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

“My father [Perry Ides] said that a long time ago that they used to burn the cranberries for
harvest. They would burn portions of it too you know lay hay on there I guess and then burn the cranberries.
And they said that kept cranberries going. They would do that every so often. They burned in
September--when they’re all bloomed out and Thanksgiving Day the cranberries would be there. See
after the east winds[stop] before the rain sets in you know. They always call it nine days wind you know.
The plants would dry and they would start fires there--before the cranberries got sogged. I don’t know
how often they burned--every year or every so often. Maybe five-year period. But they wouldn’t burn
the same place all the time you know. But I imagine that it was to fertilize itself. My dad told me that
it doesn’t burn the seeds. They said that after that it would get to be charred, but the root would not be
hurt. And that’s how come it would come back and be cranberries. When they burned, they burned the
whole bog. It was an ancient method of rejuvenating the earth. I imagine that they might have had the
same thing there at Ozette. Because Ozette is similar to what the Ts’oo-yuhs Valley is. If Ozette had some
[cranberries] it would be the same procedures of growing” (John H. Ides, Makah, pers. comm. 2006).
“It’s a sixty or eighty acre bog out in Ts’oo-yuhs. It probably has shrunk to less than thirty acres
now. They would gather the tea leaves [Indian or Labrador tea] and cranberries in there. I call it Ozette
tea. With no activity in the bog, the little spruce trees are now six feet high. The only fire that I have witnessed
in my lifetime or even heard about was set probably in 1986 and it was not intentionally started.
It was a brush fire and the east wind kicked up. It burned about ten acres. The places where it got burned
are the choicest cranberry pickings now and have the riches tea leaves. Before the tea leaves were very
coarse and it was hard picking. Now in the areas where that fire was, you can fill up a bag in a little time.
The cranberries are almost double the size in the burned area. It just shows me that somebody tended
to that bog years ago. If you walk out there--as your standing on four feet of moss your foot might sink
down underwater in some places. The 1986 fire was a fast, quick fire--that burned on top where it was
dry” (Gary Ray, Makah, pers. comm. 2006).
Pat Boachup says that Indian tea (Ledum groenlandicum) has five names: “Indian tea, wild tea,
Hudson Bay tea, swamp tea, and Labrador tea. People burned in the cranberry marsh to promote a better
crop of cranberries and Indian tea. Our people have been drinking the Indian tea for thousands of years.
But you can never drink enough. A lot of people like the Indian tea. Another reason to burn was to keep
the brush and trees from growing. Otherwise it would be a loss. The marsh behind the school, unless
someone burns it, it will be history. It is being encroached by trees and shrubs. Unless they’re cut down
and burned, they’ll eventually take over the cranberry marsh just like at Ozette” (Pat Boachup, Makah,
pers. comm. 2002).
Gary Ray, Makah, hunts on the Ts’oo-yuhs Prairie. He says (pers. comm. 2006): “There’s deer,
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