by Jack Nisbet
As Wehr oversaw that lively exchange of people and material around the Okanogan Highland sites, he maintained his many quirks. “I never saw him do one piece of laundry on his own,” recalled one friend. “He’d buy a bunch of clothes at Goodwill, with a particular eye for good dress shirts of a certain pale-blue color. He would wear a batch till they were falling apart, then give them away at the bus station.” Or as Wehr himself once put it, “I had two patron saints: Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Vincent de Paul. Saint Francis nourished my soul, and the Saint Vincent de Paul thrift store provided my clothing.” When an associate visited his office at the Burke Museum, she noticed a hot plate, various cans of beans, a paperback collection of Flaubert stories, and several nice pale-blue dress shirts on hangers. Among his possessions lay several small works from Northwest School artists like Mark Tobey, handy and tradable for an infusion of necessary cash.
In November 2003, the Paleontological Society of America presented Wehr with their Harrel L. Strimple Award, which recognizes outstanding achievement in the field by an amateur. Over two hundred friends, including artists, musicians, writers, museum curators, librarians, students, and paleontologists, attended a party in his honor the night before the awards ceremony. Kirk Johnson, praising the presentation, remarked: “It is with true pride and deep friendship that I represent the more than twenty-five paleontologists who wrote letters in support of this nomination. Wes Wehr is a regional treasure.”
The following spring, Wehr began planning a large seventy-fifth birthday party for himself at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle. A week ahead of time he was calling friends to tell them all about the details of who would sit where for the shindig. “This was vintage Wes. The only time I went head up with him was over arrangements at a dinner table,” said one of them. “He’d blow into a restaurant with a whole crowd of people, then insist on choosing who would be placed next to whom. In his mind there was a definite seating arrangement that would connect certain people and catalyze alliances.”
When Wes Wehr died of a heart attack five days before his birthday, a couple hundred of his close associates gathered at the intended birthday party for a memorial service. Many who attended expressed surprise to see so many unfamiliar faces there, and to hear such different moving accounts of their connections with the deceased. During the course of the afternoon, most of the fossil plants that bore his name, like Wehrwolfea striata, cropped up in the conversation: two ferns, a maple, a fine brown lacewing, and a winged seed of unknown affiliation called Pteronepelys wehrii, “the winged stranger.”
Lagerstätte
Today, the Okanogan Highland researchers who explore in Wehr’s spirit think of their several known sites collectively: an arc of fragile lake beds, each one slightly different than the rest, that follows a line of rumpled terrain from Republic six hundred miles north-northwest to the Driftwood Canyon digs near Smithers, British Columbia. Taken together, they represent a far-reaching interconnected lagerstätte—a German term that defines a significant fossil site with exceptional preservation of a diverse suite of organisms.
These Okanogan Highland fossils are not confined to any single situation. The climate that created them doesn’t quite match the weather we think we know. The habitats they suggest refuse to fit into neat categories recognized by current ecologists. Yet the species that pour out of them, like Wehr himself, continue to provide a flood of tantalizing information: full of names and new directions, contradictions and unsolved mysteries. There are unidentified bird feathers, waiting to take wing. Nine new bulldog ant species have been named, belonging to four genera, and one of those recurs at an Eocene site in Denmark. There are fossil palm beetles, which allow climatologists to gauge winter temperatures during the heat wave of the early Eocene, when those bulldog ants tracked across whole continents.
Most recently, in the northernmost of those ancient lakes, bits of two different Eocene mammals have emerged. One is the lower right jawbone of a tapir relative that must have been about the size of a cocker spaniel. The other is the upper maxilla of a tiny forest-dwelling hedgehog whose entire body was probably no larger than the collector’s thumb. It must have taken an eye as alert as Wes Wehr’s to spot it among the rubble, and to see right away how it might fit into the larger tapestry of the lakes.
