Shoalwater Bay in southwest Washington was a natural haven for the Olympia oyster. For many generations the Lower Chinook, Lower Chehalis, and Willapa people sustained themselves on Shoalwater Bay\u2019s bounteous shellfish, salmon, shorebird, seabird, and cedar tree resources.<\/p>\n
Their lives changed dramatically with the appearance of the first European fur traders and the epidemic diseases they carried. By 1852, when James Gilchrist Swan compiled the notes for his now classic personal chronicle, Three Years at Shoal-Water Bay<\/em>, Swan estimated that there were little over one hundred Chinook people\u2014a tenth of the estimated peak population in precontact times.<\/p>\n Native American woman harvests shellfish in Mud Bay, WA. Taken in 1905, using a first-generation Kodak camera. Photo courtesy of the Alaska State Archives, Office of the Governor, Judge James Wickersham.<\/p><\/div>\n At the same time, the Chinook and Chehalis people remained a political force. In 1855, Washington territorial governor Isaac Stevens proposed a treaty in which multiple tribes in the region\u2014including the Chinook and Upper and Lower Chehalis\u2014would relocate to a reservation in the Quinault Indian Nation\u2019s territory. The Native Americans living at Shoalwater Bay refused. In 1866, descendants of Chinook, Lower Chehalis, and Willapa people formed the Shoalwater Bay Tribe through President Andrew Johnson\u2019s executive order that set aside a 355-acre piece of land for them. (By comparison, through the Homestead Act of 1862, the United States granted a married couple of US citizens the right to claim 320 acres.) \u201cThis reservation was set aside with the intent that these last holdouts would have their own reserved land for fishing, shellfish harvesting, and hunting,\u201d the Shoalwater Bay Tribe explains on their website. \u201cThis part of Willapa Bay has sustained our ancestors since the beginning. It continues to sustain our people and enables us to reach out to the greater community.\u201d<\/p>\n The early white settlers were drawn to the unbelievable natural abundance of Shoalwater\u2019s shores. Captain Charles J. W. Russell was among them. In 1850 he built the first European-style house in the region, from which he ran a trading post\u2014an indispensable outlet for his fellow pioneers, most of whom lived in lean-tos of rough-hewn timber roofed with sailcloth. Russell lived near Chief Toke, a leader of the local Chinook and Chehalis people, and began to employ many of his Indigenous neighbors in gathering oysters.<\/p>\n In 1851, Russell traveled to San Francisco, where he introduced the first sacks of Shoalwater\u2019s Olympia oysters to the city\u2019s shellfish merchants. San Francisco had gone from a tiny hamlet to a major metropolis of 30,000 people seemingly overnight thanks to the Gold Rush. The oyster was a symbol of wealth and status in the city, and demand was huge. However, overharvesting and poor management had left the city\u2019s oysters in desperately short supply. Russell was happy to flood the city with Northwest oysters, and in the process, launched one of the more lucrative ventures of the nineteenth-century Northwest.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Russell\u2019s sacks represented the tip of an oyster iceberg. Over the years a virtual flotilla of schooners arrived at Shoalwater Bay, brought aboard bushels of wild-harvested oysters, and then made haste for San Francisco, where jubilant diners awaited. The Pacific Northwest oyster industry exploded. At one point the town of Oysterville on Long Beach peninsula possessed more gold per capita than any other town or city along the Pacific coast, with the sole exception of San Francisco. According to local lore, the nearest bank was in Astoria, Oregon, so much of the gold was either lost in transit or buried in the sand around Oysterville. Despite numerous treasure hunters\u2019 attempts, no such wealth has ever been recovered.<\/p>\n After the collapse of their oyster industry, California needed a way to compete with the Northwest\u2019s abundant beds. They found it in the Eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica<\/em>), which they began importing from the East Coast. After a rocky start, the industry grew exponentially. The popularity of the Eastern oyster caused the price of Northwest oysters\u2014now called \u201cOlympias\u201d\u2014to collapse, and Washington\u2019s oyster farm owners found themselves in dire financial straits. By the mid-1870s the price of \u201cOlys\u201d had dipped to a mere four dollars a sack. Ten years later, the same sack fetched $2.50\u2014about half the price paid for the esteemed Easterns. The once-lucrative Olympia oyster industry was now as lifeless as a sun-bleached oyster shell.