.98

26.03

42.02

1972-House

BeaverR

BeaverD

1972-Senate

Year

47.94

72.26

55.98

63.11

 

37.71

68.75

36.18

57.44

67.59

44.91

71.97

49.3

62.5

59.31

38.01

56.44

28.91

17.45

HeboD

50.19

27.74

44.02

29.33

 

61.44

31.25

63.82

42.56

32.41

52.45

28.03

50.23

37.5

40.69

60.23

43.56

71.09

82.55

HeboR

41.53

64.63

45.27

55.84

 

38.57

61.82

39.76

55.69

52.94

44.54

72.03

42.93

73.06

53.44

39.47

56.46

32.8

17.53

Cloverdale-D

55.93

35.37

54.73

34.52

 

60.54

38.18

60.24

44.31

47.06

52.1

27.97

57.07

26.94

46.56

59.21

43.54

67.2

82.47

Cloverdale-R

51.68

69.83

52.7

60.82

 

36.28

63.93

36.65

54.51

55.27

40.21

62.37

44.29

62.05

53.63

39.68

52.89

42.76

23.35

UnionD

46.23

30.03

47.13

30.32

 

63.16

36.07

61.43

45.49

44.73

54.25

37.63

55.71

37.95

46.37

59.72

47.11

57.24

76.65

UnionR

52

72.22

48.42

67.77

73.39

62.6

69.05

36.34

60.56

63.64

43.95

74.08

39.99

71.62

65.21

49.14

63.46

48.52

26.83

CountyD

46.24

27.71

51.54

25.76

26.6

36.26

30.94

63.65

39.44

36.35

52.71

25.92

59.94

28.38

34.79

49.33

36.54

51.48

73.17

CountyR

Congressional Election Results for Nestucca Valley Precincts, 1972–2018

Appendix J

Les AuCoin

Mike Kopetski

Harry Lonsdale

Les AuCoin

Les AuCoin

Rick Bauman

Les AuCoin

Margie Hendrikson

Les AuCoin

Les AuCoin

Ted Kulongoski

Les AuCoin

Vern Cook

Les AuCoin

Les AuCoin

Betty Roberts

Les AuCoin

Wayne Morse

Ralph E. Bunch

Democratic Candidate

Bob Packwood

Jim Seagraves

Mark Hatfield

Earl Molander

Earl Molander

Bob Packwood

Anthony Meeker

Mark Hatfield

Bill Moshofsky

Bill Moshofsky

Bob Packwood

Lynn Engdahl

Mark Hatfield

Nick Bunick

Phil Bladine

Bob Packwood

Diarmuid O’Scannlain

Mark Hatfield

Wendell Wyatt

Republican Candidate

41.64

2018-H

53.91

45.23

47.04

46.94

43.27

42.65

47.02

49.46

58.8

48.03

54.81

41.01

45.42

55.43

30.1

42.05

50.5

46.86

55.7

59.07

56.4

54.77

52.28

40.96

49.3

53.94

63.27

55.24

37.02

47.7

51.22

61.35

55.77

44.03

51.91

43.16

HeboD

51.59

36.63

42.24

34.18

32.07

38.4

42.32

41.49

51.19

43.01

41.73

28.39

37.96

58.01

48.47

44.21

28.28

29.88

50.37

46.95

54.27

HeboR

39.29

44

46.33

37.31

38.08

41.85

41.7

35.88

30.87

42.47

40.66

50.29

42.51

26.43

38.69

43.05

49.4

47.01

26.52

28.94

35.78

Cloverdale-D

54.64

42.33

44

46.54

45

51.85

54.61

58.4

59.06

47.26

57.68

42.51

49.1

66.66

55.93

56.94

43.02

40.63

69.18

68.13

61.21

Cloverdale-R

55.75

52.11

52.32

52.54

54.06

58.55

60.29

53.95

44.55

55.12

56.89

62.92

57.42

42.87

55.27

57.34

65.17

58.38

47.25

52.24

47.04

UnionD

38.77

36.92

38.92

37.83

35.08

37.95

37.71

43.13

48.07

36.46

39.53

28.14

34.89

52.11

40.89

37.52

28.61

31.93

46.58

44.35

48.22

UnionR

52.59

53.06

53.78

52.12

55.81

56.78

57.05

52.95

43.01

54.54

56.05

60.49

53.53

37.22

50.83

52.47

63.02

57.46

45.61

51.72

48.19

CountyD

44.21

38.18

42.09

39.95

36.7

38.82

39.74

43.75

50.58

37.89

40.32

31.2

39.15

56.67

46.43

43.52

29.43

32.71

49.62

45.69

48.14

CountyR

Kurt Schrader

Ron Wyden

Kurt Schrader

Jeff Merkley

Kurt Schrader

Kurt Schrader

Ron Wyden

Kurt Schrader

Jeff Merkley

Kurt Schrader

Darlene Hooley

Ron Wyden

Darlene Hooley

Bill Bradbury

Darlene Hooley

Darlene Hooley

Ron Wyden

Darlene Hooley

Tom Bruggere

Darlene Hooley

Catherine Webber

Democratic Candidate

Precinct abstracts provided by the county clerk of Tillamook County. I thank Christy Biggs for her help in locating this data. 1988 precinct abstracts are not available.

44.08

43.26

2016-H

40.41

2014-S

2016-S

53.36

43.06

2012-H

2014-H

47.3

48.72

2010-H

33.45

2008-S

2010-S

41.92

42.83

2006-H

2008-H

47.54

2004-S

66.38

26.47

46.07

2002-S

44.41

38.86

2000-H

2002-H

2004-H

57.77

60

1998-S

61.22

37.89

34.17

51.15

1996-S

1998-H

54.63

52.21

40.74

44.21

BeaverR

1994-H

BeaverD

1996-H

Year

Mark Callahan

Mark Callahan

Colm Willis

Monica Wehby

Tootie Smith

Fred Thompson

Jim Huffman

Scott Bruun

Gordon Smith

Mike Erickson

Mike Erickson

Al King

Jim Zupancic

Gordon Smith

Brian Boquist

Brian Boquist

Jon Lim

Marylin Shannon

Gordon Smith

Jim Bunn

Jim Bunn

Republican Candidate

CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION RESULTS, 1972–2018 171

Acknowledgments A long time ago, at a germinative moment in my education, a mentor at the University of Oregon suggested I turn a seminar paper into an honors thesis. Edwin Bingham meant well but badly miscalculated. Bing, as he was fondly called, expected a forty-page report; instead, he got a 160-page tome, much longer than a respectable MA thesis. Bing nevertheless dutifully critiqued my prose and arguments, and committee members Dick Brown and Matt Dennis helped whip a hot mess into defensible form. In fact, many people contributed knowledge and advice, but Bing comes first. His encouragement was integral to the thesis that eventually became this book, but that is not the full debt. Without the kindly words of Eugenie Yaryan at the College of Marin, who a long, long time ago assured me that I really could write, and the guidance of Bing, Dick, Matt, and Earl Pomeroy, I would not have gone on to graduate school. I cannot explain how important they were, beyond saying very simply that they changed my life. Many organizations and people assisted me, including Joyce Ames, Christy Biggs, Pat Larson, and Josephine Veltri at the Tillamook County Clerk office; Duane Edwards, Dan McNutt, and Al Duncan at the Tillamook County Surveyors office; Brett Sherry at Oregon Health Authority; Erik Knoder, Beverly Lutz, and Tracy Morrissette at the Oregon Employment Division; Tiffany Yelton-Bram at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality; Deedee Hathaway at Oregon Corporate Division; Justin Ainsworth, Don Bodenmiller, Keith Braun, Chris Carter, Guy Chilton, Mark Freeman, Rick Klumpf, Mario Solazzi, and Elaine Stewart at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife; Andy Pampush, Dave Roche, and Tamara Yingling at the Bureau of Land Management; Mick Mueller and Alex Wickham at the Forest Service; Joseph Schiwek Jr. at the Pastoral Center for the Archdiocese of Portland; Karen Morgenstern at the National Agricultural Library; the National Humanities Center, which provided a Ruth W. and A. Morris Williams Jr. Fellowship that enabled me to revise this book, and 173

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especially its wonderful librarians Brooke Andrade, Sarah Harris, and Joe Melillo. Staff at regional archives and libraries were invaluable. Thanks go to Joseph Schwarz at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland; the University of Oregon’s Knight Library, Science Library, and Map Library; Kerr Library at Oregon State University; Millar Library at Portland State University; Suzzallo Library, Fisheries Library, and Special Collections at the University of Washington; Oregon State Library and Oregon State Archives in Salem; Oregon Historical Society Library in Portland; Barbara Minard at the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria; Gary Albright, M. Wayne Jensen Jr., and Ruby Matson at the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum; and Peter Hatch and Robert Kentta at the Cultural Center of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians of Oregon. Large parts of the past would be inaccessible without the preservation of newspapers and industry journals. Among the resources that aided this project were the Daily Astorian, Lincoln City News Guard, McMinnville News-Reporter, Newport News-Times, Roseburg News-Review, Pacific Dairy Review, Western Milk and Ice Cream News, Pacific Fisherman, Portland Oregon Journal, Portland Oregonian, Portland Telegram, Tillamook Headlight Herald, and Woods Ocean Wave. Many friends and neighbors, too many of whom have passed on since I wrote my honors thesis, also helped. My greatest debt is to Harvey and Lavonne Hellwege and their kids, Sheri, Dave, Rod, Danny, Rusty, and Sue. Over a long, hard decade, Harvey and Lavonne were my surrogate parents, and I still miss them. Don Watters let me rummage his private library. Jack Crider, Tom Edwards, and Rod Hogevoll patiently answered many dumb questions about fish and markets. Paul Hanneman shared insights about the politics and processes of the Oregon statehouse. Louisa Farley, Ruth Crockett, and Ralph Redberg lent their father’s mementos from the net fishery. Lloyd McKillip offered documents on Ocean Park. Kay Hebron and Cher Bullock arranged oral interviews. When it was time to write, my roommate Randy Lindsey loaned me his CD turntable and fled our room, giving me nine uninterrupted days to draft a thesis in an empty dorm hall during spring break 1990. That turntable is actually germane to the book, because some of the songs I listened to while writing have worked their way into this book as epigraphs. Then and since, these lyrics have resonated strongly with what I found in the struggles of South County, western North America, and the rest of the rural working world. For permission

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to reprint lyrics, I thank Greg Brown and Red House Records for “Boomtown”; John Flansburgh, John Linnell, TMBG Music, and Alfred Music for “Ana Ng”; Bryan Holland and Round Hill Music for “The Kids Aren’t Alright”; Michael Scott, Stephen Wickham, Warner/Chappell Music Inc., and Alfred Music for “The Fisherman’s Blues”; Bruce Springsteen and Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks P.C. for “Growin’ Up”; I also appreciate use of lyrics from “Telegraph Road,” words and music by Mark Knopfler, copyright © 1982 Chariscourt Ltd., international copyright secured, all rights reserved, reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC; and “We Work The Black Seam,” music and lyrics by Sting, copyright © 1985 G. M. Sumner, all rights adminsistered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219, international copyright secured, all rights reserved, reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC. Only Billy Joel neglected to grant permission for publication. Lara Braithwaite, Scott Maresh, Teresa Pargeter, and Katie Shelby critiqued chapters. Erica Krause dashed to Salem to find data just before my thesis defense. Everyone improved the result. Liz Clemens proofread an article version for Pacific Northwest Quarterly 82 (1991). Gary Albright, Lorraine Eckhardt, Sandy Hanneman, Ruby Matson, Ray Monroe, Sandy Weedman, and my mom have provided photos. Finally, it was Sally Rissell who suggested I publish the thesis to raise money for the Pacific City Dorymen’s Association. I thought that a worthy goal, but it took two years to revise the manuscript—partly because of private losses, partly because I wanted to incorporate recent research, and partly because reading my undergraduate prose was painful. Louise Pubols learned to ignore my moans of “Ye gods!” Matthew Booker, Shelly Brock, Kerwin Klein, Matthew Klingle, David Lewis, Ray Monroe, Hans Radtke, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, and Charles Wilkinson critiqued and improved drafts, as did Mary Elizabeth Braun, Marty Brown, Susan Campbell, Steve Connell, Micki Reaman, and the anonymous reviewers at the press. This is a very weak thank you for all their help. Most important were the people who agreed to be interviewed. Again, most have passed on, and I miss them all: Bessie Bennett, Walter Bodyfelt, Oren Burke, Shelly Brock, Marlene Carter, Calvin Christensen, Ruth Crockett, Keith Delaney, Sue Delaney, Rudy Fenk, Si Fisher, Walt Fisher, Jack Gilman, Norma Gilman, Jean Gogas, Julio Gogas, Kenny Graves, Paul Hanneman, Jack Hogevoll, Anton Hurliman, Bertha Hurliman, Clem

176 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Hurliman, Forrest Kellow, Howard Kellow, Sue Kellow, Andrew Kershaw, Audry Knotts, Judy Landingham, Alice Learned, Terry Learned, Victor Learned Jr., Stan Martella, Lloyd McKillip, John Monroe, Ray Monroe, Harold Penter, Verle Potter, Jesse Ray, Oral Ray, Marie Redberg, Ralph Redberg, Evelyn Rock, Wilma Dunn Rowland, Bill Sears, Craig Wenrick, Susie Wenrick, Don Wenzinger, Lew Wilkinson, and Marrian Wilkinson. This book would not have been possible without their immense generosity. Writing is a craft, and a basic skill is knowing which words do work and which do not. Many people contributed to this history, but I severely limited the names and events to avoid clutter. Those I omitted—and they are legion—do matter, but in the balance their stories did not alter main points. Thus, while I regret not including more voices and stories, the women and men whom I do detail are meant to suggest the range of struggles South County families have faced as they pursued the persistent callings of farming, fishing, and logging in a corner of the Oregon coast. For a time I lived there too. Among the things I learned, to paraphrase Ken Kesey, is you have to go through a winter to get it. I went through many, and I still miss the place and my friends. As a result, I can step back only so far from this story. It is personal. This book is for my friends, the proceeds for a local scholarship. But seven require more: three are my blood brothers Bob, Chris, and Craig. We intersect less these days, but they still remind me why “I yam what I yam.” Equally important are my other brothers Julian, Matt, and Mongo. They have been my closest friends for a very long time, my sounding boards, the people I rely on to dope-slap me, and I love them for that. Finally, there is Louise, whom I will always miss. For all these reasons, I dedicate this book to all of them.

Notes SEASONS 1 Work Is Our Joy: The Story of the Columbia River Gillnetter, video, written by Irene Martin, producer Larry Johnson (Oregon State University Sea Grant and the Columbia River Maritime Museum, 1989); Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1990). 2 Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952); Leslie Fields, The Entangling Net: Alaska’s Commercial Fishing Women Tell Their Lives (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); Linda Greenlaw, The Hungry Ocean: A Swordboat Captain’s Journey (New York: Hachette Books, 1999); Cabot Martin, No Fish and Our Lives: Some Survival Notes from Newfoundland (St. John’s, NL: Creative Publishers, 1992); Jack Molan, You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: My Thirty Years as Captain in the Bering Sea (Jack Molan Photography, 2017); Spike Walker, Working on the Edge (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). 3 Lawrence M. Lipin, Workers and the Wild: Conservation, Consumerism, and Labor in Oregon, 1910–30 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 27. 4 Frank Tobias Higbie, Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 11; Paul S. Taylor, “Agricultural Workers on the Pacific Coast,” American Sociological Review 3 (April 1938), 225–232; Harry Schwartz, Seasonal Farm Labor in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945); Thomas F. Armstrong, “Georgia Lumber Laborers, 1880–1917: The Social Implications of Work,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 67 (Winter 1983), 435–450; Thomas F. Armstrong, “The Transformation of Work: Turpentine Workers in Coastal Georgia, 1865–1901,” Labor History 25, no. 4 (1984): 518–532; Allan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), 53–56; Robert B. Outland III, “Slavery, Work, and the Geography of the North Carolina Naval Stores Industry, 1835–1860,” Journal of Southern History 63 (February 1996): 27–56; Roger Biles, “Tobacco Towns: Urban Growth and Economic Development in Eastern North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 84 (April 2007): 156–190. 5 For agricultural examples, see Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism, 187–189; Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 94); John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois 177

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Prairie (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Allan G. Bogue, From Prairie to Corn Belt: Farming on the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963); Julie Guthman, Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). For the evolution of cash economies, see James A. Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America,” William and Mary Quarterly 35 (January 1978): 3–32; Michael Merrill, “Cash Is Good to Eat: Self-Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States,” Radical History Review 13 (Winter 1977): 42–71. For capital accumulation, see Margaret Beattie Bogue, Patterns from the Sod: Land Use and Tenure in the Grand Prairie, 1850–1900 (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1959); Allan G. Bogue, Money at Interest: The Farm Mortgage on the Middle Border (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1955). For persistence of seasonal labor, see Steven Stoll, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (New York: Hill and Wang, 2017); John McPhee, Coming into the Country (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977); Anna Haupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the end of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). For the state, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); 2–3, 38–52; James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 73–94. 6 Paul Hanneman, Oregon’s Beach and Bottle Bills: The Inside Story (Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2016); Patrick H. Mooney and Theo J. Majka, Farmers’ and Farm Workers’ Movements: Social Protest in American Agriculture (Woodbridge, CT: Twayne, 1995). 7 For rural problems, see Patrick J. Carr and Maria Kefalas, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009); Cynthia M. Duncan, Worlds Apart: Poverty and Politics in Rural America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). For western gentrification, see William G. Robbins, “Creating a ‘New’ West: Big Money Returns to the Hinterland,” Montana, The Magazine of Western History 46 (Summer 1996): 66–72; Joseph E. Taylor III, “The Many Lives of the New West,” Western Historical Quarterly 35 (Summer 2004): 141–165; Earl S. Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America (New York: Knopf, 1957). 8 Jeffrey Charles, “The Pacific Coast,” in The Routledge History of Rural America, ed. Pamela Riney-Kehrberg (New York: Routledge, 2016), 101. 9 Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); Bonnie Christensen, Red Lodge and the Mythic West: Coal Miners to Cowboys (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 6. RESETTLEMENT 1 Peakbagger.com, “Oregon Coast Range” (last accessed February 25, 2018), http:// www.peakbagger.com/range.aspx?rid=1222; Bureau of Land Management,

