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In a lonely wooded place
Willapa Bay didn’t always garner so much attention, and many of its residentsÊhuman and animal bothÊembraced the quiet life.
For generations, Native Americans gathered shellfish, caught salmon, and built sheltered winter villages on the shores of Willapa, pronounced “WIL-uh-puh.” The name comes from the Indian Kwalhioqua, or “in a lonely wooded place.”
That description still fit the bay in November 1805, when Corps of Discovery explorer Captain William Clark, scouting the “low pondey countrey” north of the Columbia, missed it entirely.
Fifty years later, just after the start of California’s gold rush, early white settlers found treasure of their own in Willapa: oysters. Towns such as Oysterville and the now-defunct Diamond CityÊnamed for a bleached mountain of shells piled at the northern tip of Long Island that glistened when the sun pierced the cloud coverÊsprang up at mid-century to ship oysters by the hundreds of millions to San Francisco. The salmon canneries came too, spawning more villages, and the bay buzzed with commerce.
But in the 19th century, Willapa Bay again became a lonelier place. The native Olympia oysters and salmon runs dwindled. Many people left, and some of their towns have long since rotted into the woods. Oystermen spared their livelihoods by importing large Pacific oysters, which to this day they farm like a crop, as their neighbors grow cranberries and timber on Willapa’s sparsely developed shores.
Oyster growers of the late 1800s may have unwittingly imported an unseen menace that would haunt their great-grandchildren: Spartina. For generations, the new plants were mere tufts on the bay’s 47,000 acres of tidal flats. Over time, however, the grass quietly adapted to an environment with no natural predators. By last summer, Spartina had infested 12,000 acres and was expanding 20 percent a year. It already had pushed shorebirds off some of their best foraging grounds and was poised to elbow out oyster growers.
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