CHAPTER 2
Urban Roots of Puget Sound Agriculture
The history of hops in the Pacific Northwest begins with water. Though agriculture is often understood as a solely land-based endeavor, Puget Sound waterways played a crucial role in the emergence of this particular regional industry. The Puget Sound basin covers over sixteen thousand square miles of water and land, carved out over several millennia by a retreating glacier. Flowing north, it converges with the Strait of Georgia, and west, with the Strait of Juan de Fuca, forming the body of water known today as the Salish Sea.1 Though the Puget Sound provided the cities and towns dotting its shoreline with access to the Pacific Ocean, its rivers and tributaries served an equally useful purpose, linking small inland towns with coastal communities across Western Washington.
Seattle stood at the heart of this vast marine space. Situated at the convergence of multiple rivers, the lands that would become known as Seattle served as a crucial hub of Indigenous migrations.2 Though located within Duwamish territory, other Indigenous peoples up and down the Northwest Coast also had a presence in Seattle, whether for travel, resource gathering, or connecting with extended family. These migrations did not stop with the arrival of white settlers and the disruptions of urban displacement. Seattle’s role as “the place where one crosses over” persisted into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and beyond.
Chinese histories in the Pacific Northwest also revolved around water. Many of the early Chinese migrants came to Seattle through Vancouver, traversing the waters of the Salish Sea as they crossed into the United States from Canada. Chinese laborers also worked aboard steamships that sailed through the Puget Sound, including those that carried lumber to markets around the region and down to California.3 Though their connection to the Salish Sea was very different, they shared with their fellow Indigenous migrants a maritime world that brought them frequently to Seattle.
The concentration of Indigenous and Chinese migrants in Seattle established the city as an early hub of labor migration. Their maritime mobility and accessibility made them a desirable source of labor for employers across the region, which lacked a railroad system until the late nineteenth century. Hop growers, many of them settlers who established farms on the rivers and tributaries of the Puget Sound, utilized these urban-based maritime networks, often traveling up to Seattle to hire their seasonal workforce. Hops, the main ingredient used for flavoring beer, arrived in the Pacific Northwest in the 1860s and soon emerged as the region’s first major agricultural industry, in large part because of the availability of Indigenous and Chinese labor. Though the Klondike gold rush of 1897 looms large in local historical memory as the key event that shaped Seattle’s regional connections, the miners and adventurers who passed through the city on their way up north were traversing routes that had long been established by Indigenous and Chinese migrants.4
The concentration of these two groups in the same city, within the shared space of the south end and waterfront district, appealed strongly to employers. Chinese and Indigenous migrants had a presence in many different urban coastal areas across the Pacific Northwest during this time, but it was only in Seattle that the two were pushed so closely together.5 In Seattle, employers had access to both groups and could hire one or the other or both at the same time. This gave hop growers, in particular, the flexibility they needed to accommodate the unpredictable nature of the hop harvest. It also allowed them to exploit divisions between the two in order to depress wages and maintain a profit margin. Though scholars tend to treat Indigenous and Chinese laborers as inhabiting almost separate worlds, their proximity and interconnection made the regional economy possible.6
This city-based employment system, though, did not always work as growers anticipated. The maritime world of the Puget Sound allowed for a kind of autonomy among the workforce that continually undermined growers’ expectations of a smoothly functioning industry. It brought people together in unpredictable ways, leading to new forms of sociability and leisure as well as conflicts and violence. As Seattle’s role as a hub of labor migration expanded, this unpredictability intensified; it would plague employers, industry leaders, and politicians well into the twentieth century. In this way, the hops industry set the stage for future industrial expansion, while also exposing the system’s inherent fragility and the stark limitations of settler power.