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“Nestucca River National Back Country Byway,” https://www.blm.gov/or/resources/recreation/files/brochures/Nestucca%20River.pdf. 2 Cornelis Groot and Leo Margolis, Pacific Salmon Life Histories (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995); Thomas P. Quinn, The Behavior and Ecology of Pacific Salmon and Trout (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005); Scott M. Gende and Thomas P. Quinn, “The Fish and the Forest,” Scientific American 295 (August 2006): 84–89. 3 Franz Boas, “Traditions of the Tillamook, II,” Journal of American Folk-Lore 11 (April 1898): 146; William R. Seaburg and Jay Miller, “Tillamook,” in Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 7: Northwest Coast, eds. Wayne Suttles and William Sturtevant (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), 560–567. 4 Warren N. Vaughn, Till Broad Daylight: A History of Early Settlement in Oregon’s Tillamook County (Wallowa, OR: Bear Creek Press, 2004), 39; Erna Gunther, “An Analysis of the First Salmon Ceremony,” American Anthropologist 28 (October–December 1926): 614; Dell Hymes, “Language, Memory, and Selective Performance, Cultee’s ‘Salmon’s Myth’ as Twice Told to Boas,” Journal of American Folklore 98 (October 1985): 427; Joseph E. Taylor III, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 13–38. Notes on Nestucca pronunciation from Tillamook microfilm reel, Series 10, John Peabody Harrington Papers, National Anthropological Archives, copy supplied by Robert Kentta and Peter Hatch at the Siletz Cultural Center, Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians, Siletz, Oregon. 5 Lloyd McKillip, “A Short History of South Tillamook County,” Tillamook Pioneer Museum, 1; John Sauter and Bruce Johnson, Tillamook Indians of the Oregon Coast (Portland: Binford and Mort, 1974), 54–62, 174–177, 116–118; Franz Boas, “Notes on the Tillamook,” American Archaeology and Ethnology 20 (1923): 9–11; Randall F. Schalk and Gregory C. Cleveland, “A Chronological Perspective on Hunter-Gatherer Land Use Strategies in the Columbia Plateau,” Project Report 8 (Pullman: Washington State University, 1983), 31–40; Chad C. Meengs and Robert T. Lackey, “Estimating the Size of Historical Oregon Salmon Runs,” Reviews in Fisheries Science 13, no. 1 (2005): 55. 6 Nellie B. Pipes, ed., “Journal of John H. Frost, 1840–43,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 35 (September 1934): 154; Seaburg and Miller, “Tillamook,” 561– 565; Sauter and Johnson, Tillamook Indians, 176–177; Robert Boyd, The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Disease and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774–1874 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 266; Taylor, Making Salmon, 34–35, 40–43. 7 F. A. Schwartz, The Rogue River Indian War and Its Aftermath (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 161; William Eugene Kent, The Siletz Indian Reservation, 1855–1900 (Newport, OR: Lincoln County Historical Society, 1977); Royal A. Bensell, All Quiet on the Yamhill, ed. Gunther Paul Barth (Eugene: University of Oregon Press, 1959); Mildred Edner, “Netarts,” in Tillamook Memories (Tillamook, OR: Tillamook Pioneer Association, 1972), 24; Harriet Duncan Munnick and Stephen Dow Beckham, eds., Catholic Church Records

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of the Pacific Northwest: Grand Ronde Register I (1860–1885), Grand Ronde Register II (1886–1898), St. Michael the Archangel Parish, Grand Ronde Indian Reservation, Grand Ronde, Oregon, St. Patrick’s Parish, Muddy Valley, Oregon (Portland: Binford and Mort, 1987), 55–59; Charles Wilkinson, The People Are Dancing Again: The History of the Siletz Tribe of Western Oregon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), 136–144. 8 Lila V. Cooper Boge, comp., Tillamook History: Sequel to Tillamook Memories (Tillamook, OR: Tillamook County Pioneer Association, 1975), 192; For “Gauldy,” see McKillip, “A Short History,” 1. For removal, see Schwartz, Rogue River Indian War, 192, 194–198; Alexandria Rock, “Little Nestucca Country: A History,” (Tillamook County Pioneer Museum, Tillamook, Oregon), 4; Victor Learned Jr. interview, Pacific City, Oregon (October 14, 1989); Sally Rissel and Joe Noegel, Nestucca River Country: Natives, Settlers, and Settlements (Pacific City, OR: Heron Landing, 2009), 11–16. For negotiations and move to Salmon River, see A. B. Meacham to Superintendent, June 28, 1870, M-2, roll 26, frame 53; “Report of Wm Vandever,” August 21, 1874, M1070, roll 33, doc. 13; J. H. Fairchild, “Minutes of Council held with the Tillamook and other bands of Indians living North of Northern boundary of Siletz Reservation, June 1st, 1875 to procure their consent to removal to said Reservation,” June 4, 1875, M-234, roll 621, frames 0232–0243; J. H. Fairchild, “Account of Council with bands of Indians living North of Mouth of Salmon River,” June 4, 1875, M-234, roll 621, frames 244–248; J. H. Fairchild, “Result of Council with head men of the Nestucka band of Indians living north of the Mouth of Salmon River, relative to their removal to Siletz or Grande Ronde Reservation, June 5, 1875, M-234, roll 621, frames 0252–0255; Ben Simpson to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, October 28, 1875, M-234, roll 621, frames 1201–1206; Willam Bagley, “Rel to the needy condition of the Indians recently located upon the Siletz Reservation by W. Simpson,” December 23, 1875, M-234, roll 622, frames 0070–0072; William Bagley, “General Report of affs for month of June,” July 10, 1876, M-234, roll 622, frames 0386–0392; William Bagley, “Special report on condition of Alsea, Nestucca, & Salmon R. Indians, their whereabouts. Their immediate wants. Statement of number and an appeal for help,” November 26, 1877, M-234, roll 624, frames 753–759; T. B. Sinnott, “Account of shooting affray on Salmon river between some whites—Stock trespassers & Nestucas, Inds belonging to Siletz agcy, & Killing of one Dodson (white) and an Indian,” June 21, 1878, M-234, roll 626, frames 658–663, all from Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Archives Microfilm collection; Rev. R. W. Summers, Indian Journal, 1871– 1881 (Lafayette, OR: Guadalupe Translations, 1994), 22. Robert Kentta and Peter Hatch were immensely helpful in supplying this correspondence at the Siletz Cultural Center, Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians, Siletz, Oregon. Census enumerators noted only two self-identified “Indians” through 1940. One was Myrtle Follett, born in Oregon and wife of Harold Follett, both of whom lived on Harry Follett’s farm in the Little Nestucca Valley in 1920, lines 52–57, p. 3-B, Little Nestucca census manuscript for 1920, NARA Series T626, roll 1955. The other individual was Gilbert Belleque, son of Peter Belleque, one of the first settlers in the Nestucca Valley. Peter was born at

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9

10 11

12

13 14 15

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French Prairie in the Willamette Valley, now Champoeg Park, to “French parents.” The senior Belleque and all his children consistently listed themselves “White,” but son Gilbert changed to “Indian” for the 1910 census. Older residents remembered the Belleques as “Indians,” but they were more likely Métis. See Lila V. Cooper Boge, comp., Tillamook History: Sequel to Tillamook Memories (Tillamook, OR: Tillamook County Pioneer Association, 1975), 15; and, lines 7–9, p. 7, Union Precinct Census Manuscript for 1880, NARA Series T9, roll 1083; lines 39–43, p. 6A, Union Precinct Census Manuscript for 1900, NARA Series T623, roll 1351; lines 16–25, p. 2A, Union Precinct Census Manuscript for 1910, NARA Series T624, roll 1283; line 83, p. 3B, Beaver Precinct Census Manuscript, 1930, NARA Series 626, roll 1955; line 40, p. 5A, Cloverdale Precinct Census Manuscript for 1940. Nestucca and Union Precinct Census Manuscript for 1880, NARA Series T9, roll 1083, pp. 5–9; William A. Bowen, The Willamette Valley: Migration and Settlement on the Oregon Frontier (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979); Lewis L. McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 6th ed. (Portland: OHS Press), 642. Sauter and Johnson, Tillamook Indians, 99; McKillip, “A Short History,” 1. Robert Kelley, Gold vs. Grain: The Hydraulic Mining Controversy in California’s Central Valley (Glendale: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1959); Arthur F. McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem: Law and Ecology in the California Fisheries, 1850–1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 69–71, 86–87; Joseph E. Taylor III, “Burning the Candle at Both Ends: Historicizing Overfishing in Oregon’s Nineteenth-Century Salmon Fisheries,” Environmental History 4 (January 1999), 54–79; Courtland Smith, Salmon Fishers of the Columbia (Corvallis: OSU Press, 1979). For “destroy,” see Gordon B. Dodds, The Salmon King of Oregon: R. D. Hume and the Pacific Fisheries (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 8; Clark Patrick Spurlock, “A History of the Salmon Industry in the Pacific Northwest” (MA thesis, University of Oregon, 1940), 124; R. D. Hume, “The First Salmon Cannery,” The Pacific Fisherman Yearbook (1903), 19; Courtland L. Smith, Fish or Cut Bait (Corvallis: Oregon State University Sea Grant College Program, Publication no. ORESU-T-77-006, 5; Smith, Salmon Fishers of the Columbia, 17–18, 53; John Ernest Damron, “The Emergence of Salmon Trolling on the American Northwest Coast: A Maritime Historical Geography” (MA thesis, University of Oregon, 1975), 64; Joseph E. Taylor III, “El Niño and Vanishing Salmon: Culture, Nature, History, and the Politics of Blame,” Western Historical Quarterly 29 (Winter 1998), 437–457; Rock, “Little Nestucca Country: A History” (Tillamook County Pioneer Museum, Tillamook, Oregon), 4. Rock, “Little Nestucca Country,” 32; Nestucca Precinct Census Manuscript for 1880, NARA Series T9, roll 1083, p. 8, lines 1–5 and 15–20. Walt and Si Fisher interview, Woods, Oregon (September 6, 1989); Andy Kershaw interview, Milwaukie, Oregon (December 22, 1989). Nancy Grey Osterud, Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farm Women in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 139–

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186; Sally McMurry, Transforming Rural Life: Dairying Families and Agricultural Change, 1820–1885 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 62–122; Jeffrey Charles, “The Pacific Coast,” in The Routledge History of Rural America, ed. Pamela Riney-Kehrberg (New York: Routledge, 2016), 103– 104. Conversations with Ruth Crocket, Rudy Fenk, Anton Hurliman, Bertha Hurliman, Marie Redberg, and Ralph Redberg were crucial for writing this paragraph. 16 Rock, “Little Nestucca Country,” 14; Ralph and Marie Redberg interview, Cloverdale, Oregon ( September 10, 1989); Wilma Dunn Rowland interview, Oretown, Oregon (December 30, 1989); Ralph Redberg to author, January 29, 1990; Allan G. Bogue, From Prairie to Corn Belt: Farming on the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 183–185. 17 McKillip, “A Short History,” 3–4; McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 187, 403, 647, 925. Information on Ocean Park came from a plat map owned by Lloyd McKillip that I viewed while interviewing him in Cloverdale, Oregon, on September 10, 1989; Inventory of the County Archives of Oregon, Oregon Historical Records Survey Project, Official Project No. 65-1-94-25, April 1940, p. 17. 18 Report of the Board of Fish Commissioners (Salem, 1892), 34; Ada M. Orcutt, Tillamook: Land of Many Waters (Tillamook, OR: Tillamook County Pioneer Association, 1997), 186. 19 Wilma Dunn Rowland interview (December 30, 1989); Woods Ocean Wave, August 16, 1900, 1; John N. Cobb, Pacific Salmon Fisheries, Bureau of Fisheries Document No. 1092 (Washington, DC), 566; Oregon Report of Board of Fish Commissioners (1890), 37; Oregon Report of Board of Fish Commissioners (1897), 31. 20 Beaver, Blaine, Dolph, Hebo, Little Nestucca, and Union Precinct Census Manuscripts for 1900, NARA Series T623, roll 1351; Rock, “Little Nestucca Country,” 17; Rissel and Noegel, Nestucca River Country, 116, 121, 126–127; Lawrence Fernsworth, “The Tillamook Catholic Community,” in Tillamook History, 58. 21 Report of the Oregon Fish Commissioner (1900), 65; Cobb, Pacific Salmon Fisheries, 566; Report of the Master Fish Warden (Salem, 1902), 133; Report of the Master Fish Warden (1903), 66. For resettlement, see Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987); Rock, “Little Nestucca Country,” 32. 22 US Census of 1880, Nestucca Precinct; US Census of 1900, Little Nestucca and Union Precincts; Report of the Oregon Master Fish Warden (1901). There are no records for 1900 for either the Astor Packing Company or Oregon commercial net licenses, so our understanding of the 1900 season must be interpolated from 1899 and 1901 cannery and license records. Problems with census data are manifold, especially regarding racial identity and fixations about a singular identity, an issue that continues to plague the census and demographers. See Sabrina Tavernise, “Why the Announcement of a Looming White Minority Makes Demographers Nervous,” New York Times, November 23, 2018, A1.

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ELMORE 1 For settler assessments, see especially James A. Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalité in Preindustrial America,” William and Mary Quarterly 35 (January 1978): 3–32; Michael Merrill, “Cash Is Good to Eat: Self-Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States,” Radical History Review 13 (Winter 1977): 42–69; Harriet Friedmann, “World Market, State, and Family Farm: Social Bases of Household Production in the Era of Wage Labor,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 (October 1978): 545–586. 2 For “overhauled” and “tramway,” see Pacific Fisherman (August 1905), 27; also Pacific Fisherman (April 1905), 17; Pacific Fisherman Yearbook (1906), 61; Pacific Fisherman Yearbook (1907), 21. For fisheries data, see Report of the Master Fish Warden (1905), 116; Cobb, Pacific Salmon Fisheries, US Department of Commerce Fisheries Document No. 1092 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1930), 566; Report of the Master Fish Warden (1905). 3 For “rapidly,” see Monthly Weather Review (July 1909), 386; for “droughty” see Monthly Weather Review (August 1909), 527. For “freshets” see H. C. McAllister, Pacific Fisherman Yearbook (1910), 36. For 1913, see catch statistics in Cobb, Pacific Salmon Fisheries, 565–570. For 1913 weather, see Monthly Weather Review (June 1913), 940; (July 1913), 1102; (August 1913), 1259; (September 1913), 1414; (October 1913), 1594; and (November 1913), 1771 (see reports for Toledo and Tillamook). For El Niño, see R. J. Allan, C. J. C. Reason, J. A. Lindesay, and T. J. Ansell, “Protracted ENSO Episodes and Their Impacts in the Indian Ocean,” Deep-Sea Research, Part II 50 (July 2003): 2335, 2341. For coho importance, see Robert D. Mullen, Oregon’s Commercial Harvest of Coho Salmon, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife publication number 81-3 (Corvallis, 1981), B-4547; Roger Tollefson et. al., “A Summary of Fishery Statistics of the Pacific Coast” (Report compiled for the Northwest Pulp and Paper Association, December 1959), 94, 105; Cobb, Pacific Salmon Fisheries, 553–554, 566. Case and weight equations derived from Mullen, Oregon’s Commercial Harvest, Appendix A, and John Nathan Cobb notebook, Entry 304 of compilation guide, John Nathan Cobb Papers, University of Washington Special Collections; Chad C. Meengs and Robert T. Lackey, “Estimating the Size of the Historical Oregon Salmon Runs,” Reviews in Fisheries Science 13 (2005): 61. 4 Telephone interview with Harold Penter, Newport, Oregon (March 18, 1990); Evelyn Rock interview, Oretown, Oregon (September 13, 1989); Ralph and Marie Redberg interview (September 10, 1989). Ole B. Redberg’s fish tickets were provided by his children, Ralph Redberg, Ruth Crocket, and Louisa Farley. 5 Chris Friday, Organizing Asian-American Labor: The Pacific Coast CannedSalmon Industry, 1870–1942 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 8–81, 91–92, 213 fn. 43; Sally Rissel and Joe Noegel, Nestucca River Country: Natives, Settlers, and Settlements (Pacific City, OR: Heron Landing, 2009), 53– 54. For memories, Walt and Si Fisher interview (September 6, 1989); Lloyd McKillip interview (September 10, 1989); Oren Burke interview, Cloverdale, Oregon (September 8, 1989); Ralph and Marie Redberg interview (September 10, 1989); Wilma Dunn Rowland interview (December 30, 1989). For anti-

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Asian sentiment, see Eckard V. Toy Jr., “The Ku Klux Klan in Tillamook, Oregon,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 53 (April 1962): 60–64. 6 Victor Learned Jr. interview (October 14, 1989); The Statistical History of the United States, From Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 163, Series D 705–714; Rissel and Noegel, Nestucca River Country, 103– 105, 108; Tillamook, Lest We Forget (Tillamook, OR: Tillamook Pioneer Association, 1979), 135–137. 7 Walt and Si Fisher interview (September 6, 1989); Alice and Victor Learned Jr. interview (December 18, 1989); North Shore Commercial Fishing Museum, “Techniques,” http://www.commercialfishingmuseum.org/visit/vt-techniques. html (accessed September 2, 2018). Hal S. Barron, Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 81–105; Read Bain, “The Growth of an Institution: A Sociological Interpretation of the Tillamook County Creamery Association of Tillamook, Oregon” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1926); Oliver H. Heintzelman, “The Evolution of an Industry: The Dairy Economy of Tillamook, Oregon,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 49 (April 1958): 77–81; Jeffrey Charles, “The Pacific Coast,” in The Routledge History of Rural America, ed. Pamela Riney-Kehrberg (New York: Routledge, 2016), 107–109; Census Office, Twelfth Census of the United States, Agriculture Part 1 (Washington, DC: US Census Office, 1902), 617; Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1910, Volume V: Agriculture, 1909–1910 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1914), 414–417; Tami Parr, Pacific Northwest Cheese: A History (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2013), 43, 58, 61; George Abdill, “Railroad,” in Tillamook History: Sequel to Tillamook Memories, comp. Lila V. Cooper Boge (Tillamook, OR: Tillamook County Pioneer Association, 1975), 121–123; and John T. Labbe, “Railroad,” in Tillamook History, 123–125. 8 For “hit all at once,” Ralph and Marie Redberg interview (September 10, 1989); catch information from Ole B. Redberg’s fish tickets for 1912. For dangers, see Wilma Dunn Rowland interview (December 30, 1989); Rock, “Little Nestucca Country,” 27–28; Cloverdale Courier, October 8, 1915; Rissel and Noegel, Nestucca River Country, 52. 9 Alice and Victor Learned interview (December 18, 1989); Victor Learned Jr. interview, Pacific City, OR (September 8, 1989). 10 Bottle story told during Alice and Victor Learned interview (December 18, 1989). Stella Rowland story told during Wilma Dunn Rowland interview (December 30, 1989). 11 Beaver, Blaine, Cloverdale, Hebo, Little Nestucca, and Union Precinct Census Manuscript for 1920, NARA Series T625, roll 1504; “Cheese Production in Tillamook Gains,” Portland Oregonian, February 23, 1919; Robert E. Ficken, The Forested Land: A History of Lumbering in Western Washington (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987), 5–7, 25–26, 68–72; William G. Robbins, Hard Times in Paradise: Coos Bay, Oregon, 1850–1986 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 28–29, 43–44; James R. Sedell and Wayne S. Duval, Influence of Forest and Rangeland Management on Anadromous Fish Habitat in

