Closed Captions Audio Described

Mike Lyall (Cowlitz) traces his nation's history from pre-contact times through the Lewis and Clark expedition and devastating disease epidemics. He discusses Cowlitz territory, trade networks, food sources like wapato and pounded salmon, sophisticated canoe technology, and the population collapse from disease. Lyall also describes contemporary Cowlitz efforts in environmental restoration, fish passage, and community health services.

Transcript

0:05 Yeah.
0:07 Well, good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Tent of Many Voices. Core Discovery Two. I've encouraged you folks to come on in and join us for just about to get started with the program. So you're right on time and Core Discovery two is a national traveling exhibit. It's a multi-agency Federal exhibit. The National Park Service being the lead agency.
0:33 His exhibits been traveling since January of 2003 will continue to travel through September of this year 2006 during the four years of the bicentennial of that Lewis and Clark expedition. What we do here in the tent of many voices is we bring in a wide variety of presenters to share with us
0:58 different perspectives and different aspects of that Lewis and Clark expedition. But also to talk about the history and culture of all those American Indian nations, the Lewis and Clark are traveling into their homelands and we have with us today, Mike Lyall who's Cowlitz he's gonna talk about
1:21 Cowlitz history and culture before and after Lewis and Clark. So let's give Mike a warm welcome here to the tent of many voices.
1:32 Hi there. My name is Mike Lyall, I uh want to start out with, uh we're gonna use this map and see where my pointer is. That area right there is Rupert Lund
1:49 Canadians think of it as something else, but its historic name is Rupert Lund. And we are right here in the Columbia Department of Rupert Lund. Now, later on, it would become Oregon and Oregon actually started a
2:14 whole lot farther east than it does today and it ran from Russian America. Clear down to Spanish America, Oregon used to be a whole lot bigger place than it is today. So once upon a time, we were subjects of his Royal Majesty King George. When we were here, we were in British territory
2:39 when it was Rupert lund. And uh that's really important because uh
2:46 there was a young Lieutenant Broughton, came up here, came up the river and went up as far about as modern camp modern Bonneville and Broughton in 17 nineties, the Brits had a map in 1794. Significance of that is, is 10 years before Lewis and Clark got here. The English had mapped the Columbia river
3:12 up to Bonneville. And uh the importance of that map is that in later days, in the 18 twenties,
3:25 Governor Simpson, the governor of all of Rupert Lund North America said that Scanewa were the Cowlitz chief whose track runs from off the Puget Sound and strikes the Columbia near to point Bellevue Simpson knew exactly what he was talking about, he had a map, he had a map that was first drawn in 1794 and was later revised up to 1814, I believe.
3:50 And so, uh for those of you that don't know, Point Bellevue is the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, the upstream bank. So that's the before Lewis and Clark, Lewis and Clark. When they came through here, we're not sure they ever met us. They heard about us
4:14 and they kept saying we hear they're numerous, we hear they're numerous and they called us Alu Atel And we lived across the Columbia here on the Lewis River and we lived on the Cowlitz River as well. And later on, as I said, Governor Simpson would say the Cowlitz chief lived from Olympia to Portland.
4:38 And so we had a huge area and once upon a time, we were very many uh populations are based on our estimates. They run as high as 30,000 to as low as 10,000. And the importance of that is, is that when you come down the Columbia River valley,
5:01 you know, and you leave the gorge to the Columbia, there wasn't 10,000 other people here. So we were at our smallest equal to all the other tribes combined along the Columbia at our largest, we were three times as many. And uh so that's a little bit about it. Now, Lewis and Clark, when they came through here,
5:26 they called us Halu Atel and Kalisik and Kaliski. And it's really important when you study this stuff to understand that the closest we get to exact pronunciations is a near miss. The Europeans couldn't pronounce the Indian phonetics and the Indians couldn't pronounce the European phonetics. So they would try as they might.
