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OHS Inv. #2708

Chuck Williams

Columbia River Dissenters Series

January 22, 1999

Tape 1, Side 1

CW = Chuck Williams

CH = Clark Hansen

Clark Hansen: This is an interview with Chuck Williams at his gallery in The Dalles, Oregon. The interviewer, for the Oregon Historical Society, is Clark Hansen. The date is 1/22/99. This is Tape One, Side One.

So I thought we’d first begin by exploring your own family’s background, and your ancestors, and what your roots are in every direction you could mention...

Chuck Williams: Well, my father Clyde Williams is Cascade Indian, and he was born in the back room of the Skamania General Store, and his great grandfather was Tumove [sp?] - is that coming through okay? - was Chief Tumove, who was the head chief of the western end of the Gorge, and who signed the 1855 treaty, the Willamette Valley treaty that the led to the establishment of the Grand Ronde Reservation. And a few months later, in the beginning of fifty-six, some Yakama Indians, or Klickitats came down from Yakima and attacked the blockhouse there at the Cascades. Then Lieutenant Phil Sheridan, The-only-good-Indian-is-a-dead-Indian Sheridan, was the head of the dragoons at Fort Vancouver, and some of the settlers got away, and came up and blew the bugle, and the Klickitats took off, and the Cascades had just signed the peace treaty, so they didn’t flee, and Sheridan needed a scapegoat, so my great great grandfather was the chief, so he was hung on the spot. The trial consisted of Sheridan putting his finger in my great great grandpa’s gun, [that] had been fired recently, so he hung him on the spot. It was actually one of the lost lyrics of Woodie Guthrie’s “Roll On Columbia,” that they found in the fiftieth anniversary, that had disappeared, and they found the original recording of it, and there was a line in there about Sheridan hung every Indian with smoke in his gun or something [laughs] that was great great grandpa. And so...

CH: So what year would that have been?

CW: Fifty-six. He signed the treaty in 1855, in Dayton, which is where my mom was born. And most people don’t understand that the Grand Ronde treaty goes all the way up to Cascade Locks, the crest of the Cascades is the divider between the Grand Ronde and the Warm Springs treaty ceded areas. So, since the Grand Rondes were terminated for about three decades, they weren’t really ever allowed in the Gorge debate, and still don’t have a voice in the Gorge, even though they have ceded lands, everything from Cascade Locks on the Oregon side through the rest of the Gorge is Cascade territory, down to the Portland Airport, basically.

CH: So, if you were to branch back into your - going back in time to your parents, and your grandparents, and your great grandparents, what are they all composed of? I mean, where did they come from?

CW: Well, my dad’s family were Indians, like I say here, Cascade Indians from the Gorge. [They] had been here since time immemorial. We’re from the village that they built the second powerhouse of Bonneville Dam on top of.

CH: What were the - were these Chinook Indians?

CW: Yeah, we’re Upper Chinook. We’re the same people, basically, as the Wascos and the Wishrams. We lived the village there, where the Bonneville Dam is still on top of. It’s where three treaties come together, basically: the Willamette Valley’s, the Grand Ronde Treaty, the Warm Springs, and the Yakama treaties come together. So my family and all the Cascades were split up. About half of my family was sent to the Yakama Reservation, and that’s where my family traditionally has been enrolled. A lot my family, including Zane [sp?] Jackson, who was the longtime tribal chairman of Warm Springs, his mom was my aunt, and was from our family. So a lot of the Wascos are people from our family, and then Grand Ronde is where a lot of my family ended up now.

The Grand Ronde Reservation was put out towards the coast, because the main purpose was to try to get all the Indians out of the Willamette Valley, to open up the farmlands. Since the reservation ended up over by the coast, we ended up at the - most of us ended up at the Yakama Warms Springs Reservation. It didn’t really have to do with who you were, it was where you were when you were rounded up by the army. So if you were, say, a Wishram, that’s what kind - [indiscernible] are Wishrams - if you were rounded up by the army in what’s now Dallesport, then you were sent to the Yakama reservation, and you Wishram or a Cascade. If that person’s brother was over on The Dalles side when they were rounded up, he was sent to Warm Springs and called a Wasco. If you were down on Sauvie’s Island where we used to get wapato, then you were sent to Grand Ronde and called a Cascade or something. So we were split into three different reservations and such, including my own families, where the...

CH: So your dad was, was he a one hundred percent Chinook?

CW: No, his dad was white. He’s half, so -.

CH: And where did his dad come from?

CW: He came out - he was Welsh - and came out on the railroad, in the eighteen-eighties, and then came down the Gorge. I’m not - I don’t remember why he came down, but he came down to homestead in the Cape Horn [?] area, and met my grandma, who was full-blood Indian. They sort of were married, but at that time it was illegal in the state of Washington for an Indian to marry a non-Indian, clear into the nine - I think it was like 1906 or something...

CH: Really?

CW: ...at that time, so it was a totally illegal marriage. Plus, it took two days to get to Vancouver to get married. So, people around there didn’t really formally get married anyway, that much [laughs]. So, my great grandma, my grandma - my Indian grandma’s mother is Kalliah. She’s very famous, known as Indian Mary, and there’s creeks named after her, and roads and such. So she was five years old when her father was hung by Phil Sheridan and the army. It was such an atrocity that the soldiers took up a collection of gold, and gave it to my great grandma’s older sister, Ray Zane [?] Jackson’s mom. She’s the woman in the famous Edward Curtis photographs of the Indian woman at the mouth Willamette - at Wind River with the big canoe. That’s my great grandma’s older sister. The soldiers gave her some gold, because they felt so guilty about what had been done to her dad. She hung on to that all of her life, and did a tombstone for her husband in the Cascade cemetery there, when he died, or some...

