The Ozette Prairies of Olympic National Park - Natural Resources ...

inches high and the berries and crowberries were also very small, as were the strawberries along the way;
and the ferns of the prairie were only two fingers high. I saw many people gathering berries and fern
roots, the latter to be made into bread. These people were not a finger-length high.”
At another time another medicine man, who was doctoring a patient that recovered, gave an account of
his journey to those present, on coming out of the trance, as follows: “I passed over the river of the dead
to its other side. The people I saw there were large, strong and happy, and the trees were all large. The
berries were larger than I ever saw here, and all the bushes were heavily loaded with fruit. There were
also plenty of game in the prairies and fern roots for bread; and there were feasts and dances every day in
that happy land.”
Pettitt, George A. [1950] The Quileute of La Push, 1775-1945. Anthropological Records, Vol. 14:1,
George Pettitt spent World War II in LaPush in the Coast Guard. After the war, he attended the
University of California at Los Angeles and went back to the Quileute to gather information for this community
history. As far as the Quileute recall, he never returned to LaPush after finishing his fieldwork
among them. His dissertation was, essentially, a community history and sociological study of Quileute
acculturation. Unexplainably, he neither mentions the importance of prairie resources in tribal pre-contact
economics, nor does he mention the reasons for their decline in maintenance and usage.
[p. 1] Quileute Territory Their territory, starting some thirty miles south of cape Flattery, extends approximately
thirty miles south along the Pacific coast and thirty miles inland. Except for a few meadows
and prairies of limited size along the rivers, the country is rough and mountainous and covered by a
dense tangle of trees and brush… The brush, particularly along the edges of prairies, stream, and roads,
contains a high percentage of wild berries, black, elder, salal, salmon, thimble, etc.
[p. 28] Conflicts with Whites. There was some friction as land was homesteaded and the Indians found
it expedient to move out of the back country and congregate at the mouths of the rivers, but it never came
to a dangerous break because very little of the homesteaded land could be cleared and cultivated—it
was held for the timber on it and could still be used for hunting, and hunting land animals was a minor
part of Quileute food economy in any case. [earlier] Morton Penn recalls that when his family moved
from its upper river home to LaPush, the farmer on whose land they found themselves was loath to have
them move and several times invited them to move back. Because the prairie areas were not completely
settled, there were still areas available for foraging, and quickly the Quileute appetite for traditional roots
was replaced with potatoes and other root vegetables traded or received in payment for work on farms,
or increasingly grown in the Quileutes’ own garden plots.
144