5:51 And they only got to a near miss, they never got it dead on. And then you got helpful people like Captain Clark. Now I wrote a paper about 3, 4 years ago and my wife was a trained secretary and she went through and I had taken all these direct quotes out of the journals
6:15 and she went through and corrected all these misspellings. And she said, Mike, this is junk. You didn't spell any of it the same twice in the, in the same sentence, it's misspelled over and over. I said, yeah, that's Clark. And so she had to go back and change it because I joke Clark couldn't spell cat
6:40 twice in the same sentence, but that was Clark. And so a lot of times people are going to try and split hairs and see who was here and who wasn't. And unfortunately, in some cases, it's not really clear. Uh I can tell you that I've done a lot of intensive research
7:02 and the people that lived across the river were called the Catapolan Nation. And all I can tell you is it's not clear who the cat Pola Nation was. Uh they're called Chinooks, but Chinook in the terms of an educator means literally someone that lived in this Columbia River Valley,
7:28 that means someone that spoke the languages of the Columbia River Valley. And it means
7:35 more than anything local Indian. And when you try and find what was the language of the people of Cata pole you can't find that you can't find how many people were there. It's gone. You can't find where they went. You can find later on that the Cowlitz people
7:59 lived at at in the plank houses at Khao. We know that our traditions here in the Columbia Valley were that you could not marry inside your your village. You had to marry outside your village. So you married your neighbors and the closer you were to your neighbors, the more of those neighbors you would be married with. In other words,
8:23 we, we would marry people that were two miles away, five miles away, but we still married people further away, but just not as often. Uh One of our uh chiefs, Chief Scanewa married the daughter of the Chinook chief Tahcum Stockum. Their son was Antoine Stockham.
8:48 Kwin Stockham was a Cowlitz chief. He was appointed, he was chief by birth, but he was appointed chief by Lieutenant Ulysses Graham. So we married people 100 hundreds of miles away. But we also married more often people much closer. So that was us and Lewis and Clark in
9:11 pretty much a little bit of where we lived now we had, here's a bit better detail map of Washington. You start on the Cascade Crest and you go down Skookumchuck Drainage Drainage, which uh today it's in, in modern central Washington. And then we go out here to Raymond
9:36 and then down the Willa Hills to modern Stella and then back up the Columbia River to the uh origin again on the Cascade Crest. It's a pretty big area and it's only this last few weeks that I've actually got to the point where I can take it out of the speculation stage. I believe the cowlitz were a closed society. I, I don't think that
10:01 it was kind of unique in the northwest. Uh Strangers were allowed in on trade routes. They weren't allowed off the trade routes because what does Halu atel mean
10:18 Halu Atel means strange place. The Halu Atel lived on Kawana, heoks
10:28 place of the enemy. That's what they call Lewis River. So that and then later on in the 18 fifties, some of our tight upon people, the Hampton speakers would come out of the woods in the 18 fifties to see their first white man. 50 years after Lewis and Clark, some of our people had not seen a white man
10:54 and it, it, it's kind of a, I I'm not able to prove it yet, but I think it is when you consider the speculation, it's reasonable speculation that we were a closed society. We were 30,000 people we were multiples of, of all the other tribes combined and we left almost no trace are uh uh
11:18 our populations were destroyed by the waves of diseases. After Lewis and Clark left, the fur traders came and the diseases just came in waves. And the Bay Company people would write down that three and four fell 75%. They know this, this trip,
11:43 the disease came back three and four again, 75% of the of what was left. And then again and again and again, and this went on for about 40 years and had 30,000 people became 200. So literally, depending on the numbers, you picked, one, maybe 2% of our people survived. And
12:08 I'm part of those people and they're still here. So that was our experience with the fur, the beginning of the fur trade. Now we had long time trade alliances and these were very, very important because for our history,
12:32 when Governor Simpson wanted to uh go up to the northern portion of Oregon where we would call it Canada. Today at the uh Fort Langley in the Fraser River, he took an influential man up there to help establish a trading post. He took the Cowlitz chief Scanewa,
12:53 the Scanewa was still a man of influence that far away from home. And uh that's written up in the Mor mclaughlin's Fort Langley journals as I speak and I'm not gonna give you footnotes, but I will try and give you interesting books to, to look into and to read about the Cowlitz. Another really good book is uh Doctor Verne Ray's Cowlitz
13:16 handbook written in 1966. And Dr Ray is really important to us because it's his work that helped get us recognized. And Doctor Ray is uh credited with founding the School of Anthropology at the University of Washington. So he, he's a very important guy to us, but that, that shows how to trade. Now,
13:41 remember Simpson controlled all of this, all of Portland. And
13:48 what we got from Canada in trade was the D Talum shell from Northern Vancouver Island up in here. Now that Detalium shell came down the inner corridor, down the puget Sound up to Columbia. And when you go to South Dakota in the Sioux Museum in Chamberlain, South Dakota, there are spiral flute in Dentalium that come from the only one place in the world.