CH: And she lived where?

CW: She lived at the mouth, by where they now call Home Valley, there at the mouth of the Wind River. But they were born down on our family land that’s now part of Frenz Lake National Wildlife Refuge. So when my great great grandpa was hanged, he was - even though he had signed the Grand Ronde treaty, his wife was Wishram, so the family was sent to the Yakama reservation. Like one of my Yakama friends that is on council says, “Indians are like homing pigeons: sooner or later you come back to the reservation.” So, as soon as she grew up - she was five when her dad was hanged by Phil Sheridan - so when she grew up, she came back to the Gorge, and traded some horses to get back land that’s where what’s now the Frenz Lake there, just west of the community of Skamania. Since she was an Indian, she couldn’t legally own land. So white people were filing homestead claims on top of her land, and I actually have a copy of the bill. Actually, I think I have it in the drawer there. She had got a contract with the government to take the mail around the Cascades. When the mail boat would come up from Portland, they couldn’t get around the Cascades. So she would meet the boat on her horse, and take the mail around. She was a government-contracted employee, and so when these whites were trying to steal her land from her, she went - they had an Indian agency in Vancouver at the time, that has been I guess there for years. She went in and met with them. He got a bill through Congress, signed by Grover Cleveland, that held her land in trust. That’s been kept in the family, and so when - and that’s the land that’s now - that I was telling you about, that I wouldn’t let go to the Forest Service. We had held it for decades, waiting for the National Park Service to manage the Gorge, and sell it to the Park Service. Then when it became obvious [that it would be part of] the Forest Service, then I got a rider through Congress, and made it a National Wildlife Refuge. There’s now over a thousand swans a day, on the lake in the wintertime.

One of the most exciting things is for - for Chinook people and all of the lower Columbia native people, wapato was our main starch, was our potato. It’s the tuber that grows in shallow wetlands, and it was an incredible source of starch. The Indian women would pick - would walk through the wetlands, and pick it with their toes. [If] you pick it the same time - the right time of year, it floats to the surface. They would have little, miniature canoes with them, a few feet long, and then they just put it into that. Cattle grazing wipes it out. It’s really sensitive. When I came back to our land there, in the mid seventies, there was only one patch of wapato left, and it was in Rooster Rock State Park. Dave Talbot, who was then head of the state parks, who is one of the main villains in my mind [laughs] in the Gorge battle, leased Rooster Rock out to cattle, Rooster Rock State Park, and wiped out the wapato there. The biggest patches left had been in Sauvie’s Island. So the rest of Frenz Lake - once we got our family land, and I got it authorized, then U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service bought the rest of the lake. The brothers that owned most of it had been leasing it out for duck hunting, and for cattle grazing, to pay the taxes on it. They were like me, they had ended up living in California during a lot of their childhood, and came back the same time I did, to the family land. We were real close friends, until they tried to build an airport on my wetlands [laughs], then ran for county commissioner. But anyway, once we got it into wildlife refuge, we got the cattle off there. And now the whole north shore of the lake is solid wapato, a massive patch. I assume it was probably brought in by the swans, coming up from - in their poop or something [laughs]. I assume, because the nearest patch was Rooster Rock, and that had been almost wiped out. So, wapato, our main plant now, has come back really great on Frenz Lake. I was talking to the Wasco chief the other day about when they do a root feast there, soon, for - it would be the first wapato root feast in probably a century, or something. So it’s one of those few success stories in the Gorge.

CH: Now the wildlife refuge is called the Frenz Lake?

CW: Right, F-R-E-N-Z. Frenz Lake National Wildlife Refuge. And it’s the most protected part of the Gorge. The national wildlife refuge, we got three of them in the Gorge, and one that I can tell you later, that was supposed to be - and that’s the most - that’s the best managed lands now in the Columbia Gorge, are U.S. Fish and Wildlife lands.

CH: Okay, now going back to your great grandmother, Indian Mary, her husband was who?

CW: Her husband was - my grandmother’s father was Johnny Stooquin who was Wishram. He was a jockey. He’s actually the grandfather of Chief Johnny Jackson, who lives at the mouth of the White Salmon River. And then her - my grandma’s younger sister’s father is Calitz [sp?] in French, so it’s a different husband. She had a different husband for the younger daughter, but my great grandpa is Johnny Stooquin, who is enrolled in Yakama.

CH: Stuplin?

CW: Stooquin. S - actually I got our BIA file here [laughs].

CH: Do you actually have a copy of your family tree? Did you ever put that together?

CW: Yeah, I do. Here’s...

CH: Because I’d love to have that for our file.

CW: Here’s - yeah, this is how you spell...

CH: Oh how wonderful.

CW: That’s how the Yakama BIA file is. We’re like the Mormons, we have to keep track of everyone in our family for enrollment [laughs].

CH: Oh, I see, I see. So this is part of your...

CW: Official Bureau of Indian Affairs. It’s my legitimacy [laughs].

CH: Okay, Okay. Stooquin is S-T-O-O-Q-U-I-N.

CW: And since we have verbal languages, there wasn’t any real spelling, but that’s the way it’s kind of been spelled down the years. This is a [Inaudible] that we might be doing things.