NOTES TO PAGES 41–47

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Western North America: Water Transportation and Storage of Logs, General Technical Report PNW-186 (Portland: Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, 1985), 6. 12 Cloverdale, Little Nestucca, and Union Precinct Census Manuscript for 1920, NARA Series T625, roll 1504. 13 Beaver, Blaine, Cloverdale, Hebo, Little Nestucca, and Union Precinct census manuscripts for 1920; for Swiss immigrants, see Blaine, Cloverdale, and Union Precincts. Leasing stories told by Alice and Victor Learned interview (December 18, 1989); Wilma Dunn Rowland interview (December 30, 1989); Oren Burke interview (September 8, 1989); Walter Bodyfelt interview, Oretown, Oregon (December 30, 1989); Patricia Brandt and Lillian A. Pereyra, Adapting in Eden: Oregon’s Catholic Minority, 1838–1986 (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2002), 94; Sister Miriam Margaret O’Donnell, “In Faith and Kindness: The Life of Most Reverend Alexander Christie, D.D., Fourth Archbishop of Portland in Oregon” (MA thesis, University of Portland, 1945), 104; see also Portland Catholic Sentinel, August 1, 1918, 4; August 12, 1920, 8; and August 17, 1922, 8. Joseph Schiwek Jr. of the Pastoral Center for the Archdiocese of Portland was extremely helpful with this paragraph. 14 For Fisher stories, told by Walt and Si Fisher interview (September 6, 1989); Anton and Bertha Hurliman interview, Pacific City, Oregon (September 15, 1989). For trappers see Blaine, Little Nestucca, and Union Precinct census manuscripts for 1920. 15 Walt and Si Fisher interview (September 6, 1989); Wilma Dunn Rowland interview (December 30, 1989); the Woods Ocean Wave, August 16, 1900; Tillamook Headlight, July 8, 1915; Jack Gilman interview, Hebo, Oregon (September 8, 1989); Anton and Bertha Hurliman interview (September 15, 1989). 16 Walt and Si Fisher interview (September 6, 1989); Wilma Dunn Rowland interview (December 30, 1989); Richard H. Steckel and Donald R. Haurin, “Health and Nutrition in the American Midwest: Evidence from the Height of Ohio National Guardsmen, 1850–1910,” in Stature, Living Standards, and Economic Development: Essays in Anthropometric History, ed. John Komlos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 117–128. 17 Rissel and Noegel, Nestucca River Country, 50–51; Wikipedia, Sue H. Elmore, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sue_H._Elmore (accessed March 5, 2018); Tilla­ mook Headlight Herald, October 17, 1890; Barron, Mixed Harvest, 240–241. 18 Barron, Mixed Harvest, 193–241; Harold Penter interview (March 18, 1990); “Oregon Fish King Crushed in Auto,” Spokane Spokesman-Review (June 21, 1910), 1; “The Rise and Fall of Astoria’s Cannery Era,” Daily Astorian (April 7, 1988), 6–8; Pacific Fisherman Yearbook (1921), 34, 43; (1922), 31; (1923), 38; Pacific Fisherman (May 1922), 25. 19 Walt and Si Fisher interview (September 6, 1989); Evelyn Rock interview (September 13, 1989); Brooten v. Oregon Kelp Ore Products Co., 24 F.2d 496 (1928); Rissel and Noegel, Nestucca River Country, 23, 95–102. 20 Pacific Fisherman Yearbook (1926), 92, 190, 80; Cobb, Pacific Salmon Fisheries, 554; Joseph E. Taylor III, “El Niño and Vanishing Salmon: Culture, Nature, History, and the Politics of Blame,” Western Historical Quarterly 29 (Winter 1998):

186

NOTES TO PAGES 49–54

437–457; Woods Ocean Wave, August 16, 1900, 1; Mullen, Oregon’s Commercial Harvest, 15. NADIR 1 Oregon, House and Senate Journals (1927), 61, 369; General Laws of Oregon, 1927, 219–220. 2 General Laws of Oregon (1903) and (1905), c. 192; Oregon Laws (1915) c. 49 and c. 279; (1917) c. 178; (1921) (1923) and (1925), c. 189, §. 100. 3 John Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, 3rd ed. (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2000). 4 Lawrence M. Lipin, Workers and the Wild: Conservation, Consumerism, and Labor in Oregon, 1910–30 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 140; Jonquil Bevan, ed., Izaak Walton: The Compleat Angler, 1653–1676 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1983), 1–8, 15, 27–28; Colleen J. Sheehy, “American Angling: The Rise of Urbanism and the Romance of the Rod and Reel,” in Hard at Play: Leisure in America, 1840–1940, Kathryn Grover, ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 78–92; Richard White, “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?: Work and Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, William Cronon, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 171–185; Richard White, To the Republic for Which It Stands (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 615–616. 5 Joseph E. Taylor III, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 180, 185– 189; Initiative Petition filed with the Secretary of State, June 22, 1922, Oregon Secretary of State Collection, Oregon State Archives, Salem; Pacific Fisherman (February 1927), 18–19; John Cobb, The Salmon Fisheries of the Pacific Coast, United States Bureau of Fisheries Document No. 751 (1930), 40–43; Courtland L. Smith, Salmon Fishers of the Columbia (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1979), 91; Mildred Vera Hayden, “History of the Salmon Industry in Oregon,” MA thesis, University of Oregon, 1930, 35–36. 6 Lipin, Workers and the Wild, 138–140; Deedbook D, 295, 298, and Deedbook J, 172, 174, Tillamook County Clerk Office; Probate Journal of Yamhill County, Volume 21, 546; Garibaldi News, June 17, 1927, 2. The name of the beach north of Cape Kiwanda, long referred to as McPhillips Beach, honors Barney McPhillips, who donated his inherited beach holdings to the state in the 1960s. 7 House and Senate Journals (1927), 377, 443, 454. Members of the House Game Committee hailed from interior districts in Arlington, Eugene, West Linn, Roseburg, Portland, Burns, and Helix. Members of the Fish Committee represented Sixes, Rainier, Astoria, Myrtle Point, and Toledo but also Woodburn and Rufus; two were from Portland, House and Senate Journals (1927), 4–5, 7–8. For hatchery statistics, see Appendix I. 8 House and Senate Journals (1927), 3, 7, 183, 194, 196, 201, 214, 227, 615; Oregon Voter, June 18, 1927. The number of fishers comes from the Oregon Grange argument in the special election pamphlet. Oregon Secretary of State, Oregon Voter’s Pamphlet for the Special Election, June 28, 1927 (Salem: Oregon Secretary of State, 1927); White, “‘Are You an Environmentalist?’”, 171–185.

NOTES TO PAGES 54–58

187

9 Tillamook Herald, March 31, 1927, 1; “The Nestucca Bay Fish Closing Bill,” Tillamook Herald, April 14, 1927, 1; Lipin, Workers and the Wild, 142; William G. Robbins, “Town and Country in Oregon: A Conflicted Legacy,” in Toward One Oregon: Rural-Urban Interdependence and the Evolution of a State, ed. Michael Hibbard, Ethan Seltzer, Bruce Weber, and Beth Emshoff (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2011), 67–69. 10 Tillamook Herald, May 26, 1927, 7; Petitions for “The Nestucca Bay Fish Closing Bill,” filed May 27, 1927, Oregon State Archives, Salem; Oregon Voter’s Pamphlet for the Special Election, Tuesday, June 28, 1927, 52–53. 11 Portland Oregon Journal, June 16, 1927, 10; June 24, 1927, 12; McMinnville News-Reporter, June 23, 1927, 1. 12 For example of extermination rhetoric, see Portland Oregon Journal, June 25, 1927, 4. For El Niño, see Warren S. Wooster, “Early Observations and Investigations of El Niño: The Event of 1925,” Oceanography: The Past, ed. Mary Sears and Daniel Merriman (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1980), 629–641; Clara Deser and John M. Wallace, “El Niño Events and Their Relation to the Southern Oscillation: 1925–1986,” Journal of Geophysical Research 92 (1987): 14, 189– 196; Robert D. Mullen, Oregon’s Commercial Harvest of Coho Salmon, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife Publication 81-3 (Corvallis, 1981), B-47; Cobb, Pacific Salmon Fisheries, 554. 13 Livingston Stone, “A National Salmon Park,” Transactions of the American Fisheries Society 21 (January 1892): 149–162; Report of the Master Fish Warden (1901), 25; Portland Oregon Journal, June 25, 1927, 4; Portland Oregonian, June 25, 1927, 5. 14 J. W. Nichols and D. G. Hankin, Chinook Salmon Populations in Oregon Coastal River Basins: Description of Life Histories and Assessment of Recent Trends in Run Strengths, Information Reports 88-1 (Portland: Fish Division, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, 1988), 178; Taylor, Making Salmon, 203–236; Jim Lichatowich, Salmon without Rivers: A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999), 156–169; Portland News, June 20, 1927, 1; Roseburg News-Review, June 25, 1927, 1. For Nestucca hatchery, see Report of the Master Fish Warden (1909), 32; Report of the Director of [Oregon] Hatcheries (1926), 36–37; Lipin, Workers and the Wild, 140–141. 15 Portland Telegram, June 25, 1927, 9; Portland Oregon Journal, June 27, 1927, 3; Portland Oregonian, June 25, 1927, 5; Roseburg News-Review, June 25, 1927, 1; Klamath Falls Evening Herald, June 25, 1927, 4. 16 Portland Telegram, June 23, 1927, 1; June 27, 1927, 1, 3, 12; Portland News, June 20, 1927, 1; June 25, 1927, 2; Salem Oregon Statesman, June 20, 1927, 1; McMinnville News-Reporter, June 16, 1927, 1; Banks Herald, June 23, 1927, 1; Roseburg News-Review, June 25, 1927, 1; Portland Oregonian, Jun 27, 1927, 12. 17 Roseburg News-Review, June 24, 1927, 4; June 25, 1927, 4–6; Portland Telegram, June 23, 1927, 1, 15; Portland Oregon Journal, June 16, 1927, 10; June 24, 1927, 12; Salem Capital Journal, June 22, 1927, 6; Salem Oregon Statesman, June 22, 1927, 1; Corvallis Gazette Times, June 25, 1927, 2; Portland News, June 25, 1927, 2.

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18 David Starr Jordan and Charles H. Gilbert, “The Salmon Fisheries of California and Oregon South of the Columbia River,” in The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, ed. George Brown Goode, section V, volume 1 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1887), 748; William A. Wilcox, “Notes on the Fisheries of the Pacific Coast in 1899,” Report of the Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries (Washington, DC: GPO, 1901), 503, 505, 537; P. George Hummasti, “World War I and the Finns of Astoria, Oregon,” International Migration Review 11 (Autumn 1977): 334–349; Taylor, Making Salmon, 188–189; White, To the Republic for Which It Stands, 136–141; Daniel Johnson, “Anti-Japanese Legislation in Oregon, 1917–1923,”  Oregon Historical Quarterly 97 (Summer 1996): 176–210; Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 114–149; William Toll, “Progress and Piety: The Ku Klux Klan and Social Change in Tillamook, Oregon,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 69 (April 1978): 75–85; Eckard V. Toy Jr., “The Ku Klux Klan in Tillamook, Oregon,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 53 (April 1962): 60–64. No fishers appear on the Tillamook KKK membership rolls. For Beals and farmers, see Oversize Ledger, 1923–1925, box 4, Records of the Ku Klux Klan, Special Collections, University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene. 19 Oregon Voter, June 18, 1927, 310; Portland Oregon Journal, June 18, 1927, 4; Portland Telegram, June 23, 1927, 15; Portland Oregon Labor Press, June 17, 1927, 1, found in Lipin, Workers and the Wild, 144, 196, fn. 91; Sally Rissel and Joe Noegel, Nestucca River Country: Natives, Settlers, and Settlements (Pacific City, OR: Heron Landing, 2009), 80, 108. 20 Tillamook Herald, June 23, 1927, 8; Garibaldi News, June 17, 1927, 2; June 24, 1927, 1; Sheridan Sun, June 23, 1927, 2; Coos Bay Times, June 16, 1927, 1; Southwestern Oregon Daily News, June 27, 1927, 4; Eugene Guard, June 23, 1927, 4; Oregon Voter, June 25, 1927, 28–29; Bend Bulletin, June 27, 1927, 4; Baker Herald, June 27, 1927, 4; The Dalles Weekly Chronicle, June 23, 1927, 4; Lipin, Workers and the Wild, 143. 21 “County Voter Abstracts for the Special Election of June 28, 1927,” box 3, Abstract of Votes, Accession 70A-61/8, Secretary of States Papers, Oregon State Archives, Salem; Appendix C. The Nestucca was the first coastal stream to be closed. The rest would follow in the next quarter century; Mullen, Oregon’s Commercial Harvest, 19; Courtland L. Smith, Oregon Fish Fights, Pub. No. ORESU-T-74-004 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Sea Grant, 1974). Columbia River gillnetters were finally eliminated in 2012 when Oregon governor John Kitzhaber, himself an avid angler, initiated an executive-led policy change to avoid another loss by angling interests at the ballot in November. “Kitzhaber Proposes Moving Commercial Gillnet Fishing to Off Channels of the Lower Columbia River,” Portland Oregonian, August 9, 2012. PIVOT 1 The Dalles Weekly Chronicle, June 23, 1927, 4. 2 General Laws of Oregon (1931), 516; Oregon House and Senate Journals (1931), 255, 257, 284, 290, 311.

NOTES TO PAGES 64–69

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3 Senate Bill 170 (Oregon, 1933), Oregon State Library, Salem; Oregon House and Senate Journals (1933), 182, 183, 236; Oregon Voter, March 11, 1933, 17–18. 4 Portland Oregonian, February 7, 1935, 8; Ole B. Redberg to Ray W. Gill, State Grange Master (February 7, 1935), letter in possession of Ruth Crockett. 5 House Bill 191 (Oregon, 1935) Oregon State Library, Salem; House and Senate Journals, Oregon (1935), 54, 365, 370, 390, 395, 398, 399, 428, 435; Oregon Voter, March 9, 1935, 17. Lawrence Lipin charts the shifting sympathies of urban unionists in Workers and the Wild: Conservation, Consumerism, and Labor in Oregon, 1910–30 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 145–147. 6 Walt and Si Fisher interview (September 6, 1989); Forrest Kellow interview, Woods, Oregon (December 26, 1989); Lloyd McKillip interview (September 10, 1989); Wilma Dunn Rowland interview (December 30, 1989); Anton and Bertha Hurliman interview (September 15, 1989). Sally Rissel and Joe Noegel, Nestucca River Country: Natives, Settlers, and Settlements (Pacific City, OR: Heron Landing, 2009), 100–101; Brooten v. Oregon Kelp Ore Products Co., 24 F.2d 496 (1928). For census data, see census manuscripts for Beaver, Blaine, Cloverdale, Hebo, Little Nestucca, and Union census tracts, Tillamook County, 1930 Census, NARA T626, roll 1955. Documenting Indigenous presences is difficult because of the neglect of census enumerators, but hints come in Tillamook Memories (Tillamook, OR: Tillamook Pioneer Association, 1972), 24, 44–45, 83; Rissel and Noegel, Nestucca River Country, 116, 144–145; Charles Wilkinson, The People Are Dancing Again: The History of the Siletz Tribe of Western Oregon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), 257–270. 7 Report of the Director of Oregon Hatcheries (1925), 29–31; (1926), 32–34; (1927–1928), 21, 23; and additional reports from 1929 to 1948. For hatchery numbers, see Appendix I. 8 Willis H. Rich, “A Statistical Analysis of the Results of the Artificial Propagation of Chinook Salmon” (Seattle: 1921–1922), 8, copy in reprint file at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center Library, National Marine Fisheries Service, Seattle; Willis H. Rich, Local Populations and Migration of Pacific Salmon in the Western States and Alaska, Department of Research, Fish Commission of the State of Oregon, Contribution No. 1, foreword by John C. Veatch (Salem, 1839), 47; Joseph E. Taylor III, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 203–236. 9 For fishers and watershed, see Anton and Bertha Hurliman interview (September 15, 1989); Walt and Si Fisher interview (September 6, 1989). For “phenomenal” see John T. Gharrett and John I. Hodges, Salmon Fisheries of the Coastal Rivers of Oregon South of the Columbia, Contribution 13 (Portland: Oregon Fish Commission, 1950), 19. For woody debris, see Robert E. Bilby and James W. Ward, “Characteristics and Function of Large Woody Debris in Streams Draining Old-Growth, Clear-Cut, and Second-Growth Forests in Southwestern Washington,” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Science 48 (December 1991): 2499–2508; C. J. Cedarholm, R. E. Bilby, P. A. Bisson, T. W. Bumstead, B. R. Fransen, W. J. Scarlett, and J. W. Ward, “Response of Juvenile