14:13 Queen Charlotte and, and Nunka up on the northern end of Vancouver Island. And those shells came down that trade corridor through Fort Vancouver before it was Vancouver and up to Columbia and out to the rest of the world. Now, I know that uh I think I can show that trade was here
14:38 long before Lewis and Clark. When Lewis and Clark came by uh Fort Vancouver, they saw people standing on the river banks wearing sailor clothes, carrying pistols, carrying rifles. We had the Russian rifle. It was a better gun than the Americans. American guns broke a lot.
15:00 One of the party in the Lewis and Clark Party, his job was keeping the guns patched. Well, here we had, we had better guns. Uh, what did we trade to get that stuff? Well, we had our dentalium shells and we had something else. We had a couple of really important items. We had camas that grows on prairies
15:25 and
15:28 it, it, it's not widely known now, but it's, it's being well documented that the Indians were doing prescribed burns long before Lewis and Clark got here when you see a prairie. Anywhere around here, it is probably not a natural landform. The prairies in most of this place are signs of human occupants. So,
15:52 and I actually, because I work on a lot of environmental issues, I point out that trees in the mountain meadows are an encroaching species because the tribal people went up there and burned the trees. They burned it almost every two or three years. And so that the berry crops would stay good. And one of the things that happens is when there's a burn down on the prairies,
16:16 the camas regenerates real quickly. And I know that these burns were frequent because our war was at the height of the flames. You could step over the fire. You didn't have to outrun the fire because they burn so often you could just step over it. It wasn't an issue and
16:39 there's a, another really good book. It's by a guy by the name of James Swan. It's called the Northwest Coast. And in that book, you want to just read the whole thing cover to cover because he was a early uh pioneer out here in the 18 fifties. And uh he was among other things,
17:01 a drunkard and a bum. But he also before he was that he was Governor Stevens personal secretary. So if you want an insider's view of the Stevens Treaty Councils, what happened behind the scenes,
17:18 travel with, with James Swan and Michael T Simmons and the Indian agent Lansford, the agent. Uh,
17:31 no, I missed his name. But anyway, uh he James Swan will take you on these journeys and it's a really neat book and in the back of the book you read, read through the part that you normally wouldn't read. And there's a letter from George Gibbs and George Gibbs was uh Steven's ethnographer
17:56 and it's Gibbs work that is today the most quoted and Gibbs was brigadier general in the territorial army appointed general by Governor Stevens. And in the back of that, there is a, uh a letter from Gibbs to Swan that a friend of ours, uh
18:18 a researcher by the name of Dr Stephen Dal Beckham, who's a professor at Lewis and Clark College who did his doctoral dissertation on Gibbs.
18:30 Steve had never heard of that letter because the letter was a personal letter to Swan. So it's not in the national archives. But you can see it in the back of the book and it talks about why the war, the Indians went to war, why who lived where all of that is in that book? It's a really neat source. So now I've got to get back on to uh
18:55 what did we eat? And what did we trade? We traded camas we traded something even more valuable. We traded. Wapato. Wapato is a little bulb like fruit, uh vegetable and it's only place it grows is out of the Columbia River valley
19:16 just as it comes out of the, the, the, the gorge and downstream to a point where the water gets too salty and it's too tidal. Stop. What are you coming?
19:29 Wapato doesn't grow much farther than that. And people would trade anything for Wapato. It was really, it was a really desired food. The other thing we have to trade, we traded salmon, we traded smelt and what did we get? Well, we would trade with the people that lived on the coast
19:53 and we would get clams and oysters from the coast. So we could trade them Wapato, we could trade them canvas, we could trade them salmon. And we had a another unique food source that was again from the Columbia Valley really just from the gorge down to about Wahkiakum for some reason, nobody else
20:16 processed it upstream or downstream. And that was the pounded salmon. Now, Lewis and Clark bach, pounded salmon. And what was pounded salmon? Will you take smoked and dried salmon and you process it another step further and, and they pound it and put it into bricks
20:37 and these were fairly large bricks. Some of them would weigh as much as 90 pounds and I'm still chasing down the stuff on this one. It's my belief that it's spring now. So this time of year it would be when we would make our pounded salmon. Last year's leftover, smoked salmon would become this year's pounded salmon
21:02 and it was your emergency food supply. If something failed. If the weather changed, if the salmon run was small, if the smelt run was small, if you had bad luck hunting, you could go get that pound of salmon. And Lewis and Clark bought that pound of salmon. They bought smelt, they bought, uh,
21:25 salmon, they bought elk, they bought all of that from us. And it's kind of interesting though
21:34 today, we think that in the old days, uh, communications weren't that good. Well, Lewis and Clark would hit the falls. The tribal people were on the banks there ready to watch the show because you saw the, the canoes out there. There's a writer by the name of Rex Zeke
21:56 and Rex Zeke really drilled it. He hit the nail on the head to describe the Lewis and Clark canoe. Call them Fred Flintstone boats out here. The Indians canoes were the formula one race cars those canoes, the canoes were so finely built Lewis and Clark said the sunlight would shine through them.