CH: [laughs] So...

CW: Where’d you go Watson [?] [laughs]?

CH: Right, exactly. Yeah [laughs]. So, in other words, your - okay, your - this is on your father’s side?

CW: Right.

CH: Now - So your great grandmother was Indian Mary.

CW: Right.

CH: And her husband was...

CW: Johnny Stooquin.

CH: Johnny Stooquin.

CW: Right.

CH: Then...

CW: When my grandma was born. That’s my grandma’s father. And then she had another daughter later with her next - with her second husband.

CH: Right.

CW: Who was Calitz, Henry Will Wyapy [sp?],

CH: And then your other great great grandparents, on your father’s side?

CW: I don’t know too much about him. He was - ironically, my white grandpa - my grandpa that was married Indian grandma, was born in Pipestone, Minnesota, which is where all the pipes come from, where the red stone that all the peace pipes in the country come from that quarry. That’s where he was born, and he kind of left the family. He came out in the eighteen-eighties, to Tacoma, on the railroad, when they completed the railroad. Then [he] ended up coming down to homestead and logged and such in the Gorge, and met my grandma. Like I say, at that time they couldn’t be married. They lived with my great grandma, had a cabin there that’s - if you go down Indian Mary Road to the National Wildlife Refuge, the road makes an S-turn through an orchard, and that’s my great grandma’s orchard. Until we sold it to Fish and Wildlife, my dad and I still harvested fruit there every year. The trees from this was - my great grandma died in 1906, and the orchard’s still producing. Like I say, until my dad and I made it a national wildlife refuge, we still ate off the fruit off of those trees, clear into the - until about ten years ago or so. That’s were she lived. And then my fam - my grandparents then homestead - lived with her, Indian Mary, Kalliah, for a while, and then they homesteaded up in Cape Horn. There’s pictures in my book of that. Then, during the depression ran the Skamania General Store. People think that’s the old one that’s there now, but that’s actually the new one. The old one was just to the west of there, on the land that I lived on when I wrote the book. My dad was born in the back room of the Skamania General Store, in 1918, when my parents were - operated the store there.

CH: So your parents now - your grandparents - your grandfather was a Welshman.

CW: Right, right.

CH: And your grandmother was...

CW: Full-blood Cascade.

CH: Full-blood Cascade. And her name?

CW: Amanda.

CH: Amanda.

CW: Yeah.

CH: And...

CW: Williams, of course.

CH: Amanda Williams.

CW: Yeah, she was known [?] by Tumove or Stooquin, either way, [?] [in her] pre-Mary days.

CH: How did she meet your Welsh grandfather?

CW: I’m not really sure. She was incredibly beautiful, as you can see, so I imagine [laughs] he was probably struck immediately [inaudible]. I don’t really know. Our oral history is so thorough, but it’s one of those things - I don’t really know other than he came down to the area to probably log. You know, there’s a lot of logging, and homesteaders. Like I say, he came down to the Gorge for work, and met her.

CH: Right.

CW: And got married, and they ended up having eleven children. It was a cold Gorge - and my dad is the youngest of the eleven.

CH: So you’re probably related to almost everybody that’s in there.

CW: Yeah, exactly [laughs]. About a third of Skamania County is related to me [laughs].

CH: [laughs] Right. Okay, so going on your mother’s side, why don’t you go back there to as far back as you can go.

CW: My mom’s white, and she’s Scotch Irish, and some English mixture. Her grandmother, my great grandma, started out on the Oregon Trail when she was five years old. They got off in Nebraska until my great grandma grew up. Then they moved on, and came on out to Oregon in the eighteen-eighties, and settled in Dayton, were one of the early settlers in Dayton. That’s where my mom was born, and her mom, my white grandma were born in Dayton. It was - kind of talk about a schizophrenic childhood. Dayton’s where my dad’s great grandpa, Tumove signed the treaty. That’s where the Grand Ronde was signed, in Dayton, with Joel Palmer. So my white great grandma used to live, when I was growing up, on the square in Dayton, right across the street from Phil Sheridan’s blockhouse. So Phil Sheridan shot my white great great grandpa [laughs] - or my Indian great great grandpa. So I would be with white great grandma, playing in the blockhouse [laughs], Phil Sheridan’s blockhouse. I kind of had a schizophrenic childhood, there.

CH: [laughs] So, your - going back again, your great grandparents on your mother’s side were - you had two sets of them.

CW: Right, and they settled in Dayton, and lived up there. My mom’s maternal grandmother started out on the Oregon Trail to Oregon, got off for a little while in Nebraska, and came on out, and lived to see men on the moon. She died at ninety-nine in Dayton. Can you imagine, one mind trying to comprehend wagon trains to spaceships in one lifetime? It’s just mind-boggling.

My mom - my white grandma was born in Dayton. Then my white grandpa is from Nebraska, from a farming family near Hastings, Nebraska. He came out - he grew up and was kind of the family rebel - and moved out to Oregon. My mom was born in 1921, so he came out in the teens. Then he worked on the Old Scenic Highway, here in the Gorge, as one of the workers on the Old Scenic Highway. Then he went down and lived in Dayton, working on the locks, the Yamhill locks there, on the Yamhill River. That’s where he met my grandma. Which is ironic, because she wanted to get out of the little town, and get to the big city, and have some excitement, and he wanted a farm girl [laughs]. That marriage didn’t last too long, [just] long enough for my mom to get conceived. Then actually they got divorced, my grandma remarried, and he got killed in a car wreck. Then she remarried my grandpa again for a while.

