by Jack Nisbet
Coombs’s team agreed with the earlier Canadian report that the quake’s epicenter had been located on the west slope of the Cascades just above the international border, more than fifty miles north of Lake Chelan. The researchers assigned Mercalli level VIII to a circle around that epicenter, which extended east across the Cascade crest and south past Lake Chelan. The Mercalli levels in the concentric circles that grew away from the epicenter diminished like ripples across a pond.
Coombs and his associates estimated that the 1872 earthquake ranged in force between 7.0 and 7.3 on the Richter scale. They set the origin of the temblor between twenty-five and forty miles below the surface—still within the outer layer of the earth’s crust, and relatively shallow by the standards of seismologists. Such origins create long, slow shock waves that often leave local buildings intact but can be amplified on unstable ground much farther away. Crustal quakes of this depth are often characterized by significant and long-lasting aftershocks.
The Coombs report was far from the last word on the 1872 quake, and a subsequent study, published three years later, arrived at somewhat different conclusions. Its authors postulated a 7.4 magnitude, deeper event that occurred in the mantle of the earth. They placed the epicenter around Ross Lake, just west of the Cascade crest but south of the Canadian border. Obviously, the wide range of eyewitness accounts coupled with a complete lack of instrumentation make it impossible to pinpoint exactly what took place on that cold December night.
On the Ground
The raw power of the 1872 event remains clearly visible at the landmark known today as Earthquake Point, twenty miles above Wenatchee on the Columbia River’s west bank. The massive Ribbon Cliff looms directly above the point, and the earthquake unleashed a landslide from the formation that temporarily blocked the great river’s flow. At one family encampment some miles below Earthquake Point, a woman told of walking down to the Columbia to dip out water for cooking on the morning after the quake. Upon arriving at her familiar spot, she was startled to find the entire riverbed dry.
Another story came from Wapato John, a headman of the Chelan-Entiat band who farmed and ran a store upstream from Ribbon Cliff. He described the river rising fifty feet overnight, flooding his fields and trading post. The next day the Columbia broke back through the temporary dam to send a scary pulse of fast water downstream. Many of the tribal stories were relayed through white settlers of the area, and many of those included expressions in Chinook jargon, which served as the common language of the time. One quotation was translated as “mad bulls down in the earth, these will kill all the Indians.” Wapato John was said to have declared that “a bad Ta-man-na-was,” or spirit, had set things off, and in response he proceeded to move his family off the Columbia and up to the east shore of Lake Chelan.
The cliffs above Earthquake Point are composed of massive pale-gray granites written through with dark ribbons formed by more recent volcanic intrusions. Viewed from close range, these lines of basalt carry a reddish-brown color that fits both their geologic origin and an Interior Salish creation story about a bad blind dog whose head was broken open by the sun. Searching for its den, the injured dog bled all over the cliffs, leaving behind many ribbons of dried blood.
Even though these gory intrusions make the sheer Ribbon Cliff look ripe for a cataclysmic event, recent geological investigations suggest that the river-blocking landslide of 1872 did not calve directly off its face. More likely, the earthquake triggered a release of colluvium, the unsorted rubble of soils, scree, and volcanic ash that had piled up for some thousands of years at the base of the cliff. According to this hypothesis, a sudden jolt sent untold tons of such debris sliding forward like an avalanche to impede the river’s flow. Over a period of hours, the Columbia bored an opening back through the mix of loose materials, and relentless pressure from the untamed river quickly enlarged the initial stream into a torrent that matched Wapato John’s description of a sudden pulse of water. Such an event would not leave many clues behind, but rock and tree-ring studies from around the cliff have revealed a complex history of other slides in the area, as if the bleeding dog had created a host of troubles over time.
