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THE ONCE & FUTURE ASTORIA
DRAWINGS BY ROLF KLEP
BY MICHAEL McCUSKER
"Astoria is the Paris of the Columbia River."
-EG IL UNA ND ER
Before anything else you must remember that when the
American ship Columbus Reborn entered the river that bears its
name in the robust spring of 1792, a culture that had vibrantly
dwelled on both shores for maybe 20,000 years at that moment
began to become extinct.
The history we celebrate is our own cultural history
— that which we supplanted has generally been ignored as
insufficient and not worth popular study. Until recently. Now, a
few generations removed from their obliteration as hemispheric
monarchs, we are interested in them. So new are we that we
might be regarded as an alien pustule growing from the skin of
a leathery twenty millennia culture that was decimated by its
parasitic guests. We know little of their history, assorted myths
and a few bones to fill in the vast gaps of time in broadly general
rather than individual narrative.
An example of this is reflected in the tattooed cartoons
that swirl around the Astoria Column like stripes on a barber
pole. Of all this fresco history (an art from the Renaissance
which seems to have perished with the death of Column artist
Attilio Perstula), only one panel predates Western discovery
— Before The White Man Came. The Clatsop tribe whom the
county is named after were gone long before Scandinavians got
here in the late 19th century. By the 1840s they were virtually
extinct as a people by smallpox and whiskey, traditionally
weapons of colonization more ruinous than rifles. A few years
ago an Astoria mayor criticized a chainsaw sculpture of a
Clatsop chief. Her criticism was not justly artistic. She said
it diminished Astoria's Scandinavian heritage and had to be
reminded that the Chinook peoples (Tshinuk is an early attempt
to phoneticize the name into European spelling) had residence
along the lower Columbia for tens of millennia.
The mountainous surroundings of Astoria are a
complicated geology of 200 million years of collision between
the Pacific Ocean tectonic plate and the North American
Continent. It is a volcanic and earthquake structured erosion
of a once extensive formation of sharp peaks and rift valleys
inundated by ocean and ice. Through all of this geology flows
the second mightiest river of the continent, beginning in a
glacier far up in Canada and ending its 1200 mile surge at
the Pacific Ocean That is the second thing to remember:
that the river has always been Astoria's lifeblood It was late for
exploration by whites though used by natives for thousands of
years. The Boston Captain Robert Gray sailed his ship into the
river in May 1792 when everyone else of his contemporaries
was certain or afraid the wild surf they saw breaking on shifting
sandbars at its entrance was on a beach instead. Gray gave
the river its current name (from his ship Columbia Rediviva),
itself named after the Great Navigator who discovered the
Western Hemisphere in his way of reaching India 300 years
earlier; the Great River of the West (a variation of Oregon was
a name for it) was almost immediately a gateway to Asia.
The European exploration and exploitation of the Pacific
Northwest — Russians, English, Spanish and Americans newly
free from insidious Albion — is a microcosm of the immense
forces of emigration and conquest set loose 300 years earlier
when Columbus bumped into the western hemisphere on his
way to India. Some celebrate, others bitterly denounce the
intrusion of Europe into the Americas, which had existed
comfortably apart from the rest of humanity for 20 millennia
or so. Overcrowded and money hungry Europe poured into the
newly "discovered" half of the world as if it were an empty plain
and overran the native cultures as if they were not there or not
worth consideration (as well as obliterating a large number of
native species, which continues).
The Pacific Northwest has been a last small comer
for Western exploration, with the exception of the Poles and
Antarctica. The present tenants of the Columbia River inherit
a legacy of raw exploitation and waste. The riches once so
abundant have been despoiled, virtually all used up in a dozen
generations. The great wild river has itself been tamed with
dams, drained by irrigation and polluted as well as irradiated,
the massive forests on both sides of its banks logged and
supplanted with cities and farms, and the millions of salmon
so numerous our descendants claimed they could cross the river
on their backs have dwindled to only an endangered few.