22:22 Some of these canoes would haul 40 men. The other thing they would haul. And I had to read this about three or four times before I got to where I could accept it. The bay company would order horses from the Cowlitz because we had more horses than any people in the area. And so when they were building Fort George, which today is Astoria,
22:48 they went up to Wahkiakum and they talked to the Cowlitz chief and ordered two horses. Cowlitz chief said, ok, so he puts an order in our version of UPS. They put two horses in canoes and brought him down the Columbia river to Wahkiakum You can only imagine a canoe with a horse
23:13 going by. Ok.
23:18 Really good canoe, men, really good boatmen and one really tame horse. So then they get the horse to Wahkiakum
23:30 And these two horses go across the Columbia river to Fort George where the horses stand patiently, harnesses are made for him. And within the week of placing the order, the horses are working as draft animals building Fort George and that's canoes. We had both fast and light canoes. We had 40 man war canoes where
23:56 there's a story about the Cowlitz getting in a battle with this one chief. And before the morning was out, we had 400 men there. It was a small party. Originally, there was only 100 guys that were going hunting up the Willamette River. Uh The fur trader, Alexander Henry said the Cowlitz were gathered on the banks of the Columbia to go hunting up the Willamette
24:20 for the summer as they usually do. And interestingly enough, the guy we were fighting, he had a tiny little village nearby and he's the only one that had guns. We didn't have guns. We had boats because we were hunting. Guns are for war. And combat out here was unique
24:45 when we would have a war, they would stand back at maximum range and fire their bows and arrows. And after a while, someone might be hurt
24:57 and then they would call a truce and they would discuss it has honor, been satisfied. If so, the guilty parties would make their apologies, make gifts. The war is over. We had one man wars sometimes, you know, there might not even be a, you know, a single fatality in the war. Well, this poor chief that's shooting at the Cowlitz
25:21 He's the only one in the battle with guns,
25:25 but he can't shoot the Cowlitz because they out number him. I think his tribe that, his village was like 70 people. He's picking on 30,000 all at once with 70
25:39 So he has to shoot near him and not hurt him
25:44 anyway, at the end of the day, they were able to sit down and talk it over and no one was hurt. And uh the chief with the guns was able to buy back one of his slaves who was taken in combat. And uh the war was over. But that was our wars. We had unique, different wars. Culture was really strong here.
26:09 Uh People, there was no consideration that you could just go stand in the face of a chief or, you know, today we have this idea of civil descent, you know, didn't exist culture, the the binds of culture were so strong, the thought wouldn't have come up to you. So
26:30 now I've got to talk about uh I talked about a little bit about what we ate where we lived and I touched a little bit on what happened to us. The diseases came through. But our survivors,
26:45 we're traveling all over my own great grandfather was a uh a missionary and the head of the Indian Shaker church. His name was Ma man, but he was also called Ayah Hawa. Lower your wallet, your la
27:05 and Lyall I am went to a so samalish ceremony in Central Oregon and Washington.
27:18 And he took, he went back reported that ceremony, John Slocum took that ceremony and made that ceremony, the Indian shaker church,
27:34 the Indian Shaker church. Then they returned back to Eastern Oregon in a pipe by the name of Avoca. Attended that ceremony in Eastern Oregon.
27:48 That pilot took that ceremony to Sioux country, not in here and that shaker ceremony morphed and became the Ghost dance religion. And that's in Mooney's book, The Ghost Dance Religion and Sitting Bull. So we Cowlitz actually had a tiny little touch in s Ball's life
28:13 from Western Washington up here in the northwest. And my daughter teaches in college and one of the professors she's teaching with is going to write a book on Prett Trade here in North America. And I told her, I said, well, that's a really neat book for you to read. Mooney thought he was reading or studying religion.