Even as such discoveries pour in, Wes Wehr’s presence suffuses Stonerose and its associated fossil sites, especially in the energy that swirls around the collectors. It’s as if he remains fixed on the floor of the quarry, surrounded by fragments named by or after him, peering at an especially puzzling one through his well-worn jeweler’s loupe. He holds the surface of the stone in question up to the light, looking like a little Cyclops, single-eyed and blind to many things, but acutely attuned to many others. As he once wrote, “These artifacts of eons ago were constant reminders that no matter how immediate the present might seem to me, it was only a flickering instant in the ongoing continuum and flux of all things great and small.”
Several years after his memorial service, one of Wes’s former office mates and some of her Burke Museum associates assembled a small tribute to him inside a desk-sized glass case, then placed it between the entry lobby and exhibit halls at the museum. The left side of the case holds an array of perfect fossils that Wehr collected, including a few samples from Stonerose. To their right lie five of his brightly colored rock-shop purchases, including azurite and amethyst—a small taste of the kaleidoscopic treasures that his fingers had caressed. Beside these, three flashy mineral crystals rest on a ragged swatch of cloth that Wes had always claimed was a piece of Mark Tobey’s bathrobe.
Wehr’s two hardback volumes of memoirs, full of dish on famous people and extinct Latin species designations, are propped upright on the other side of the case.
Beside the books, a photograph of Wes in Switzerland, with Mark Tobey and his long-term partner, fronts a small 1944 Tobey drypoint titled Agate World. Its lines seem to travel at a furious pace, like the paths of subatomic particles, quickly bouncing a visitor’s eye to a sample of untrimmed agate cooked into a complexity of textures and colors by the earth’s unending geologic processes.
One of Wes Wehr’s seascape miniatures lurks in the back center of the display. Four polished moss agates, cut into perfect rectangles of ascending size, flow away from the painting. The artist’s melted-wax creation reflects the shape, color, and tone of the agates perfectly, bringing to mind another memory from a friend who once helped Wehr move his possessions from one office to another at the Burke. As they were unpacking boxes, he suddenly presented her with a clear plastic ziplock bag filled with green Crayola crayons. Not sure how to interpret such a gift, she stared blankly at Wehr. He held up the bag, mumbled something unintelligible, then finally explained: “I don’t use green.”
X
RESTLESS EARTH
Two Casualties
Ann McCrae worked for some time in the archives of the Spokane tribe. She had terrific language skills and often could be found wearing headphones in front of her computer, transcribing oral accounts recorded decades ago by Salish-speaking Spokane elders. The younger generation of these informants included Ann’s mother, Nancy Flett, as well as a group of her friends who spoke the language known as Spokane Salish. Most of these women and men had grown up in very traditional families.
As an occasional visitor to the nearby tribal school, I often worked with students on projects that involved language questions—a plant, a place, a family name no one could quite nail down. The answer sometimes lay within the cross-referenced categories and extensive genealogical charts that had grown out of Ann’s transcriptions. She was very keen on sharing such information with the school, so when any of the queries drew a blank, she would call on interested old friends for help. The fact that such pursuits usually led to more questions only seemed to spur Ann on, in her own patient, quiet way.
One afternoon I visited the archival offices to find Ann standing in front of a whiteboard on her wall, lookin
g perplexed as she stared at five cryptic lines of English and Salish text.
Born 1851
1872 Earthquake—21 years old
wch wi’chem
xs- ch- xw-
died Walla Walla 1904—53 years old
One of Ann’s cohorts had copied the lines from a wooden grave marker in the cemetery of the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, almost two hundred miles to the south. Prison records identified the deceased man as a Spokane Indian. To Ann, the fading English letters on the marker made a very poor approximation of any Salish language sounds, but she thought they might match up with a story she recalled from one of the elders’ audiotapes.
The story began before the Spokane Reservation was established and told of a young man who lived with his mother near the mouth of the Spokane River. They had been through plenty of hard times together there. He was about twenty years old when a big earthquake shook their campsite on a cold winter night. The strength of the quake terrified his mother so badly that she ran away into the hills. For days afterward, the earth kept trembling, and with every aftershock she would start running again. Some neighbors finally found the woman draped over a fallen log, motionless. She never regained consciousness.