Astoria is the oldest city of the American West. It
started as a frontier fort in 1811 on a bump of hill above the
wde river, the strategic port John Jacob Astor and his friend
Thomas Jefferson thought might dominate the Pacific fur trade
that the empires of Russia, Spain and England fought over.
Astor, who desired to be the Fur King of the West, lost his pelt
on the Astoria venture. He had not anticipated either the War of
1812 (when to avoid capture and pillage his employees sold Fort
Astor to the British who renamed it Fort George after their king)
or consolidation of the bitter rivals of Northwest Company (which
had purchased Fort Astor) and Hudson's Bay, the premier
capitalist empire in the "New World" for a couple of centuries, its
fur hunters the great explorers of the Northwest The combination
forced Astor, the USA's first millionaire and slum lord, to sell his
Pacific Fur Company (once again to the British) and concentrate
on charging high rents for substandard dwellings to immigrants
settling on the East Coast, principally Manhattan Island.
There was about a twenty year transition between the
failure of the pelt market in Europe and China and the beginning
of a century long prosperity of Astoria in the twin resource
extraction industries of timber and fishing. The major transform
ation vtfiich has since defined Astoria was the beginning of
fishing, initially in the river for the plentiful and sumptuous
salmon. The city was the first downriver interception of the
spawning salmon, and with the surge of fisherfolk from
Scandinavia much of boomtown Astoria was built on pilings
over the river because of the steep hills that rose from the river
like cake layers. The immense Pacific Coast forest was beyond
measure then, the ages of trees commensurate with their
dimensions; thousands year old giants were decimated for an
immediate human need for wood to build cities like Astoria.
After nearly two centuries of unrelenting despoliation, the forest
and the fish are just about gone.
The animal-skin clad frontiersmen we engage in loving
myth of the frontier West did not last long in the Northwest. Not
only were they victims of a market change of styles in Europe
and Asia, they were engulfed by wagon train emigrants who left
their dead on the prairies, deserts and mountains they voyaged
across, and who brought the plow, the book and the bank.
Astoria was the end of the Oregon Trail. Lewis & Clark
ended their transcontinental trek here, though namesake Astor
never visited. The city's most prosperous period was during the
late years of the 19th century when tallmasted ships and stem
wheel riverboats crowded its wharves and the river swarmed
with the winged sails of fish boats. Its dozens of canneries sent
fish all over the world. Scores of trains hauled canned salmon
into the interior and thousands of tourists to the coast. For nearly
a century most Astoria men were fishermen or worked with
hundreds of women in the canneries. Yet this prosperity was
costly. The river and ocean claimed an astonishing toll of
vessels and crews: at least 2000 ships and boats are believed
to have sunk near the river's entrance and about 700 persons
have perished. (There are no known figures for native vessels
and crews that met a similar fate over the thousands of years
they fished in the river and ocean.) Astoria's families have
mourned a long succession of parents, spouses, lovers,
children, neighbors and shipmates.
Astoria was infamous in those rowdy fin de siècle years
for its sleazy waterfront saloons and brothels, and for its open
practice of shanghaiing; loggers, mariners, farmers and tourists
were drugged or beat up and kidnapped aboard China-bound
ships by an army of crimps, saloonkeepers and brothel madams.
Crime and potent drugs were rampant; brawling and murder
were common. And, of course, there were epic struggles
between fishermen and cannery packers over the price of fish.
For a brief time Astoria had a population of nearly
30,000 (in the 1920s) and anticipated a peak of 100,000 —
unabashedly promoting itself as the New York City of the Pacific
Northwest — but the fish and trees that were to last forever were
decimated in only a few generations.
BURNING BUMBLE BEE
(Thursday, 28 January 1993)
I am drinking brandy in the Ship Inn, looking out
through a large window at the desolation and smoking ruins
of the Elmore/Bumble Bee cannery. I came up here my first
season as an albacore puller on an old California fish boat and
unloaded at Elmore Fifteen years later I spent the first couple
of years I lived in Astoria spelunking through Elmore and Union
canneries, both of which were important icons in Astoria's
history, each closed and abandoned years before I prowled
through their dark spaces, now each destroyed — Union by
wreckers a few years ago and Elmore yesterday by accidental
or premeditated inflammation.
