Pre-Settlement Forests around Puget Sound: Eyewitness Evidence

Abstract

Witness trees from GLO surveys covering 6,300 square miles around Puget Sound (western Washington State) reveal, for the first time, the character and local diversity in the region's mid-19 th -century forest cover, before it was severely logged during the settlement period.

Pre-Settlement Forests of Southwest Washington: Witness Statements

“…Coherent forest patterns are less clear in this narrow 600-sq-mile zone, whose integrity is intruded by low-lying valleys (T12/R3&4E), irregular projections of Douglas-fir from Corridor (T10/R2E), and high-elevation subalpine volcanic ridges; only a few townships are free from such irregularly shaped encroachments. Regardless, quantifications in Figure 5 do confirm the expectation that the zone's forests would be a southerly extension of "Hemlock Heights" of Puget Sound country described in a previous study (Schroeder, 2019): more than half of witness trees pooled from its six "core" townships were hemlock (56.6%), and Douglas-fir and redcedar abundances were intermediate (respectively 18.3% and 12.6%, much higher than those species' values in Willapa Zone).…”

“…This study reconstructs the region's 4,400 sq miles of natural forests as they were at the dawn of Euro-American settlement in the mid-19 th century. The findings complement a similar investigation that focused on 6,300 sq miles of early forests around Puget Sound (Schroeder, 2019). Together, the two studies cover all non-mountainous parts of western Washington, except for coastal strips of the Olympic Peninsula.…”

“…The 1,500 sq miles of Corridor Zone forest traversed by early settlers generally resembled those previously described for the southern parts of Puget Sound country (Schroeder, 2019), all of which lie in a rain shadow and experience 45-55 inches of rainfall annually. As quantified in Figure 5, nearly half of Corridor stems were Douglas-fir and another one-fifth were redcedar, both with tree diameters that averaged nearly 2 feet.…”

“…Thirty-six sections, numbered in a boustrophedon, compose each of the region's townships. As elaborated more fully elsewhere (Schroeder, 2019), the map was constructed by tiling townships into numbered rows (Townships) and columns (Ranges); accordingly, T/R axes provide a convenient shorthand for locating details in the map, e. g., Grays Harbor is centered on T17/R10W. Boundaries and river courses were fitted secondarily.…”

“…Rich soils in the generously wide Chehalis Gap were particularly attractive to early immigrant farmers, despite the risk of periodic flooding, as comparable sites had been in the Floodplains Zone of Puget Sound country (Schroeder, 2019). Riverside farms along the narrower benches of the Cowlitz River were even less secure, being more subject to seasonal melt waters and more regular flooding.…”