Everyone said that the mother’s death hit her son very hard and filled him with anger. In time he took it out on somebody, so that he ended up in a prison on the coast. He stayed there for fifteen years before he was transferred to Walla Walla, and he died in the penitentiary there only a few years later.
“We’d like to know his real Indian name, something more than wch wi’chem,” said Ann. “We’d like to identify him, and bring his remains back home. We have this one version of the story, but I think my mom’s friend Sadie Boyd might have talked about him too—I just have to find out where. And I’d like to know more about this earthquake. Was it really such a powerful thing?”
The Shakes
In the late fall of 1872, much of the Interior Columbia District—that large portion of the drainage between the Cascades and the Rockies that had been ruled by the British fur trade system for half a century—was still adjusting to a traumatic shift toward American control. A significant number of Plateau tribal bands and leaders had refused to sign treaties with the United States in the mid-1850s, and the 1858 wars that followed those controversial agreements were still fresh in everyone’s memory. Walla Walla, the Oregon Trail stop in Washington Territory’s extreme southeast corner, remained the only interior town of any size. At the same time, gold strikes on the upper Columbia and middle Fraser Rivers continued to attract a steady flow of fortune hunters, and hopeful farmers bent on scratching out homesteads were spreading tentatively across the region.
As the weather began to clamp down that December, Indian Affairs agent W. P. Winans began his third year in northeastern Washington, based in the small settlement of Colville. In the midst of his chaotic duties, Winans posted a message to his Walla Walla headquarters describing an event that took place on December 14, 1872. His words soon appeared in a local newspaper.
Our valley was visited by an earthquake at 10 1/2 o’clock P.M. The first shock lasted about three minutes, stopped clocks, shook down crockery and bottles from shelves, etc. Several slighter shocks occurred during the next five hours.
The weather is cold, and sleighing good.
Winans’s letter stands as one of several brief firsthand written accounts of the quake. Another missive, from Spokane Bridge—a new settlement just upstream from present-day Spokane—assured friends that four distinct tremors had hurt no one. “In fact, nobody around here had any clear conception of what was the matter until it was all over,” the writer confided.
Overlapping reports from Umatilla and The Dalles, in Oregon, described between two and five heavy shocks around ten o’clock on the same night. In Yakima City, several cowboys had gathered at the Sagebrush Saloon to celebrate the end of their season’s work when “there came a sound like some one hitting the side of the house with a flat board; then the building began to shake. The boys ran outside to see who was trying to turn the house over.” Columbia River steamboat captain J. C. Ainsworth, aboard his vessel near the confluence of the Walla Walla and Columbia Rivers, noted that the event was followed by “five lighter shocks at intervals of about fifteen minutes, after which a heavy, rumbling sound was heard as distinctly as a heavy peal of thunder.” Ainsworth considered the first shock violent enough to shake buildings and their contents up “pretty lively, yet no damage or injury was sustained by any one, that I am aware of.”
The original tremor must have been pretty lively indeed, because people in towns as far east as Virginia City, Montana, and across the Rocky Mountains in Henry House, Alberta, also felt a succession of mild shocks. West of the Cascades, newspapers in the larger cities of Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, and Victoria all described a temblor, although questionable informants and overblown prose often left the strength of the disturbance unclear. These newspapers also ran fuzzy reports of stronger events in the Interior, including a landslide on the Columbia. Some said that it had blocked the entire river somewhere north of Wenatchee, emptying the channel below and forming a vast lake upstream.