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Coho Salmon and Steelhead to Placement of Large Woody Debris in a Coastal Washington Stream,” North American Journal of Fisheries Management 17 (Fall 1997): 947–963. 10 For closures, see Referendum Bill of Oregon Senate Bill No. 1 (36th Legislative Assembly) for the Oregon General Election of November 8, 1932; Voter Abstracts for the Oregon General Election of November 8, 1932; Referendum Bill of Oregon Senate Bill No. 53 (41st Legislative Assembly) for the Oregon General Election of November 3, 1942; Voter Abstracts for the Oregon General Election of November 3, 1942; Referendum Bill of Oregon House Bill No. 378 (43rd Legislative Assembly) for the Oregon General Election of November 5, 1946; Voter abstracts for the Oregon General Election of November 5, 1946; list of payments made to the Oregon Secretary of State for arguments for and against measures on the Oregon General Election ballot of November 5, 1946, Oregon State Archives, Salem. 11 For global enclosure, see J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Regina Schulte, The Village in Court: Arson, Infanticide, and Poaching in the Court Records of Upper Bavaria, 1848–1910, trans. Barrie Selman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 121–177; Theodore S. Hamerow, The Birth of a New Europe: State and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 46; Lance van Sittert, “Holding the Line: The Rural Enclosure Movement in the Cape Colony, c. 1865–1910,” Journal of African History 43 (2002): 95–118. For North America, see Steven Hahn, “Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South,” Radical History Review 26, no. 1 (1982): 37–64; Daniel L. Boxberger, To Fish In Common: The Ethnohistory of Lummi Indian Salmon Fishing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Stuart A. Marks, Southern Hunting in Black and White: Nature, History, and Ritual in a Carolina Community (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Louis S. Warren, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Ken Cruikshank and Nancy B. Bouchier, “‘Sportsmen and Pothunters’: Class, Conservation and the Fishery of Hamilton Harbour, 1850–1914,” Sport History Review 28, no. 1 (1997): 1–18; Bill Parenteau, “‘Care, Control and Supervision’: Native People in the Canadian Atlantic Salmon Fishery, 1867–1900,” Canadian Historical Review 79, no. 1 (1998): 1–35; Taylor, Making Salmon, 166–202; Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Douglas C. Harris, Fish, Law, and Colonialism: The Legal Capture of Salmon in British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). For critiques of conservation, see Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11 (Spring 1989): 71–83; William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness, Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History 1 (January 1996): 7–28;

NOTES TO PAGES 70–72

12

13 14

15

191

Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2009); Thomas Robertson, The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Miles A. Powell, Vanishing America: Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and the Origins of Conservation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). For global contests, see E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975); Douglas Hay, “Poaching and the Games Laws on Cannock Chase,” in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Allen Lane (London: Penguin, 1975), 189–253; Tom Scott, “Peasant Revolts in Early Modern Germany,” The Historical Journal 28 (June 1985): 455–468; Schulte, The Village in Court; Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). For North America, see Joseph E. Taylor III, “Salmon’s Mother Was His Father: Development and Declension of Aboriginal Conservation in the Oregon Country Salmon Fishery” (MA thesis, University of Oregon, 1992), 238–278; Karl Jacoby, “Class and Environmental History: Lessons from ‘The War in the Adirondacks,’” Environmental History 2 (July 1997): 324–342; Theodore Catton, Inhabited Wilderness: Indians, Eskimos, and National Parks in Alaska (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997); Bill Parenteau, “A ‘Very Determined Opposition to the Law’: Conservation, Angling Leases, and Social Conflict in the Canadian Atlantic Salmon Fishery, 1867–1914,” Environmental History 9 (July 2004): 436–463; Charles Wilkinson, Messages from Franks Landing: A Story of Salmon, Treaties, and the Indian Way (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000); Larry Nesper, The Walleye War: The Struggle for Ojibwe Spearfishing and Treaty Rights (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); John Sandlos, Hunters at the Margins: Native People and Wildlife Conservation in the Northwest Territories (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007); Scott E. Giltner, Hunting and Fishing in the New South: Black Labor and White Leisure after the Civil War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Douglas Harris, Landing Native Fisheries: Indian Reserves and Fishing Rights in British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008); Andrew H. Fisher, Shadow Tribe: The Making of Columbia River Indian Identity (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010); Miles A. Powell, “Divided Waters: Heiltsuk Spatial Management of Herring Fisheries and the Politics of Native Sovereignty,” Western Historical Quarterly 43 (Winter 2012): 463–484. Walt and Si Fisher interview (September 6, 1989); Victor Learned Jr. interview (September 8, 1989). Walt and Si Fisher interview (September 6, 1989). For wardens, see the Hebo Precinct census manuscript for 1930, NARA T626, roll 1955; for the curious case of the “hatchery workers,” see census manuscripts for Cloverdale, Hebo, and Little Nestucca Precincts, Tillamook County, 1940 Census, NARA T627. Walt and Si Fisher interview (September 6, 1989); for Carver, see Little Nestucca census precinct manuscripts for 1940; Ralph and Marie Redberg interview (September 10, 1989).

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16 Jack Gilman interview (September 8, 1989); Union Precinct census manuscript for 1920, p. 5-A, NARA Series T625, roll 1504; Union Precinct census manuscript for 1930, p. 2-A; Union Precinct census manuscript for 1940, p. 2-A. 17 For roller story Walt and Si Fisher interview (September 6, 1989). For “fight,” see Gilman interview (September 8, 1989); also Jack Gilman interview, Hebo, Oregon (October 15, 1989). Mink ranching quickly grew into the second largest livestock industry in the county. The Fisher, Kellow, and Reddekopp ranches grew rapidly during the 1930s, and a few still operated in 1990. Planning Committee, Tillamook County’s 1968 Long Range Planning Document (Tillamook, OR: County Court and Oregon State University Extension Service, 1968), 15, 21–22, 49. 18 Walt and Si Fisher interview (September 6, 1989); Gilman interview (September 8, 1989); Jack Gilman interview (October 15, 1989); Paul Hanneman interview, Woods, Oregon (September 6, 1989); Andy Kershaw interview (December 22, 1989). 19 Walt and Si Fisher interview (September 6, 1989); Andy Kershaw interview (December 22, 1989); Forrest Kellow interview (December 26, 1989); Courtland L. Smith, Salmon Fishers of the Columbia (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1979), 85; John Earnest Damron, “The Emergence of Salmon Trolling on the American Northwest Coast: A Maritime Historical Geography” (PhD diss., University of Oregon, 1975), 43–46; Walter G. Jones and George H. Harry Jr., “The Oregon Trawl Fishery for Mink Food,” Oregon Fish Commission Research Briefs 8 (August 1961): 14–30. 20 Jack Gilman interview (September 8, 1989); Andy Kershaw interview (December 22, 1989). 21 For population, see census manuscripts for Beaver, Blaine, Cloverdale, Hebo, Little Nestucca, and Union Precincts, Tillamook County, US Bureau of the Census for 1940, NARA T627; US Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, Volume I (Washington, DC: GPO, 1942), 892. For cheese production figures, see Appendix D; Bureau of the Census, United States Census of Agriculture, 1925, Part III (Washington, DC: GPO, 1927), 420–423; Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States, Agriculture, Volume II, Third Series State Reports, Part 3 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1942), 264–268. 22 Census manuscripts for Beaver, Blaine, Cloverdale, Hebo, Little Nestucca, and Union Precincts, Tillamook County, 1940. The CCC hires were standard policy. Crews were usually filled with urbanites from elsewhere, so hiring a few “Locally Experienced Men” ensured that some funds worked their way back into communities. Neil Maher, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 82, 148, 254 fn. 19. For the New Deal’s regional impact, see Richard Lowitt, The New Deal and the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993). Three CCC camps operated within the watershed from 1933 to 1937 and again in 1941 and 1942, mainly thinning forests, clearing firebreaks, and replanting trees on fire-scarred mountainsides. Gerald W. Williams, “Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC): Camps and Companies in the

NOTES TO PAGES 78–82

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Pacific Northwest, 1933–1942” (typescript working draft report, Umpqua and Willamette National Forests, 1989), 5, 9. 13, 17, 26, 35, 42, 67, 70, Forest History Association Library, Durham, North Carolina; Gerald W. Williams, The U.S. Forest Service in the Pacific Northwest: A History (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1984), 115–120. 23 David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and World War Two (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 164. 24 Victor Learned Jr. interview (September 8, 1989) 25 Andy Kershaw interview (December 22, 1989). 26 Andy Kershaw interview (December 22, 1989); G. Thomas Edwards, “The Oregon Coast and Three of Its Guerrilla Organizations, 1942,” Journal of the West 25 (July 1986): 20–34; D. A. Webb to author, March 9, 1990. 27 I am indebted to Tim Essington for the clarity of his explanation about population dynamics, but see also R. J. H. Beverton and S. J. Holt, On the Dynamics of Exploited Fish Populations, Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food Fishery Investigations 2, vol. 19 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1957), 26–27; William E. Ricker, Computation and Interpretation of Biological Statistics of Fish Populations, Canada Fisheries Research Board Bulletin 1919 (Ottawa: Department of the Environment Fisheries and Marine Service, 1975), 24; Ray Hilborn and Carl J. Walters, Quantitative Fisheries Stock Assessment: Choice, Dynamics and Uncertainty (New York: Chapman and Hall, 1992), 47–103. Victor Learned Jr. interview (September 8, 1989). For declining runs, see Robert E. Mullen, “Estimates of Historical Abundance of Coho Salmon Oncorhynchus kisutch (Walbaum), in Oregon Coastal Streams and in the Oregon Production Index Area,” Information Reports 81-5 (Corvallis: Oregon Department of Fish and Game Fish Division, 1981), 3–8; Karen Johnson, A History of Coho Fisheries and Management in Oregon through 1982, Information Reports 84-12 (Corvallis: Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife Fish Division, 1983), 23, 34; Nathan J. Mantua, Steven R. Hare, Yuan Zhang, John M. Wallace, and Robert C. Francis, “A Pacific Interdecadal Climate Oscillation with Impacts on Salmon Production,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Association 78 (June 1997): 1069– 1079; E. Di Lorenzo, N. Schneider, K. M. Cobb, P. J. S. Franks, K. Chhak, A. J. Miller, J. C. McWilliams, S. J. Bograd, H. Arango, E. Curchitser, T. M. Powell, and P. Riviére, “North Pacific Gyre Oscillation Links Ocean Climate and Ecosystem Change,” Geophysical Research Letters 35 (April 2008): 8, L08607; Michael J. Malick, Sean P. Cox, Franz J. Mueter, Brigitte Dorner, and Randall M. Peterman, “Effects of the North Pacific Current on the Productivity of 163 Pacific Salmon Stocks,” Fisheries Oceanography 26, no. 3 (2017): 268–281; Taylor, Making Salmon, 39–67, 203–236. 28 For economic colonialism of the coast, see William G. Robbins, Hard Times in Paradise: Coos Bay, Oregon, 1850–1986 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988). For reclassification, see Oregon Voter, March 9, 1935, 17–18. The reclassification of the steelhead as a trout constitutes a classic example of politics steamrolling science and even common sense. To hold a steelhead and contemplate why it would not be classified as a salmon represents one of the great mental challenges in fishing. Ultimately, however, logic caught up with nature

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in 1988. “Taxonomic Changes in North American Trout Names,” Transactions of the American Fisheries Society 117 (April 1988): 321. For mink, see Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Agriculture, Volume 1, Part 6 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1942), 617. SEAWARD 1 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2003); Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 535–565; Elmo Richardson, BLM’s Billion-Dollar Checkerboard: Managing the O & C Lands (Durham, NC: Forest History Society, 1980), 59–130; William G. Robbins, Landscapes of Conflict: The Oregon Story, 1940–2000 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 150, 206. 2 Jack Gilman interview (October 15, 1989); Mario Solazzi interview, Corvallis, Oregon (September 1, 1989); John R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016); Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 71–170; Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environment­alism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 3 Jack Gilman interview (October 15, 1989). 4 Victor Learned Jr. interview (October 14, 1989). 5 Victor Learned Jr. interview (October 14, 1989); Terry Learned interview, Cloverdale, Oregon (September 10, 1989). 6 Victor Learned Jr. interview (October 14, 1989); Jack Gilman interview (October 15, 1989); Paul Hanneman interview (September 6, 1989). 7 Jack Gilman interview (October 15, 1989); Victor Learned Jr. interview (October 14, 1989). 8 Alice Learned interview, Woods, Oregon (December 18, 1989); Norma and Jack Gilman interview, Hebo, Oregon (December 30, 1989); Archie Satterfield, The Tillamook Way: A History of the Tillamook County Creamery Association (Tillamook, OR: Tillamook County Creamery Association, 2000), 68. 9 Norma and Jack Gilman interview (December 30, 1989); Alice Learned interview (December 18, 1989). 10 Victor Learned Jr. interview (October 14, 1989); Jack Gilman interview (October 15, 1989); Jack Gilman interview (September 8, 1989); Howard Kellow interview, Pacific City, Oregon (September 9, 1989); Paul Hanneman interview (September 6, 1989); Terry Learned interview (September 10, 1989). 11 Andy Kershaw interview (December 22, 1989); Victor Learned Jr. interview (October 14, 1989). 12 Victor Learned Jr. interview (October 14, 1989); Paul Hanneman interview (September 6, 1989); Terry Learned interview (September 10, 1989).

NOTES TO PAGES 92–94

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13 Sally Rissel and Joe Noegel, Nestucca River Country: Natives, Settlers and Settlements (Pacific City, OR: Heron Landing, 2009), 70, 86–88; Charles Wilkinson, The People Are Dancing Again: The History of the Siletz Tribe of Western Oregon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), 296 and 278–301 passim; Jack M. Van Hyning, The Ocean Salmon Troll Fishery of Oregon, Contribution No. 15 (Portland: Oregon Fish Commission, 1951), 74; Kenneth A. Henry, Alfred R. Morgan, and Robert L. Rulifson, “The Salmon Catch of the Sports Fishery in the Coastal Rivers of Oregon in 1949,” Oregon Fish Commission Research Briefs (September 1950), 33–38; J. W. Nichols and D. G. Hankin, Chinook Salmon Populations in Oregon Coastal River Basins: Description of Life Histories and Assessment of Recent Trends in Run Strengths, Information Reports 88-1 (Portland: Fish Division, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, 1988), 350, 352; “Pacific City State Airport,” http://www.airnav.com/airport/KPFC (last accessed April 20, 2018); Paul Hanneman interview (September 6, 1989); Keith and Sue Delaney interview, Pacific City, Oregon (September 6, 1989). 14 For cheese production figures, see Appendix D and Annual Report Tillamook County Creamery Association, Tillamook County Pioneer Association Library; Bureau of the Census, 1964 United States Census of Agriculture (Washington, DC: GPO, 1967), 320–321; Satterfield, The Tillamook Way, 45, 89–90; Tami Parr, Pacific Northwest Cheese: A History (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2013), 103, 126; Jody Moore and Brian Jennison, “Oregon’s Shortline Survivor,” Trains Magazine 65 (August 2005): 30–37. 15 Bob Zybach, “The Great Fires: Indian Burning and Catastrophic Forest Fire Patterns of the Oregon Coast Range, 1491–1951” (PhD diss., Oregon State University, 2003), 192–201, 211–216, 221–227; C. P. Cronk, “The Siuslaw National Forest in 1910–11 as I Remember It,” Hebo Ranger Station, Siuslaw National Forest. For “vast,” see Rolfe E. Anderson, “Hebo District Historical Notes, 1907–1966,” Hebo Ranger Station, Siuslaw National Forest, 2; Richardson, BLM’s Billion-Dollar Checkerboard, 43–58; Emily Brock, Money Trees: The Douglas Fir and American Forestry, 1900–1944 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2015), 25–63. This very early replanting program forces a reevaluation of arguments made by Stephen Pyne that the Tillamook burns initiated the Forest Service’s policy of replanting. He was correct that the policy began in Tillamook County, but it looks like it started four decades earlier. Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 332–334, 342; Ward Tonsfeldt, Celebrating the Siuslaw: A Century of Growth (Washington, DC: US Forest Service, Siuslaw National Forest, 2010), 45, 56–57, 70–79. 16 For timber statistics, see Appendix E and Karen Johnson, A History of Coho Fisheries and Management in Oregon through 1982, Information Reports 84-12 (Portland: Fish Division, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, 1983), 18–20, 23; Anderson, “Hebo District Historical Notes,” 3–6; M. P. Twerdal and C. D. MacLean, “Forest Statistics for Tillamook County, Oregon,” Forest Survey Report No. 130 (Portland: Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station of the U.S. Forest Service, 1958); Biennial Report of the State Forester (Salem: Oregon Department of Forestry, 1957), 5–17; Margaret Elley Felt, Gyppo Logger

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18 19

20 21

NOTES TO PAGES 94–101

(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002). I thank Andy Pampush and Tamara Yingling for enabling me to view pre-1963 O&C timber contracts at BLM’s Public Room in Portland, and Dave Roche for schooling me on the scale of logging. As a rule of thumb, a single-trailer logging truck carries about five thousand board feet. For habitat, see Alfred R. Morgan and Kenneth A. Henry, “The 1955–1956 Silver Salmon Run into the Tenmile Lakes System,” Oregon Fish Commission Research Briefs 7 (July 1959): 71–77; Nichols and Hankin, Chinook Salmon Populations in Oregon Coastal River Basins, 177–178. For catch statistics, see Appendix B; Johnson, A History of Coho Fisheries, 23, 34. For ocean, see William Pearcy, Ocean Ecology of North Pacific Salmonids (Seattle: University of Washington Press and Washington Sea Grant Program, 1992). Jack Gilman interview (October 15, 1989). Jack Gilman interview (October 15, 1989); Norma and Jack Gilman interview, Cloverdale (December 30, 1989); Keith and Sue Delaney interview (September 6, 1989); Robert D. Mullen, Oregon’s Commercial Harvest of Coho Salmon, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife Publication 81-3 (Corvallis, 1981), C-2223. For mink, see Bureau of the Census, United States Census of Agriculture: 1950, Counties and State Economic Areas, Volume 1, Part 32 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1952), 286–287; Bureau of the Census, 1964 United States Census of Agriculture, Volume 1, Part 47 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1967), 318–319. Keith and Sue Delaney interview (September 6, 1989). Keith and Sue Delaney interview (September 6, 1989); Marlene Carter interview, Pacific City, Oregon (September 11, 1989).