So anyway my grandma moved into Portland. My mom was born in Dayton, but my family had some land that my grandpa bought when he was working on the Old Scenic Highway. It’s the land - my mom thinks it’s where the high school is in Hood River, but I never checked it out. It’s not really that important. So they used to spend the summers a lot in Hood River. Growing up, my mom spent a lot of her summers in Hood River, and has a lot of stories about that. She was living - my mom - in Portland, during her high - she went to high school in Portland. It’s now the administrative center in Portland. As I said, my dad was born in the back of the - and grew up in Skamania, and being a half-blood there, you were totally between cultures. It was really a rough time. It was so bad that a lot of his generation kind of repress stuff. You know, they forget the bad times, and actually a couple of the older ones just moved into Portland, or one to San Francisco, and just kind of left their Indian heritage behind. They were just harassed constantly. Even my dad, who was born in 1918, suffered a lot of that when they went got to school. Stevenson was, still is, a very racist place, which is about eleven miles to the east. But that’s where he had to go to high school and such. So the Indian kids and the half breeds would go up there. They’d get rocks thrown at them. They could get Saiwash [sp?] yelled at them, which was kind of the equivalent of nigger. It was the Chinook jargon word for Indian. It became a slur towards Indians to whites. Fortunately, it seems to have disappeared from - unlike the N-word - it seemed to have disappeared from the vocabulary here in the Northwest. They would have rocks thrown at them and such, but they were educated and half white, so they weren’t - they didn’t really fit in with the Indian community, too. In fact, when Aunt - Widacreek [sp?], Aunt Virginia - the woman photographed by Curtis - would come down to visit my grandma, her niece, they would kind of be embarrassed, because she was what they used to refer to as a blanket Indian. She was a traditionalist, that made no attempt to assimilate into the white world. So they were kind of embarrassed , you know [laughs], that a blanket Indian - that they’re relatives. They were hung out between cultures. There was a whole community around Skamania of half-breed people that didn’t really fit in, really, to each culture. The older ones really had it bad, I mean to the point where the don’t even - won’t talk even. There’s two of my aunts left, still alive, that wouldn’t even talk about [it]. But the younger ones were very proud of them [?]. My dad and the next few were just - even though they got harassed - they were Indian period, and made no bones about it, and were very proud of it. The older ones were - really had a lot of it beaten out of them. It was a pretty rough time there.

My dad ended up - right before he went into the Navy - was working in the shipyards in Portland. He actually - his first job out of high school was working out at Bonneville Dam, which was built on top of his village. It didn’t last - that didn’t last long. It’s kind of one of those little ironies of life. So, he went into Portland and worked in the shipyards there, the iron works. My mom was - had just gotten out of high school, and was babysitting for one of my aunts, who ended up marrying Jim Walker who’s - I think they - the Oregon Historical Society, I understand, has a whole section on him. He’s invented model airplanes, remote control. He had American Junior Aircraft Company. He was the founder of that. He’s the only person in my family that ever had money. He’d do these inventions. He, for instance - he had a lot of nerve problems - you know, a very hard-working guy. The doctor told him he needed a hobby like model trains. His business was making model airplanes, so he filled up his whole basement with model trains. His friends would come over and they’d get drunk, and wreck his trains up. So he invented this switch that would automatically align itself as the train came, so they wouldn’t wreck it. [He] ended up selling it to Lionel for a fortune. He became very wealthy, the only people in our family that were wealthy [laughs].

CH: Really?

CW: They had three daughters, my aunt and Jim Walker. My mom was babysitting for them, to try to get enough money to get to school. So my dad came over to visit his older sister one day, and their youngest daughter is one of my favorite cousins - dragged my dad in to meet my mom, and said, “this is your future wife here [laughs], meet her.” So that’s how my parents met.

CH: Was it actually kind of arranged like that?

CW: No, no. It was just - the young girl decided that her Uncle Clyde and my mom, her babysitter, were a perfect couple [laughs], and informed them that they were going to marry each other. So it was arranged by like a five year old [laughs].

CH: Your mother’s name was what?

CW: Betty.

CH: Betty.

CW: Betty June Defanbaun [sp?]. That was her father’s name, Defanbaun. He’s the one that came out from Nebraska and worked on the Old Scenic Highway. Her maiden name was Rowley. My mom’s grandma, Ida Rowley, is the one that settled in - one of the early families in Dayton. Rowley’s kind of the family name there...

CH: And your father...

CW: R-O-W-L-E-Y.

CH: L-E-Y.

CW: Yeah. R-O-W-L-E-Y. It’s one of the early families in Dayton.

CH: And your father’s name was?

CW: A. Clyde - Arthur Clyde Williams.

CH: Arthur Clyde.

CW: He goes by Clyde - went by Clyde. He past away a few years ago. My mom’s still alive.

CH: And so, he was - his father was white...

CW: Yeah.

CH: And his mother was...

CW: Was full-blooded.

CH: Full-blooded Indian.

CW: Yeah. His father’s Charles Otis Williams, the Welsh man. That’s who I’m named after.

CH: Oh I see, I see.

