Three Peninsula Graveyards: Nudging History

Last post ended with looking forward to climbing the Little River trail to Olympic National Park's Hurricane Ridge once the snow melts off next spring. Local river guide, writer, historian, and newspaper columnist Pat Neal told me about the Little River trail as he was trying to get my friend, Don Nunley and me into King salmon. (He was successful as far as Don and his big old fish were concerned. Well, maybe not the fish.)

That day on the river came not only with the guide service but with a steady, entertaining stream of local history drifting from the working part of the boat behind Don and me. As Pat mixed fishing guiding with history with trail suggestions it occurred to me that I haven't been sharing the texture, the richness of what little history and mystery we've learned of this place. It's been left off in the distance, shrouded like Ocean View Cemetery way off there under the clouds, miles below Klahhane Ridge. Stories about the American West are, as often as not, woven through the grandeur and threat of sweeping landscapes; elements of indescribable beauty but known to be primed with coiled fury. The wonders of this Olympic Peninsula out of doors are no different, having captured many an imagination before ours; so maybe it has been natural for us to focus on these mountains, rivers, and seas. But then there are the people who have wrestled with and loved this place. Generations of them are resting in the local graveyards. I've long enjoyed spending a little time in cemeteries, puzzling my family to no end, but the monuments were put there to be reminders, for a future I happen to be inhabiting, and I doubt that the dead mind. If they notice at all I think they appreciate the company. Here with a little bit about the people who've gone on ahead.

I'll start with an honest to goodness local hero. The word hero gets thrown around a lot these days; some deserve it, some don't. I supposed it all comes down to how you define the word. Whatever you think a hero is, Marvin Shields from Port Townsend down the road, was an honest to goodness, Audie Murphy type war hero. The major difference between Shields and Murphy is that Audie survived to become a movie star. Shields was killed in action saving people during a horrific firefight in Vietnam. A simple sign on Hwy 101 between Port Townsend and Sequim suggests his grave site and that you turn onto a short, quiet road leading to the Gardiner Community Cemetery. I'm told Gardiner is a community but you can't find even a tiny downtown. Still, the little cemetery is spotless, perfectly tended, and at the top of the little hill is a small, enthusiastic explosion of flags and color. Clearly Marvin Shields's story has touched folks; locals and pilgrims. There are navy bases down the road on the Kitsap Peninsula and Shields was the only SeeBee to ever win the Medal of Honor so maybe sailors take the short drive. Clearly Seebees have visited and curious explorers like me. Whoever they are or why ever they've come they share beer, hats, coins, Seebee paraphernalia, flags, spent cartridges, and token tributes of all sorts. Marvin Shields appears to have earned every one.

Place Road turns off of Hwy 112 toward the Strait a little way toward Joyce along the highway that runs beside the Strait of Juan de Fuca and to the Makah reservation at Neah Bay. All the way down Place, within earshot of the waves running along a sizable stretch of beach near the mouth of the Elwha River and acres of new delta created with the removal of 100 year old dams, you'll find one of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe cemeteries, The Place Cemetery. There is a lot to say about the Lower Elwha Tribe, of the terrible, familiar fate the Tribe shares with all Native peoples on the Peninsula and on this continent, and of a huge, fascinating story of the Tribe's relationship with the Port Angeles community; of modern progress and ancient voices. But for now, about this ground, what little Shar and I know is that icons of the Tribe and of the history of this part of the Peninsula are buried here. Just before Memorial Day Shar, Kat, and I wandered up to the cemetery at the suggestion of a friend after a walk along the mouth of the Elwha .

People were working, primping the gravesites with fresh mulch. One woman, sharing and friendly, urged us to notice Hunter John and Boston Charlie. We asked who they were. She said it would be better if we researched them ourselves, which we have and learned just enough to plant an itch.

As you can see from the monuments, Hunter John was said to have lived for 130 years, one of the up river, inland, hunting Elwha Klallam groups rather than fishing/shellfish gathering clans down on the Strait. He lived in a village where Indian Creek meets the Elwha river, a place we pass every day going to or from our home at the lake. Indian Creek begins as it spills out of Lake Sutherland and slides down Indian Valley just a few miles above the junction where the village would have had to have been. Since reading that, I think about Hunter John and the village every time I cross the Elwha going west and notice Indian Creek entering the river.

