Having not grown up in the northwest, my elementary schooling never contained any info about the history up here. Oh, if you want background on the California missions, as well as the applicable missionary position (teehee), well, I've got that in spades. But, we never learned about anything that happened above the redwoods.
Thus, with a wander through the historic site of Fort Vancouver, I was forced to make up my own story of the past. I'm sure the following is pretty close to what really happened, anyway.
 |
| A Song of Trees and Flannel |
It started in, oh lets say, 1879. Early settlers in Portland, fed up with the long lines at the popular dirtpods, (mounds of mud and sticks that people would gather at, sometimes ironically, though they weren't sure what that meant), would look elsewhere for their artisan rickets and locally sourced dysentery. They considered going west, but had to stop that migration when more than a third of them drowned from water not falling from the sky, but rising from the ground. It was the ocean, and it was way too corporate. So, instead, they went north.
 |
| Fencing to keep the colonial hipsters out |
The natives called it Big-Box-and-Chain-wee-un-suk-la. That was too complicated to say, so the immigrants just stole the name of a cool outpost in Canada and made it their own. They hoped for a quiet life, and to lure confused explorers who were expecting hockey and poutine upon arriving.
And that has continued...until this day.
Now you know as much as I do.
I was not drinking when I wrote this. I thought I should make that clear.
