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

Figure 13. Ahlstrom’s homestead from the article “Here’s a man who went West just as far as he could go”, which appeared in the Seattle Times,
Sunday, July 25, 1954. According to Emil Person, “This photo was taken from the east side of the prairie looking West. Another trail ran on the
ocean side through the woods. It started from where Pete Roose’s mill, root house, and another little building were. It dropped down into a little
flat there. It came out at Ahlstrom’s house. I don’t think I could find it again, it’s all grown over” (pers. comm. 2007).
how the wetlands might be different today had Roose and Ahlstrom not settled there.
Because Ozette use of the wetlands ended by the early 1900s, we lack a complete historical or eth-
nographic record of how these people interacted with the wetlands. More than one hundred years after
their relocation, descendants of the last Ozettes still remember the importance of the Ozette Prairies to
their people. They recall some of the plants their elders gathered on the Ozette Prairies (see Table 4), the
animals their elders hunted there, and some of the efforts the people undertook to keep the Ts’oo-yuhs
wetlands on the Makah Reservation productive (see Appendix 5).
The Makah called themselves Qwidicca-atx, meaning “people who live on the cape by the rocks
and seagulls.” James Swan wrote that their remote territory was “almost out of the world,” but to the
Makah, of course, this land was, and still is the center of the world (Swan 1971; Erikson et al. 2002). The
name Makah is itself from a Klallam word that means “generous with food” (Pascua 1991:40), which suggests
that the Makah territory had a bountiful supply of edible plants and animals.
One reason for the Makah’s plenitude was that they were able to exploit the rich resources of
both land and sea (see Figure 14). Through much of the year, they focused on the ocean. California gray
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