CYCLES My thanks to Steve Pyne for his help with this paragraph. 1 For harvest figures see Appendix B; Jack Hogevoll interview, Newport, Oregon (September 13, 1989); Jack Gilman interview (October 15, 1989); Victor Learned Jr. interview (October 14, 1989). 2 Verle Potter interview, Sand Lake, Oregon (December 31, 1989); Paul Hanneman interview (September 6, 1989); Gilman interview (October 15, 1989); Victor Learned Jr. interview (October 14, 1989). 3 Ray Monroe interview, Pacific City, Oregon (September 15, 1989); Susan Chambers, “Shakers, Sharks, and Salmon,” National Fisherman (November 2004), 22–25. 4 Paul Hanneman interview (September 6, 1989); Ray Monroe interview (September 15, 1989); Kathy Veldhoen, W. Ted Allison, Nik Veldhoen, Bradley R. Anholt, Caren C. Helbing, and Craig W. Hawryshyn, “Spatio-Temporal Characterization of Retinal Opsin Gene Expression during Thyroid Hormone-Induced and Natural Development of Rainbow Trout,” Visual Neuroscience 23 (March 2006): 169–179; “Barry Fisher,” NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center Newsletter, https://marineresearch.oregonstate.edu/comes/barry-fisher (accessed May 7, 2019).

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5 Marlene Carter interview (September 11, 1989); Julio and Jean Gogas interview, Pacific City, Oregon (December 26, 1990); Matthew McKenzie, Breaking the Banks: Representation and Realities in New England Fisheries, 1866–1966 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018), 36–42; Kathryn Graddy, “Markets: The Fulton Fish Market,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20 (Spring 2006): 217–118; Priscilla Jennings Slanetz, “A History of the Fulton Fish Market,” The Log of Mystic Seaport 38 (Spring 1986): 22–23; Stefano B. Longo, Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark, The Tragedy of the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 159. 6 Allan H. Meltzer, “Origins of the Great Inflation,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review 87 (March/April 2005, part 2): 145; Mark Denny, The Science of Navigation: From Dead Reckoning to GPS (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 197–226. 7 Robert K. Lane, “Wind, Nearshore Ocean Temperature, and the Albacore Tuna Catch Off Oregon,” Oregon Fish Commission Research Briefs 11 (June 1965): 25–28; Edwin K. Holmberg, “A Review of the 1951 Albacore Season,” Oregon Fish Commission Research Briefs 4 (December 1952): 3–8. This account is based partly on personal experience. My first tuna trip in 1978 was a huge success, putting me in the black for the first time, but later ventures taught the value of considering costs, weather, and rumors. I learned to better identify the point of diminishing returns. 8 Scholars have explored the implications of these mediations, but as the narrative suggests, at least within the fishing world, humans’ senses and cogitation remain the primary means of interpreting and acting on machine-borne data. Donna Haraway’s notion of the cyborg condition seems illustrative, but the body does not seem destined to become the discursive construction that N. Katherine Hayles sees in the “posthuman” condition. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–182; N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 192–221. 9 Ray Monroe interview (September 15, 1989); for catch and sales statistics, see Appendix B and Historical Troll Report for Coho. Inflation-adjusted figures provided by the Consumer Price Index calculator by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm (accessed May 11, 2018). 10 US Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of Population: 1950, Vol. 2, Characteristics of the Population, Part 37, Oregon (Washington, DC: GPO, 1952), 37-20; US Bureau of the Census, Census of Population: 1960, Vol. 1, Characteristics of the Population, Part 39, Oregon (Washington, DC: GPO, 1963), 39-16; US Bureau of the Census, 1970 Census of Population, Volume 1, Characteristics of the Population, Part 39, Oregon (Washington, DC: GPO, 1973), 39-19. For Orcutt purchases, see Deed Book 85, pp. 240–241, Deed Book 90, pp. 568–569, and Deed Record Q, 124, Tillamook County Clerk Office, Tillamook, Oregon. 11 For construction data, see Appendix F. If employment data since 2001, which is broken down by census tracts, is at all indicative of earlier eras, then the rela-

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13 14

15

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NOTES TO PAGES 107–110

tively tiny portion of Tillamook County composed of Neskowin, Pacific City, Tierra del Mar, and Woods generated ~30 percent of the total county contract construction jobs, perhaps even greater during summers. For statistics, see Series D 49-62, US Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 133; Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 300–319; Richard D. Polenberg, One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States since 1938, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1991), 63; Marlene Carter interview (September 11, 1989); Terry Learned interview (September 10, 1989). Ray Monroe interview (September 15, 1989); for catch figures see Appendix B. Chambers, “Shakers, Sharks and Salmon”; Marlene Carter interview (September 11, 1989); Terry Learned interview (September 10, 1989); Don Wenzinger interview, Pacific City, Oregon (December 18, 1989); E. Di Lorenzo, N. Schneider, K. M. Cobb, P. J. S. Franks, K. Chhak, A. J. Miller, J. C. McWilliams, S. J. Bograd, H. Arango, E. Curchitser, T. M. Powell, and P. Riviére, “North Pacific Gyre Oscillation Links Ocean Climate and Ecosystem Change,” Geophysical Research Letters 35, no. 8 (April 2008): L08607; Daniel L. Bottom, “Research and Development of Oregon’s Coastal Salmon Stocks,” Progress Reports 1985 (Portland: Fish Division, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, 1985), 2–6. For inflation, see chart data for Figure 7 in Stephen Reed, “One Hundred Years of Price Change: The Consumer Price Index and the American Inflation Experience,” Monthly Labor Review (April 2014), https://doi.org/10.21916/ mlr.2014.14 (accessed May 23, 2018). Donald L. McKernan, “The Biological Research Program,” Oregon Fish Commission Research Briefs 1 (April 1948): 9; Robert D. Mullen, Oregon’s Commercial Harvest of Coho Salmon, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife publication number 81-3 (Corvallis, 1981), 21; Karen Johnson, A History of Coho Fisheries Management in Oregon through 1982, Information Reports 84-12 (Portland: Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, 1983), 45; Thomas Alfred Hatley, “Efficiency in Oregon’s Commercial Salmon Fisheries: A Historical Perspective” (MA thesis, Oregon State University, 1975), 119–125; Steven L. Johnson, The Effects of the 1983 El Niño on Oregon’s Coho and Chinook Salmon, Information Reports 84-8 (Portland: Fish Division, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, 1984); James A. Lichatowich, Lars E. Mobrand, Ronald J. Costello, and Thomas S. Vogel, “A History of Frameworks Used in the Management of Columbia River Chinook Salmon,” US Department of Energy Contract DEAM79-92BP25105 (1996), 50–56, copy in author’s possession. For “high abundance,” see Johnson, A History of Coho Fisheries and Management in Oregon, 64. For hatchery statistics, see Appendix I; Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife figures for annual smolt releases 1960–1988; Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, Comprehensive Plan for Production and Management of Oregon’s Anadromous Salmon and Trout (Portland: Fish Division, ODFW, 1982), sec. II, B-6. For “responsible,” see Thomas E. Nickelson, The Influence of Ocean Conditions on Abundance of Coho Salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) in the Oregon Production Area, Information Report 83-6 (Port-

NOTES TO PAGES 111–114

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land: Fish Division, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, 1983), 19. The severe El Niño of 1983–1983 was the turning point in thinking about the Pacific’s ecological significance. In a 1978 review of salmon survival, researchers were still confining themselves to discussions of dams and fishing. See Jerome Diamond and Howard J. Pribble, A Review of Factors Affecting Seaward Migration and Survival of Juvenile Salmon in the Columbia River and Ocean, Information Report 78-7 (Portland: Fish Division, Oregon Fish and Wildlife Department, 1978), 6–7. 17 General Laws of Oregon (1971), c. 203; David Schlip, Richard Goché, and Paul Hanneman, ORCO ’80 Report (Pacific City, OR: 1980), 5–26; California State Legislature, Joint Hearing on Should California Permit Commercial Salmon Hatcheries for Profit? (Sacramento: Assembly Publications Office, 1979), 96– 106; Terry Learned interview (September 10, 1989); Ray Monroe interviews (September 15, 1989 and October 14, 1989); Paul Hanneman interview (September 6, 1989); Jim Martin, “Leadership: A Tale of Six Mentors,” Fisheries 33 (September 2008): 456. The salmon ranching industry died in Oregon of its own unprofitability, and the state of Washington terminated permits in Puget Sound, but stalwarts continue to boost the idea in both states. “Long Outlawed, Salmon Ranching Might Make a Comeback,” Kitsap Sun, June 21, 2016; Mayo Associates, “An Assessment of Private Salmon Ranching in Oregon,” report prepared for Oregon Coastal Zone Management Association (Seattle, November 30, 1988), copy provided by Hans Radtke; Longo et al., Tragedy of the Commodity, 106–143. 18 For two-hundred-mile limit see Public Law 94-265, Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976, 16 USC 1801; Legislative History of 94th Congress, 2nd Session, 1976 (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1976), 597; Carmel Finley, All the Boats on the Ocean: How Government Subsidies Led to Global Overfishing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 141–158; M. P. Shepard and A. W. Argue, The 1985 Pacific Salmon Treaty: Sharing Conservation Burdens and Benefits (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005), 14–52. For Salmon and Steelhead Act, see U.S. Code, 1982, Title 16, Vol. 6. As a lasting legacy of anglers’ influence, the steelhead was considered a separate genus from Pacific salmon until 1988. 19 “Most Trollers Comply with Fishing Closure,” Portland Oregonian, July 26, 1979, 1; Richard Goché, Paul Hanneman, and David Schilp, ORCO ’80 Report (Pacific City, OR: 1980), 10–15; Terry Learned interview (September 10, 1989). 20 For “exclusive or unusual,” see Portland Oregonian, November 9, 1975, C2; for “Nets” and “Deer and elk” see Pete Cornacchia, “Poor Who?” Eugene RegisterGuard, November 25, 1975, D1; Charles Wilkinson, The People Are Dancing Again: The History of the Siletz Tribe of Western Oregon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), 305–333. For ceremonial fishery, see Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians of Oregon v. State of Oregon, Civ. No. 80-433 (District of Oregon, May 2, 1980). 21 Schlip et al., ORCO ’80 Report, 27–33. 22 Schlip et al., ORCO ’80 Report, 1–16, 19–23, 34–53. For Goché, see Member Report, https://www.dfw.state.or.us/fish/OHRC/docs/committee/OHRC_Ad-

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visory_Committee_Member_Profile_Goche.pdf; Terry Learned interview (September 10, 1989); Ray Monroe interview (September 15, 1989); Paul Hanneman interview (September 6, 1989); Dick Herrig, “Step—An Update,” Oregon Fish and Wildlife Journal (Winter 1983): 63–70. 23 Joseph E. Taylor III, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 99–132, 203–236. For ODFW annual smolt releases, see Appendix I. For hatchery and ranching practices, see Mitchell J. Willis, Out-System Transfers of Coho Salmon Stocks in Coastal River Systems, 1960–79, Information Report 79-9 (Portland: Fish Division, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, 1979); Jay W. Nicholas, Lisa Van Dyke, and Robert C. Buckman, Straying by Hatchery-Reared Coho Salmon Released in Yaquina Bay, Oregon, Information Reports 82-6 (Portland: Fish Division, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, 1982), 12–20; Steven E. Jacobs, Straying in Oregon by Adult Salmon of Hatchery Origin, 1985, Information Reports 88-5 (Portland: Fish Division, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, 1988), 20–24; Mario Solazzi interview, Corvallis (September 1, 1989); John L. Dentler and David V. Buchanan, Are Wild Salmonid Stocks Worth Conserving? Information Reports 86-7 (Portland: Fish Division, Oregon Fish and Wildlife Department 1986); Jay W. Nicholas, Paul E. Reimers, and James M. Hutchison, The Potential Impact of Releasing Hatchery Coho Salmon on Wild Juvenile Chinook Salmon in the Siuslaw Estuary, Information Report 79-7 (Portland: Fish Division, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife), 17–22; ODFW Staff, “The Impact of Oregon Aqua-Foods Operation on the Wild Coho Salmon in the Yaquina River,” Oregon Fish and Wildlife Fish Division, Portland, January 30, 1987, photocopy in author’s possession. 24 Mullen, Oregon’s Commercial Harvest, 21; ODFW figures for Estimated Value of Commercial Food by Port for the Years 1982 to 1984. For county and local employment data, see Appendices F and G; for national rate, see “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population for 1947 to 2017,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Department of Labor, https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LN U04000000?periods=Annual+Data&periods_option=specific_periods&years_ option=all_years (accessed May 25, 2018); and Ray Monroe interview (September 15, 1989); Marlene Carter interview (September 11, 1989); Jack Hogevoll interview (September 13, 1989); Bill Sears interview, Pacific City, Oregon (September 12, 1989); Lew and Marianne Wilkinson interview, Sandlake, Oregon (September 13, 1989). 25 For interest rates, see Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Effective Federal Funds Rate,” https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS (accessed May 25, 2018); Michael Bryan, “The Great Inflation, 1965–1982,” Federal Reserve History, November 22, 2013, https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great_ inflation. For construction employment, see Appendix F. Information on how it was experienced is drawn from Marlene Carter interview (September 11, 1989) and Bill Sears interview (September 12, 1989). Insights on real estate from conversations with Steve Larkins, Don Penater, and Barbara Taylor, 1998. 26 For timber data, see Appendix E; Paul W. Hirt, A Conspiracy of Optimism: Management of the National Forests since World War Two (Lincoln: University

NOTES TO PAGES 117–119

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of Nebraska Press, 1994), 266–271; William G. Robbins, Landscapes of Conflict: The Oregon Story, 1940–2000 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 178–188; William G. Robbins, “Town and Country in Oregon: A Conflicted Legacy,” in Toward One Oregon: Rural-Urban Interdependence and the Evolution of a State, ed. Michael Hibbard, Ethan Seltzer, Bruce Weber, and Beth Emshoff (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2011), 73–74; Richard W. Haynes, Monthly Stumpage Prices for the Pacific Northwest, Research Paper PNW-RP-436 (Portland: Pacific Northwest Research Station, Forest Service, US Department of Agriculture, 1991), 7, 9. 27 Robby Atkinson, Floyd Bodyfelt, Rudy Fenk, Bertha Hurliman, Clem Hurliman, Ed Hurliman, and Pamela Riney-Kehrberg gave considerable help in understanding the arc of twentieth-century dairying locally and nationally. Sally McMurry, “The Impact of Sanitation Reform on the Farm Landscape in U.S. Dairying, 1890–1950,” Buildings and Landscapes 20 (Fall 2013): 22; Wesley Arden Dick, “When Dams Weren’t Damned: The Public Power Crusade and Visions of the Good Life in the Pacific Northwest in the 1930s,” Environmental Review 13 (Autumn-Winter 1989): 113–153; Tillamook Public Utility District, “History,” https://www.tpud.org/aboutus/history/ (accessed May 28, 2018). 28 “Cheese Men Report,” Portland Oregonian, February 21, 1915, 11; “Cheese Output Is Worth $807,095,” Portland Oregonian, February 19, 1917; “Big Cheese Year for Tillamook,” Pacific Dairy Review, February 28, 1918, 16–17; “Tillamook Cheese Yield Biggest Ever,” Portland Oregonian, February 22, 1922. Tensions inhered in many cooperatives. See Hal S. Barron, Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 104–105; Archie Satterfield, The Tillamook Way: A History of the Tillamook County Creamery Association, a Farmer-Owned Cooperative (Tillamook, OR: Tillamook County Creamery Association, 2000), 87–97; Tami Parr, Pacific Northwest Cheese: A History (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2013), 126–131. For contemporary coverage, see the “Scoops & Skimmings” section of the Western Milk and Ice Cream News, March 25, 1966 and May 6, 1966; and Western Milk and Ice Cream News, April 15, 1966, 9; and November 11, 1966, 28. The events in Tillamook were part of a regional push for consolidation. See “Oregon Co-ops Urged to Merge for Survival in Industry-Wide Decline of Producers,” Western Milk and Ice Cream News, January 21, 1966, 16; “Articles of Merger,” January 1, 1969, File 13330-12, Oregon Secretary of State, Corporate Division, http:// records.sos.state.or.us/ORSOSWebDrawer/Recordpdf/3996377 (accessed Dec­ember 1, 2018). For cheese production, see Appendix D. 29 Rudy Fenk and Clem Hurliman were crucial for understanding the array of forces working against small farmers in the 1970s and 1980s. For urban and dairy impacts, see Satterfield, The Tillamook Way, 105–108; Chris McDonald, Nestucca River Basin Water Quality Study, Tillamook and Yamhill County (Portland: Soil Conservation Service and Forest Service, Department of Agriculture, 1992), 39–42, 57–83. For logging, see Biennial Report of the State Forester, July 1, 1944 to June 30, 1946 (Salem: Oregon Department of Forestry, 1946), 46–53; Biennial Report of the State Forester, July 1, 1954 to June 30, 1956

