1890 WAS A good time to be on the Olympic Peninsula. That was before the coming of the railroads and the industrial age that slaughtered the elk, exported the timber and managed the salmon to extinction.
That was the year Lieutenant Joseph P. O’Neil’s expedition was cutting a trail across the Olympics.
On Monday, Sept. 22, 1890, members of the expedition were making a first ascent of Mount Olympus, where they stashed a copper box that has never been found.
Rations were running low. All they had was some flour, a bit of bacon and some bear meat. Expedition member Private Harry Fisher made a meal of the bear meat, “as a novice would on Limburger cheese.”
In an attempt to “get the lay of the country,” Fisher became separated from other expedition members.
After firing shots from his revolver and hallooing amid a tangle of brush-choked canyons, he lost contact with the others. Fisher’s companions felt he was “an old woodsman” who would overtake them eventually.
Instead, he patched his trousers with an empty sugar sack, repaired his shoes, counted his remaining pistol ammunition and set off to the West in an attempt to reach the Pacific Ocean.
He followed some fresh elk tracks down to a river, where he shot a grouse that he cooked with a bit of bear fat.
Traveling downstream, he waded the river to walk on the gravel bars. The salmon were running “in plentiful numbers,” so he attached a barb to his alpenstock and speared a salmon, which he declared to be much better than bear.
Descending the river further, he discovered many fish-drying racks built by the Indians to preserve fish for the winter.
These were the remains of the villages of the Queets people, who were decimated by European diseases before the Americans arrived.
Stopping to camp for the night, Fisher speared what he called a 40-pound Chinook. There were so many salmon in the river, Fisher said he might as well have camped in “Barnum’s Menagerie, so far as sleep was concerned.”
Salmon thrashed in the shallows while large animals snapped the bushes all around his camp.
While walking along the river, Fisher came upon a cabin recently built by a homesteader of “above average intellect and refinement,” who had come from Tacoma by way of Grays Harbor. He informed Fisher he was indeed on the Queets River.
On Sept. 26, Fisher was hailed by an Indian, also named Fisher, who offered the lost private a canoe ride downriver.
Fisher described floating the Queets in the cedar canoe, seeing V-shaped ripples in water 4 feet deep made by giant king salmon swimming upriver in uncounted hordes. Of watching his new friend hitting fish 20 or 30 feet away with a forked spear.
After spearing six large salmon, he quit fishing.
Fisher describes his “staunch friend” watching the many splashing salmon with “pride, as a farmer would his cattle.”
A recent trip to the Queets River revealed a far different scene.
There were no fish-drying racks, homestead cabins or thrashing king salmon swimming upstream. There was not even the dimple of a rising cutthroat on a stream once described as the best fishing river on the Olympic Peninsula.
Protected within the boundaries of Olympic National Park, the Queets represents the most pristine salmon habitat in America. The salmon are gone — suggesting there is something more to salmon restoration than restoring habitat.
Current efforts to restore salmon to dead rivers relies on habitat restoration.
Will restoring salmon habitat restore salmon populations? The Queets River says it will not.
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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.