HOP FARMS AND THE SALISH SEA
In her memoir, Tulalip, from My Heart, Tulalip elder Harriette Shelton Dover recalled her mother’s seasonal migrations down to the hop fields. Together with extended family in “six or eight canoe loads,” her mother traveled each year from Guemes Island near Anacortes to the Puyallup Valley. Over several days, the group “would come along the Sound” and camp at night, stopping and eating lunch during the day. Then, “they would go up the Puyallup River to where Ezra Meeker’s hop fields were.”7 With this story Dover illuminates a crucial aspect of the Puget Sound hop industry: the farms were oriented around major rivers. The eastern side of Puget Sound is surrounded by rivers: the Nisqually down by Olympia; the Puyallup and Duwamish; the Snohomish, Skykomish, and Stillaguamish; and the northern Skagit and Nooksack. Puget Sound Coast Salish peoples had traversed these rivers since time immemorial, moving around the region in “beautiful” canoes.8
In the 1850s, hop farms began to pop up along these waterways, claimed by some of the first settlers in Washington Territory. Ezra Meeker, who would later achieve worldwide recognition as “hop king” of the Pacific Northwest, first spotted the location of his Puyallup Valley hop farm on a canoe trip through the southern half of Puget Sound. Born in Ohio, Meeker had made his way west along the Oregon Trail, lured by the promise of free land through the Donation Land Claim Act. He arrived in 1853 and spent the next several months along the water, scouting potential sites for farmland. Reluctant at first to pay for Indigenous guidance, Meeker and his brother attempted to sail the waters of the Puget Sound in a homemade skiff, only to find themselves lost and struggling against the strong current. At that moment, in Meeker’s telling, a group of Puyallup men passed by and towed them right into Commencement Bay at the mouth of the Puyallup River. Meeker recalls that after that mishap “we secured the services of an Indian and his canoe to help us up the river and left our boat at the Indian’s camp near the mouth.”9 From there, Meeker explored the Puyallup River valley, birthplace of Puget Sound hop culture. He would later operate one of the era’s largest hop farms.
Following Meeker’s lead, other settlers arrived in the 1850s and established farms in the fertile lands surrounding Seattle, including the valleys of the Puyallup and White Rivers. Running along the southeastern side of the Puget Sound basin, the two rivers formed a maritime highway that cut through thirty miles of land between present-day Seattle and Tacoma. Both rivers flowed into Puget Sound; the Puyallup River drained into Commencement Bay on the southern end, while the White River joined the Duwamish River just south of Yesler’s mill in Seattle. These rivers offered settlers a water-based transportation network as well as rich alluvial soil ideal for growing crops. According to Seattle historian Clarence Bagley, “The only farms of the district in those days were along the banks of rivers.”10
As was the case in Seattle, these early settlers acquired farmland through donation claims and benefited materially from the dispossession of the region’s Indigenous peoples. Though settlers like Meeker focused on farming instead of building a town and commercial center like Denny and Maynard, their occupation of the Puyallup and White River valleys constituted a parallel movement made possible by the same legal structures their urban counterparts utilized. The Donation Land Claim Act itself predated the ratification of the three Puget Sound treaties—those of Point Elliott, Medicine Creek, and Point No Point—and allowed settlers to claim unceded Indigenous lands, amounting to an “invasion of white settlers,” in the words of Muckleshoot elder Joe Bill.11 Another Puyallup elder recalled, “There were a lot of white people then taking lands . . . yes, they took their possessions, took their homes, they took cleared lands.”12 Even after the three treaties’ signing and ratification, settlers continued their land grab irrespective of treaty terms setting aside reservation lands. Settlers also expressly ignored the reserved rights of Indigenous peoples to their traditional fishing and hunting grounds. Individual settlers and industrial firms like railroad companies continued to take and occupy the most valuable lands, including those within reservation boundaries, without penalty, even after legal protest and violent resistance by Puget Sound tribes.