<\/p>\n ****<\/p>\n To save itself, Washington\u2019s oyster industry looked east as well. After years of waiting for the transcontinental railroad to allow Eastern oysters to be imported to the Northwest (San Francisco had the advantage of connecting to the railroad decades before), the first batches of Eastern oysters arrived in the Northwest in the late 1800s.<\/p>\n Rearing Eastern oysters in Washington turned out to be a cinch\u2014or so it seemed. One only needed to buy baby oysters from afar, plant them, and wait for the comestibles to come of age. Within a decade, the Washington business in Eastern oysters had burgeoned into an enterprise valued at around $1 million and employing several hundred individuals. Production figures steadily climbed from about four thousand gallons of meat in 1902 to twenty thousand gallons in 1908.<\/p>\n Northwest shucking houses were hubs of activity in the 1800s. Carved into the back wall of this Oregon facility are the words \u201cOysterville\u201d and \u201cSan Francisco,\u201d plus the initials of shuckers who worked at this place. Photo courtesy of Oregon Historical Society, Gi 7203.<\/p><\/div>\n Along with Eastern oyster culture came an existence inspired in large part by life on the Atlantic coast. The shift from a purely extractive industry, one where Olympia oysters were simply plucked from their natural habitats, to one of planting and harvesting from well-tended beds, required oyster workers to keep in closer proximity to their intertidal and subtidal holdings. Growers built one- and two-story homes on pilings, clustering what were known as \u201cstation houses\u201d near the most productive beds. As many as five or six workmen lived in a station at one time.<\/p>\n Some station house residents spent weeks, months, and, in the case of oysterman Richard Murakami, entire years in these outposts. \u201cI was born there [in 1914],\u201d Murakami told an interviewer from the Washington State Oral History Program. \u201cWe didn\u2019t move to land \u2019til I was about five years old.\u201d<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n But in 1919, just a couple decades later, the Northwest\u2019s new venture into farmed oysters suffered a collapse. For some reason, quite possibly related to tides and water temperatures, the expense of harvesting oysters, or a combination of all three, the Northwest\u2019s stocks of Eastern oysters were not reproducing. Harvest and recruitment rates had been nowhere near commensurate.<\/p>\n When a more cost-effective alternative presented itself, Northwest growers leapt at the chance to abandon the Eastern oyster trade altogether. In northern Puget Sound they were hard at work, readying their beds for another imported shellfish, the Pacific oyster (Crassostrea gigas). Hale and hearty, this species had been successfully cultured under similar oceanic and weather conditions for several centuries in Japan. Still, there was reason to believe this foreign marvel might not thrive and multiply in North American seas.<\/p>\n Two entrepreneurs stood ready to accept the challenge. J. Emi Tsukimoto and Joe Miyagi were residents of Olympia, Washington, yet had family ties that extended across the Pacific to the suppliers of Japan\u2019s superior oyster stocks. Both men possessed experience in the shellfish industry, having worked in the shucking house and shellfish beds of the J. J. Brenner Oyster Company.<\/p>\n Tsukimoto and Miyagi had staked out six hundred acres of tideland on Samish Bay, south of Bellingham. With its remaining money, their company\u2014Pearl Oyster Company\u2014bought four hundred cases of Pacific oysters, grown in the Miyagi Prefecture and shipped in early April 1919 from the port of Yokohama in northern Japan. These fine specimens were loaded onto the deck of an American steamship, the President McKinley, covered with a protective layer of Japanese matting and given frequent showers of seawater to keep them fresh throughout the voyage. The well-tended cargo\u2014approximately eight hundred bushels of high-quality shellfish stock\u2014arrived in Seattle eighteen days later. But Pearl Oyster\u2019s people were in for a shock. Many of the larger oysters were dead on arrival. The rest were hastily transplanted to the company\u2019s beds, in the off chance of resuscitation. Any hopes of salvation were soon dashed, however, as these sole survivors slowly perished.