Over the next few weeks and months, new accounts continued to appear. Purported eyewitnesses swore that several chimneys had twisted, and that a couple of cabins had been shaken to pieces. Rolling rocks had killed at least three people. Water on the lower Fraser River had jumped its banks. Mount Rainier had let off a smoke plume that blanketed eastern Washington, suffocating children with its sulfurous fumes. There was a report that “in the Spokane country the earth opened up and swallowed a number of Indians and their horses.” Many of the wilder stories emanated from the vicinity of Lake Chelan, forty miles upstream on the Columbia from Wenatchee. These included cracked earth, geysers, waterspouts, rhythmic waves, and sulfur- or oil-tainted water near the lake’s outlet. As years and then decades stretched out, anniversaries of the quake were marked with commemorative coverage that tended to embroider rather than illuminate the truth, so that over time a body of conflicting stories passed into local lore.
The event also piqued the interest of geologists, and a 1956 Canadian report attempted to sort through period newspaper accounts from Fraser River towns that included Chilliwack, Hope, Spences Bridge, and Quesnel. An eyewitness in Yale related “that violent shock of earthquake lasted 5 m[inutes]. All rushed out of the house-never so much alarmed in my life—dreadful sensation.” The authors of the Canadian article postulated that the quake’s epicenter had been located just north of the international border, on the west slope of the Cascade Range.
During the 1970s, as part of an attempt to determine the stability of several proposed sites for nuclear power plants, the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) commissioned a geologic study of the 1872 earthquake. The lead investigator on the WPPSS report was Howard A. Coombs, a respected geologist whose team did an exemplary job of correlating period newspaper reports and tribal stories with geologic evidence. Coombs’s team weighed the reliability of each account, placing the highest value on the source’s proximity to the most affected areas in place and time. They then applied their findings to the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale of 1931.
The Mercalli scale, first developed in the late nineteenth century, uses oral and sensory evidence to determine the seismic power of an earthquake on an index of one to twelve. Level II, for example, includes wakened sleepers and clanking crockery of the sort witnessed in Colville by W. P. Winans. Level III on the scale referred to “motor cars” rocking in unison. There were no automobiles in 1872, but Coombs’s team did find a clear statement that the steamer North Pacific, lying in the mud of a south Puget Sound low tide, had rolled at its berth and “creaked in every joint.”
Both general fright and significant physical damage begin to appear at Mercalli level VI, and there were several reports of both along the east slope of the Cascades. A railroad survey crewman camped on a mountain lakeshore wrote th
at “in the Cascades west of the lake one whole peak was shaken off. Disturbance deep in the earth could be heard in its dull deep grinding which was terrifying to all who heard it.” A Chinese placer miner, working a gold claim on the east side of the Columbia above Wenatchee, told a settler that as he slept on the bank above his stake that night, “the river rolled up on the land and the land rolled down to the river.”
At the mouth of the Wenatchee River, clerk John McBride said that just before the initial tremor, he heard a powerful explosion that sounded like an artillery barrage. He and his partner were jolted out of their sleep, then thrown to the floor as they attempted to dress. The clerk ran to a nearby trading post, which had suffered extensive structural and roof damage, and while he was there he felt at least three strong aftershocks over the next hour.
Another cluster of interviews in which Coombs placed great stock came out of Chilliwack, a settlement on the lower Fraser River, and had been printed within a few days of the quake: “Houses commenced to oscillate; the earth rose like waves of the sea; the rivers splashed their banks.” These kinds of motions meet the criteria for level VII on the Mercalli scale. Several of the difficult-to-verify stories from the vicinity of Lake Chelan, including reports of significant cracks opening in the ground and drastic changes in spring and well flow, match level VIII.
The Coombs report, published in 1976, compiled four volumes of information from around the region and then used the site data to assign Mercalli scale numbers to far-flung settlements around the Greater Northwest. While the report debunked many of the second- and thirdhand accounts that had appeared in newspapers from west-side cities, it left no doubt that a major earthquake had shaken an area that up to that point in time had been viewed as geologically stable. It also confirmed accounts from a variety of inhabitants that significant aftershocks had been felt across the region after the initial tremor and that “lighter shocks, forming many small fissures in the earth, were felt for several years in the surrounding mountains.”