28:40 He is wrong. He talked about religion, but he was showing us the old trade routes how people could travel from western Washington up to Columbia to central Oregon, back to western Washington, back through Central Oregon and out to the Dakotas. Mooney didn't realize that he thought he was talking about religion,
29:02 title of his books about religion. But in reality, he was showing us the trade routes and this was in the 18 nineties, after 98% of our people had disappeared. And the, the, the decimation wasn't exclusive to just calls. A lot of the tribal people had that kind of numbers taken down. And so after all of the culture is gone,
29:26 the few people that are left still respected the, the old traditions so very well that, that religion could travel just like I said, in just a relatively short time. And, and that's what we saw And in the 18 fifties, the kits started their fight for recognition and that was by Antoine Stockham
29:52 at Stockham. Had a uh uh a nephew who was my grandfather, Frank, I
30:00 took over the fight for callous recognition in the early 19 hundreds and Frank helped write and pass the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. And uh he continued to work out the rest of his life for K's Rights and he died in the 19 thirties and in Washington State Indians weren't given the right to vote until after the 19 forties.
30:25 So the guy that passed the Citizenship Act never got to vote as an Indian. But uh then in 2002, we did finally get the recognition. And I, I think uh to the people that, that have worked against us in different issues, you know, you need to know that it took
30:48 four generations in 150 years for us to finish something, but we don't quit. You know, I, I've got, I've got kids, I've got grandchildren, you know, projects that I start. If I don't finish them, I'm not worried about it. Somebody else will take it over.
31:05 But, uh and so that comes on to my next project. Next thing I wanna talk about is who are we? And what are we doing today? Well, we're working on the environment for one, I'm Director of Natural Resources. Uh We're working on fish passage on the Lewis River on the Kitz River. We're uh trying to get a grant to do studies on the smelt.
31:29 Uh The smell may be a fish that will go from uh once harvested at the point of disinterest to extinct. Uh We're, we're starting to find somebody last year for the State Washington State Department of the Game did uh DNA testing and they found that the cow
31:52 river smelt are as genetically unique from the main channel. Columbia smelt as the main channel. Columbia smelt is from the Fraser river smelt. So we're dealing with incredibly tiny fragile populations and I think it's only just this week that the uh smell are starting to come back to the College River. Uh And
32:16 why is that important? Well, the smelter, tiny little fish, they can't dig a nest in the river bottom. They have to spawn between the rocks, they call it the substrate. So the smelt need a river that's free of silt and good smelt habitat is tremendous salmon habitat.
32:38 And for those of you that live in flood prone areas, it's good flood control because if the river bottom is nothing but bare rocks, it's not full of mud. And in the case of the Colt River, the uh north fork of the Toodle, the result of the Mount Saint Helens eruption is depositing according to the Corps of Engineers, figures approximately six inches of silt
33:03 per year on the length of the college river. And that would be one thing if it were smoothly applied, like a nice uniform coat coat of paint. But the reality is it's not, it gathers in sand bars. There's some places where there's lots, there's some places where there's not so much. And when you go across the river to the town of Longview, Kelso,
33:28 you see dikes build up and there's talk now of making the dikes higher, got to make the dikes higher because the river is filling up.
33:38 Sooner or later you end up with an elevated river. You have a river above the town. What do you do when you have that big nine point something or other earthquake that's going to happen here and cause us lique fraction. That's where the mud and the water just become liquid and just go to silly putty and everything goes away.
34:00 Long UK is gonna get really, really wet. So we're working to, to control sediment. We're working to, uh, when, when we, when we control that sediment, we get three bangs for the buck, we get smelt, we'll get salmon and we get flood control. That's some of what we're doing. We're working on, uh,
34:25 habitat protection for salmon, for elk, for deer. Uh We're working to establish health care for our people, uh, because we used to live in such a huge area. Our tiny remnant population, we're only 3500 today is scattered all over northern Oregon and western Washington. Uh, so for instance, at our, uh, senior nutrition centers,
34:51 they are open to the neighbors. When you go to Toledo, if you're over 60 you go in on our, the, the days that we have, uh, senior nutrition you can eat for free. You don't have to be a tribal member. Uh, some days, a lot of the people that eat, there are just neighbors
35:12 are Indian health care centers because we don't have enough people are open to any Indian people. We're actually working on one health care center where when we get the proper paperwork, it will probably be open to all low income people. Uh, those are things that we're doing. And, uh, so that's,
35:35 that's where we were, that's, uh, where we are and that's where we're going. So, with that, if anybody has any questions, I'd be happy to answer it.