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(Salem: Oregon Department of Forestry, 1956), 28–30; D. W. Chapman, “Effects of Logging upon Fish Resources of the West Coast,” Journal of Forestry 60 (August 1962): 533–537; Robert W. Phillips, Home J. Campbell, Wayne L. Hug, and Errol W. Claire, A Study of Logging on Aquatic Resources, A Progress Report, Progress Memorandum 3 (Corvallis: Oregon State Game Commission, 1966); J. W. Nichols and D. G. Hankin, Chinook Salmon Populations in Oregon Coastal River Basins: Description of Life Histories and Assessment of Recent Trends in Run Strengths, Information Reports 88-1 (Portland: Fish Division, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, 1988), 257–259; Pilot Watershed Analysis for the Nestucca River (Denver, CO: Bureau of Land Management, 1994), 6–10; Hirt, A Conspiracy of Optimism, 115–117, 199–201, 235; Robbins, Landscapes of Conflict, 178–212. For impacts on dairy and mink farms, see Bureau of the Census, 1969 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, part 47 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1972), 234, 285, 296; 1978 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, part 37 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1980), 139, 309, 310, 312; 1992 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, part 37 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1993), 166, 176; 1997 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, part 37 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1999), 293. For rankings, see Bureau of the Census, 1982 Census of Agriculture, vol. 2, part 3 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1984), 17; 1987 Census of Agriculture, vol. 2, part 3 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1990), 21; 1992 Census of Agriculture, vol. 2, part 3 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1994), 32; Jack Madison, ed., Tillamook County’s 1968 Long Range Planning Report (Tillamook: Tillamook County Court and Oregon State University Extension Service, 1968), 15, 21–22. 30 Ray Monroe interview (October 14, 1989). 31 For harvest data, see Appendix B; Ray Monroe interview (October 14, 1989); Peter Carlin, “Beyond the Limits,” Northwest Magazine, Portland Oregonian (March 4, 1990): 8–15. GENTRIFICATION 1 Bureau of the Census, 1970 Census of Population, vol. 1, part 39 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1973), 19; 1990 Census of Population, vol. 1, part 39 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1992), 286; 2000 Census of Population, vol. 1, part 39 (Washington, DC: GPO, 2002), 12–13; 2010 Census of Population, vol. 1, part 39 (Washington, DC: GPO, 2012), 16–17, 50–51, 128. 2 For grass, see W. T. McLaughlin, “Planting for Topographic Control on the Warrenton, Oregon Coastal Dune Area,” Northwest Science 13 (May 1939): 26–32; A. M. Wiedemann and A. J. Pickart, “Temperate Zone Coastal Dunes,” in Coastal Dunes: Ecology and Conservation, ed. M. Luisa Martinez and Norbert P. Psuty (Berlin: Springer, 2010), 57. For transfer payments, see Jeremy White, Robert Gebeloff, Ford Fessenden, Archie Tse, and Alan McLean, “The Geography of Government Benefits,” New York Times, February 11, 2012, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/12/us/ entitlement-map.html?_r=0; William G. Robbins, “Creating a ‘New’ West: Big Money Returns to the Hinterland,” Montana, The Magazine of Western History 46 (Summer 1996): 66–72; Joseph E. Taylor III, “The Many Lives of the New West,” Western Historical Quarterly 37 (Summer 2004): 141–165. Geographer

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Peter Walker points out that the restructuring of western resource economies is not just “clashes of cultures or ideologies” but also conflicts “between competing capitalisms that commodify nature in incompatible ways.” “Reconsidering ‘Regional’ Political Ecologies: Toward a Political Ecology of the Rural American West,” Progress in Human Geography 27 (February 2003): 17. 3 Pat Forgey, “Dory Fishermen Clash with Hotel Development,” Portland Oregonian, May 27, 1996, B1, B6; Robbins, “Creating a ‘New’ West”; Greg Brown, “Boomtown,” The Live One (Red House, 1995). 4 KATU News, “NW Heavenly Destinations,” July 22, 2010, www.katu.com/ news/content/9964106.html; “County Fines Are Cut,” Tillamook Headlight Herald, May 12, 2010. 5 Phone interview with Nestucca Watershed Council member Chuck Fahrni (April 9, 1998); author’s notes from council meeting, July 17, 1997, in Cloverdale, and May 15, 2018, in Tierra del Mar, plus several field trips and conversations with board members over the years; Guido R. Rahr III, James A. Lichatowich, Raymond Hubley, and Shauna M. Whidden, “Sanctuaries for Native Salmon: A Conservation Strategy for the 21st Century,” Fisheries 23 (April 1998): 6–7, 36; Mary J. Barczak, “Management and Action Plan,” NestuccaNeskowin Watershed Council, 1999. 6 Fahrni interview (April 9, 1998); Barczak, “Management and Action Plan”; David Thelen, “Memory and American History,” Journal of American History 75 (March 1989): 1117–1129; Richard White, Remembering Ahanagran: History and Storytelling in a Family’s Past (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998). For wild stocks, see John L. Dentler and David V. Buchanan, Are Wild Salmonid Stocks Worth Conserving? Information Report 86-7 (Portland: Fish Division, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, 1986); Andrew P. Lutz, “Recovery of Oregon Coast Coho Salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) through Restoration of Freshwater Habitats” (MA thesis, University of San Francisco, 2014), 44–60; Chad C. Meengs and Robert T. Lackey, “Estimating the Size of Historical Oregon Salmon Runs,” Reviews in Fisheries Science 13, no. 1 (2005): 62–63; Mario F. Solazzi, Thomas E. Nickelson, and Steven L. Johnson, An Evaluation of the Use of Coho Salmon Presmolts to Supplement Wild Production in Oregon Coastal Streams, Fishery Research Report 10 (Portland: Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, 1990), 15. For uneven attention, see Eugene H. Buck, Amy Abel, Marla L. Kessler, and Elizabeth B. Bazan, Pacific Salmon and Steelhead: Potential Impacts of Endangered Species Act Listings, Report 91-267 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 1991), 16–17 ; Claire A. Montgomery and Ted L. Helvoigt, “Changes in Attitudes about Importance of and Willingness to Pay for Salmon Recovery in Oregon,” Journal of Environmental Management 78 (April 2006): 330–340; Joseph E. Taylor III, “Regional Unifier or Cultural Catspaw: A Social and Cultural Historical Geography of Salmon Recovery,” in Imagining the Big Open: Nature, Identity and Play in the New West, ed. Liza Nicholas, Elaine M. Bapis, and Thomas J. Harvey (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003), 3–26; Nicholas D. Kristoff, “The White Underclass,” New York Times, February 8, 2012.

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7 Bureau of the Census, 1997 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, part 37 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1999), 202, 207, 276–277; 1997 Census of Agriculture, vol. 2, part 2 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1999), 31; 2002 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, part 37 (Washington, DC: GPO, 2004), 220–221, 243, 247, 288; 2007 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, part 37 (Washington, DC: GPO, 2009), 269–270, 294, 313–314; 2012 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, part 37 (Washington, DC: GPO, 2014), 247– 248, 278, 292–293. For mink see 2012 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, part 37, page 26, and Appendix B-1, 2, 14, 17; “In Dairy Industry Consolidation, Lush Paydays,” New York Times, October 27, 2012; “Much of the Tillamook Cheese Factory’s Packaging Operations Shut Down,” Portland Oregonian, February 4, 2012; “How Tillamook’s Cheese, Ice Cream and a New Portland Office Will Propel It Past $1B in Sales,” Portland Business Journal, December 13, 2017, https://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2017/12/13/how-tillamookscheese-ice-cream-and-a-new-portland.html; “Tillamook, The Town That Cheese Built,” Portland Oregonian, July 9, 2009; Tillamook County Creamery Association, Appellant v. Tillamook Cheese and Dairy Association, Appellee, US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 345 F.2d 158 (Ninth Cir. 1965); Tillamook Country Smoker Inc. v. Tillamook Creamery Association, US Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, No 04-35843, October 11, 2006; Archie Satterfield, The Tillamook Way: A History of the Tillamook County Creamery Association, a Farmer-Owned Cooperative (Tillamook, OR: Tillamook County Creamery Association, 2000), 103–107; Tami Parr, Pacific Northwest Cheese, A History (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2013), 147; “Cheesemaker Tillamook Still Buys Embattled Mega-Dairy’s Milk, Despite ‘Terminated’ Contract,” Portland Oregonian, March 22, 2018; “50 Jobs Lost,” Tillamook Headlight Herald, January 12, 2012. For alienation, see Mary Ann Albright, “Something’s Rotten in Tillamook,” Willamette Week, August 3, 2004; “Tillamook Bans Growth Hormone,” Seattle Times, February 19, 2005; “Going for Greener Pastures,” Tillamook Headlight Herald, November 6, 2007; “TV Tale of Farmer, TCCA Is Complex, with Twists in Plot,” Tillamook Headlight Herald, June 3, 2008; 8 For environmental protections, see James. R. Skillen, Federal Ecosystem Management: Its Rise, Fall, and Afterlife (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 150–221. For harvest data, see Appendix E. For jobs, see V. Alaric Sample and Dennis C. Le Master, “Economic Effects of the Northern Spotted Owl Protection: An Examination of Four Studies,” Journal of Forestry 90 (August 1992), 31–35; Josh Lehner, “Historical Look at Oregon’s Wood Product Industry,” Oregon Office of Economic Analysis, January 23, 2012, https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2012/01/23/historical-look-at-oregons-wood-product-industry/; Gail Krumenauer, “Oregon’s Forest Sector Employment Totals 61,000 in 2015,” State of Oregon Employment Department, February 8, 2017, https://oregonemployment.blogspot.com/2017/01/oregons-forest-sector-employment-totals.html (accessed July 11, 2019); Ted Helvoigt, Darius Adams, and Art Ayre, Employment Transitions in Oregon’s Wood Products Sector during the 1990s (Eugene, OR: ECONorthwest, 2003); Matthew Carroll, Keith Blatner, Frederick Alt, Ervin Schuster, and Angela Findley, “Adaptation Strategies of Displaced Idaho Woods Workers: Results of a Longitudinal Panel Study,” Society

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and Natural Resources 13 (March 2000): 95–113; Jonathan Kusel, Susan Kocher, Jonathan London, Lita Buttolph, and Ervin Schuster, “Effects of Displacement and Outsourcing on Woods Workers and Their Families,” Society and Natural Resources 13 (March 2000): 115–134; Steven Daniels, Corrine Gobeli, and Angela Findley, “Reemployment Programs for Dislocated Timber Workers: Lessons from Oregon,” Society and Natural Resources 13 (March 2000):135–150; Matthew Carroll, Steven Daniels, and Jonathon Kusel, “Employment and Displacement among Northwestern Forest Products Workers,” Society and Natural Resources 13 (March 2000): 151–156; Sheri Harrison, “A ‘Dying Breed’? Exploring Logger Identity after the Decline in the Timber Industry in Hayfork, CA” (MA thesis, Humboldt State University, Arcata, CA, 2017), 80–109. 9 Hard numbers are elusive for recreational harvests and sport vessels. They were never recorded as diligently as commercial activities, partly because sportfishers moved on and off the beach more quickly and sometimes were more numerous in individual boats and collectively, but also and mostly because they individually caught fewer salmon, although collectively in some seasons that was not the case. Leon Shaul, Laurie Weitkamp, Kent Simpson, and Joel Sawada, “Trends in Abundance and Size of Coho Salmon in the Pacific Rim,” North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission Bulletin 4 (2007): 93–104; for harvest figures, see Appendix B; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “Fishery Disaster Determinations,” https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/ funding-and-financial-services/fishery-disaster-determinations (accessed June 1, 2018); Paul Koberstein, “The Decline and Fall of Salmon,” High Country News, November 15, 1993; George Guillen, Klamath River Fish Die-Off, September 2002: Report on Estimate of Mortality, Report No. AFWO-01-03 (Arcata, CA: US Fish and Wildlife Service, 2003), 7–16; “The Mystery of Oregon’s Missing Salmon,” Portland Oregonian, April 20, 2008; “Salmon’s Gone, So Is the Season,” Portland Oregonian, May 2, 2008; “Oregon Salmon Rated as ‘Avoid’ on Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Guide,” Portland Oregonian, June 29, 2010; Chad C. Meengs and Robert T. Lackey, “Estimating the Size of Historical Oregon Salmon Runs,” Reviews in Fisheries Science 13, no. 1 (2005): 61–62. 10 “Salmon Market Crash,” Tagline, Oregon Salmon Commission Newsletter (July 1988), 1, 7–11; Trude B. Andersen, Kristin H. Roll, and Sigbjørn Tveterås, “The Price Responsiveness of Salmon Supply in the Short and Long Run,” Marine Resource Economics 23, no. 4 (2008): 425–437; Gunnar Knapp, Cathy A. Roheim, and James L. Anderson, The Great Salmon Run: Competition between Wild and Farmed Salmon (Washington, DC: Traffic North America, 2007), 69–70. For marketing see Joseph E. Taylor III, “The Food of Kings: Advocacy, Academics, and Consumption,” talk given to the Environmental Ethics Certificate Program, University of Georgia, February 6, 2003. 11 For “bank,” see LeeAnn Neal, “Dory Fisherman Struggle to Survive,” Tillamook PUD Newsletter (April 2002), 4–5; Schubert Moore, “Dory Stories,” Lincoln City News Guard, July 12, 2011; Schubert Moore, “Pacific City Fisherman a Rare Breed, Lincoln City News Guard, July 13, 2011; Peter Murphy, “Oregon Dorymen and the Best Season That Never Happened,” 1859 11 (Winter 2012): 80–87.

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12 For real estate, see the “Oregon’s Crowded Coast” series by Peter D. Sleeth and Foster Church, Portland Oregonian, August 6–8, 1997; “Vacation Rental Debate Takes Root on Oregon Coast,” Portland Oregonian, September 29, 2018. The maps and data sets for South County at the US Bureau of the Census’s “The Opportunity Atlas” are less than ideal because of its merging the west side of the Nestucca River with far more depressed inland areas of South County, and with small data sets that lead to potentially large margins of error, but the contrast between tracts 41057960700 (Pacific City) and 41057960800 (Cloverdale) for the “Median Rent in 2006–10” and “Job Growth Rate from 2004 to 2013” maps illustrate the effects of gentrification in the Nestucca Valley, https://www. opportunityatlas.org/#urbanrural (accessed October 15, 2018). For misery statistics, see Appendices G and H; DCI data for Tillamook County by the Economic Innovation Group, “Distressed Communities Index,” http://eig. org/2017-dci-map-national-counties-map (accessed May 30, 2018); Yuxing Zheng and Mark Friesen, “A Picture of Poverty in Oregon,” Portland Oregonian, August 14, 2014, https://projects.oregonlive.com/maps/poverty/; Feeding America, “Food Security in Tillamook County,” http://map.feedingamerica. org/county/2014/overall/oregon/county/tillamook (accessed May 31, 2018). For meth labs, see Oregon Health Authority Clandestine Drug Lab Database; Brett Sherry to author, “Oregon Drug Lab Program,” email, June 4, 2018; Oregon Health Authority Opiate Data Dashboard, http://www.oregon.gov/oha/ PH/PREVENTIONWELLNESS/SUBSTANCEUSE/OPIOIDS/pages/data. aspx (accessed June 5, 2018); Sara Roth, “New Data Reveals Oregon’s Opioid Epidemic Still Dire in Rural Counties,” KGW, https://www.kgw.com/article/ news/investigations/new-data-reveals-oregons-opioid-epidemic-still-dire-inrural-counties/283-456530917 (accessed September 11, 2017); Rick Bella, “New Drug Report: Meth Still Oregon’s No. 1 Problem, Run Mostly by Mexican Drug Traffickers,” Portland Oregonian, June 21, 2015. 13 Charles Wilkinson, The People Are Dancing Again: The History of the Siletz Indians of Western Oregon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010); email communication with Robert Kentta, “Re: Harrington notes,” December 29, 2018; Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians of Oregon v. State of Oregon, No. 96-36027, US Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, April 24, 1998; Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians of Oregon v. Fish and Wildlife Commission, A. 1318847, Court of Appeals of Oregon, July 27, 2011. I thank Robert Kentta, Peter Hatch, and Charles Wilkinson for help in refining this paragraph. 14 John Monroe to author, June 11, 2018, email communication. Drew Desilver, “What the Unemployment Rate Does—and Doesn’t—Say about the Economy,” Pew Research Center, March 7, 2017, http://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2017/03/07/employment-vs-unemployment-different-stories-from-thejobs-numbers/; Erin Wolcott, “22 Percent of Men without College Degrees Don’t Have Jobs. Here’s Why They’re Being Left Behind,” The Conversation, June 4, 2018, https://theconversation.com/22-percent-of-men-without-college-degrees-dont-have-jobs-heres-why-theyre-being-left-behind-97055; Ted Helvoigt, Darius Adams, and Art Ayre, Employment Transitions in Oregon’s Wood Products Sector during the 1990s (Eugene, OR: ECONorthwest, 2003);

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Jonathan Kusel, Susan Kocher, Jonathan London, Lita Buttolph, and Ervin Schuster, “Effects of Displacement and Outsourcing on Woods Workers and Their Families,” Society and Natural Resources 13 (March 2000): 115–134; Steven Daniels, Corrine Gobeli, and Angela Findley, “Reemployment Programs for Dislocated Timber Workers: Lessons from Oregon,” Society and Natural Resources 13 (March 2000): 135–150; John Gettens, Pei-Pei Lei, and Alexis D. Henry, “Accounting for Geographic Variation in Social Security Disability Program,” Social Security Bulletin 78, no. 2 (2018): 36–42; Chana Joffe-Walt, “Unfit for Work: The Startling Rise of Disability in America,” Planet Money, National Public Radio, March 28, 2013, http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/; Lauren M. Rossen, Holly Hedegaard, Diba Khan, and Margaret Warner, “County-Level Trends in Suicide Rates in the U.S., 2005–2015,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 55, no. 1 (2018): 72–79; Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Spring 2017), 402–418, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/casetextsp17bpea.pdf; William R. Emmons, Ana Hernández Kent, and Lowell R. Ricketts, “The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fall: The Decline of the White Working Class,” Demographics of Wealth, 2018 Series, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 6–16, https://www.stlouisfed.org/household-financial-stability/the-demographics-of-wealth/decline-of-white-working-class (accessed October 10, 2018). 15 2000 Census of Population, vol. 1: 39, 67; 2010 Census of Population, vol. 1: 39, 94; Mark Friesen, “Oregon Counties Mapped by Food Stamp Usage, Unemployment and Poverty,” Portland Oregonian, September 13, 2013, https://projects.oregonlive.com/maps/foodstamps/; Moore, “Pacific City Fisherman”; Sheila Martin, “Critical Linkages: Strengthening Clusters in Urban and Rural Counties,” in Toward One Oregon: Rural-Urban Interdependence and the Evolution of a State, ed. Michael Hibbard, Ethan Seltzer, Bruce Weber, and Beth Emshoff (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2011), 143–149. 16 I need to thank Christy Biggs for gathering precinct data at Tillamook’s Office of the County Clerk during a busy election season, and Andrew Binder at North Carolina State University for his help in analyzing the numbers. Katherine Cramer identified the importance of resentment in The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 11–20, 208–225. James C. Scott traced the internalization of resentment in Southeast Asia, but the entire world witnessed its western dimensions with Brexit and Donald Trump. As Scott argues, “When the insult is but a variant of affronts suffered systematically by a whole race, class, or strata, then the fantasy can become a collective cultural product. Whatever form it assumes—offstage parody, dreams of violent revenge, millennial visions of a world turned upside down—this collective hidden transcript is essential to any dynamic view of power relations,” Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 9, and 4, 7, and 13. 17 For precinct-level election results, see Appendix J. For educational attainment in 2017 see the United States Census Bureau’s American Fact Finder at https://