A few miles north and west of Ribbon Cliff, a Pleistocene glacier pushed out of the Cascade Range to carve the very long, very deep gouge that today holds Lake Chelan. This glacier’s terminal moraine created the dam that contains the lake, which now drains through the Chelan River’s short, wild canyon to the Columbia. The size and depth of Lake Chelan seem to connect it to the spine of the entire continent. In 1899, an earthquake of 8.6 magnitude struck Yakutat Bay in Alaska. Only twenty minutes later, almost 1,400 miles away, a “volcanic upheaval” occurred on the surface of Lake Chelan, splashing petroglyphs on rock walls high above the normal lake level. Such violent sudden splashes or standing waves are known to geologists as “seiches.” The Coombs report described Lake Chelan’s 1899 seiche as “almost certain to have been earthquake-induced” and speculated that the 1872 temblor may also have been responsible for some unusual groundwater effects around the Chelan area.
Native accounts from the near vicinity tell of the earth subsiding up to five feet in one place, and of large cracks opening in the ground both at lake level and along a nearby hogback ridge. Some of the cracks released water that spurted two or three feet into the air and reeked with sulfurous fumes. One such gusher, which appeared in the middle of a tribal encampment at the lake’s south end, ruined much of the people’s stored winter food. The Coombs report noted that lake-bottom sediments near this site lay more than four hundred feet thick and that much of that material had been washed down from the trough’s upper end, where natural copper deposits concentrated sulfide minerals. Shifts in that ancient mud combined with hydraulic pressure could have disrupted water patterns of the area and created small geysers that emitted stinky fumes.
Wapato John’s son Peter, who was a teenager when the 1872 quake occurred, described a similar outburst below the outlet of Lake Chelan.
At Chelan Station a great hole opened in the earth and a veritable geyser was thrown into the air to a height of twenty or thirty feet. For weeks the Indians from all parts of the country came to see the strange phenomenon.… The geyser continued all winter but got weaker and as time went on it subsided. Springs in this location still remain to show the place where there occurred this remarkable water spout.
Today, just upstream from the confluence of the Chelan and Columbia Rivers, a series of artesian springs follows the crease between the slope of the glacial moraine and the extensive floodplain that leads down to the placid waters of the dammed Columbia. Initially diverted to irrigate an early orchard, for the past century the steady artesian flow has supported a pair of fish hatcheries. Known collectively as Beebe Springs, the upwellings can be traced by a thick brow of Himalayan blackberry that runs above the upper hatchery road for more than a quarter mile.
When I related Peter Wapato’s geyser story to US Geological Survey researcher Ralph Haugerud, he wondered if the quake, in a smaller version of the action at Ribbon Cliff, might have dislodged an avalanche of glacial till from the hillside to plug the whole Beebe Springs system. Aftershocks combined with the impediments could have created a geyser that took months to settle back into a quieter flow pattern.
“Imagine a rubber hose filled with water and sand,” explained Haugerud. “Hold one end up in the air. If you shake the hose, your flow increases on the lower end. If you shake it hard enough, it will spurt up like a geyser and stay that way for a bit before pulsing back down.”
In 2002 Haugerud teamed with three fellow geologists to reevaluate the 1872 event. Their method was to rigorously compare it with a dozen more scientifically documented earthquakes that had occurred both east and west of the Cascade Range in the twentieth century. The investigators concluded that the 1872 earthquake was probably a shallow crustal event with a magnitude of 6.8 and an epicenter east of the Cascade crest, close to the south shore of Lake Chelan. In an appendix, the author
s also stated that their findings could not represent any kind of final word, because “analyses of historical earthquakes often depend critically on ambiguous descriptions of earthquake effects.”
Gravy
More than a hundred river miles upstream on the Columbia and almost due east from Beebe Springs, between the mouth of the Sanpoil and Spokane Rivers, the prominent landmark of Whitestone Rock rises above the river’s south shore. In 1872 John “Virginia Bill” Covington ran a store in the shadow of Whitestone. Covington, who was married to a Sanpoil woman known as Spillkeen, talked to a reporter in the spring of 1873.