Situated on prime agricultural land, this group of white settlers began to establish farming businesses. Hops had been brought to the United States from Europe in the seventeenth century, spreading first into New England and then New York, which emerged as the center of global hop production by the turn of the nineteenth century. Hop cultivation followed the movement west and became popular along the Pacific Coast beginning in the 1850s. In Washington, Ezra Meeker’s father, Jacob, first received hop roots from an acquaintance in Olympia. From these first roots, the Meekers planted and harvested one bale of hops in 1865 that sold for eighty-five cents per pound, “more than had been received by any of the settlers in the Puyallup Valley.”13 Impressed with these profits, Meeker’s neighbors, including L. F. Thompson, E. C. Meade, and J. P. Stewart, ordered a barrel of hop roots from California, planting four acres and sparking a craze that would eventually spread throughout the valley. Growers sold hops locally to brewers in the Pacific Northwest; as production increased they expanded sales into California, and then into Europe by the early 1880s.
In the early years, growers faced significant hurdles. Hop production involved heavy startup costs, including investments in equipment and facilities. After securing the land, growers planted the hop roots, which grew in vines around tall wooden poles during spring and summer. Once ripe, hop cones produced pungent-smelling resin containing the chemical compounds used to flavor beer. As a child, Dover spent time on the hop fields and recalled that “even within a few yards you can smell them.”14 In order to preserve the resin’s flavor and color, growers dried the hop cones in a process known as curing, baking the hops in a kiln over low heat for several days. In the 1860s, New York farms churned out almost ten million pounds of hops per year in large-scale industrial drying plants, while in Washington curing occurred in barns or even living rooms around the stove.15 Workers moved the cured hops to a separate shed or barn to be pressed, bagged, labeled, and either stored or shipped. Growers sold directly to beer brewers, whose agents visited the fields in early summer to negotiate a fixed price, or to merchants who bought and sold hops independently.
The unpredictable ripening process of the hop plant made finding pickers a particular challenge. Growers required pickers for only a short period, typically two to three weeks in the late summer. The timing of picking season depended upon temperature, climate, and humidity; even a handful of chilly or rainy days could delay the harvest. “We will not finish hop picking until the first of next week,” one grower lamented. “The rainy weather damaged the hops more than I thought it would.”16 Once fully ripe, the hops had to be picked within a short window or the cones would start to rot, forcing growers to sell at lower prices. Though not as physically taxing as other forms of agricultural labor, hop picking nonetheless required many dexterous hands to detach the cones, sticky with resin, from the vines. Growers hired foremen to oversee and pay the workers, typically seventy-five cents to one dollar per box, as well as inspectors to grade the quality of the picked hops. In the beginning, growers looked locally for help with the harvest. They enlisted their wives and children as well as Indigenous pickers from the surrounding Puyallup and White River areas, including men, women, children, and the elderly.
In the early 1870s, growers quickly realized that their industry’s expansion depended upon labor. Without enough workers to come harvest, Puget Sound hops would never exist as anything more than a local specialty. But procuring the thousands of temporary workers needed for the profits they envisioned was complicated. Individual growers depended more than others on existing transportation infrastructure to bring workers to the fields. Logging companies, for example, built service railroads to move workers and timber from the forests to the sawmills, while the Northern Pacific Railway Company commanded its own fleet of steamers throughout the Puget Sound.17 Only one passenger railroad operated in Western Washington at the time—a spur line from Kalama, a cannery town along the Columbia River, to Tacoma. Growers initially considered Columbia River salmon canneries as a promising source of seasonal labor, since the salmon-canning industry offered a concentrated pool of unemployed workers whom growers could access at a convenient time. Cannery schedules followed the salmon runs, which tapered off in July and August, just in time for the hop harvest.18 Cost, though, remained an issue. The Kalama line could funnel cannery workers directly from the Columbia River Valley into southern Puget Sound, but the railroad company refused to lower its rates, forcing growers to look elsewhere for pickers.
