![]() ![]() ![]() The Treaty of Point No Point, the Treaty of Neah Bay, and the Quinault Treaty, signed in 18, established reservations at Skokomish, Neah Bay, and Taholah that made up a small fragment of the tribes' historic territories. It was under these circumstances that Washington Territory Governor Isaac Stevens pursued a series of treaties with Olympic Peninsula tribes, radically changing their relationship to their homeland. Among the Makah, losses were likewise catastrophic, from an estimated 1,200 people in the early 1840s to 654 in 1861. By 1855, the Klallam and Chimakum people numbered an estimated 1,106 people, less than half their population of approximately 2,400 in 1780. Olympic communities suffered further outbreaks of smallpox and other infectious diseases such as influenza and measles in the nineteenth century. A smallpox epidemic that devastated Northwest peoples in the 1770s and 1780s may have been introduced by seafaring colonists, such as the Spanish party whose 1775 encounter with the Quinault people escalated into violence. The Makah village at Ozette was home to a whaling and sealing society with a sophisticated aesthetic culture represented in patterned woven blankets, decorated chests, and finely carved tools of wood and bone.Ĭontacts with European and American voyagers multiplied in the late eighteenth century. Settlements such as the Klallam village of Tse-whit-zen thrived on harvests of fish, shellfish, birds, and sea mammals. Along the coast, permanent maritime traditions developed between 3,000 and 1,000 years ago. The people of the Olympic Peninsula foraged for berries, nuts, and roots, mounted inland hunting expeditions in pursuit of land mammals such as deer and elk, and manipulated the local ecosystem with techniques such as prairie burning. There were hundreds of such trails scattered throughout the country" (Hobucket, 51-52). Roads and mountain paths that park visitors follow today were first explored by the indigenous people of the region as Quileute writer Harry Hobucket recorded, the people "made long journeys for purposes of war or trade and had many well-defined trails. A 2,880-year-old basket fragment found under a snowbank on Obstruction Point, along with other evidence recovered throughout the high country, attest to human activity in the mountains over millennia. The Manis mastodon, discovered in 1977, was killed and processed by Paleolithic hunters near the current park boundary around 13,800 years ago. While many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century accounts of the Olympic Range claimed that the mountains "lay untouched by human foot until the white man very tardily entered the unknown country" (Roloff, 217), there is good evidence in the form of archaeological findings and traditional knowledge that the landscape now called Olympic National Park has sustained human habitation for thousands of years. Today, Olympic ranks among the most popular American national parks, averaging more than 3 million visitors each year. Skirmishes over the park's boundaries and the governance of its resources, especially its vast timber wealth, would recur through the years. Though conservationists won the designation of Olympic National Park in 1938, their victory was by no means permanent rare is the natural reserve whose existence has occasioned such bitter and enduring conflict. By the 1930s, Forest Service management practices had ignited a campaign for a national park intended to protect the region's old-growth forests and wildlife. Designation of Mount Olympus National Monument under the Antiquities Act followed in 1909. In 1897, more than 2 million acres were withdrawn from the public domain to create the Olympic Forest Reserve. Indigenous people have inhabited and managed the natural resources of the Olympic region for thousands of years, and the park's borders fall across the traditional lands of the Skokomish, Klallam, Makah, Quileute, Hoh, Queets, and Quinault people. The park, encompassing 922,650 acres on the Olympic Peninsula, comprises landscapes ranging from subalpine meadows and rugged peaks to temperate rainforests and Pacific coast. Roosevelt on June 29, 1938, Olympic National Park has obtained global renown as a natural reserve. ![]()
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