A hulking, sienna-colored rust skeleton, encrusted with barnacles, rests just along the seashore on the Northwest Oregon Coast.
This is the Peter Iredale. It wrecked here more than a century ago on Oct. 25, 1906.
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Tourists play on the rusted ship near Astoria. Dogs strain against their leashes to get a deep-salty whiff. They all explore its shape and ribs.
The Iredale is one of thousands of shipwrecks in this region, known as the Graveyard of the Pacific. Storms, fog, shifting sand bars, rocks, clashing currents and brutal tides all combine into treacherous waters.
“The larger history of shipwrecks on the Northwest Coast tells us a lot about the collision between Indigenous and settler cultures, and how we are all still living with the results of that collision today.”
— Coll Thrush
For centuries, shipwrecks caused clashes of cultures and worlds in the Northwest. The wrecks created opportunity but also great tragedy for Indigenous people. But today, Native American tribes are still vibrant and alive. And the echoes of those wrecks are still felt today in Northwest myths and culture.
“The larger history of shipwrecks on the Northwest Coast tells us a lot about the collision between Indigenous and settler cultures, and how we are all still living with the results of that collision today,” said Coll Thrush, a historian, professor and author of the recent book, “Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific.”
“And so as these people move up and down the beach, they're really, again, living inside the wreckage, in some ways, of the history of this coast.”
Chinook Indian Nation
Grandmother-aged potted jade plants tenderly balance along the red wooden railing of Tony A. (naschio) Johnson’s home. He lives in Bay Center, Wash., and is the chairman of the Chinook Indian Nation.
Collections of agates, rocks, petrified wood and seashells eddy — or collect together — in piles on the porch.
Johnson calls to his two border collies, Dotsi and Carl, in the Chinook language.
He said during whale migrations, his tribes’ chiefs would send people with “particular powers or spirit powers” to be on the beach. They would sing the whales ashore, he said. Then, when whales did come ashore, they would be claimed and marked by the first who found them, who would get the choicest pieces.
“Ultimately, I think it's really important to say, too, that … as a sovereign nation that anything that came ashore on our lands was in our jurisdiction,” Johnson said. “When those things came ashore here, they fell under the jurisdiction of our sovereign nation.”
‘If these stones could only talk’
Off U.S. Route 101, at the edge of Ilwaco, Wash., is the Ilwaco Cemetery. It’s a solemn scene on this damp, drizzly and cold summer day.
Two retired caretakers run the place. They try to keep the grass down in the main swaths between stones. Daisies and tall grass soften the edges. The caretakers don’t have the ability to edge everything. So instead of a tightly manicured commercial cemetery or a derelict abandoned one, Ilwaco is somewhere in the middle.
Ron Hylton is the vice president, and Tom Williams is the president of the Ilwaco Cemetery Association.
Here there are graves of unknown sailors from ships like the Strathblane, that went down on Nov. 3, 1891.
“It is an archive. It’s history.”
— Ron Hylton
And Hylton said that his predecessor said that they didn't know who exactly was buried in some of the graves here. But they do think the cemetery cradles even more lost sailors.
"If these stones could only talk, the stories they would tell," Hylton said. "It is an archive. It's history."
This is also the final resting place for Comcomly, a Lower Chinook Tribe Chief. He was a powerful man, known for trade. Comcomly has a historical marker near Astoria, Ore. — it’s a cement replica of his burial canoe.
Now, he also has a gravestone at the Ilwaco Cemetery — there, a beautiful abalone shell catches fallen Douglas fir needles.
And the lost sailors rest not far, too.
Men of the sea. All together in death.
Salvage
Donella Lucero doesn’t care for spring’s rhubarb, but she loved her grandmother’s pie.
“Her favorite was apple pie,” said Lucero, a collections volunteer for the Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum in Ilwaco. “And that was my grandpa's favorite, too. So that's mostly what she made.”
Her grandmother would make pies from lard and flour stores recovered from shipwrecks on Washington’s Long Beach Peninsula.
“So my grandpa would take an axe and whack at it several times.”
— Donella Lucero
For example, Lucero's family gathered sacks of flour from The Iowa, a ship that had wrecked at Cape Disappointment on Jan. 12, 1936. Because the flour sacks were in the seawater, a crust formed outside of them.
“So my grandpa would take an axe and whack at it several times,” Lucero said.
These sacks had crusts that were about eight to 10 inches thick, she said.
Lucero recounted more stories of how her family would salvage nearly anything they could off a ship or the beach, especially during the 1930s and 1940s.
They would recover things like plumbing parts and signs from the U.S. Army Transport ARROW which went aground on Feb. 13, 1947. It was a ferry between the Hawaiian Islands during World War II. According to the Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum, the ship was being hauled up to Tongue Point to become part of a reserve fleet. But a storm stirred up the waves. Then, twice the Army tugboat pulling the ship lost its tow line. Then it broke and the ARROW went aground, quickly sinking into the sand. The ship was stranded near the north end of Long Beach, Wash.
“You used anything you could find,” Lucero said. Her family even took a toilet from the ARROW wreck. Some things post-World War II, like metal too, were extremely valuable.
“You couldn't find any metal right after the war,” she said.
‘Squint Eye’ and sovereign nations
On the Northwest Coast, Indigenous nations sometimes experienced violence at the hands of settlers and explorers.
And violence against Indigenous nations can be surfaced through the words of one Native American woman.
In December 1900, at a meeting of the Oregon Historical Society, Jenny Michel, also known by Tsin-is-Tum, recounted an attack.
“I remember well when the village was bombarded. I was a small girl then."
— Jenny Michel, also known by Tsin-is-Tum
They had been blamed for the sinking of the William & Ann ship on Clatsop Spit. British men fired upon her village, killing an “unknown number of Clatsop people,” Thrush, the author of “Wrecked” writes.
"I remember well when the village was bombarded. I was a small girl then. All the Indians ran to the woods,” Michel said in her account. “I ran with my mother, and she carried my younger sister on her shoulders. In running through the woods a stick caught one of my sister’s eyes and tore it, so she was called ‘Squint Eye.’”
Despite many brutal stories, there are also shipwreck stories in which Native Americans on the Northwest Coast helped foreign shipwrecked sailors. Some would even be fed and housed for months. The Quileute Nation is centered near La Push, Wash., on the Pacific Coast. One Quileute elder named Hallie George gives an account, referenced in “Wrecked,” saying: “The White people stayed a long time in Quileute-land. Some of the White people learned to speak the Quileute language because none of them could speak the language of the White people.”
Resilient
Chinook Indian Nation Chairman Tony A. Johnson said that ultimately, colonizers might have expected that Native Americans’ culture would die out or be replaced.
“And of course, Chinook folks have continued to live and, you know, in some cases thrive," said Johnson.
"Chinook folks have continued to live and, you know, in some cases thrive.”
— Tony A. (naschio) Johnson
Western towns and cities have grown up around the sites that were historically villages, Johnson said. Places like Astoria, Ilwaco and South Bend.
The stern
Back at the Iredale on the Northwest Oregon Coast, the Iredale wreck counts the waves that ebb about its ribs. And then, counts the tourists that appear when the seawater recedes.
Rippling, salty tidepools at the Iredale hull reflect the sky and lattice of the wreck. Shipwrecks shaped the Northwest Coast and its people, but the history is more complicated. Hidden in all these wrecks are secrets — whispers of inequalities past.