At this point, growers consciously decided to utilize Puget Sound’s maritime networks to move large teams of seasonal workers in the absence of land-based transportation. According to one local newspaper report, growers specifically looked for “the Indians and Chinese of Washington Territory . . . and from the same class of people in Victoria [and] New Westminster” because they were accessible by water. Growers dispatched agents “on the boats” to every coastal community and industrial site, which included all of the Puget Sound reservations.19 As discussed in the previous chapter, few Indigenous peoples had relocated to reservations in the 1850s and 1860s. Severely underfunded and disorganized, reservations held little attraction for those who could live on the outside and pursue seasonal wage work. But in the years following the Civil War, federal Indian policy grew more punitive, doling out harsher punishments to those who did not accept forced assimilation programs. Further, increasing white settlement during this period pushed more and more people off their land and onto reservations. The reservation borders remained fluid, however. The wage economy pulled many Indigenous people off the reservations seasonally, while others continued to live and work among settlers in local towns and cities.20 While the reservation system functioned as an important feeder into the hops workforce, growers were capitalizing on the residents’ existing mobility.
In addition to the reservations, growers looked to British Columbia’s canneries, where they found concentrations of Indigenous and Chinese workers along the Fraser River. Though Chinese laborers dominated the US cannery workforce, Indigenous workers played a far bigger role on the Canadian side in the late nineteenth century and beyond.21 The broader Pacific Northwest’s salmon canning industry began in earnest during the 1870s, when newly constructed plants along the Fraser and Columbia Rivers attracted large teams of seasonal workers. In northern Oregon, Chinese crews provided the bulk of the labor, occupying almost every spot in the cannery hierarchy, from skilled positions as butchers, tinsmiths, and can testers to semiskilled and manual labor. During this period cannery owners utilized informal methods of labor contracting, typically relying on individual Chinese employees to recruit and oversee their Chinese-speaking workforce.22 In British Columbia, employers enlisted Indigenous fishers, primarily men, whose knowledge of salmon migration and fishing technology proved invaluable during the canning industry’s early years. Indigenous women and children worked on the shore mending nets and in the plants as fish cleaners and can fillers.23 While Canadian cannery owners also hired Chinese teams to perform factory work, they relied more on Indigenous labor than their American counterparts did.
By focusing their recruitment strategy on the maritime environment of the region, growers hoped to ensure a steady stream of workers who could travel to the fields by water. Unlike the salmon canneries dotting the Columbia River, the British Columbia plants along the Fraser River allowed for fast, cheap water-based travel to the hop fields. Indigenous workers leaving from Victoria, Vancouver, and the Northwest Coast could travel by canoe through the Strait of Georgia, down into the Puget Sound, and up the Puyallup and White Rivers, while those coming from Puget Sound communities simply had to journey across the Sound. Chinese workers could also move quite easily by boat, which remained the cheaper, more practical option for transportation. Steamships and smaller ferries made frequent trips around the Puget Sound and across the maritime border between the United States and Canada.
To assemble this massive team of seasonal labor from all around the region and effectively respond to unpredictable harvest conditions, hop growers needed easy access to a consolidated workforce. Seattle again emerged as a critical hub of labor: a stopping-over place for workers as they passed to and from the hop fields, and a site of labor recruitment where growers went to hire workers and negotiate terms of employment. Rather than smoothing over inefficiencies, however, this geography of migration gave workers the upper hand in their dealings with growers, carving out autonomous spaces that consistently undermined the logic of capitalist exploitation and control.
INDIGENOUS AND CHINESE WORKERS IN THE CITY
Seattle in 1870 was still a relatively small city, its population hovering around one thousand residents. With an official incorporation date of 1869, Seattle was also a very new city. At that time, the urban economy still revolved mostly around Yesler’s sawmill, which sold cut timber to other settler communities around Puget Sound as well as California. The commercial and entertainment district surrounding the mill, known as the Sawdust, provided another source of economic activity, attracting people from beyond the city itself and generating revenue from customers far and wide. Indigenous and Chinese laborers constituted the bulk of the urban workforce at that time, toiling in the sawmill and construction projects as well as performing domestic labor such as laundry and housekeeping. As discussed in the last chapter, Seattle remained stratified by race, reflecting settlers’ efforts to claim and occupy Indigenous lands by creating a northern residential district for white families and policing racial and gender boundaries through municipal regulation. These practices also consolidated workers in one geographic area, which benefited employers, including hop growers, who could more easily access this pool of labor. Seattle’s urban context of racial segregation and displacement thus played a key role in Puget Sound hop growers’ employment practices, as well as the city’s growth as a regional hub.