CW: But Chuck - but he went by Charlie. Chuck is a Chinook word for river. So that’s why I’ve always gone by Chuck. A lot of the rivers like the Klickitat and White Salmon, that are wild - they’re National Wild and Scenic rivers, I was the impetus behind. So my nickname at Warm Springs - a lot of Indian country - is Wild-And-Scenic Chuck - is my Indian nickname. Hell, I’m neither as wild nor as scenic as I used to be [laughs]. Pollution over the years, erosion, is something that [laughs} -.

CH: So then your father then, he moved into Portland during the war years?

CW: Yeah, to work in the shipyards, before he went into the Navy. That’s when he met my mom. So I was born in Portland, because of that, in a hospital that no longer exists. I can’t even remember the name of it.

CH: Really? It’s...

CW: I could find that out, but mom still remembers. But it’s one that no longer exists.

CH: So you were born when then?

CW: In forty-three.

CH: 1943.

CW: July, twenty, forty-three. War baby. My dad had just gone in the Navy. So then we - the first two years of my life, we lived in, like twenty places. I think that’s one reason I’m so nomadic [laughs], I’ve been so nomadic. I’ve moved to San Diego, San Francisco, and all over the place, when my dad was in the Navy. And then, after he got out of the Navy, we ended up in Springfield, there near Eugene. That’s where I went to first and second grade, was in Springfield.

CH: I see. Do you have brothers and sisters?

CW: I’ve got a younger sister, whose three year - Em [????], who lives in Santa Rosa, California.

So when I was in third grade - my dad was able, after got out of the Navy - only because of the GI bill - was able to got school. [He] was one of those people who probably would never have been able to got to college, if it hadn’t been for the GI bill. He started at Washington State, and was going to take business classes. He scored the highest score they had ever scored on a math test. The college says, “Hmm, you ought to think about engineering.” So he ended up going to Oregon State [inaudible]. So we lived there - I guess the first two years of my life was when we traveled in the Navy, so it would have been until I started first grade. We lived in Corvallis there, when I was like three and four, in that - three, four, five, somewhere in that - while my dad was going to school. Then we moved to Springfield.

Even though my dad has an engineering degree - a mechanical and electrical engineering degree - he, being Indian, it wasn’t real easy to get jobs. So we ended up moving to Petaluma, California. It’s about an hour north of San Francisco. So that’s where I grew - from third grade through high school, that’s where I grew up. About the time I was getting out of high school, my parents divorced. My dad moved back to the Gorge, and I ended up back here later. My sister and my mom still live in Sonoma County. So [it’s] kind of a second home.

CH: Well...

CW: My mom’s one of those people that was born in Oregon and moved to California.

CH: [laughs] The other way around.

CW: The reverse migration, yeah.

CH: What was your father’s occupation?

CW: He was an engineer.

CH: Where?

CW: Well, from third grade on, he primarily worked at a company called Crestview, and did a lot of inventions. He helped the - what do you call it? - the ion, negative ion generator. He was one of the co-inventors of that, and invented these Christmas tree stands that went around and played music. We used to have all this stuff in the house, testing all the time, growing up.

CH: And -.

CW: But like all Indians he came back home - so he came back to the Gorge. About the time I was getting out of high school, they divorced. So he worked for Tidlan [sp?] Machine Company in Washougal, when he came back.

CH: What year would he have come back?

CW: I graduated in sixty-one, so it was in - he actually - they divorced in sixty-one, but he lived in San Rafael for about a year before he came back to the Gorge. So he would have back in sixty-three probably.

CH: And he came back to - and lived in Washougal, then.

CW: Yeah. That’s where my wife - his parents moved to Washougal at the end of their lives, so they’re buried. That’s where I remember my grandparents more, is living in Washougal, right under the tower there. They’re buried along the Washougal River, there. All the rest of my Indian family, at what was called the Cascade -.

[End of Tape 1, Side 1]

January 22, 1999

Tape 1, Side 2

CH: Okay, go ahead. You were talking about your family was a - the rest of the family was buried.

CW: Right. So on my - when my dad’s parents retired, they moved into Washougal, and lived there. My oldest - my dad’s oldest sister worked in the mill there at Pendleton. So we used to hang around there when we were kids, back when in the seconds shop, you got really good deals, before the tourist buzz found it [laughs]. We got most of our clothes from the Pendleton Wool Mill seconds shop there in Washougal, that only locals went to...

CH: But that would have been after you got out of high school then, and came back?

CW: No, my dad’s father died when I was real young, and my grandma died when I was nine or ten. So that would have been - she would have died in the early fifties. They moved into their - I think in the forties. They still lived in Skamania County during the thirties. So some time in the - around forty probably - is when they moved into Washougal, basically their retirement years - when they retired.

CH: But you basically grew up in Petaluma.

CW: Right.

CH: I mean, prior to your first couple of years of grade school, then you went back down...

CW: Yeah, I grew up from third grade through high school in Petaluma.

CH: And did you come up here during that time?

CW: Oh yeah. It was every summer. It was family - yeah. We spent a lot of time. We’d come up for Christmases and it was - we were kind of like the hillbillies that moved to the North, Chicago and Detroit, but we’re - I can’t remember what they call it, but that road that goes between Chicago and Detroit to the - [to] Kentucky and Tennessee is just lined with people commuting back. We were that way. We were just all - it was with both my families, being from here, all the relatives were...

CH: So you would go where? When you came back up here during your summers, where were you...