My partner in most explorations was Paula Piukkula,
third generation Finn whose grandparents worked in both
canneries We explored Union before its demolition, and
while it was being taken apart we rummaged through records
left to blow away with the rubble and found a few of her grand
mother's paycheck duplicates from the 1930s. My most vivid
memory of the two canneries is the large beautiful polished
wood floor in the Elmore cafeteria which was built atop the
main cannery building, its walls gleaming with windows that
made the floor glow in even dull light and presented an ample
view of the river, though a friend who once worked on the
Elmore fishline said that all anyone could see were cannery
roofs filled with shrieking hungry seagulls.
Paula and I walked, climbed and craved through
all the spaces remotely accessible in both canneries. Old
machinery remained silently in place; cookers, cutting tables,
ancient exotic slabs of metal whose purposes I had no idea
about. More than once police were called but none caught us
trespassing. I took another friend. Rita Rupp, into the Elmore
one afternoon so that she could shoot a good photo vtfien a
large squarerigged Japanese naval training ship sailed down
river from a Portland visit We stood on the outermost pier and
wtiile she clicked her shutter as the ship slowly passed the city
I bowed in formal Japanese fashion to the crew who waved and
shouted like nouveau Yankees. As we left the cannery we saw
a portly policeman who had obviously been sent to capture us
trespassing but he was too large to squeeze through a narrow
window opening in a door that was my usual entrance into the
cannery (once inside I opened a side door for Paula and that
day for Rita) Rita and I linked arms and brazenly danced past
the suspicious cop as if we were actors in a musical
I never worked in a cannery My only expenence
was walking through vtfien a fish boat I crewed aboard was
unloading. The noise and busyiness involved in transposing
full bodied fish into steam cooked little round cans impressed
me greatly, which added a poignancy to my visits to the silent
abandoned Astoria canneries, often in late afternoon when long
shafts of rosy light filtered through rows of dusty western
windows and for brief moments illuminated unmoving relics of
a dead past. I heard voices and smelled rank odors of fish and
sweat mingled with grease and oil each time I visited Union and
Elmore, snapshots of old photos of people in aprons and head
scarves working on the fish line in the late 19th century and
most of seven decades in the 20th, mosaiced my imagination.
I found a photograph of an albacore boat I later worked aboard
after another sank (in the infamous Columbia River Bar) tied up
to the Elmore when the Astoria bridge was under construction
— Pelican in the early 1960s with the yet uncompleted bridge
arcing high above it in the background, on display at the
Columbia River Maritime Museum.
The records of Elmore, originally owned by Columbia
River Packers Association and bought out by Bumble Bee
Seafoods in the 1950s, are preserved by the Maritime
Museum, which spent tw> years cataloguing them for archives.
The records of Union, owned and operated by fishermen and
cannery workers, were left to rot or blow away, though a few
scavengers like Paula and me saved scraps; but instead of
preserving them for history in organized files they are scattered
among personal memorabilia
Rain falls on the grotesque skeleton of Elmore which
from my comfortable chair by a barside window resembles a
war blasted ship pointing out into the river. Smoke from a
dozen hotspots rises into restless wisps of fog that briefly
obscure the ruins every few minutes, and I wish the cannery
would be whole and unburned each time the mist contracts.
People vtfiose association with Elmore is more substantive
than mine visit the ruin and stand in little knots oblivious of the
rain. Virtually everyone I have talked with since yesterday's fire
mention it and seem to feel that a tangible part of Astona's
history is lost
I ask for a second brandy Wendy Wolfe brings it to my
table She looks out the window 'They could have done some
thing to fix it up," she says "Maybe made a museum out of it."
I think of a remark by my first boss at the Maritime
Museum when I made the same complaint about the obliter
ation of an old flour mill on the Astoria port docks 'You can't
save everything." he said
-MICHAEL McCUSKER