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factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/community_facts.xhtml (accessed December 10, 2018). The rate of high school graduates or higher for Pacific City CDP was 85.1%; Cloverdale CDP was 96.8%, Hebo CDP was 92.4%, and Beaver CDP was 100%. 18 “The Commissioner’s Column,” Tagline (January 1987), 3; Phone interview with Paul Hanneman (March 25, 1990); Terry Learned interview (September 10, 1989); “Dory Builder One of a Kind,” Tillamook Headlight Herald, July 7, 2010; “HOWB 126 Interview—Terry Learned of the Learneds’ Boat Shop, Building Fishing Dories for 3 Generations,” Hooked on Wooden Boats, March 6, 2014, https://radiopublic.com/hooked-on-wooden-boats-podcast-c-6B2APq/ ep/s1!774b0021f18cc6181f9512f267d8ae36c9d834ba. 19 Victor Learned Jr. interview (October 14, 1989); Alice Learned interview (December 18, 1989); Jack Gilman interviews, Cloverdale (September 8, 1989; October 15, 1989; and December 30, 1989). 20 “Reader Tips Hat to Fisherman Mentioned in Nov. NF Story,” National Fisherman (January 2005), 9, 48; Murphy, “Oregon Dorymen,” 80–81. 21 Brenda Devore Marshall, Launching through the Surf: The Dory Fleet of Pacific City, DigitalCommons@Linfield, http://digitalcommons.linfield.edu/dory/ (accessed July 6, 2018); “Launching through the Surf Traveling Exhibit,” http:// digitalcommons.linfield.edu/dory_exhibit/?utm_source=digitalcommons.linf ield.e du%2Fdor y_exhibit%2F7&utm_me dium=PDF&utm_ campaign=PDFCoverPages (accessed July 6, 2018); “Dory Builder,” Oregon Public Broadcasting, February 28, 2013, https://www.opb.org/television/programs/ofg/segment/dory-builder/. 22 For PCDA concerns about surfers before the accident, see Peter D. Sleeth and Foster Church, “Paradise (at a Cost),” Portland Oregonian, August 7, 1997, A7. For accident, see “Surfer, 14, Loses His Left Arm during a Collision with a Dory,” Portland Oregonian, July 7, 2008; “Teen Hurt as Surfers, Boats Share Waves near Pacific City,” Portland Oregonian, July 8, 2008; “Doctors Reattach Teen Surfer’s Arm,” Portland Oregonian, July 9, 2008; “Dory Group Vows Safety Plan after Accident,” Portland Oregonian, July 10, 2008; “More Surgery for Boy Who Lost Arm in Doryboat Accident,” Portland Oregonian, November 4, 2008; “Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Cole Ortega’s Tragic Accident,” Surfer Magazine, July 22, 2010, https://www.surfer.com/features/cole-ortega-accident/; Bend Bulletin, August 13, 2014, https://www.bendbulletin.com/localstate/2318536-151/ jury-awards-bend-surfer-38-million. For surfing culture, see Tom Wolfe, The Pump House Gang (New York: Bantam, 1968), 4–6, 15–30; Mark David Spence, “My Wave, My Beach—Get Off! Surfing, Localism, and the Nature of Residence,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, Ka‘anapali, Maui, August 7, 1999. 23 Richard Moe, “Rushing to Ruin the Boundary Waters Wilderness,” New York Times, May 17, 2018; Laura Alice Watt, The Paradox of Preservation: Wilderness and Working Landscapes at Point Reyes National Seashore (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 232. During debate on HB 3219 in summer 1989, the rhetoric of the bill’s backers remarkably paralleled the reasoning and style of the 1927 campaign. For studies of angler claims, see Oregon Legislative

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Assembly Interim Committee, Economic Values of Anadromous Fishes in Oregon Rivers (Salem, OR: State Printer, 1952); William G. Brown, Ajmer Singh, and Emery N. Castle, “Net Economic Value of the Oregon Salmon-Steelhead Sport Fishery,” Journal of Wildlife Management 29 (April 1965): 266–279; Christopher N. Carter and Hans Radtke, “Selected Economic Aspects of the Commercial/Recreational Allocation of Willamette River Spring Chinook” (Portland: Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, 1986), 1, 15–34. Hans Radtke helped with the technical and spatial problems of angler self-surveys. 24 For history of anti-net initiatives, see Courtland L. Smith, Oregon Fish Fights, Publication No. ORESU-T-74-004 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Sea Grant College Program), 1974. For “liability,” see “Read Gov. John Kitzhaber’s Resignation Letter,” CNN, February 13, 2015, https://www.cnn.com/2015/02/13/ us/governor-john-kitzhaber-resignation-letter/index.html; “Governor John Kitzhaber Has Resigned,” Portland Oregonian, February 13, 2016; see also “House Bill 3219,” Secretary of State Papers, Oregon State Archive, Salem; “The Last Gillnetter, Magazine Documented the Life of the Fishermen,” Chinook Observer, January 9, 2018. Although noted much earlier, researchers in 1948 highlighted the role of allocation battles: “It appears that the elimination of any one type of gear on the Columbia River has served only to increase the catch by other gears rather than increase the escapement.” Donald Johnson, William Chapman, and Robert Schoning, The Effects on Salmon Populations of the Partial Elimination of Fixed Fishing Gear on the Columbia River in 1935, Contribution 11 (Portland: Oregon Fish Commission, 1948), 31. For “few aspects,” “losses,” and details, see Bill Tweit, Ryan Lothrop, and Cindy LeFleur, “Comprehensive Evaluation of the Columbia River Basin Salmon Management Policy C-3620, 2013–2017: Final Draft” (Olympia: Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, August 30, 2018), 54, 104, and 92–105; “Evaluation of Columbia River Harvest Reforms Shows Expected Benefits Have Not Materialized, Columbia Bains Bulletin, November 2, 2018; “Gillnets on Columbia River: The Longstanding Debate Roars Back,” Portland Oregonian, January 17, 2017. 25 Daniel Carpenter and Colin D. Moore, “Robust Action and the Strategic Use of Ambiguity in a Bureaucratic Cohort: FDA Scientists and the Investigational New Drug Regulations of 1963,” in Formative Acts: American Politics in the Making, ed. Stephen Skowronek and Matt Glassman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 340–362; Daniel Carpenter, Reputation and Power: Organization Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 45–47, 69; phone interview with Paul Hanneman (March 25, 1990); “Protecting Oregon’s Investment, A Program to Restore and Enhance Oregon’s Fisheries,” Issue Backgrounder distributed by the Office of the Governor of Oregon, Neil Goldschmidt (Fall 1989); Paul Hanneman, Oregon’s Beach and Bottle Bills: The Inside Story (CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2016). C ALLINGS 1 For nineteenth-century demographics, see Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age,

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1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 477–517. For callousness, see Ben Haller, “One US County’s Solution to Drug Epidemic: Let Addicts Die,” El País, July 25, 2017, https://elpais.com/elpais/2017/07/25/inenglish/1500994369_980611.html; Jennifer L. Doleac and Anita Mukherjee, “The Moral Hazard of Lifesaving Innovations: Naloxone Access, Opioid Abuse, and Crime” SSRN Library, March 6, 2018, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3135264. For equating gentrification with progress in environmentalist thought, see Richard Ackerman, Rachel Neuenfeldt, Theo Eggermount, Mike Burbidge, Joanna Lehrman, Nathan Wells, and Xi Chen, “Resilience of Oregon Coast Communities in Response to External Stressors” (MA thesis, University of Michigan, 2016), 203–216. For increasing asymmetries in wealth and power between Oregon’s urban and rural spheres, see Sheila Martin and Bruce Weber, “A Tale of Two Oregons: Common Aspirations, Different Contexts, and Critical Interdependencies in Urban and Rural Oregon”; and David Holland, Paul Lewin, Bruce Sorte, and Bruce Weber, “The Declining Economic Interdependence of the Portland Metropolitan Core and Its Periphery,” in Toward One Oregon: Rural-Urban Interdependence and the Evolution of a State, ed. Michael Hibbard, Ethan Seltzer, Bruce Weber, and Beth Emshoff (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2011), 17–40, 86–87, 89–90. 2 For “tragedy,” see Gharrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (December 1968): 1245. For neoliberal theories, see H. Scott Gordon, “The Economic Theory of a Common-Property Resource: The Fishery,” Journal of Political Economy 62 (April 1954): 124–142; Anthony Scott, “The Fishery: The Objectives of Sole Ownership,” Journal of Political Economy 63 (April 1955): 116–124; Francis T. Christy Jr. and Anthony Scott, The Commonwealth in Ocean Fisheries (Baltimore, MD: Resources for the Future, 1965); James A. Crutchfield and Giulio Pontecorvo, The Pacific Salmon Fisheries: A Study in Irrational Conservation (Baltimore, MD: Resources for the Future, 1969). For critiques see Daniel Pauly, “Small-Scale Fisheries in the Tropics: Marginality, Marginalization, and Some Implications for Fisheries Management,” in Global Trends: Fisheries Management, ed. E. K. Pikitch, D. D. Huppert, and M. P. Sissenwine (Bethesda, MD: American Fisheries Society, 1997), 40–49; Emily H. Young, “Balancing Conservation with Development in Small-Scale Fisheries: Is Ecotourism an Empty Promise?” Human Ecology 27 (December 1999): 581– 620; Christophe Béné and Richard M. Friend, “Poverty in Small-Scale Fisheries: Old Issue, New Analysis,” Progress in Development Studies 11 (April 2011): 119–144; Mansel G. Blackford, Making Seafood Sustainable: American Experiences in Global Perspective (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 26, 141–144; Longo et al., Tragedy of the Commodity, 9–13, 52–59, 63– 143. For impacts on marine ecology and industries, see Mary Carmel Finley’s All the Fish in the Sea: Fish, Fisheries Science and Foreign Policy, 1930–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), and All the Boats in the Ocean: How Government Subsidies Led to Global Overfishing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). For the shortcomings of and resistance to the state, see James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), and

NOTES TO PAGES 143–145

211

Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 3 Jack Gilman interview (September 8, 1989); William R. Emmons, Ana Hernández Kent, and Lowell R. Ricketts, “The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fall: The Decline of the White Working Class,” The Demographics of Wealth, 2018 Series, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, https://www.stlouisfed.org/household-financial-stability/the-demographics-of-wealth/declineof-white-working-class (accessed October 10, 2018); “Rural Health Expert Weighs In on Latest CDC Report of US Decreases in Life Expectancy Rate,” NPR Morning Edition, November 30, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/11/30/ 672123787/rural-health-expert-weighs-in-on-latest-cdc-report-of-u-s-decrease-in-life-expec; see also Jennifer Sherman, Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010); Cynthia M. Duncan, Worlds Apart: Poverty and Politics in Rural America, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015); Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has written lyrically about the cultural importance of freedom among mushroom pickers in central Oregon, but this issue has resonated broadly among people who work in nature for a very long time. See The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 75–76, 126–127. 4 Colin Long and Cathy Whitlock, “Fire and Vegetation History from the Coastal Rain Forest of the Western Oregon Coast Range,” Quaternary Research 58 (November 2002): 215–225; James K. Agee, Fire Ecology of Pacific Northwest Forests (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993); Colin J. Long, Cathy Whitlock, and Patrick J. Bartlein, “Holocene Vegetation and Fire History of the Coast Range, Western Oregon, USA,” Holocene 17, no. 7 (2007): 917–926; Robert Boyd, ed., Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1999); Stephen F. Arno, “Fire in Western Forest Ecosystems,” Wildland Fire in Ecosystems: Effects of Fire on Flora, ed. James K. Brown and Jane K. Smith, vol. 2 (Ogden: US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, 2000), 108–109, 113–115; Gail Wells, Tillamook: A Created Forest Comes of Age (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1999); Stephen Pyne, Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015); Stephen Pyne, “Burning Like a Mountain,” Aeon, January 14, 2014, https://aeon.co/essays/ how-the-american-southwest-became-a-tinderbox; Joseph E. Taylor III, “Is Wilderness Sustainable?” BlogWest.org, September 13, 2017, https://blogwest. org/2017/09/13/is-wilderness-sustainable/. 5 Joseph E. Taylor III, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999). 6 For “shortcomings” and “contemplative,” see Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995),

212

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x; Richard White, “The Problem with Purity,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values, University of California, Davis, May 10, 1999, https://tannerlectures.utah. edu/_documents/a-to-z/w/white00.pdf. For “right,” see John Muir, The Mountains of California (New York: Penguin, 1985), 64; Jonquil Bevan, ed., Izaak Walton: The Compleat Angler, 1653–1676 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); George P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), chapter 3. This critique relies on many fine works, but four key texts are John Urry, “The Tourist Gaze and the ‘Environment,’” Theory, Culture and Society 9 (August 1992): 1–26; William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness, Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History 1 (January 1996): 7–28; Richard White, “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 171–185; and Miles A. Powell, Vanishing America: Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and the Origins of Conservation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 7 Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion (New York: Penguin, 1963), 15, 24, 413; Hal R. Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas), 10; William G. Robbins, “Town and Country in Oregon: A Conflicted Legacy,” in Toward One Oregon: RuralUrban Interdependence and the Evolution of a State, ed. Michael Hibbard, Ethan Seltzer, Bruce Weber, and Beth Emshoff (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2011), 59–78. For a critique of the shallowness of modern tourism, see Galen Rowell, Many People Come, Looking, Looking (Seattle: Mountaineers, 1980). 8 Jake Kosek, Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 118–119.

Index References in italics are to images Cape Kiwanda Fish Company, 101, 148 Cape Lookout, 43, 135 Carlton, OR, 94 Carver, Curtis, 64, 72 Cascade Head, 13, 18 Caspell, Walt, 84–86 Caufield, Jack, 65 Central Cheese Association, 77, 87, 88, 118 Chapman, C. C., 53, 65 Chamber of Commerce. See merchants cheese making, 27, 36, 40, 65, 66, 77, 92, 117–118 Christensen family, 21, 23, 41 Christensen, Anna, 21 Christensen, Christopher, 21–22 Christensen, Bonnie, 10 Civilian Conservation Corps, 77, 93, 192n22. See also New Deal programs class, 7–8, 10, 51, 59, 61, 65, 70, 124, 126, 127, 129, 132–133, 141–148 Cloverdale, OR, 7, 25, 29, 36, 40, 44, 66, 76, 77, 78, 93, 104, 118, 123, 125, 133, 147 Cloverdale Cheese Association, 77, 118 Coast Indian Reservation, 17–19 Coast Range, 13–14 Cody, Steve, 130 Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians of Oregon, 18, 66, 92, 112– 113, 131–132 Congress, 8, 109, 111, 113 consumption, 124, 145–148, 203n2 Coos Bay Times, 60

Allen, Jim, 130 Alsea Indians, 17 Anderson Arthur, 33 anglers, 9, 54, 55–59, 63–65, 66–67, 69, 80, 89, 137–139, 144. See also sporting culture Asians, 34, 41, 51, 58–59, 123 Astor Packing Company, 27, 31, 33 Astoria, OR, 44, 95 AuCoin, Les, 113 Baker Herald, 60 Baker, Pat, 73 Baker, Walt, 72 Banks Herald, 57 Beals, Fred, 42, 52, 59, 96 Beaver, OR, 7, 13, 40, 42, 66, 76, 78, 93, 123, 125, 133 Beckman, Jay, 130 Bingham, Edwin, 3, 173 Blaine, OR, 7, 13, 66, 76, 93, 125 Blazer, Carl, 109 Boxley, Sarah, 21 Boylan, Lloyd, 89 Brock, Shelly, 119–121, 133, 141 Brooten family, 65 Brooten, Hans, 45–46, 65 Brown, Greg, 123, 125 Burke, Jim, 33 Bush, Nancy, 136 Buxton, Jerry, 136 Cape Kiwanda, 2, 43, 72–75, 79–80, 83, 88–92, 91, 94–97, 99–101, 105, 106, 108, 109, 111, 115, 119, 124– 125, 129, 130, 135, 142, 143, 146, 146–148 213

214 INDEX

Cramer, Katherine, 133 Craven, John, 40 Craven, Lyle, 33, 82 Crider, Jack, 101 Crown Zellerbach; 116 Csikszentmihaly, Mihaly, 5 dairying, 2, 9, 14–15, 19, 23–24, 27, 36, 40, 59, 66, 77, 78, 82, 83–84, 85–87, 92, 106, 117–118, 125, 127, 135, 144 and cows, 23, 24, 82 and labor, 23–24, 27, 107 and milk deliveries, 24, 77, 87, 88, 117, 118 dairy technology, 127–128 Dart, Anson, 17 Delaney, Keith, 96 demography. See US census Denny, R. B., 55 developers, 9, 116, 124–126, 141, 144 devil’s bargain, 10–11, 146 Dolph, OR, 44, 125 Donaldson, John, 110–111, 114 Dory Derby, 91, 91–92, 97, 105 Douglas County Sportsmen’s Association, 56, 57 Dunn family, 25 Dunn, Clarence, 41 Dunn, John, 25, 28–29, 33, 38–39, 43 East Beaver Cheese Association, 92 ecology bottomlands, 13–15, 19, 20, 24, 27, 28, 126, 144 dairies, 24, 84 fire, 19, 28, 45, 83, 92, 93, 126, 144, 145, 192, 195, 144, 195n43 forests, 13–14, 92, 126, 128–129 ocean, 80, 94, 107, 108, 110, 129, 143–144 oceans and El Niño, 21, 32, 55–56, 109, 115, 199n16 oceans and North Pacific Gyre Oscillation, 80, 108 salmon, 15, 19, 94, 125, 128, 129 economy, 7–10, 19, 23, 25–29, 31, 41, 45, 49, 60, 63–64, 77, 82, 84, 90, 97,