Mr. Covington, who has a trading post at White Stone … informs us that he spent the Winter in that country, and was there at the time of the earthquake last Fall. He says that he counted ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-TWO DISTINCT SHOCKS continuing at irregular intervals for forty-two days. At one place he saw a crack in the surface of the earth which is now open for about one hundred and fifty yards in length, and is from two to three feet wide at the top, and is from two to six feet deep. At another place he saw where the bank of the Columbia river had CAVED OFF AND SETTLED DOWN for two or three hundred yards. The mountains and cliffs were so shaken up and appear to be so greatly agitated and disturbed that large masses of rock are still constantly falling, tumbling and sliding down.
Succeeding subheads in the newspaper article announced both the appearance of “A BOILING LAKE” near the mouth of the Okanogan River and a “NATURAL BRIDGE” that formed over the Columbia just north of the Canadian border. Although the truth of such details remains impossible to verify, Howard Coombs and his cohorts did date discontinuities in nearby land-forms and confirm that sizeable landslides had occurred around the Whitestone trading post.
In the unsettled environment that existed throughout the Plateau tribal world in 1872, it is not surprising that a landscape-altering earthquake would be seen as a significant spiritual event. The Okanogan-Lakes author Mourning Dove remarked that although many of her elders clung to their native beliefs during the missionary period that began in the 1840s, the shaking earth persuaded some to embrace Christianity. Even as the aftershocks continued, a frame church was constructed on the site of an original Jesuit mission just south of Kettle Falls. “During that time my people stayed close to the priests,” Mourning Dove wrote. “The Black Robes [Jesuits] had no difficulty making lifelong Colvile and Okanogan converts at that time.”
The Jesuit priest Father Urban Grassi, who worked out of Yakima in the 1870s, interpreted the tremor as a sign from God, and in an 1874 letter commented about its effects on Sanpoil and Nespelem bands along the southern edge of the proposed Colville Reservation. Like Bill Covington, Father Grassi described significant aftershocks and landscape alterations, some of which score surprisingly high on the Mercalli scale for a place so far removed from the quake’s epicenter.
This tribe more than any other on the Columbia for the past two years has been visited by God with earthquakes that in some places has sunk the ground, in others has piled it up greatly, and in others has broken the sides of the mountains. At the sight of such terrors, it is something new that this tribe, like its neighbors … are beginning to fear and to pray, although the earthquakes have not caused them to abandon their vices entirely …
If by “vices” Father Grassi meant traditional cultural practices, he was correct: many Native American people had their own spiritual response to the upset of the earthquake. In 1873, an Indian Affairs agent on the Columbia Plateau compiled a list of no fewer than ten different native prophets or “dreamers” active across the region, each with a number of followers, ranging from a few dozen to several hundred. Two of these dreamer-prophets, Smohalla, from the Wanapum tribe, and Skolaskin (also spelled Kolaskin), of the Sanpoil, were said to have predicted the 1872 earthquake. A third, Patoi, of the Wenatchi, took advantage of the tumult to increase his following.
Working a few decades after the event, anthropologist Verne Ray gathered a host of different versions of Skolaskin’s story. One person told him that some weeks before December 14, 1872, Skolaskin had ridden into the camp of a rival Okanogan prophet and declared that “the Manitou is angry with the wickedness of his people.… The land is going to shake. Buildings will fall down. People will go out of their heads. You had better tell your people. Warn them as to what is going to happen.”
Skolaskin and his party then departed for home. “All along the river they warned the people of the impending tragedy. They were laughed at by some, but many more took the prophecy seriously. Those who had become followers of Skolaskin began to pray to qwrlantsu’tan to deliver them from destruction.”
After a day of travel, the group camped at the mouth of the Nespelem River. During the night they felt a slight tremor in the earth. As soon as they arrived at Whitestone Rock the following day, “Skolaskin gathered his followers together in the church to pray. Severe quakes occurred that night and throughout the following day. Further tremors were felt at intervals from that time until spring.”
Julia Garry, a Spokane woman, confirmed at least some of the activities. “I was camping at Whitestone, not far from Skolaskin’s camp, a little while after the big earthquake,” she told Ray. “Suddenly one day Skolaskin rushed out of his lodge and called to the people to begin praying and to look out for what was to happen. A little while later another earthquake came, just a small one. More people believed in him after that.”
