The Pacific Northwest Quotes

“The crisis at Nootka thus sparked the first cabinet-level foreign policy debate in the United States under the new Constitution of 1787.”
― Carlos A. Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History

“Over a three-year period the Chinook population declined to one-tenth its former size, and riverbanks were strewn with the unburied dead. “The depopulation here has been truly fearful,” observed the physician John Kirk Townsend in his eyewitness account of the lower Columbia River in 1834. “A”
― Carlos A. Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History

“That Euro-Americans ultimately prevailed over Indians was less a matter of warfare than of disease. It was neither the guns of the whites nor their whiskey that really decimated the Indian population, but their germs. Violent”
― Carlos A. Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History

“Once it was believed that the Coast culture was essentially an extension of that of Asia. Anthropologists now argue that it was derived from that of ancient Eskimos and spread through the interior to the coast. Although no definitive answer is yet possible, it has been documented that Indian civilization on Washington’s northwestern coast has existed continuously for nearly six thousand years, and some scholars estimate that human habitation of the Pacific Northwest dates back twelve thousand years.”
― Carlos A. Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History

“An even more important intertribal gathering took place at the Grand Dalles of the Columbia River, the home territory of the Wishrams, Wascos, and other peoples. It was the most important point of contact between Coast and Plateau cultures. Here was the cosmopolitan center of Northwest Indian life, site of great month-long trade fairs analogous to those held in medieval Europe, a time for trading, dancing, ceremonial displays, games, gambling, and even marriages. The”
― Carlos A. Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History

“Few regions of the present United States were more inhospitable to human habitation than the lands of the Great Basin, the high desert country of southern Idaho, eastern Oregon, Nevada, and Utah. Indians of the Great Basin spent much of the year foraging for food in small and dispersed groups, although several families might come together for a communal rabbit drive or to dig for camas bulbs. It was common for Shoshonis to name their subgroups after the food most abundant in their customary dwelling grounds: thus among the Shoshonis were groups whose names translated as “seed eaters,” or “fish eaters,” or “mountain-sheep eaters.”
― Carlos A. Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History

“Because whites only poorly understood that decentralized arrangement, they eventually forced the notion of a single tribal chief upon the Indians. Prior to Euro-American intrusion, the Nez Perces had a permanent governing council, a political organization that could speak for all of them, but they had no head chief empowered to sign away their lands in treaties.”
― Carlos A. Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History

“Canadian missionaries promoted legislation in 1884 that made giving or assisting in a potlatch dance a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in prison. That law remained on the books until 1951.”
― Carlos A. Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History

“It was believed that salmon represented a race of supernatural beings who dwelled in a great house beneath the sea. When a salmon died, its spirit returned to its place of origin, and thus it behooved humans not to offend the salmon people by the careless disposal of their bones. If the bones were properly returned to the water, the being resumed a humanlike form without discomfort and could repeat the trip next season. All”
― Carlos A. Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History

“But life in the Coast culture area was hardly idyllic. Warfare aimed at driving out or exterminating another lineage or family was an established practice in the northern portion of the region. Peoples to the south carried on feuds much more limited in violence and extent. After a successful attack, the northern warriors sometimes beheaded their victims, brought the heads home, and impaled them atop tall poles in front of their villages. Only”
― Carlos A. Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History

“The Coast peoples were hunters and gatherers. The land and sea around them was so rich in food that they did not need to cultivate crops. Their only domesticated animals were dogs, used mainly for deer hunting or for fibers: one woolly breed of dogs was kept in pens and sheared twice a year. Anthropologists once considered cultures so heavily dependent upon naturally occurring products for their sustenance to be primitive in comparison to those based on agriculture, yet therein lay an anomaly. The environment yielded such a surplus of natural resources that Coast Indians had no trouble feeding themselves and finding enough leisure time to improve and elaborate their material culture and to conduct a lively trade. At the same time they developed a highly stratified and class-conscious social structure atypical of other North American maritime hunting and gathering groups.”
― Carlos A. Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History

“A popular quip in geographically divided Idaho is that the state has three capitals: Spokane for the northern half,”
― Carlos A. Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History