This is a much-needed history of the long struggle to save one of the last unspoiled river deltas on the west coast. First, though, before engaging in this epic story, take a moment to gaze at the image of the delta that graces the book’s cover. In the hazy distance are the Cascades, crowned by Mount Rainier, the birthplace of this river. From its glaciated heights the Nisqually River begins as melting water seeping from the accumulated ice, gathering force as it winds the miles down the mountain and through forests and clearings until it reaches Puget Sound, where it spreads out to mingle with its salt water. The journey marries the snow and rocks with the evergreen forests, the haunts of elk and deer, with salmon and birds and other creatures, as well as the people who have made this their home for millennia. The delta itself supports a different mix of life forms: from tiny sea creatures and crustaceans, to salmon early and late in their life phases, to the millions of waterfowl and other birds, seasonally during migration or year-round, from eagles to hummingbirds. Let’s keep all this life and activity in mind as the vision driving the work of so many to conserve this vital place.
The book begins with a dedication to children, grandchildren, and future generations as it should; this is a work not just for now, but for ages to come, to keep up the quest to restore and save this special place. Also, appropriately, Daniel Evans contributed a Foreword; for without his direction and vision as Governor during some of the most crucial years of this history, the conservation campaign would have lacked the tools and institutional support so critical for their successes. There is also an important note honoring the work of Billy Frank Jr. and the Nisqually people who have cared for the river for as long as they have drawn their lives from its course. Gates also gives us a quick history leading up to the modern industrial threats to the Delta.
The threats were legion. It began slowly, with dikes to hold back salt water so the land could be farmed by the enterprising Alson Brown. There was the gun powder plant built by the DuPont Company with its townsite for employees and railroad tracks to deliver its product to a wharf for shipment years before the World War made use of its dynamite beyond what lumbermen used in their struggle with the giant trees. When the sprawling Brown farm faltered, the local ports of Olympia and Tacoma began to envision various schemes for using the area for industrial development. Grandiose visions, ranging from dredging and building huge modern facilities needed to support international trade, to providing accommodation for the growing trash piles of Seattle, animated port officials. Having been created in the 1920s as economic drivers for their districts, the ports saw the Delta as the best location for whatever enterprise best captured their go-ahead mandate. The notion for a deep water super port designed for the new gigantic ships coming online was the most alluring. And alarming.
Gates chronicles the first uprisings against this industrial vision of dredging and filling the waters currently host to thousands of ducks and other waterfowl. Del McBride, descendent of Hudson Bay traders and local tribal people, talented artist, and soon to be curator at the State Capital Museum, alerted his friend Margaret McKenny about a meeting where the Tacoma Port officials were to announce their plans for development of the Delta. McKenny was already a veteran crusader against various attacks on local forests and parklands by unthinking officials and was well known in Olympia society. She was strategically placed as founder and president of Olympia Audubon Society and an active member of the Olympia Garden Club, among other interests. She knew “everybody” and had phone lists to prove it. The meeting room was shockingly crowded and almost unanimously against Port plans.
And so it began. Unfortunately, McKenny was already elderly by these mid-1960 years, but she had a very good friend, Flo Brodie, who was just as earnest and versed in campaign know-how. When McKenny died, Brodie stepped up and organized. She and others launched the Nisqually Delta Association, run out of her house where she kept a vital piece of equipment—a copy machine—pumping out letters and bulletins to build a movement to save the Delta. Remember, this was the era of the telephone and typewriter, when letters were written by hand and sent through the Post Office. The newly fledged group pushed back on the Port plans, and then again on Weyerhaeuser’s ideas for log exports, giant real estate schemes, and other developments, then, yet again, against plans hatched by Lone Star for gravel mining and other industrial activities. The struggle to save the delta for the ducks took persistence, talent, and dedication to keep going, whatever was thrown at the movement.
Olympia Audubon—soon to reorganize as Black Hills Audubon, teamed with the newly formed Tahoma Audubon and joined with many others alarmed by the possible destruction of a cherished place, fought, fundraised, and showed up again and again. The list of energetic, talented, dedicated and feisty people who fought forces much bigger than they were is amply documented by Gates. She helps us remember the names and deeds of the many who dedicated themselves to the cause. Black Hills Audubon as an organization and several individual members such as Ada and Jack Davis, with Helen Engle of Tahoma were early standout leaders of the effort. State officials, led by Governor Evans, legislators such as William Chatalas, who sponsored the Nisqually Delta Preservation Act that envisioned the delta as a wildlife refuge, and agencies such as the State Game department which bought up land to preserve it in safe hands, and all who passed the Shoreline Management Act, made conservation possible. Individuals such as Bruce Fortune, Jennifer Belcher, Karen Fraser, three generations of the Hedrick family, journalist Mike Layton who broke some of the earliest stories and continued to cover the news of the delta, and so many other stalwart friends of Nisqually are part of the story detailed in Gates’ book.
It’s a thrilling read and a sober one. The most powerful sentence she writes is a warning and a call for more and sustained dedication: “Today, the Nisqually Delta is still at risk.” This book should be added to everyone’s toolkit in the long and continuing struggle to save the delta. For the ducks, for all of us.
Anne Kilgannon is a local and state historian and member of the South Sound Bird Alliance
To purchase the book, follow this link
https://www.savingnisquallydelta.com/where-to-purchase
You can find information about a December 4 presentation and slideshow about the book by author Janine Gates at this link
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