CW: Well, we’d go to Dayton to see my - we’d go to Portland to see my maternal grandma, and Dayton to see my maternal great grandma, and then Washougal to see my grandparent - my dad’s parents, and then we owned the land where the Skamania General Store was, in Skamania. That was always like - we always spent a lot of time there, in the huckleberry. You know, that was kind of the roots to my life in a lot of ways. It was our home that we always went back to - kind of our spiritual home or something, was the land we owned there. So [I] spent a lot of summertime there, chasing bears. It was like a really fun time. Then we had other aunts and uncles. My dad had eleven older brothers and sisters. So it spread from The Dalles to Portland, basically [laughs].

CH: At that - during that period that you were growing up, say by the time you got through with high school in Petaluma, where did you - I mean, do you feel there were any major episodes that happened in your life, major events that somehow affected the way you - decisions you made in terms of which way to go and all that?

CW: Well, my Indian heritage had a big thing, because even when I was young - my mom was telling me when I was visiting her at Christmas. Well, I started in Petaluma, and they went to a field trip, to the Sonoma Mission - this was when I was in third grade, my first year there. They started to take the class into the Phil Sheridan Room at the Sonoma Mission, and I refused to go in. The teacher says, “how come?” and I says, “because he was a jerk. He hung my great great grandpa after - he was an Indian chief.” She thought, this kid - being light-skinned, blue eyes - she thought this kid is probably a little bad [laughs]. So she - and she knew my mom, who was white, but she didn’t - she never met my dad, so she didn’t realize he was Indian. She calls up my mom that night and says, “let me tell you the story your son’s told us.” And my mom said, “oh, that’s all true.” So I was - you know that’s always been my identification. My Indian grandma even said, even though I was light-skinned I was the most Indian mentally, of all her grandkids. I was the one that was Indian through and through. So, I don’t what the - like an Indian that acts like a white we call apples. I don’t what the - what’s white on the outside and red on the inside [laughs]. I don’t what there is to describe me, but I’ve always grown up Indian, proud of it. That’s always been my identification, ever since I can remember. It’s just something where it’s just that’s the way that I was.

CH: So what did you do when you got out of high school, then?

CW: Well, we didn’t have enough money for me to go to college. So I went to junior college for a year, at the college of Marin, near San Rafael. [I] was taking engineering. My dad was - I kind of have a unique family anyway. I tell people, “it’s no wonder I’m a mess. I was raised by a conservative Indian father who was fascinated by technology and engineering, and a radical left-wing WASP mother who loved art and nature. So my mom was always the one that took me fishing and such [laughs]. It was bound that I wouldn’t turn out too normal, I guess...

CH: You were there for two years?

CW: Where was -? Oh one year. One year, and was working at a gas station, and was usually out drunk and partying most of the time. But my dad was an engineer, and so I think I just - probably because of that, was doing engineering. I was really lucky, because he was having me doing drafting, mechanical drawing by the time I could walk. [It was] just one of those things I kind of picked up on. When I was in high school, I would do my friends’ - and college - math for them. You know, I could go into a math class, and I would be out drunk the night before, and I’d get a hundred percent. It was one of those things. And I always - when they give you the aptitude test, I would always score a hundred percent on engineering and on art. It was one of those dual brain - you know I was kind of lucky that I have both sides - kind of max on both sides of the brain. But I never - growing up in the fifties like I did - I never had any concept that you could be an artist. That that was - that that could be your primary profession. That was something you did on the weekend. Those Eisenhower years - I don’t think I ever comprehended, probably until I was in my early twenties, that art was something you could do as your life.

CH: Yet, during that time, I think of the fifties and the early sixties as being - your being so close to California. That was really the center of The Beat culture, and the whole North Beach, San Francisco scene...

CW: Right, I was in the middle of all of that. And I really - on the negative side of growing up in California is I missed so much of the - of my Indian culture. I might get to a pow wow in the summer or something, but it wasn’t something that was daily - part of my life that it would of been if I was up here. On the flip side, I am really glad that I grew up in the Bay Area during my formative years. I was there during the beatnik thing. It was in the middle of that. Later, I was already really grown up and such, yet I was kind of a hippie, but I didn’t know what I was until the hippies came along. It was one of those, “oh, okay. That’s what I [laughs] - that’s what I am.”

CH: Would you say you were more a part of the kind of beatnik thing that was happening?

CW: Yeah. Yeah, very definitely.

CH: What kind of attitudes do you have, or what kinds of things did you do, that would reflect that beatnik part of your nature?

CW: Well, really getting into art, going to Jazz clubs. That’s what really got me interested in art. It was more, at that point, surrealism, and that was - you know, to a young person, Dollence [sp?] and Dali, and such. I used to hang out in the coffee shops, and hung out in Furlengetti’s bookstore, and I was - played pool Mike’s pool hall half the night, and smoking stuff before other people were [laughs], and stuff. So it was a very - I was graduating just when all the radical - the be-ins and stuff were happening on - arrested at Berkeley. It just totally changed my life. As I said, I’m really glad I’m back home in Oregon, but I’m really glad my formative years were in the Bay Area. So I’m very thankful for that.

So I went to junior college for a year, taken eng - taking calculus and such, and I didn’t really - was not enjoying it, and...

CH: Why? Why weren’t you enjoying it?

CW: Oh, I just didn’t - I wasn’t into school. I wanted to party and have a good time. So, I got a job as a junior engineer - so I decided to drop out - as I said I was just going to junior college, because then it was ten dollars a semester, [unintelligible] back in California schools where - in the Brown days. You could go to college for ten dollars a year. Like I say, I was having to work in a gas station to support myself. That got real old, so I decided to drop out for a year, and work for a year, and then go back to school.

