WHEN VIEWED THROUGH the lens of history, today’s current events are no mystery. In last week’s column, we tore the dirty laundry from the seamy underbelly of the salmon restoration cabal that has Washington state spending a million dollars a day removing barriers to salmon migration.
While people are for removing barriers to salmon migration, we are not for increasing the gas tax to build bridges over streams with no salmon.
So, when we see a culvert replacement project in a stream that runs off a cliff with no possibility of a salmon ever jumping over it, it is not unusual that we would raise the possibility of a fraudulent undertaking using public funds for private gain.
It’s all been done before.
The history of the Olympic Peninsula is a catalogue of fraudulent undertakings.
Starting with Juan de Fuca himself, who claimed in 1592 he sailed into the Strait that bears his name from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean through a land rich in gold and pearls.
It was a tall tale so convincing that navigators spent the next 200 years searching for this fabled Northwest Passage without any luck. This Strait of Juan de Fuca later became a magnet for fraud.
We have only to look at Victor Smith, a federal customs inspector, commonly considered the “Father of Port Angeles,” described by historian Ruby El Hult as “The local Judas Iscariot who probably caused more turmoil, dissension and hatred than any other figure in Pacific Northwest history.”
Smith moved the federal customs house from Port Townsend to Port Angeles, then known as “False Dungeness,” at gunpoint and, in 1861, at the outbreak of the Civil War, had Port Angeles declared “the second national city,” just in case something happened to Washington, D.C. According to the plan, Uncle Sam would build the city while Smith would reap the profits.
Victor Smith’s son Norman did not fall far from the family tree. Norman became famous for what was known as “The World’s Shortest Railroad,” when, in 1890, he sawed an iron rail in half and spiked it to some tracks on the pass to Lake Crescent based on the rumor the Union Pacific Railroad was coming in from the West. It wasn’t.
Undeterred, Norman Smith brought a locomotive to town and formed the Port Angeles Pacific Railroad company, laying tracks for three miles up Tumwater Creek before the funds disappeared.
Col. James S. Coolican was a visionary promoter with a keen business sense. He served as president of the Port Angeles Board of Trade and the Clallam County Immigrants Association, whose goal was attracting immigrants to the Olympic Peninsula in general and Port Angeles in particular.
By immigrants, Coolican did not mean the Chinese. They were accused of taking jobs from Americans and smuggling opium. The colonel wanted a “desirable class of immigrants,” northern Europeans along with any Englishman that cared to jump ship, and, of course, women to swamp out and cook in the logging camps. We didn’t celebrate diversity back in 1897.
Coolican wrote about the “good time coming” in his promotional pamphlet, “Port Angeles, The Gate City of the Pacific Coast.” The colonel promised to the farmer, “Heaven descends in universal bounty, shedding grains and fruits and flowers on Nature’s ample lap. For the stockman, you can almost hear the grass growing. Herds and flocks can revel in the wantonness of plenty. Veins of precious metals, ores and coal bulge out of the hillside.”
Gold Creek, Silver Lake and Iron mountain were named for the treasures soon to be found.
In 1894, Coolican and other civic leaders raised $10,000 from the locals to buy a genuine diamond drill and followed their coal mining dreams up Tumwater Creek. They drilled 600 feet and found nothing but sand and gravel, which were readily available at the surface.
All of which is peanuts to bigger blunders a hundred years later, such as the Washington Public Power Supply System, AKA Whoops!, which robbed $2.5 billion from investors in 1983 in what was the largest municipal bond default in U.S. history. All in an attempt to build five imaginary nuclear reactors.
While Whoops board members were not accused of fraud or corruption, they were blamed for bad judgement and bungling on an unimaginable scale.
All of which is small potatoes compared to the billions we are spending tearing up our roads to eliminate barriers to salmon migration.
Unfortunately, many of these salmon are imaginary and only exist on paper.
Let’s remove barriers on streams with salmon in them and stop restoring salmon habitat where there are no salmon.
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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.
He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.