THERE’S A LITTLE piece of history blooming now right along U.S. Highway 101, a few miles south of Forks. The camas are blooming. In 1806, Captain William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition described the beauty of a field of blooming camas as “a perfect resemblance of lakes of clear water.”
Unfortunately, when the Corps of Discovery tried eating camas, the debilitating effects stopped the expedition in its tracks with a perfect storm of vomiting, diarrhea and flatulence. Lewis and Clark had just emerged from the rugged Bitteroot Mountains, starving on a diet of bear grease and horse meat. When offered camas bread by his Nez Perce friends, Lewis was very grateful until after supper when he was “filled so full of wind, that we were scarcely able to breathe all night.”
Lewis and Clark’s cure might have been worse than the disease. The expedition’s pharmacy consisted of laudanum, mercury and “Dr. Rush’s Pills,” known as “Thunderclappers.” This potent purgative of calomel, mercury, chlorine and jalap was thought to cure anything from sniffles to syphilis, with side effects not unlike putting out a fire with gasoline.
Despite this temporary debilitation to those unfamiliar with it, camas used to be the most important carbohydrate staple to Native Americans throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Twana and S’Klallam stories tell how, in the beginning, a great chief had three wives who could not get along.
In what could be the oldest example of family counseling on the Olympic Peninsula, Docuebatle, a spiritual being known as “The Great Changer,” similar to Kwati of the Quileute, brought balance to the world by using his power to transform people, animals and landscapes into what we see today.
These transformers or changers turned wolves into the Quileute people, caused the trees to spring up out of the ground, and mountain and rivers to form. As the story goes, the Great Changer turned the feuding wives into mountains but not before one of the wives, Taklobad, spread camas on nearly every prairie in the Northwest.
It was believed these prairies were formed when the Thunderbird, a massive prehistoric bird that lifted whales out of the ocean, would occasionally lose its grip and drop the whales into the forest, where they would thrash around, knocking down all the trees forming prairies that were maintained by regular burning. It was a practice taught by Kwati that resulted in setting fire to his cedar-bark underwear, causing him to jump in the Calawah river.
In May 1792, Captain George Vancouver sailed his ship Discovery into Dungeness Bay. Vancouver named the area after his home in England because of the beauty of the Sequim Prairie.
In 1841, the American explorer Charles Wilkes described the camas prairies as, “All seeming in the utmost order as if man had been ever watchful of its beauty and cultivation.”
That is because these gardens had been cultivated for thousands of years. The level, well-drained, fertile lands were also free of trees, which made them very attractive to the invading hordes of European farmers.
The 1,500-acre Sequim Prairie was first homesteaded in 1866. The land was considered “unimproved.”
The Indian crops were considered weeds.
Farmers released the hogs that made short work of the camas. The hogs moved to the West End of the Olympic Peninsula, where ethnologist Jay Powell documented nine camas prairies in the Quileute River drainage.
Of these, only one retains its camas. Located south of Forks, where it is blooming a blue carpet of flowers to this day as you read this, producing “a perfect resemblance of lakes of clear water.”
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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.
He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.
