04/26/2024 | 7m 11s | Video has closed captioning.
For millennia, clam culture has infused our region with mythology, humor and flavor. Clams were eaten and traded in vast numbers by Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest. One First Nations people traced the origin of humanity to a clamshell opened by a raven. Settlers too discovered how essential clams were and even sang about them as the key to contentment.
Aired: 04/26/24
(bright music) (lighthearted music) - According to the Haida First Nations people of Northern British Columbia, the origins of humanity began on a beach.
Raven found a large clamshell and noticed some creatures protruding from it and squirming inside.
He coaxed the reluctant creatures to come out and join the rest of the world.
They were the first men.
It seems apt that a clam shell would be part of an origin story in the Coastal Pacific Northwest.
Thousands of years of shell middens, old refuse deposits, our testament to the role of shellfish in sustaining people here.
The variety and abundance of clamshells show they were a crucial source of food.
Proof of the old adage, "When the tide is out, the table is set."
Let's hear it for the quiet, unsung, well, barely sung, by valve, the clam.
(uplifting music) (jaunty music) The receding of the glaciers left a pleasant homeland for shellfish.
(lighthearted music) Clams were accessible on sandy beaches.
On Haida Gwaii, the Haida's island homeland, people were living sustainably on game and shellfish as early as nearly 11,000 years ago, not long after the ice retreated and Raven coaxed humanity into the daylight.
(mellow music) Indigenous people throughout the northwest coast dug for clams carrying special clam baskets and using digger sticks to chase them down.
Many middens were the result of processing large numbers of clams, which were often smoked and dried for later consumption or trade.
Dried and smoked clams made their way over the mountains.
People far from the sea could still enjoy some briny goodness.
(lighthearted music) The cultivation of clam beds by Indigenous people is one phenomenon that is being revived.
Many native peoples made clam gardens.
Some argue the term is a misnomer, because the gardens involved a variety of techniques and serious heavy lifting.
Shorelines were re-engineered to expand sandy beaches.
Rocks were removed to increase clam habitat.
Walls and revetments were erected to improve cultivation.
Aquaculture here is thousands of years old.
There's another more local kind of origin story involving clams that relates to the beginnings of modern Seattle.
The Denny Party, Euro-American settlers credited with starting the city of Seattle, landed at Alki Point on a chilly wet November day in 1851.
They marked a new wave of settlers on Puget Sound.
Among the party was a new baby, Rolland Denny, just two months old.
His mother, Mary Ann, was sick and couldn't produce milk, and so Duwamish women taught her to nurture tiny Rolland on clam broth until she could.
It worked.
He lived to be a ripe 87 years old, the last survivor of the original Denny Party.
(bright music) (lighthearted music) Ivar Haglund, the Seattle restaurateur, capitalized on clams and kept the virtues of clam broth, or clam nectar, on menus with a winking suggestion that it might be an aphrodisiac.
- If you drink clam nectar, then really buy hectare, you'll feel something new that you never felt before.
- That guy will do anything to sell if it comes to clam nectar.
(lighthearted music) - But he also promoted an old frontier song that said that the abundance of clams was the essence of the good life in Puget Sound country, especially for those who were not prosperous in farming, prospecting, or any other frontier endeavor.
Haglund sang folk songs on the radio, and one of these was called "The Old Settler" and was first published in 1877.
It ends like this.
♪ No longer a slave of ambition ♪ ♪ I laugh at the world and it shines ♪ ♪ As I think of my happy condition ♪ ♪ Surrounded by Acres of Clam ♪ - In other words, one could be as happy as a clam here.
There are a number of different versions of the song, and the original had some objectionable lyrics.
Ivar named his waterfront restaurant Acres of Clams, though we hardly gave up on ambition as an entrepreneur.
(lighthearted music) The Olympia connection is interesting in a couple of ways.
One is that in the 1860s when the Washington Territory stretched as far east as Idaho, Western Montana, and a bit of Wyoming, political observers in the Eastern parts felt a division of power between East and West.
Today, people might complain about the Cascade East-West Divide, but back in the day, they grumbled about the politicos throwing their weight around in, quote, "Clam country, the epithet for Olympia-dominated politics."
And my college alma mater is the Evergreen State College in Olympia, whose founders named the geoduck as school mascot, and the school motto is, "Omnia Extares," translated as let it all hang out, which all made sense for what was launched as an alternative school in the 1960s.
(jaunty music) No clam is more identifiable or as great a conversation piece than the geoduck, a Lushootseed word that relates to the clams' prodigious digging abilities.
It can go deep, and because of an appendage that cannot fit into its shell and can extend up to three feet.
It is not a reproductive organ, by the way, but rather the clam's neck through which it breathes and siphon sand and water.
The geoduck is considered delicacy and is used in sushi among other things.
And then there is chowder.
In the Northwest, the popular version that caught on was creamy New England-style clam chowder.
Back in the day, the region was not known for tomatoes, the basis of Manhattan-style clam chowder.
Food historian Jacqueline Williams says that by the 1880s, New England-style chowder recipes began appearing in the first local cookbooks.
Territorial cooks could reliably come by more ingredients like flour, thanks to shipments from back East, and it's a damp weather, gut-warming tonic.
(jaunty music) (lighthearted music) Happy as a clam, quiet as a clam.
Keep clam and carry on.
Clams are the symbol of steady, contented existence.
They've been feeding us for thousands of years, long after they attended our birth on a beach.
(lighthearted music) - [Announcer] For more on this episode, listen to the "Mossback" podcast.
Just search for "Mossback" wherever you listen.