Here is what Indian Creek looks like as its leaving Lake Sutherland today. It had to have been a place to love. Those are alders adding context and symmetry to the water.

I've no idea if Hunter John actually lived for a century and a third. It doesn't really matter. He knew this country when it was what it had been for thousands of years, and he knew it when it wasn't that country any longer, ruined for all practical purposes he would have been able to grasp. That have to been a nearly unbearable process. The fact that he lived to any old age at all is miraculous.

Boston Charlie appears to have been a familiar, beloved member of the Tribe, living to 99 years old, or so they say. Who knows what earlier European settlers really thought of him, but history has been kind. The web doesn't say a lot except that he would go to a particular camp high in the mountains across the High Divide each summer and Boston Charlie's Camp is a part of Olympic National Park to this day. I hope to get up there before the legs get out. Apparently there is an airy approach not for the faint of heart. I'd guess that dealing with the Europeans who moved in and stripped off every inch of forest east and west of the Elwha, dammed the river, took basically everything they wanted and shoveled the tribes off into a corner as if they were nothing...I'd guess that wasn't for the faint of heart either. I'd love know what Boston Charlie had to say about all that. Maybe we'll be able to find some sort of oral history where someone thought to ask his opinion.

Same with Grandfather Pysht. 115? Ok. Whatever it was, he lived long. I imagine that we'll eventually learn more about him and his likely brothers (I think) Granduncles Jack Psyht and Peter Schwartz Psyht. Their beautiful, weathered cross markers hang nearby. There are stories of the Native community of Pysht along the Strait coast to the west being destroyed by whites when the people were away doing business. The elder Pyshts (Jack was also a hundred year guy; Peter only made it to 80) had to have had a seminal connection with that community but I haven't gotten there yet.

And then there is Ocean View Cemetery. When someone describes a cemetery as being right next to the dump, you probably wouldn't expect to be drawn into the simple beauty of the place. Fortunately, I stumbled onto it the first time while driving to the dump looking to recycle piles of cardboard, so the beauty took hold before there was time to question. The cemetery sits right on a high bluff overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca. There past the Conestoga is the ocean pouring through the Strait toward Puget Sound, with the land beyond, Vancouver Island, Canada. There are days when a marine layer literally fills the Strait with heavy clouds and baritone blasts from the horns of massive container ships and tankers below the bluff follow bits of fog drifting through to cemetery. As you might guess, trite suggestions of spirits restlessly floating about the veteran's memorial obelisk are inescapable, even if you find such things silly.

The day I decided to stop and spend some time looking at the headstones, Port Angeles Bob was the first name I saw. Looks like its too late for me to try to earn that title. Internet research doesn't tell me more about him and Covid has stymied library or historical society research but we do know that Bob was making a life here, and at least some sort of reputation, during the same times as Hunter John, Boston Charlie, and the Pysht elders. I wonder what, if anything, they knew of one another; if they were hated adversaries or respectful mutual lovers of the northern Olympic Peninsula. Where did Port Angeles Bob fit in the grand march of Manifest Destiny, did he care about what had happened to the Native Tribes, was he just a survivor hoping to feed himself, a logger, a farmer, a fisherman, a man of the sea, and would the Elwha Klallam have given him a second thought, except that he was part of the push that took their historical lives from them? Or am I making too much over a piece of stone? After all, he may have simply been the beloved town bum. Although, pretty elaborate cross for a guy with no last name.

I also can't find anything on line about this guy, John Frost Henson. Obviously he was a huge part of Mary and Marie's world but surely a "Wandering Scribe" would have left something behind that I could find without much trouble. It's little mysteries like this that keep drawing me back to these places. And maybe he did more wandering than scribing.

I'd read about Elsie Winters Mitchell and her sad place in World War II history before ever visiting Ocean View so I was actually on the hunt for her plot. The marker says that she was "The only adult civilian killed by an enemy instrument of war in the continental U.S. during World War II." It is a rough, pretty little monument and I guess it's bronze that weathers green the way the plate placed by the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars has ripened. I was surprised at what the placard doesn't say.

Elsie was from Port Angeles. She married Pastor Archie Mitchell in 1943. Here they are that day, stiff before the camera, and on another day when the smile on her face is warm, fun. I'd bet that was the real Elsie, maybe around the first of 1945 when they learned that she was pregnant.