Seattle’s position within the marine space of the Puget Sound made it an ideal place for Indigenous workers to converge before the harvest season. Seattle had long served as a “crossing-over place” for Puget Sound Coast Salish peoples. As more Indigenous people from along the Northwest Coast, including Alaska, joined the hop-picking workforce, they included a stopover in Seattle. Sightings of their canoe fleets signaled the start of hop-picking season and were widely covered in the Seattle press. In 1879 a local journalist noted, “The bay and its shores were dotted and lined with their canoes, while the store fronts and sidewalks downtown were thick with the Indians themselves.”24 Another report described the waterfront during hops season as “crowded with rudely constructed tents and other hastily built habitations.”25 Many camped along the shore for days, often with their children and families, cooking and socializing with one another before heading out to the harvest. Though some commentators described these multitribal waterfront gatherings as “strange” and “striking,” Indigenous movement through this area had long predated the city itself and would continue even after the decline of the hop industry.26
In addition to social gatherings, Indigenous workers used their time in Seattle to shop and engage in other commercial activities. Before the harvest, they often focused on purchasing food, clothing items, and other supplies for the three-week picking season, while after the harvest they indulged in less practical goods to take back home, such as cuff links and handbells.27 Their presence and purchasing power created a legitimate sensation among local businesses and shopkeepers. Not confined to the shore and waterfront camps, Indigenous shoppers ventured into the commercial district, purchasing “anything which may attract their attention in store windows,” according to one account.28 Other vendors and merchants came directly to them, like one “enterprising” salesperson who “spread his goods on boxes outside, and has done on the sidewalk a rushing business with Indians returning flushed with money from the hop-yards.”29 Front Street (now First Avenue), which ran along the waterfront near Yesler’s sawmill, received the most traffic. Its shops offered goods and services ranging from banking to billiards, jewelry to tailoring, cigars, hardware, and candy.30 Indigenous hop pickers also took the opportunity to vend their own goods to local Seattleites. One newspaper described the popularity of “woven baskets and large rugs” being sold by Indigenous women in the commercial district.31
Indigenous dugout canoes docked at the foot of Washington Street in Seattle, c. 1891. Washington Street served as an early workers’ hub. Indigenous and Chinese labor networks converged in one shared space within Seattle’s south end; Wa Chong’s main building was located just two blocks east of this waterfront location. University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, NA 897.
It was during this time that hop growers traveled up to Seattle to recruit pickers camped along the waterfront. Once growers had decided to scale up and look beyond the local towns for their workforce, hop picking took on a life of its own among Coast Salish and other Northwest Coast Indigenous communities, becoming one of the most popular forms of wage labor. “The reservation has been quite deserted during the last month,” wrote a missionary on the Tulalip reservation in 1882, “the Indians nearly all gone hop picking.”32 Local authorities in Canada reported similar migrations. On Vancouver Island, one government employee estimated some “six thousand British Columbia Indians are now crowding to the hop fields of Washington Territory.”33 Growers no longer had to recruit directly from the reservations and canneries; they could simply show up to Seattle in advance of the picking season and negotiate directly with workers. For their part, Indigenous workers came prepared. Each group of pickers selected a labor negotiator, or “Boston man,” to deal directly with growers and settle in advance issues such as payment and the number of pickers required.34 After agreeing on the terms of employment, the pickers dispersed, traveling by canoe up the rivers and to the various farms where they camped during the harvest, returning to Seattle again at the season’s end.35
On one hand, the highly mobile workforce allowed growers to increase their profits and expand their farms’ capacity. Puget Sound growers saved on transportation costs by relying on Indigenous pickers, who provided their own transportation in the form of canoes. In New York, by contrast, growers carried local pickers to and from their homes each day in wagons, and paid train fares for those coming from out of town.36 In Puget Sound, recalled Meeker, many of the Indigenous hop pickers traveled “long distances, some of them three hundred miles in their canoes . . . all by the inland channel and among the islands of the Puget Sound.”37 But as growers cast a wider geographic net to satisfy their need for a larger workforce, their operations grew more and more unpredictable. Growers often had no idea when their pickers would arrive or how many would show up in any given year, an issue that Indigenous negotiators became adept at exploiting. “They are masters of the situation,” grumbled one employer, “quick to . . . profit by [our] anxiety.”38 Another grower complained bitterly about “tricky and sly” Indians who drove a hard bargain, withholding their labor until the last possible minute in order to secure better terms.39 While the concentration of Indigenous workers made the hops industry possible, it also created the conditions for collective action and bargaining.