102–108, 115–121, 124–134, 138, 141–142 Great Depression, 1, 7, 76–79, 80, 92, 94, 107, 117 Great Recession, 131, 141 transfer payments, 124, 131, 141–142 Edmunds family, 42, 59 Edmunds, Arthur, 32, 39, 41, 45, 59 Edmunds, Charles, 41, 70 Edmunds, Ernest, 39, 41, 54, 59–60, 69 Edwards, Jasper, 26–27 Elmore, Samuel, 31, 44 environmentalists, 125–127, 134, 142, 144–145 environmental regulation, 134–135, 143, 144–145 Eugene Daily Guard, 60–61 farmers, 9, 10, 19–21, 24, 27–29, 36, 41, 45, 52, 55, 63, 78, 82, 87, 92, 95, 107–108, 117–118, 125–126, 127– 128, 134, 135, 136, 141, 142, 143, 145 farming, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 19, 21, 25, 27, 29, 36, 41, 54, 82, 86, 107, 134, 147 Ferrington, Victor, 99–100, 124 First Salmon Ceremony, 15–16 Fisher, Barry, 101 Fisher family, 42, 49 Fisher, Louis, 43, 73, 130 Fisher, Si, 44 Fisher, Syd, 36–37, 38, 43, 49, 77, 95, 130, 142 Fisher, Walt, 21, 31, 34, 36, 38, 42–44, 49, 65, 69, 70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 81, 82, 89, 130, 135 fishers aboriginal, 51, 144 commercial, 8, 10, 18, 111, 134– 135, 141, 144, 145 sport, 10, 23, 144 fishery management, 49–50, 94, 109– 115, 129–130, 139, 142, 199n16, 205n9 in Canada, 114 hatchboxes, 113–114, 126 farmed salmon, 130

INDEX 215

Nestucca basin hatchery, 56, 59, 63, 66–67, 68 Oregon Production Index (OPI), 109, 113 salmon hatcheries, 56, 66, 67–68, 110–115 salmon ranches, 110–111, 113–115, 199n17 Trask River hatchery, 67 wardens, 71–72, 191n14 wartime regulation, 79–80 fishing aboriginal, 15–17, 28, 70, 109, 111–113 bottomfish, 9, 43, 49, 75, 76, 79, 82, 95, 108, 130 buyers, 22, 72, 79, 94–97, 100–102, 119–121, 130 chartering, 43, 47, 49, 76, 79–80, 82, 83, 97 Columbia River, 20, 32, 44, 51, 59, 94, 95, 139 commercial, 2, 5, 26, 27–29, 36, 41, 47, 83, 97, 99–104, 105, 106, 107–109, 129–130 community, 38–40, 47, 61, 68, 79 costs, 102–4, 107, 115, 119–21 crabbing, 2, 9, 109, 119, 130, 143 dangers, 23, 37–38, 75, 108, 119 guiding, 18, 73, 82, 83 netting, 9, 21–23, 24–25, 37, 41, 47, 49, 50, 55, 57, 60, 63, 66, 68–69, 70–72, 80–82, 113, 139, 142, 182n22 peddling, 26, 28, 43, 44, 45, 47, 49, 75, 76, 79 poaching, 63, 70–72, 94, 135 politics, 9, 49–61, 63–65, 69–70, 80–82, 137–39, 188n21, 209n24 and bigotry 55–59, 69–70, 111– 113, 137–139, 208n23 and rural resistance, 70–72; 111–115, 134–136, 207n16 processors, 101–102 salmon, 9, 19, 43 sport, 2, 68–69, 78–79, 105, 121, 124, 205n9

technology, 21–23, 73–75, 84–90, 96–97, 100–3, 107 trawling, 76 trolling, 43, 49, 63, 72, 75–76, 79, 80, 82, 84, 94, 95, 99–104, 119– 121, 147–148 tuna, 102–103, 108–109, 197n7 fishing boats, dories, 73–75, 85, 89, 99–101, 105, 107, 138, 146, 147–148 river, 37, 73 Fouts, Olga, 41 Franklin, Floyd, 70, 78 Franklin, Wayne, 70 Frost, John, 17 Garibaldi News, 52, 60 gender and work, 16, 18, 23–24, 78, 87–89, 96, 100, 101, 106–107, 121, 131, 133, 141, 143 gentrification, 9–11, 116, 124–127, 141, 143, 206n12 Gilman family, 7, 97 Gilman, Cal, 84 Gilman, Ernest “Brick”, 72–73, 73, 76, 79, 82, 84, 89, 95, 131 Gilman, Elsie (née Miles), 72, 73, 84 Gilman, Jack, 73, 74, 76, 83–89, 95, 97, 99, 107, 135, 142, 147 Gilman, Norma (née Phelan), 87–88 Gilman, Warren, 76, 84–85, 89 Goché, Richard, 112 Gogas, Jean and Julio, 101 grange, 58, 64 Grant, Ulysses, 18 Gunderson, Bill, 5 Gunther, Erna, 16 Hall, Beverly, 112–113 Hanneman, Paul, 86, 89, 91, 101, 112, 134–136, 139 Hardin, Garrett, 142 Harrington, John Peabody, 15 hatcheries. See fishery management Hatfield, Mark, 113 Haystack Rock, 6, 22, 89, 91, 138, 146

216 INDEX

health, 131–134 “deaths of despair,” 132–133, 141, 143–144 Hebo, OR, 7, 13, 25, 42, 44, 66, 74, 76, 78, 93, 123, 133, 147 Hemingway, Ernest, 5–6 Hogevoll, Jack, 96, 99, 101 Hogevoll, Marlene, 96, 101 Holley, Clarence, 70 homesteading, 8, 18, 24, 35, 43 housing construction, 9, 106–107, 115–116, 141, 197–198n11 second homes, 104–106, 123–126 costs, 131 Hoy Brothers Fish & Crab Company, 96, 101 Hume, Robert Deniston, 20 hunting commercial and subsistence, 18, 36 sport, 50 Hurliman, Bertha, 43 identity, 10, 21, 23, 27, 28–29, 73, 129, 132, 135, 143, 147–148 Imlaw, Jim, 96, 101 immigration, 19, 27, 66, 125 Indians, 17, 18, 19, 51, 91, 111, 123, 132, 145, 180–181n8, 189n6. See also fishers aboriginal; Alsea Indians; Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians of Oregon; Nestucca Indians; Tillamook Indians Jackson, Vern, 70, 78 Jefferson County, 133 Jensen, Adella, 54 Johnson, Andrew, 18 Josephine County, 133 Kalmiopsis Wilderness, 144 Kangiser, Al, 73 Kellow family, 97 Kellow, Forrest, 76, 82 Kellow, Howard, 89, 99, 107, 135 Kennedy, David, 78 Kershaw, Andy, 76, 79–80, 81, 82, 89

Kesey, Ken, 146, 176 Kester, Harvey, 96 Kitzhaber, John, 139, 188n21 Klamath Falls Evening Herald, 57 Klamath River, 129 knowing nature, 54, 90, 145, 147–148, 197n8 Kober, Ivan “Ink,” 95–96 Kristof, Nicholas, 127 Ku Klux Klan, 34, 57, 59, 134 Kuenzi, Fred, 89 laboring, 18, 29, 35, 40, 79 Landingham family, 100, 148 Launching Through the Surf, 136–137 Learned family, 7, 41, 78, 82, 97, 107 Learned, Alice, 39, 86–89, 107, 135 Learned, Alva, 34 Learned, Ed, 84–86 Learned, Grace (née Edmunds), 35–36, 38, 39 Learned, Terry, 85–88, 99, 107, 109, 114, 135 Learned, Victor, 31, 34–35, 38, 41, 43, 69, 72, 82, 142 Learned, Victor Jr., 19, 38, 39, 59, 70– 71, 76, 78–79, 80, 83–89, 97, 99, 101, 135 Liftin, Ben, 63 Lincoln City, OR, 96, 101 Lincoln County, 65, 132 Lindsey, Randy, 3 Linenwebber and Brown Packing Company, 8, 20–21, 25–26, 29 Linfield College, 136 Lipin, Lawrence, 51, 60, 61 Little Nestucca River, 13, 15, 19, 43 Little Nestucca Valley, 21, 76, 134 loggers, 9–10, 29, 40–41, 70, 118, 125– 126, 129, 134–135, 141–142, 145 logging, 8, 19, 29, 40–41, 68, 76, 77, 82, 83, 92–94, 106–107, 115, 116–118, 126, 128–129, 132, 134–135 and mills, 9, 25, 35, 40, 66, 72, 76, 77, 86, 87, 94, 104, 106, 115–116, 128–129, 196n44

INDEX 217

Magarell, R. C., 25, 29, 42 Malaney, Thomas, 25, 29, 77, 123 Marshall, Brenda Devore, 136–137 Marshall, Jerry, 136–137 Matthiessen, Peter, 3 McEvoy, Arthur, 3 McKean, John, 112 McLaughlin, John T., 54 McMinnville, OR, 14, 128 McMinnville News-Reporter, 55, 57 McMurry, Sally, 117 McPhillips, Arthur, 49–53 McPhillips, Barney, 186 fn. 6 Meda, OR, 40, 93, 125 merchants, 19, 27, 42, 77, 79, 90, 96, 103–104, 115, 123–125 Miles, Clint, 38–39, 72 Miles, D. A., 33, 72 Miles, George, 43, 72, 99 Miles, Heman, 26–27 Miles, Stella, 39–40, 43 mining, 20, 45–46, 80, 94, 126 minks. See ranching Monroe family, 7 Monroe, John, 108, 132, 141, 145 Monroe, Ray, 100–2, 104, 108, 119– 121, 120, 123, 129–130, 133, 136, 141–142 Monterey Bay Aquarium, 129 Mount Hebo, 13–14, 92, 93 Multnomah Anglers and Hunters Club, 57 Nehalem River, 15, 32, 44–45 Neskowin, OR, 13, 93, 104, 134 Nestucca Bay, 37, 38–39 Nestucca Bay Canning Company, 2, 47 Nestucca Indians, 8, 15–19, 28, 66, 131 Nestucca Watershed Council. See Nestucca, Neskowin & Sand Lake Watershed Council Nestucca, Neskowin & Sand Lake Watershed Council, 125–127, 128, 134 Nestucca River, 1, 2, 13, 15, 25, 26, 29, 31–32, 64, 68, 73, 74, 80, 104, 105, 106, 116, 118, 142

Nestucca Valley, 7, 13–15, 31, 108, 141, 146 New Deal programs, 77–78, 92. See also Civilian Conservation Corps Newport, OR, 95 Norblad, Albin, 53 Ocean Park, 25, 29, 34, 77, 123 ORCO ’80, 112–115 Orcutt, Frances, 1, 104–105 Oregon Aqua Foods, 111 Oregon Board of Fish Commissioners, 26 Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, 118 Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, 110–115, 139 and internal criticism, 114 Oregon Department of Justice, 112– 113, 132 Oregon Fish Commission, 32, 52–53, 55, 68–69, 94 Oregon Fish and Game Protector, 51 Oregon Game Commission, 52–53, 60, 64, 67 Oregon Labor Press, 60 Oregon legislature, 9, 49, 52–53, 63– 65, 68, 77–78, 80, 109–110, 112, 114, 138 Oregon Mink Ranchers Association, 76 Oregon Restoration and Enhancement Board, 136 Oregon Salmon Commission, 135–136 Oregon Sports Club of Waterloo, 58–59 Oregon State Council of Fishermen, 54 Oregon State Sportsmen Association, 57, 58 Oregon State University Extension, 101 Oregon Voter, 53, 59, 60, 65, 66 Oretown, OR, 7, 13, 19, 29, 43, 65, 104, 125 Oretown Cheese Association, 65, 77, 118 Ortega, Cole, 137

218 INDEX

Pacific City, OR, 1, 2, 7, 25, 29, 36, 40, 42–43, 47, 66, 72, 76–77, 79, 91, 96–97, 100, 104–105, 106, 118, 123, 125, 126, 134, 147 and airport, 91, 106, 126 Pacific City Boat Works, 99–100 Pacific City Dorymen’s Association (PCDA), 136–139 Palmer, Joel, 17 Patterson, Isaac, 53 Penter, Harold, 33 Penter, William, 33, 44–45 Piasecki, Edward, 52, 57, 59 Pierce, Franklin, 17 politics anti-statism, 126–127, 133–136, 207n16 voting patterns, 133–134 pollution, 84, 118, 126–127, 144 Portland, OR, 44, 51, 61, 69, 101, 127, 130 Portland Central Labor Council, 54 Portland News, 57 Portland Oregonian, 56–57, 99 Portland Oregon Journal, 55–59 Portland Telegram, 57, 59–60 Potter, Melvin, 100, 107 Potter, Verle, 100 Pyne, Stephen, 195n43 racism, 18, 19, 34, 51, 57, 58–59, 66, 69, 111–113, 131–132, 134, 145 ranching cattle, 18, 66, 82 mink, 43, 49, 66, 75, 76, 82, 95, 118–119 Rasmussen, Jay, 136 Redberg family, 24, 24–25, 41, 82 Redberg, Marie, 34 Redberg, Ole Jr., 24–25, 28–29, 33–34, 64–65, 70, 82 Redberg, Ralph, 25 Redberg, William, 41 Reddekopp family, 73, 76, 82, 86 referendum campaign, 54–61 religion, 27, 28, 41–42, 58, 65 retirees, 123–25, 134

Rich, Willis, 68 roads, 18, 25, 42, 50, 65, 89–91, 92, 96 Robinson, David, 57, 58 Rock, Alexandria, 28, 41 Roe, Al, 95 Rolf, Bert, 86 Rogue River, 20, 51 Roseburg News-Review, 56, 57 Rothman, Hal, 10, 146 Rowland, Wilma, 26, 40, 66 Russell, Walter, 49–51, 53 Sakamoto, Sam, 109 Salem Oregon Statesman, 57 Salem Rod and Gun Club, 57 salmon Atlantic (Salmo salar), 130 Pacific (Oncorhynchus), 15, 23, 49– 50, 68, 80–82, 108, 126 chinook (O. tshawytscha), 15, 32, 47, 67, 94, 107, 110, 129–130, 148 chum (O. keta), 15, 33–34, 47, 110 coho (O. kisutch), 15, 32, 41, 47, 67, 75, 80, 94–95, 99, 110, 112, 115, 129–130 cutthroat (O. clarki clarki), 15 steelhead (O. mykiss), 15, 41, 47, 67 steelhead as trout, 80–82, 193– 194n28, 199n18 salmon ranching. See fishery management Salmon River, 18, 26 Samuel Elmore & Company, 29, 31–34, 35, 41, 44–45, 46, 47, 49, 104 Sand Lake, OR, 134 Sanders, G. D., 54 Schlip, David, 112, 135, 136 Scott, James, 134, 207n16 Scott, William, 43, 99 seasonal labor, 8, 25, 28–29, 35, 41, 42–43, 66, 73, 82, 86–87, 92, 100, 107–108, 115, 130, 133, 142–143 Sheridan, OR, 26–27, 76 Sheridan Sun, 60 Shermer, Dutch, 84 shipping, 29, 36, 42, 44, 49, 68

INDEX 219

Siletz Boat Works, 89 Siletz Indians and Reservation. See Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians of Oregon Siletz River, 15, 26, 32, 44–45, 70 Smith, Harvey, 95 Smith, Edith, 95 Snipe, Ralph, 86 South County, 7, 14 Southmayd, H. W., 54, 73 sporting culture, 50–51, 69–70, 137–139 Stacy, Bob, 95, 96, 101 Stevens, Isaac, 17 surfing, 124, 125, 137–139, 138 The Dalles Weekly Chronicle, 60, 63 The Waterboys, 5, 7 Three Rivers, 15, 25, 67 Tierra del Mar, OR, 106, 198n11 Tillamook, OR, 36, 44, 94 Tillamook Bay, 32, 70, 72 Tillamook County, 7, 13, 54, 77, 96, 116, 132, 136, 144 Tillamook County Creamery Association (TCCA), 36–37, 40, 64, 92, 117–118, 127–128, 144 and regulation, 117–118 and end of South County cheese factories, 118 and Morrow County, 127 Tillamook County Fisherman’s Union, 54–55, 64, 102 Tillamook County Grange, 54–55 Tillamook County Soil and Conservation Service, 136 Tillamook Herald, 54, 60 Tillamook Indians, 15, 17, 18 trapping, 29, 35, 36, 41, 42 tourism, 8, 25, 43, 44, 45–47, 49, 65, 76, 77, 83, 91–92, 97, 104, 115, 123– 125, 130, 134, 141, 144 Turner, Enis, 73 Union Precinct, 27, 41, 76, 104, 133–134

United States Bureau of Land Management, 116–118 United States Census population, 19, 27, 28–29, 40–42, 66, 73, 82, 104, 106–107, 123– 124, 133 agriculture, 26, 77, 118–119, 127 United States Department of the Interior, 92–94, 104 United States Forest Service, 42, 66, 93, 104, 116–118, 134 United States National Marine Fisheries Service, 111, 129 Upton family, 21, 23 Upton, James, 21, 28–29 urbanization, 118, 129, 134, 138, 141– 142, 144 Vaugh, Warren, 16 Walker, Peter, 203n2 Washington state, 51–52, 139 Watts, Guy, 96 Weiss, Hank, 70 Wenrick family, 131 Wenrick, Craig, 130–131, 136, 141, 142, 143 Wenrick, Susie, 130–131, 133, 141 Wenzinger, Don, 109 White, Richard, 145 Whiteman, Rufus, 43 Willamette River, 51, 64 Willamette Valley, 13, 26, 42, 44, 50, 55, 60–61, 64, 65, 92 Willamina, OR, 14, 72, 76, 94 Wilson, Bill “Redeye,” 100 Winslow, George, 52, 53, 63 Woods, OR, 7, 25, 29, 40, 41, 43, 45, 65–66, 72, 76, 77, 93, 100, 104, 105, 134 Woods Ocean Wave, 27 Yamhill, OR, 94 Zimmerman, Peter, 64