Native American Gardening on the Oregon Coast:
The Uses o f Fire
Douglas Deur
It is not easy to grow a garden on the shady
temperate Rainforest floor. Under dense clouds and
dense foliage, sunlight is scarce. Under conifers and
constant winter rains, soils are acidic and nutrient-poor.
This has not been much of an obstacle to IO1*1 century
gardeners, who have variously employed chainsaws and
dynamite to clear trees, and who have their foods, plants,
and fertilizers trucked in from around the globe For the
native peoples of this coast, though, these environmental
conditions presented challenging limits on the
availability of plant foods. More often than not, they did
not let this get in their way. In subtle and sustainable
ways, the peoples of this coast changed the vegetation.
Ornamental planting was probably not on their
minds: Emma and Jane Adams — daughters of Illga, the
last hereditary chief of the Tillamook — remembered
seeing white settlers planting flowers for the first time in
the m id-19* century, which they found to be both a
novel anil an appealing thing to do. Instead, these
peoples modified their environment in order to provide
the foods, medicines, and materials that they used in
daily living Arguably, the native peoples of this coast
were - - at varying times and to varying degrees —
gardeners. Their principle objective in gardening was to
enhance the productivity of native plants within
convenient and defensible sites, close to their villages
Their principal gardening methods involved the burning
of hill slopes and the modification of wetlands. This
month. I’ll discuss burning.
Fire was a potent force in the modification of
coastal ecology, and the peoples of this coast burned
vegetation extensively. The Native Americans of drier
places —such as the central California coast or the
Willamette Valley — burned vast clearings, of hundreds
of square miles in some cases However, the Native
Americans of the northern Oregon coast had to contend
with profound Rainforest sogginess They could only
burn small clearings within the forest, which were ol
different character and function than the larger clearings
found in drier places. On the seaward edges of the
forest, the Tillamook and other native peoples of this
coast pushed the forest landward through controlled
summer fires, creating a patchwork of small prairies at
the coastal fringes of the dense spruce-hemlock forest.
The region’s first European explorers noted this prairie
patchwork, but viewing this coast as unmodified
wilderness, they attributed this pattern to natural causes.
The locals knew belter: they burned their prairies
annually, and almost every major settlement was
accompanied by a prairie patch on a south-facing slope,
a patch which appears to have been owned by the entire
village as a form of common property. On the British
Columbia coast, burned clearings were often owned by
families, and were zigzagged with property boundaries
delimiting inherited patches of productive plants.
Along the entire coast, trees were sometimes
removed as part of the process of creating prairies. They
were burned with fires built around their base, toppled
through the gradual application of wedges as they
swayed in the wind, or were ‘girdled’ — which involved
removing a section of bark encircling their base, thus
killing the trees which were then burned. This could
take days, weeks, or months - this, by their conception of
time, was probably just fine. Still, the trees of this damp
coast were remarkably resistant to fire — through much
of the Northwest, Native Americans would burn the
under-story plants of the forest floor, causing little or no
damage to the massive trees above. Here and there, one
can still see the fire scarring which resulted, around the
bases of ancient trees.
Some of the coastal peoples’ most important
food and medicinal plants grew within the cleared
prairies. Bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum) grows
rapidly on recently-burned clearings, and this was one of
the more important products produced in these prairies,
both its “fiddlehead” tops and its starchy roots were used
for food and medicine. While stationed near Astoria in
the winter of 1805-06, Lewis and Clark noted that a
bread made of bracken fern flour was a highly important
article of trade among all native peoples of the coast; it
was produced by roasting the ferns’ roots, pounding
them into a flour, mixing this with water, and baking this
dough over fires. (Do not try this at home: bracken fern
is now believed by some to be carcinogenic, although
not enough to have caused dramatic health problems or
prevented its widespread use before the arrival of
Europeans.)
Fire also enhances the output of berries,
particularly the huckleberries (Vaccinium spp.) and
salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis), which come back lush
with new growth and prolific berries after having their
dead, woody tissues cleaned off by a good scorching.