<\/p>\n At one point the town of Oysterville on Long Beach peninsula possessed more gold per capita than any other town or city along the Pacific coast, with the sole exception of San Francisco.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As it turned out, however, the experience was not a total loss for Pearl Oyster. Attached to the shells of the recently expired were hundreds of fingernail-sized spat\u2014juvenile oysters that had apparently settled on their parents\u2019 calcareous crags in Japan. Like the mythological phoenix rising from the ashes, these youngsters would eventually grow to adulthood and become the first cash crop of Pacific oysters ever cultivated in the New World.<\/p>\n After two years in the plankton-rich waters of northern Puget Sound, Washington\u2019s Japanese transplants had grown from near-microscopic spat to adult specimens with shells over six inches in length. By one calculation at the time, it would take only 120 of these mega-mollusks to yield a gallon of shucked meat\u2014a twenty-fifth of the Olympia oysters required to produce the same quantity.<\/p>\n The state\u2019s production of oyster meat nearly quintupled in just two years\u2014from 6,500 gallons in 1929 to 31,000 gallons in 1931. But not everyone in the Northwest was as appreciative of the new oyster species as the growers would\u2019ve liked. Pacific oyster grower E. N. Steele found some consumers were reluctant to try something new. As he made the rounds of Seattle-area restaurants and fish markets, he found that each owner had initial objections and, as he put it, \u201chad to be shown that their business would be increased by making the change\u201d from imported Easterns to locally grown Pacific oysters.<\/p>\n Some buyers felt the Pacific oyster\u2019s characteristically dark-rimmed flesh made it appear unappetizing. Steele overcame this prejudice with a snappy advertising campaign. \u201cLook for the oysters with the velvet rim,\u201d his printed advertisements proclaimed. \u201cIt assures you that it is grown in the pure waters of Puget Sound.\u201d<\/p>\n Others were unaccustomed to the new oyster\u2019s large size. Steele won over these skeptics with cooking demonstrations, staged by his brother and sister-in-law with a three-burner electric hot plate. Shoppers were offered fried oysters and shown how to make what Steele called a cracker sandwich. \u201cMany of those who liked the sample would purchase a can of oysters, and were assured that this market would keep a supply for future use,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n Steele\u2019s persuasive presentations and promotional materials worked remarkably well. In one day, workers at the Portland Fish Market sold eighty dollars\u2019 worth of Pacific oysters, at thirty-five cents for a half-pint and sixty-five cents for a pint. Buoyed with optimism, Steel bought a small Dodge truck, fitted it with sleeping quarters for his sales staff, and packed it with advertising materials and painted oyster shells. This oysters-on-wheels operation spread the word about Pacific oysters as far south as San Bernardino, California, and as far east as Salt Lake City.<\/p>\n Other oyster growers followed, literally, in Steele\u2019s salesmen\u2019s footsteps. With massive quantities of Pacific oysters to sell, Willapa\u2019s growers soon dominated the market, unintentionally driving down oyster prices with their surpluses. Although smaller-scale operations such as Steele\u2019s suffered, there was enough business in oysters for everyone to benefit to a degree. No longer viewed with suspicion, the immigrant oyster was now regarded as a \u201cnaturalized\u201d citizen of Northwest shores, one with a solid reputation for conferring wealth on its cultivators. Output skyrocketed over the next ten years, reaching a record 1,131,100 gallons in 1941.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.humanities.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/shellfish_harvest.jpg\")
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