Too High and Too Steep by Williams David B

Author:Williams, David B.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2015-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

MAP 4.2. DUWAMISH RIVER VALLEY. Historical mapping by UW’s Puget Sound River History Project.

Flooding had long been a central concern for people around Lake Washington and in the Duwamish River corridor. As early as the 1860s, and continuing regularly for decades, residents had prevailed upon their elected officials to fix this scourge caused by excess runoff. Reengineering the Cedar would eliminate half of this problem; building the ship canal, which had long been a central goal of those in the floodplains, would kill the other half—that is, kill the Black River.

When not flooding, the Black River was a quiet, shallow waterway, shaded by dense vegetation, and rich in sediment washed out of the Cedar’s old river terraces, hence its name, as opposed to the clearer White River, which it joined to become the Duwamish.9 What the White lacked in color it made up for with spring floods that pushed up the Black and reversed the darker river’s flow back into Lake Washington. This is the origin of the name for the Black in Chinook jargon: Mox La Push, or “Two Mouths.” Modern roads and buildings mask how flat the White River valley is and how it easy it would have been for a large flooding river to rage across the level land and up its smaller tributary.10

Despite its modest length, the Black had an oversized role as the only outlet of Lake Washington, notes historian David Buerge.11 He describes the land surrounding the Black as a “storied landscape,” where the hills, the river, and a quaking bog were associated with supernatural beings and events. For the Native people, living along the Black meant controlling access to the salmon that used the river to reach the lake and the Cedar River. This location made them “well-to-do and well connected,” with three major settlements along the Black and an extensive trade network down the river to Elliott Bay and Puget Sound.

With the building of the ship canal, no fish would ever again travel the Black River, though traces of the channel persisted for decades. A photograph from 1969 shows what was apparently the river’s last remnant in town, a narrow swath of shrubs, weeds, and cottonwoods in downtown Renton. When I go to find that historic waterway, I become excited when I discover a row of trees at roughly the right location. But when I examine the photograph with my reading glasses on, I realize I am too far east, and that the last vestige of the Black in Renton now lies under the parking lot of a huge Safeway. But one clue still remains, two blocks west of the Safeway, behind a Fred Meyer store.

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