CH: That would have been sixty-three?

CW: Well, I graduated in Petaluma High in sixty-one, so I went one year, so it would have been sixty-two.

I got a job in Sausalito for a big engineering firm, Johnson Controls, as kind of a junior engineer. I was actually somewhat trusted. I was the least-qualified person to apply for this job. The guy that hired me said he’d just had a feeling that I was the person, and hired me. Within the end of the year, I was a full-blown engineer, and people with degrees [were] working for me. [I] ended up doing that for six years, and never went back to school. So I worked three years for Johnson Controls, and then three years Robert Shaw [sp?} Controls.

CH: And what kind of work were they doing?

CW: Design, and I was an instrumentation engineer. I designed a lot of the early NASA computer systems, which is ironic because I went - this is kind of future in light, but I spent seven years camping, once, totally after I’d been an engineer, and totally deprogrammed my mind of all technology. When my Gorge book came, my taxes got complicated enough, a had to get a calculator. I couldn’t even work it. My dad and I just - you know, worked on early-ass [?] computers. I just deprogrammed my mind so much I couldn’t even [laughs] - I could fix my old Econoline van, and that was - and my cameras, and that was it. Now I’ve got about four computers, so I’ve been corrupted again.

So I got a job, like I say, in Sausalito with Johnson Controls. It turned out to be - in terms of Vietnam, it turned out to be a lifesaver. I was drafted six times, and I was doing NASA work. I had a deferment that I was essential to the national defense. It was when they had just put Sput- you know, the Russians had just sent up Sputnik, so they were on this big push. Since I did NASA - I was a contract worker, doing contract work for NASA, so they couldn’t draft me. I got drafted six times, and worked three years for Johnson Controls, and moved to San Francisco. Then I went to work for Robert Shaw. Then they - then I went to Houston for a year, and worked on the manned spacecraft center in Houston. Then I went over - I hated Houston. In fact, they paid me hardships - the British Embassy there paid people in Houston a hardship pay, and so I demanded and got hardship pay [laughs]...

CH: Sure.

CW: ...For being there. So they paid me back by letting me live the next year in New Orleans. I worked on the Mississippi test facility there. I don’t know if you remember, in the Goldwater-Johnson years, there was the big campaign thing over how Ladybird’s land had been turned into this NASA facility - so that’s where I worked. About two weeks in Mississippi, being a shaggy - not a longhair like I am now, but for the times, you know, the Beatles. This is the Beatle Years. I had Beatle hair, which was unheard of, and was in my early twenties. I decided that wasn’t - Mississippi was not for me. I was the boss. I had 150 people working for me, and my boss was in Virginia, so I just moved into the French Quarter. This was in sixty-four, sixty-five. And in the South then, if you were in the French Quarter, you could do anything you wanted. You could be a transvestite, whatever you want, hippie, beatnik. You know, there weren’t hippies yet then, quite, so most people called me a beatnik. But I was this high level engineer. So I lived in the French Quarter in New Orleans for a year, and then commuted out a couple of days a week to the project. I had 150 people working for me, was running multi-million dollar projects, would be in negotiations with the Army Corps of Engineers for massive contracts, and I was just this kid, [unintelligible] just take them to the cleaners if they just let down their guard. This was just some kid, clean them out.

CH: What were the projects - what kind of projects were you working on at the time?

CW: Well, when I was in the Bay Area, it was mostly heating and air conditioning systems and such. In NASA - you’ve seen, what’s that, Alphaville, what’s the Gedart [sp?] film where the fascists take over the world, and they have this control center with all the walls covered with dials.

CH: Oh yeah.

CW: So that’s what I used to design, those [laughs], the walls covered with instrumentation systems, and such. At NASA, I was designing the instrumentation systems for the manned spacecraft center, which is like a massive campus, just these buildings. It was one of those really political - where Brown and Root [sp?] were buddies with Johnson, and they donated the land to NASA, but they owned all the land around it. They become quad - you know, billionaire, big massive rip-off - but anyway that’s where I’d work. So I was designing these instrumentation systems for the all the NASA building. I would take all the inputs and stuff, and feed them into a central computer system, and bring those back - when printers were IBM typewriters that were hooked into the computer, and the computer room was about this size or something, with these massive computers. When I worked at the Mississippi Test Facility, it was the instrumentation systems for the - it was the static tests they did on the NASA rockets, before they sent them. Before they sent them to Cape Canaveral, they’d send them there. They had these massive towers that bolt them onto, and then test fire them, but they were bolted down so they couldn’t raise up. I designed those. Like one of them had a junction box. It had a million wires coming into it, and I had to design a system where electricians could just - even electricians could go in and hook up a million wires in a junction box about the size of this room, and have them come out right.

Then I went from - so I got really tired of - New Orleans was fun for about six months, and the food I still miss, but I was ready for the West Coast. So I said, “I’m going back to the West Coast or I quit.” I ended up going up to Seattle. It was when I was starting to get really political. I was - I did a lot of Boeing work, subcontracting, helped design a lot of the instrumentation for the 747 assembly plant, which, along with the Cape Canaveral building, one the two biggest buildings in, I think, the world, definitely the country.

CH: At Boeing.

CW: Yeah, up in Everett there, the big 747 facility. I did a lot of the design work on that. But I was getting really political at the time.

CH: This would have been when?

