Stateside with Rosalea: Washington

On February 28, 2001, an earthquake struck just 18 km from Washington State’s capital, Olympia. Here are some of the images posted on the BBC’s website that day; and here is the beautiful image created by the tremors as captured by a pendulum and a shallow dish of sand in nearby Port Townsend.

Just as in the earthquake that struck Christchurch, NZ, last weekend, the damage included collapsed awnings and brick walls. So much for the popular song lyric that implies “brick house” means someone (or something) that is solidly built. (Ironically, the bridge lyrics in that Lionel Ritchie song are “Shake it down, shake it down now”!)

The 2001 “Rattle in Seattle” is officially known as the Nisqually Earthquake. The first European settlement on Puget Sound, in what would become Washington State, was on the beach and flat land above the Nisqually River estuary, where it flows into the sound. Fort Nisqually, as the settlement was known, wasn’t a military fort but a fortified trading post built by the Hudson Bay Company in 1833. The Nisqually River has its origins in a glacier on the slopes of Mt Rainier, which is often seen by television viewers in the US whenever someone is being interviewed from afar and is seated in a Seattle television studio. The city’s Space Needle and the mountain are usually part of the fake background.

Nisqually Indian myths often begin with the phrase “Back when mountains were people…”, according to journalist Bruce Barcott’s wonderful book The Measure of a Mountain, on which most of this post is based. “Back when mountains were people,” Barcott writes, “they quarreled like wet hens. The Cascade volcanoes were often jealous wives… Mount Hood and Mount St Helens threw fire at each other across the Columbia River.” He goes on to write about how Mt Rainier often assumed the role of a fat angry wife, with one tribal myth placing her originally in the Olympic Range until her husband could stand her no more and picked her up and plopped her down across Puget Sound, “where there was room for her ample flanks and peace from her bickering tongue.”

The Lummi, who live near the Canadian border, cast her in a different role—and one that is familiar to anyone who knows about the journey of (Mt) Taranaki in Aotearoa/New Zealand, even if the gender and temperaments are reversed. In the Lummi story, Rainier was one of Mt Baker’s two wives, and his favorite until he grew weary of her bad temper. Baker started paying more attention to his kinder wife, Shuksan, and Rainier threatened to leave. When Baker ignored her, she made good on her threat and moved south, pausing every now and then to look back to see if her husband was calling her home.

He never did, and Rainier came to rest that night on the highest hill in the land, stretching herself up and up so she could see Baker and her children. And there she is today, special to many different tribes for many different reasons—including to the modern European tribes in Seattle, who view her as mysterious and sublime and put her image on everything from personal cheques to the state license plate to the disposable placemats used in restaurants.

She is the largest and most dangerous volcano in the United States of America, and at 14,494 feet is the fifth-highest mountain in the Lower 48.

But what about her name? Aah, therein lies a very interesting tale. In fact, the entire state—the only one in the US to be named after a US President—might have been renamed in the 1890s if the boosters for a township just south of Seattle had gotten their way. Signed into being as Washington State on November 11, 1889, the former territory’s European settlement had begun in earnest in the Puget Sound area after the completion of the Northern Pacific railroad just six years earlier. Tacoma was the railhead, and its population boomed from 1,000 in 1880 to 36,000 by the time of statehood, rivaling Seattle’s 42,000.

One of the directors of the Northern Pacific railroad company was also president of the Tacoma Land Company, and once he had secured Tacoma as the terminus for the railroad, he then ordered that all company brochures would refer to the nearby mountain not as Rainier but as Tacoma. Rainier, after all, was named for a British admiral who had fired on American privateers during the Revolutionary War, so he was only being patriotic.

Barcott continues:

In 1892, “to counteract the thousands of free ‘Mount Tacoma’ maps distributed by the Northern Pacific, the [newly created US Board on Geographic Names] ruled that Washington state’s high peak be named ‘Rainier, Mt.’ Tacomans suspected foul play. An apocryphal story circulated about the Seattle Brewing and Malting Company delivering free kegs of Rainier Beer to a late-night geographic board meeting. The story gained credence only in Tacoma, where the town fathers gathered for a fight.”

And the fight to rename the mountain continued for the next three decades, culminating in 1924 when the US Senate voted for the name change but a committee in the US House of Representatives voted to refer the question back to the Board on Geographic Names. And that, jolly well was that. By 1939 even the Tacoma Chamber of Commerce had stopped referring to the mountain as “Tacoma”.

The biggest cause of the Tacoma boosters’ failure was that, in fact, the mountain has many different monikers, depending on which tribe is speaking of it. The two tribes nearest the mountain call it Tuakhu, Stiquak, or Puskehouse, none of which suited the purposes of the Tacoma Land Company and Northern Pacific. And all her written names are, of course, just phonetic renderings of languages that were exclusively oral.

As fate would have it, the name “Rainier” nowadays evokes not a British admiral whose Ostrich outgunned the privateers’ Polly off the coast of Georgia, but a Prince of Monaco and–more particularly—his elegant American wife. Could any icon be further from the legend’s fat, jealous, harpy than Princess Grace? Yet “graceful” is the word that springs to mind when looking at the 42nd state’s iconic mountain.

(God help us if the legendary Taranaki and Tacoma ever get wind of each other and fall in love! I’d hate to be in their path when they rush into each other’s arms.)

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE—

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