North Cascades Ethnography of The North Cascades

The chapters that follow represent a first attempt to achieve three principal, related goals. In brief, these are:

(a) To determine the American Indian groups —"tribes" in a loose technical sense — that claimed, occupied, and made use of those land areas that today fall within the boundaries of the North Cascades National Park and the Ross Lake and Lake Chelan National Recreation Areas, and to establish their tribal limits within and in the vicinity of this Park Complex as of the early contact period.

(b) To assemble from the ethnographic and ethnohistorical literature and from such other sources as may be located data descriptive of the lifeways of these native groups in late protohistoric and early postcontact days, the "traditional" period as this term is employed in this study, and to present this information in an organized, scholarly, but non-technical fashion.

(c) To ascertain to the degree possible from the data at hand the specific ways in which these tribal entities made use of the natural resources of their high country, in particular those of the Park Complex, and, more broadly, to describe their life patterns when in these elevated valleys and on these lofty mountain slopes.

As the following chapters indicate, it has been found that four different tribes aboriginally claimed territory within the present Park Complex: the Upper Skagit in the Skagit Valley and surrounding mountains from the southwestern corner of the Complex upstream through today's Ross Lake region to the vicinity of the international boundary; the Chilliwack in the upper Chilliwack Valley and the mountainous terrain in its vicinity, including the northwesternmost segment of the Park; the Lower Thompson in the upper Skagit Valley and neighboring high country south to the Canadian line and down through the Ross Lake area almost as far as Big Beaver Creek; and the Chelan east of the Cascade crest in the upper Lake Chelan and Stehekin River sector of the Complex.

The claim of the Chelan to its territory is uncontested and that of the Chilliwack essentially so, though Lower Thompson parties and hunters from other neighboring groups sometimes entered the mountains within the tribal boundaries of the Chilliwack. As intimated above, that segment of the Skagit Valley now under the waters of Ross Lake and the flanking mountain masses, however, represented at least in traditional times disputed hunting and gathering grounds, frequented by parties of both Upper Skagit, coming up the river from Newhalem and below, and Lower Thompson descending the valley from their tribal lands north of today's international border. These overlapping tribal claims in this Skagit region, protected on occasion by hostile action on the part of both groups, call for no adjudication by the ethnographer in terms of time priority, extent and manner of utilization, or any other standard or basis, for the claims of the two groups appear on the surface equally valid, though the Upper Skagit had an appreciably shorter trek to the area than did the Lower Thompson. As noted below, this overlapping multiple land use is simply reported as an ethnographic reality of the traditional time period.

Accordingly, there are four chapters in this report, one devoted to the Upper Skagit, Chilliwack, Lower Thompson, and Chelan respectively, ordered thus rather arbitrarily in a geographically clockwise fashion. To the degree that information is available, each chapter provides the same subject coverage and follows the same data organization and presentation. This comprises a brief "data base" appraisal; a short introductory, back ground section; a substantially more extended summary of what is known of the life patterns of the tribe with particular attention to its diverse associations with its higher country; and a final, unfortunately necessarily rather brief and general section collecting, integrating, and interpreting such information as is known or can be reasonably inferred regarding the tribal utilization of its mountainous regions and of its homeland inside the boundaries of the Park and Recreation Complex.

It is important to the theoretical interests of this report to note that, though their territories joined or, in the case of the Chilliwack and Chelan, were almost contiguous, these four tribal entities differed in important linguistic and cultural respects. Although all four spoke dialects of the Salishan language family, their dialects were mutually unintelligible. Further the speech of the Upper Skagit and Chilliwack belonged to the Coast Salish division, while the Lower Thompson and Chelan were members of the Interior Salish group. Culturally, the Upper Skagit were an inland Puget Sound people as the Chilliwack were a hinterland Fraser River folk, both with obvious though rather dilute Northwest Coast cultural affiliations. The Lower Thompson of the Fraser Canyon country followed a basic Plateau life pattern, but with a considerable tilt in certain cultural domains toward a weak and modified coastal life style. The Chelan, in contrast, were an out-and-out Plateau group, but somewhat atypical in their unusual lake and towering mountain environment and in their life mode in adaptation to this special ecological configuration. Yet in spite of these substantial differences, all utilized extensively their part of the highlands of the Park Complex and the nearby mountains and forests. Obviously there are here opportunities for an intensive comparative ethnographic inquiry of some considerable interest.

It is hoped that the data of this report will be useful to the interpretive corps in the Park and Recreation Areas in their continuing efforts to share with the public information concerning the aboriginal life patterns of those Indian groups that identified themselves with geographical segments of the Park Complex, and particularly the ways in which these tribes were intimately bonded in their subsistence quest and many other life domains to the valleys and mountains, streams and lakes, and forests and alpine meadows of the Complex.