CW: I moved to Seattle in sixty - I lived there in sixty-six and sixty-seven. So I was like - went to Houston in sixty-four, went to New Orleans in sixty-five, went to Seattle in sixty-six, and was there for a year and a half. Then, I was fighting the SST. I was the only engineer in Seattle that was against the SST, and had become a real anti-war activist, and was always in political trouble all the time. That was kind of when hippies came along. There were people that were running on the Seattle city council on the total - their only platform was to go on the UW campus and beat the shit out of all the hippies, and so [laughs] it was real, real polarized. That’s when I really got politicized. So I moved back to the Bay Area, about the beginning of sixty-eight, and got my last draft deferment. When the first time I had been drafted, if you refused induction, you got - you spent about twenty years in jail. By the time I got my sixth one over, people were burning down draft centers and such. I moved back to the Bay Area, San Francisco, working for Robert Shaw. By then, I was working on sewage treatment plants, because politically, there was almost nothing else - I was a good enough engineer, I could have any job I wanted, but I wouldn’t work on most things. So I was ending up working on things like sewage, recycling plants, sewage and such [laughs]. When I got my last deferment, I called the draft board, and they said, “we don’t even want to hear from you.” That was the one that carried me until I was twenty-six and they wouldn’t draft me. So I quit engineering, and went into the Peace Corps. I decided I’d serve - I’d gotten out of the service. I figured I wasn’t going to go to Vietnam, but I definitely felt like I should serve my country. So I spent a year in the Peace Corps, and ended up in the Dominican Republic. Then I quit once, and then got kicked out once, and then rejoined, and then got kicked out the same time the head of the Peace Corps did. This is when Nixon came in and they fired - about a third of the Peace Corps was - deselected was the term they used for me, since I was still in the program. Like I say, I quit once because I was in the Dominican Republic. They, both Johnson and the Dominican government wanted the Peace Corps there for the political thing, but they didn’t want me to do anything. I was in the worst ghetto in Santo Domingo, a place that hated Americans. It was where the Marines were. If you went into the rural parts, they idolized Americans, because their idea was these care packages that the U.S. sent - and that was their idea of America. The minute you went into the city ghettos, where the Marines had been, they hated Americans, but they’d always say, “well, we love you, but we hate Americans,” or something.

I was supposed to be doing community organizing, and if I got caught speaking to more than two people at once, the police would break it up for being a communist cell block meeting. It was kind of hard to do community organizing [laughs] when you couldn’t talk to more than two people. I helped build a school for the neighborhood, and stuff - and did some stuff, but I really wasn’t in a position where I could really accomplish much. I learned a lot. I mean it was incredible personal growth. I got dysentery, and weighed less than a hundred pounds when I got home, and was really sick. But I learned a lot. Like almost everyone that goes in the Peace Corps, you come home without any materialism. You’re in a culture where people live in poverty you can’t even conceive of, and they’re so much happier than most people in the United States. They’re people that have nothing, and they’re so easy-going and happy, that it really - I came home really very anti-materialistic.

CH: So you were deselected from the Peace Corps then for what reason?

CW: Well, I quit in the Dominican Republic, because I couldn’t get anything done. I was in training to go to Afghanistan, and that’s when I was deselected. It was just for being too radical. I was like a threat - you know, I was probably a trouble maker. So I say, a third of the Peace Corps got kicked out that week, including Jack Baum [sp?], the director. This is when Nixon came in.

So the first time I quit, the Dominican Republic, and then I was supposed to go to Afghanistan, and got kicked out the day before we went to Afghanistan. But in the process of that, I was hitchhiking through El Paso, one time, and was eating down in the barrio there, in this little Mexican Restaurant. Some young Chicano guys came in that had long hair, and they had never seen anyone - this is sixty-eight or nine, in there - and they had never seen anyone other than them that had long hair. They all had long hair, but they were the only guys in west Texas. They were just - couldn’t believe here was some guy - and so anyway I became buddies with - you know, I was talking with them. They seemed liked nice kids. They were like fifteen to twenty. One of them invited me to stay in the projects with his family. So I stayed about a week with a family there in the projects. It turned out they had been - they were the biggest, most notorious gang in west Texas [laughs]. They were just straight kids to me. So it turned out, they had - there had been a Catholic priest - this is in the Segunda Barrio there in El Paso, right on the border there. You don’t know which side of the Mexican border - I mean there were conditions there that were just appalling. (We probably want to get more salad bar than where we were.)

CH: So are we going?

CW: Yeah, yeah. So I met these young Chicano guys that turned out the biggest gang in west Texas, and next to the Shamrocks, the most feared gang. There had been a Catholic priest there, in the barrio there, this really poor part. Say, this is poverty beyond anything someone in the West Coast had been. They had these apartments there called the Bisidios [sp?]. They’d be about - there were massive rats and there were no indoor plumbing, no electricity, and there’d be about two outhouses and a water faucet between these rows of apartments. [It was] just poverty like I have never seen. All the slum lords were the mayor and the county health inspector, and people. They loved it when the kids were fighting each other, and not political.

So this Catholic priest there had gotten all the other gangs, like, a big brother. He was some local Mexican guy who ran a grocery store, or something, that the kids would go to. And this gang was the biggest, most notorious, and they weren’t about to have a big brother, but they kind of missed it. So when I left El Paso, they said, “well, if you want to come back and work with us, you know, you’re the only person crazy enough to be our big brother.” [laughs]. So - and they we