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

would come up in little green sprouts and that was real good feed for the deer and the elk” (Bud Klock
pers. comm. 2002).
Emil Person (pers. comm. 2006) remembers his father (who moved the family to Royal in 1921)
and other “old-timers” telling him how burning of the Ozette Prairies attracted game animals: “By burn-
ing it off, then the new foliage would come out and then the deer and the elk would come out there and
probably bear too.” According to Emil, the animals would feed on the swamp grass and the moss. “Then
they [the Indians] had a good chance of getting animals because they could surround them and they
couldn’t get away. That’s the way that they would get their meat.”
Enhance productivity of below-ground food plants. Bracken fern rhizomes were a
staple in the diet of all the tribes on the Olympic Peninsula, and we know that the Makah and the Ozette
people gathered them as well. Bracken fern patches in the Ozette Prairies were burned and cultivated for
edible rhizomes, as well as for fiddleheads for food and medicines and fronds for cleaning and serving
fish.
According to Myra Vanderhoof (1960), enhancing the growth of bracken fern was one reason for
burning Ahlstrom’s Prairie: “The Indians burned it yearly to discourage further tree growth.... to foster
the growth of the bracken and the fruitfulness of the evergreen huckleberries, both of which were important
items in their [the Indians’] diet.”
In the mid 1950s archaeologists Stallard and Denman (1955-56) surveyed a large open space
bordering the ocean, located at the foot of the trail which leads to the ocean from Allen’s Bay. They found
a cover of bracken fern which reached a height of seven feet. They correlated this archaeological site with
field notes of Ram Raj Singh, who said that this clearing had been “maintained [by the Indians] to provide
bracken fern as a source of food.”
Bracken fern is common following fire, and in fact, repeated fires favor it (Page 1976; Tryon 1941;
Agee and Huff 1987; Ingram 1931). Most sources agree that bracken fern’s primary fire adaptation is its
deeply buried rhizomes, which sprout vigorously following fires before most competing vegetation is
established (Crane 1990: Skutch 1929). Rhizomes range in depth in the soil from 8 to 30 cm, but may be
as deep as one meter (Crane 1990). Fire benefits bracken fern by eliminating competing plants while it
sprouts profusely from surviving rhizomes (Page 1982). New sprouts are more vigorous following fire,
and in the open habitats created by fire, western bracken fern becomes more fertile, producing far more
spores than it does in the shade (Page 1982; Haeussler and Coates 1986).
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