by Tim Steury
photography by Zach Mazur
THERE’S A WELL-KNOWN PHOTOGRAPH taken by Native American
chronicler Edward Curtis in 1915 of a Makah whaler. Dressed
in an animal skin, the man is longhaired and wild. He had
indeed been a whaler, as had generations of his people. But still,
the photograph is a memory of a time already past. Curtis
provided Wilson Parker with a hide and a wig to replace the
European clothes the Makahs had adopted long before. In spite
of Curtis’s fiction, however, there is much to be learned
from Wilson Parker, the man in the photograph. As is always
the case with a good myth, there is a deeper truth that lies
beneath the surface story.
Parker is Sharon Kanichy’s great-great-grandfather, she tells me
as we talk in the Makah cultural center in Neah Bay. Kanichy
’01 was born in February 1970. That same month, a powerful
storm blew in off the Pacific, eroding the bank above the
beach at Cape Alava, on the Olympic Coast, revealing
something remarkable.
“All we knew was there was a burial site,” says Ed Claplanhoo
of the buried longhouses revealed by that February storm.
Claplanhoo ’56 was Makah tribal chairman in 1970, so it was
he who got a phone call the first Saturday in February, from
a hippie schoolteacher, as Claplanhoo describes him. A
dubious character, says Claplanhoo, which is why he didn’t
take the fellow seriously when he tried to warn Claplanhoo
that “people” were getting in the “house” and taking
“artifacts.” Claplanhoo knew everyone in Neah Bay and knew
everyone who owned artifacts. He’d heard of no problems.
But the fellow persisted. The next Sunday, the same phone call.
“Mr. Claplanhoo, they’re still taking artifacts out of the
house.”
“So I said okay,” says Claplanhoo, “I’ll tell you what, you come
to my house at seven o’clock tonight and we’ll talk about
it.”
What Claplanhoo heard from the hippie schoolteacher finally
got his attention, once he understood the “house” was not in
Neah Bay, but at Ozette, at Cape Alava. Twenty miles south of
Neah Bay, reachable only by boat or a four-mile hike from the
nearest road, Ozette was one of five traditional Makah
villages. Ozette was ancient, far older than any of the Makah
stories or songs remembered. It had been abandoned only in
the 1920s, when the federal government forced the last
remaining inhabitants to move to Neah Bay so their children
could attend school.
The next morning, Claplanhoo convened the tribal council to
discuss the matter. It happened to be an unusually beautiful
and calm day for February, so one of the council members
offered to launch his speedboat. Claplanhoo told them to
investigate and to invoke the Antiquities Act, if they found
anyone retrieving artifacts.
When they returned to Neah Bay that evening, both the
investigators had hats full of artifacts they’d confiscated
from people digging at the site.
The next morning, Claplanhoo called Richard “Doc” Daugherty,
who had been an archaeologist at Washington State College. He
and Claplanhoo met in the early 1950s. He had been the freshman
class advisor, and Claplanhoo the class treasurer.
“We had a lot to talk about,” says Daugherty ofClaplanhoo.
Daugherty grew up in Aberdeen, on the southern Olympic Coast.
Following World War II, during which he’d served as a blimp pilot
in the North Atlantic, he returned to the University of Washington.
In the summer of 1947, he and a colleague from Berkeley surveyed
archaeological sites in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and a bit in
Montana. But his true love was the coast.
Although archaeologists had completed some ethnographic studies,
of the Quinault, for example, and had acquired some knowledge of
village sites, by the late 1940s a systematic survey of coastal
archaeological sites had yet to be done.
Daugherty convinced the chair of the anthropology department at
University of Washington to provide funds for him to spend a summer
surveying archaeological sites along the Olympic coast. She came up
with $900 and a university vehicle. With his wife and daughter,
Daugherty set out from the mouth of the Columbia and worked his way
up the coast, exploring beaches and bays, questioning residents
about possible Native village sites, making it as far as La Push
that first summer. He continued the next summer, at the end of
which he’d identified some 50 sites along the coast. But even then,
Daugherty recognized that Ozette was “extraordinary.”
The problem was, all the money for Northwest archaeology at the
time was directed to the interior. Dams were going in, and money
was flowing from the Corps of Engineers and other sources to
salvage archaeological sites before they were flooded. But there
was no money for coastal exploration.
By the mid-1960s, Washington State University was the powerhouse
of Northwest archaeology. Daugherty had helped build an
extraordinarily innovative department, defining how
archaeology would be done from then on. He and others in the
program realized that truly understanding the rich ancient culture
of the Northwest required more than traditional
archaeological expertise. Before there were specialized
subdisciplines within archaeology, they hired a geologist to
interpret the geological context, a soil scientist to make
sense of the layers of soil they would descend through, a zoologist
to understand the animal remains of the rich middens —
scientists whose names would become legendary in Northwest
archaeology. Dozens of graduate students provided both physical
and intellectual labor. It was a magical time.
Actually, says Daugherty, it was a madhouse.
Amidst it all, in spite of the urgency of projects in eastern
Washington, Daugherty was determined to return to the coast.
With WSU geologist Roald Fryxell, Daugherty won a National
Science Foundation grant for a field school study in 1966-7 of the
Ozette site. They excavated a deep trench from the present
high-tide line 200 feet up the slope. What they found by the
end of the 1967 field season indicated that the site was
richer than Daugherty had imagined.
Radiocarbon dating placed the oldest trench deposits at 1,600
years old. Deposits on top of Cannonball Island, just offshore,
were over 2,000 years old. Artifacts included harpoons, whistles,
combs, gambling pieces, and carvings. Whale bones were prevalent
all through the deposits.
Then they started finding the really interesting stuff. A wet
part of the bank revealed perfectly preserved cedar rope and
fragments of mats and baskets. These things don’t normally
occur in such sites, as they decay rapidly under normal
conditions.
What these findings would confirm was Makah oral tradition that
a mudflow had swept over Ozette, burying houses. The wet,
oxygen-free condition created by the 10-foot thick clay of the
ancient landslide had enabled objects to remain perfectly preserved
beyond the wildest dreams of archaeologists. What lay beneath them,
the archaeologists were starting to realize, was an American
Pompeii. Only this was better than Pompeii. Rather than mere
impressions in volcanic ash, the things buried by the
mudslide were intact.
But summer was over, the money had run out, and Daugherty and
the others were called back to eastern Washington by the discovery
of the Marmes rock shelter and its skeletal remains, which were
threatened by the rising waters behind the Lower Monumental Dam.
Daugherty and Fryxell closed the Ozette site, realizing it was far
too valuable to disturb except through a full-scale, very expensive
exploration.
But now a February storm had moved Ozette from wishful thinking
to urgent. Daugherty agreed to meet Claplanhoo at the Ozette site
that Sunday. What he found there left Daugherty no choice but to
reopen the site before storms and looters destroyed any more. A
canoe paddle. Wooden halibut hooks. A harpoon shaft. House planks.
What had been revealed by the storm defined the next 11 years of
their lives.
It appears likely from the geological and historic record, that
on January 26, 1700, an earthquake of magnitude 9 shook the
water-saturated hill above Ozette. There was no escaping the
resulting mudslide. Sudden and massive, it buried five
longhouses, destroying them — but also preserving the broken
complexity of those households and their reflection of Makah
culture beneath wet, oxygen-free clay.
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