35:47 Yes, I got two questions. Uh,
35:54 some time ago I read a
35:59 diary of a lady that came over the trail and, uh, she said that when, uh,
36:06 somebody got sick, the neighbors all went over to visit.
36:12 I don't know if they were concerned, hoping to make them feel better and they didn't know it then that's how disease got spread around when they went to visit a sick person that they were inoculated also. Um, would that,
36:29 did the Indians do the same thing or would that account for the Indians decimation? Uh, in part, probably because the medicine man would, would come and pray over the, the sick person. But also there was an American captain that just about made this part of Canada forever a captain by the name of Damis that said that he had released the contagion.
36:55 He told the people if you don't behave, I'll release it again. And then another uh trader at Fort George Duncan macDougall made the same threat. We've turned this disease loose on you and if you don't behave, we'll turn the disease loose again. We know that uh the Brits back back east in the colonial area,
37:19 intentionally distributed contaminated blankets. Uh Here were they, was it intentionally done? I don't know, I know that it was, they took credit for it even if they didn't do it. So, uh yeah, the other thing was is that these are diseases that we had no uh immun
37:43 immunity to it all. Um One of them was malaria. They think that the malaria mosquitoes came over in the water casks of the ships and the ships would uh put in, in the South America and the different areas around the world to pick up fresh water. And they think that that's where malaria come from
38:06 and malaria came up here and it was called intermittent fever. And there was a really neat guy by the name of, to me, Doctor Tome of the Bay Company. And he figured out a way to take a tree bark and make quinine because I had figured it all out. I had it all thought out because I'm descended from, you know Cowlitz Chief Scanewa, and I knew that sons and daughters of chiefs intermarried other sons and daughters of chiefs
38:26 and so I thought wow I got a broader gene pool. Thats why I survived and I talked to the author Dr. Robert Boyd and told him that and he laughed and
38:55 he said Europeans exposed to this died. your family had access to quinine. And later on, I found out that the quinine was through. This doctor told me. And so that was the only thing that they, they were ever, as far as I know, that was the only disease they were ever able to control. But we had no immunity to these diseases. And
39:17 so stuff that today you would laugh off or take two days off of work, kill people when Lewis and Clark came through here when they went up to the Willamette and they could smell the death of an entire village in the main channel. The Columbia people died right where they fell, nobody was buried.
39:40 They just died as though it was one big bold lightning strike. People died so fast, so quick, they couldn't do anything with them. So any other questions,
39:52 unfortunately, I can understand what happened to your people due to disease in the past. I'm curious as to why your population is not any larger than it, is today. Is it because of illness yet, or is it because people are marrying and moving away or do you know why it is not growing at a faster rate? Uh, probably all of those, uh, in part, a lot of our people have moved away
40:17 and in part, uh, you're looking at literally only one or 2% of our, our original population. Uh, we were marrying out and, uh, many of the people as they move out, uh, never come back.
40:40 Um, Indians often like to talk about wishing it was like it was 100 years ago or 200 years ago. Uh, 200 years ago, Saint Helens, uh, silted the Cowlitz, how would the Indians have handled it? How would that impact the smelt Cowlitz smelt?
40:58 Well, a couple of 100 years ago, we didn't have a structure on the Cowlitz. It's called the SRS, the sediment retention structure that the corps of engineers put in for the price of a couple billion bucks. And, uh, at that time, I don't think they had ever had an eruption so severe, but the presence of the SRS has allowed the sediment to bleed out
41:21 and it will continue to bleed out if we aren't able to control it for the, the lifetime of our grandchildren, it will be bleeding out for 100 or more years. Now, that eruption was so severe that it may have had salmon out of the Cowlitz and Toutle drainages for four or 500 years.
41:44 But the salmon stocks were so much healthier 500 years ago, 200 years ago than they are today, that remnant stocks from other drainages could repopulate it. But just as the tribal people are a few percent of what used to be, the salmon are a few percent of what used to be. And it's unlikely that
42:07 if we don't control the salmon, it's quite likely the salmon will go extinct with the smelt has become a, uh, that specific population may have disappeared, but it would have been repopulated by other healthier stocks that were unharmed.
42:25 Any other questions?
42:28 All right. Thank you very much.

Tent of Many Voices

Mike Lyall on Cowlitz history, trade, and survival

Mike Lyall

Cowlitz

43:05

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Mike Lyall on Cowlitz history, trade, and survival

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