The berries of both were important to the native diet,
while the young, juicy sprouts of the salmonberry were
eaten raw or cooked, like asparagus. Further north along
the British Columbia coast, other berries, such as the
High-bush cranberry ( Viburnum edule) were maintained
by the use of fire, and have disappeared from those large
portions of the coast where burning has ceased. The
peoples of this coast would bum entire berry patches, but
would also burn on a much reduced scale — down to
individual berry bushes in the forest under story — to
improve their output. The seeds of the “Indian
consumption plant” (Lomatium nudicaule) were used
medicinally for the symptoms of colds and other
respiratory problems, and were traded extensively
between the interior and the coast; on the outer coast,
these plants appear in remnant burned prairies only, and
one can conclude that they were introduced there either
intentionally or unintentionally. There is some evidence
which suggests that a few lilies with edible bulbs, such
as the Tiger Lily (Lilium columbianum) and the Rice
Root Lily (Fritillaria camscliatcensis), were also
introduced to ocean-front burned clearings from less
accessible alpine meadows, by local Native Americans.
And importantly, these burned clearings were attractive
UFTtRLtfT Ê.&CX O blM W
grazing sites for elk and deer after the herbaceous
vegetation began to grow back, creating highly localized
hunting grounds alongside Native Americans’ most
important plant patches.
Most interesting, however, is the use of fire in
promoting the growth of camas (Camassia quamash)
and the great camas (Camassia leichtlinii), plants with
showy blue flowers on stalks extended up from plump,
edible bulbs. Camas was one of the most attractive
flowering plants of this coast, and once created solid
patches of blue on local hill slopes. According to early
ethnographers who worked in the area, camas was
among the most important foods to the Native
Americans of the northern Oregon coast. The shamans
of the northern Oregon coast also used camas in the
production of a number of medicines, and tribal folklore
is replete with references to the trading, planting and
consumption of camas by supernatural beings
Asatagatk, ‘South W ind’, was the folkloric Tillamook
trickster who was said to have planted camas here and
there along the northern Oregon coast, tossing the bulbs
and proclaiming of each place they landed, “That will b e ,
a big camas field. They will always grow there.”
But don’t bother looking around for camas on
this part of the coast, now: they’re almost entirely gone.
Where did these plants go? Truth is, these plants cannot
grow on the coast without human intervention. They
were, for all practical purposes, “ introduced plants” in
the wet coastal forest, brought here through tribal trade
networks from the drier interior, and planted
intentionally or unintentionally. The preferential trading
and tending of those plants with larger bulbs might be
seen as “proto-domestication” : The bulbs of
transplanted coastal camas patches appear to have been
larger, generally speaking, than the wild populations in
the dry interior. In a few cases, Native Americans
appear to have fertilized camas with rotting piles of
compost, making up for the leached soils of the area.
Once introduced, camas became ‘naturalized’ as its
bulbs divided and spread within prairies subject to
continued burning. Women turned the soil with digging
sticks, taking what was needed for food trade and
ceremonial use, and leaving the younger bulbs in the soil
to grow and become next year’s crop. Resource
management decisions were guided by a sense of long­
term obligation to one’s community, and it was seen as
very bad form to exhaust these finite patches of food
plants.
As prairies were overgrown with new forest, the
camas disappeared with them. To quote Tillamook Bay
settler W arren Vaughn, when European settlers first
arrived on the traditional lands of the Tillamook, “there
was not a bush or tree to be seen” on a number of
burned over hills “as the Indians kept them burned
off... But when the whites came they stopped the
fires.. .This caused the young spruces to spring up.”
Settlers of the 19“ century, by and large, sought to stop
the fires as they would temporarily eliminate the
livestock-grazing potential of these prairies; by the early
20lh century, the decline in indigenous burning allowed
the accumulation of woody debris, so that wildfires
became dangerous and uncontrollable. Local Native
Americans were still interested in clearing up this mess
with a fire or two, but coastal foresters were opposed to
fire of any description: forestry officials would
sometimes hire Native Americans, so that foresters
would be able to keep an eye on them, and keep them
from burning.