What they wouldn't have known was that in 1944 the Japanese had started releasing these things.

They were called Fu-Go ballon bombs, 9000 of the things intended to ride on the jet stream to North America and randomly land bombs across the United States. The Mitchells would not have known about these things because the Office of Censorship, not wanting Japan to believe their plot was working or to panic the U.S. public, convinced the media not to report the various sitings. Of course, that also meant that people like Elsie and Archie didn't know that if they found one that they were in the presence of powerful explosive devices and should steer clear.

So, on May 5, 1945, when the young pastor of a church in Bly, Oregon and his five months pregnant wife, Elsie, took five children of parishioners on a picnic in the woods they would not have suspected that danger might have landed nearby. Archie dropped off Elsie and the kids while he parked the car. The little group called to him that they had found something unusual and then there was an explosion. Elsie and all of the children were killed.

That's why I was surprised at Elsie's marker. It does not mention the dead children who had been left in her care. Don't you know that she would have wanted their names there with her? Sure, she was the only adult civilian, a pregnant woman at that, killed by enemy action on our continent, but isn't the story all the worse, the tragedy demanding to be remembered all the more because five children, on a happy spring outing with their pastor and his wife, Elsie, the woman of that smile in that second photo, were so terribly taken by the random violence of war?

This monument, photo taken from the internet, marks the spot of the tragedy near Bly, Oregon. All of the victims are listed.

I also went looking for this grave.

Raymond Carver is buried and memorialized in Ocean View. The incomparable short story writer married Tess Gallagher, an exceptional poet who comes from Port Angeles, sobered up, moved here, and died in 1988 of cancer at 50. I'd read a number of his stories in various compilations but did not settle in to read all of them until this last year when I worked through his Library of America volume. Small wonder that so many have left talismans, fetishes, tributes. There at the end of the bench is a water tight container holding a spiral notebook. Adoring fans leave their messages to him, to Tess, and, I suppose, to themselves, sitting under the usual clouds, looking across Carver's words carved into black granite and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, here in the far upper left hand corner of the continent, that many would consider in the middle of nowhere.

There are bunches of Civil War veterans buried here. Rows of them gathered together and then, as you venture out away from the more organized veteran's area, there are more sprinkled through the various families. And they were all union soldiers. In Colorado you'd find confederate graves along with the yankees, not unusual in light of the expansion west by both northern and southern veterans. But here, near as I could find, not a rebel in sight. The pure volume of union vets puzzled me but before I had the chance to look into it there was a sizable article in the local Peninsula Daily News going into the whole mass of union graves (the article says that there are 80) thing. It's all related to a colony of members of the Grand Army of the Republic from Michigan, the Michigan Soldier's Colony. They stormed here in 1892 upon the promise of 160 acres of land along with home sites in a previously preserved federal "reserve" set aside by President Lincoln and the stated vision to "make Port Angeles the great Grand Army city, and carry out the plans of the grand and immortal Lincoln of building up a city which would be a monument to his illustrious memory." (From the 5/5/20 article by John McNutt) Quite the mouthful and I don't know that I'd describe this wonderful little city as a "illustrious," but over the years Lincoln has gained a large, cool park near the airport and fairgrounds and the main road pulling Hwy 101 through the city. The GAR colonizers had a substantial role in developing this part of the Peninsula and the well tended graves along with the GAR obelisk from the earlier photo mark well their contributions and their service. And there are, of course, many more veterans from all sorts of wars, conflicts, and service. They rest among and near the GAR veterans or with their families.

And there are others, so many others.

Signe Wolverton, who only made it to 15, rests at Ocean View with his (likely) brother Clay, who survived World War I and lived into his 80s.

Joe Massaro, whose 38 years earned him the wonderful mosaic of this headstone still shining 90 years hence, Eulalie Blin, who traveled a very long way to end a 74 year journey so far from the famous "Chateaux de Nemours" 15th century castle of his or her (I can't tell by the name) hometown, Richard Rector, one of a long line of log truck drivers whose "Richie Rescue" nickname has to have a story behind it, who was clearly loved by many, who lost his life in an accident involving the brakes on his truck, who represents not only the timber industry that is such a big part of this part of the country, but the hazards faced by so many who work out here, they all rest at Ocean View. They all tell part of the story of this place, and, of course, there are more, many more, and I could go on.

Which means that it is time for me to stop.