Whether or not Skolaskin was purposely capitalizing on these aftershocks, for years afterward his influence remained strong. He ordered a small church built in his home village of Whitestone—one of the places most affected by the earthquake—and held regular services there. Skolaskin’s Whitestone church was later dismantled and rebuilt in front of the main offices of the Colville Confederated Tribes at Nespelem, where it stands today as a monument both to his work and to the resonant power of the 1872 earthquake.
What Sadie Boyd Heard
Oral accounts passed down through generations continue to provide sharp and significant evidence of the historic disruption. Coeur d’Alene member Cliff SiJohn grew up hearing how an area around the mouth of the Spokane River sank during that first night of violent tremors eight decades before. When SiJohn’s elders spoke the Salish word for the place, they would hold their hands out, fingers spread and palms down, then shake and lower them to mimic the effect. “That’s what the word means,” SiJohn said. “All sunken down.”
“I’ll ask around about that word for ‘sunken down,’ ” said Ann McCrae, after digesting all the earthquake material I had piled on her desk. “The Spokane is probably different than the Coeur d’Alene. And the Kolaskin story is interesting. I don’t like to use the word ‘prophet,’ but I think he was a seer. Many of our people long ago were seers. Some could see any time; others could see when their animal or plant spirits guided them. In my life I’ve known some, and have seen what they could do.”
Ann handed me a file folder that contained a single page of neat typing. She had found Sadie Boyd’s recorded account of the earthquake and transcribed it into English, highlighting all the Salish names for people and places. Ann had tried to trace out the site names, but she couldn’t figure out all of them. “Sadie was the oldest informant,” she said. “Maybe the words are old and those places are underwater now.”
“Before I was born, and while my mother was pregnant with my older sister, there was an earthquake,” Sadie began. Ann knew that Sadie was born in 1884, so the dates matched up well.
“There were families living at the flat above the mouth of the Spokane River, and at a place near there,” Sadie continued. Ann said their second campsite had a name that sounded to her like “stuffed”—maybe it was a place where they gathered bedding, or stored food in pits.
“It was in the fall when the earthquake happened. The way my mother told it to me, it was so frightening that it made one woman lose her mind. This was Whist-m-la’s mother.” The son’s name, Whist-m-la, looked similar to the name on the m
arker in the Walla Walla cemetery. But Sadie could not recall the name of his mother. Sadie said that the people at the camp “remembered Whist-m-las’s mother running around, scared, and when it was all over they couldn’t find her.”
There were others, she said, who were just as disturbed by the earthquake. One man who lived at the mouth of the Spokane River kept chasing his horse, even though the animal was safe in a corral. But at least his family knew where he was.
Whist-m-la’s mother remained lost, and it was only after a long time that someone found her body. It was in a place named for the sound of water, with rough breaks and steep side hills.
Sadie Boyd’s mother told her how the trees and land were shaking and moving in the earthquake—not from side to side as Sadie had imagined it, but like boiling water, or something boiling. When Sadie grew up, she said she asked another elder who had been there what the earthquake looked like: “Did it shake from side to side?” The old lady said, “No. It was like something boiling.”
Sadie Boyd also recorded the story of a separate seismic event that had taken place long before 1872, echoing the scientific analysis of the colluvium below Ribbon Cliff.
“It was awesome as it boiled like a giant pan of boiling gravy. Wave upon wave upon wave, fore and aft. People were running helter skelter, screaming, crying, as the land pulled apart, swallowing them up, swallowing the animals, trees, everything.”
When I showed Sadie’s Boyd’s transcript to geologist Ralph Haugerud, he did not hesitate to interpret the account. “I immediately think of ground liquefaction,” he said. “If you shake water-saturated sediments, they disaggregate and pack more closely. Then they release water, or muddy water, or sandy water, to boil up to the surface.” Haugerud sent YouTube links of classic liquefaction from recent earthquakes in Japan, New Zealand, and Puget Sound to prove his point. Every one of them bubbled like thick gravy. “This is the kind of clue that we might be able to do something with,” said Haugerud. “All we need is a few more.”