As a result, only a few remnant, burned prairies
remain. A few small patches persist in remote comers of
our local State Parks, but are disappearing under the
encroaching forest canopy. Elsewhere, prairie patches
remain where white settlers continued to clear brush into
the 20h century through burning and cattle grazing.
(Creating grassy holes in the forest canopy, these
prairies had provided the grounds for early agricultural
settlement on the ocean coast, but ironically, began to
shrink as soon as settlers displaced the native
inhabitants.) For a brief time, some settlers carried on
the practice of burning to maintain grazing land for their
introduced livestock: Chief Illga’s great-grandson, Joe,
informs me that by the time he was a youth in the 1920s
and 1930s, only white ranchers burned the south slope of
Neakahnie Mountain, one of our larger local prairies. At
Cascade Head, the intervention of settlers preserved a
species of butterfly and a type of violet so rare that the
Nature Conservancy was motivated to buy this headland,
and have recently began to burn the slopes themselves.
You could reasonably conclude that the practice of
burning has been around so long that some local flora
and fauna became dependent on these human-
constructed prairies. A small number of camas plants are
still found. Almost all of these are on sites where white
settlers began to clear vegetation before the plants had
been entirely crowded out by encroaching forest, but
where there were no livestock intensively grazing and
trampling on the native vegetation.
the coast and planted in land cleared of the forest
canopy. It disappeared almost immediately after the
more potent, cultivated tobacco from the eastern US
(Nicotiana tabacum) became widely available. The
variety of tobacco cultivated on the coasts of northern
British Columbia and southeast Alaska is now extinct, it
seems, and therefore appears to have been entirely
dependent upon human cultivation. Though tobacco
cultivation was recorded among coastal peoples to the
north and south of us, there is no clear record of tobacco
being grown here on the northern Oregon coast.
Conventional wisdqpi suggests that tobacco was the only
“cultivated” plant on the Northwest coast, even though
many other plants were “cultivated” in a very similar
manner. W hy only tobacco? W ell... significantly,
among all the plants cultivated by the peoples of this
coast, tobacco was the only one familiar to the white
guys of Europe, who stumbled ashore here in the late-
18* century. The rest of the plant communities
mentioned here they interpreted as the natural products
of a pristine wilderness. Never trust conventional
wisdom.
Publications describing Native Americans’ use
of fire in the Northwest have appeared in diverse and
widely-scattered sources. Fortunately, an ambitious and
nice guy named Robert Boyd has done us the service of
bringing many of the classics on the topic together in a
single book, which will be published very soon by the
Oregon State University Press. Looks like it will be a
good book, and I recommend it in advance.
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Art« & C rafi« Period N otecard 8
These 6 motto» were designed for the
Roycroftcrs hy Dard Hunter, whose work
there between 1902 and 1911 helped define
the classic styles of the A rts & Crafts
movement. They are hand printed in two
colors from original plates on an 1889
Chandler & Price letterpress using 1OOZ
recycled, acid-free archival Quality paper.
O n e of each design, blank inside.
Six cards w ith matching envelopes.
Boxed set, $13.00 ppd.
A few plants on this coast were grown in
clearings around village sites, which may have been
cleared by fire originally, but were not burned with any
regularity thereafter. While conducting archaeological
surveys on the west coast of Vancouver Island recently, I
noted that former village sites could be instantly
identified by the clusters of wild crabapple trees (Malus
/used) in clearings around the perimeter of collapsed
rows of longhouses. This tree is not found in such
concentrations anywhere else on the outer coast.
Crabapple was an important source of food and wood;
by some accounts, the peoples of the coast managed
their crabapple trees with the same care that white
settlers managed their orchards of introduced trees. Yet
the natural distribution of crabapple trees is often
diffuse, and relegated to drier locations inland from the
sea. The pattern which I saw was not natural. Crabapple
trees were either intentionally planted close to villages,
or were accidentally seeded on piles of household refuse.
Tobacco (Nicotiana quadrivalis) was grown by
native peoples along much of the coast; George
Vancouver, one of the first Europeans to observe this
practice, noted that tobacco was planted “in square
patches of ground,” and fertilized with piles of compost.
This, too, was a plant from the drier interior brought to
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