As Indigenous pickers gathered in the city for the hops harvest, a regional hub of Chinese labor and commercial life flourished nearby. Most Chinese businesses during the 1870s were situated on Washington Street, just a short walk away from waterfront. Though the census counted only thirty-three Chinese residents in King County in 1870, this number increased steadily during the next few years, growing to over two hundred in 1876.40 The Wa Chong Company stood at the heart of Washington Street and accounted for much of this population boom. When the company moved from its initial location by Yesler’s mill to its permanent spot a few streets over on Washington, the owners bought up parcels of land surrounding their headquarters to create a Chinese commercial district. They leased out the property to laundries, shops, restaurants, and other Chinese businesses.41 While much of Wa Chong’s business model focused on labor contracting—they furnished Chinese labor to sawmills, railroads, city construction projects, and the Puget Sound mosquito fleet—the company also operated an import-export business and sold Chinese goods including tea, opium, fireworks, and paintings to local Seattleites.42 Washington Street thus served as a key node in the transpacific circulation of people and goods; like Indigenous consumption and labor, this south-end city block helped shape Seattle’s commercial life and role in the regional economy.
Advertisement for the Wa Chong Company (also referred to as Wa Chong & Co.), 1879. Note the location of the building on Washington Street, just steps away from the waterfront and common docking area for Indigenous migrants. University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW 539.
During the early years of the hop industry, growers directly recruited Chinese workers from the canneries in British Columbia, hiring laborers left unemployed at the end of canning season. As the industry expanded and its connections with Seattle grew stronger, growers traveled to the city and negotiated with Chinese labor contractors along Washington Street. Because hop growers only needed pickers for a short period, three weeks at the most, the labor contractors often diverted workers from other projects for the harvest season. The Wold brothers in Issaquah, for example, engaged the services of Quong Chong & Co. in 1885 to provide three dozen Chinese workers to pick hops for ninety cents per box. The company agreed to send two teams from the coal mines in Newcastle to the Wold brothers’ hop farm just a few towns over.43
Hop growers relied less on Chinese labor than they did on Indigenous labor. Because of the overwhelming popularity of hop picking among Coast Salish and other Indigenous peoples, growers tended to employ Chinese pickers only during harvests with unusually high yields, or if they faced other kinds of labor shortages. Growers also turned to Indigenous pickers with more frequency because, in the words of a Puyallup Valley hop farmer, “they are more likely to return another season” than the Chinese.44 Contrary to their caricature as robotic tools of the capitalist class, Chinese laborers made strategic choices about where and when to work. For growers, this complex system of labor recruitment and employment laid the groundwork for the industry’s massive expansion during the 1870s and early 1880s.
A SPECTACLE IN THE VALLEY
The 1877 Puyallup Valley hop harvest stands as a prime example of how growers managed their vast hop-picking workforce. This particular harvest is notable from a historical perspective because it was the first time growers put into action their plans for utilizing maritime networks and recruiting workers regionally. As a result, that season nearly three thousand Indigenous and Chinese pickers from British Columbia and around Puget Sound flocked to the fields, constituting the largest hop-picking workforce assembled at the time.45 Because of the size and heterogeneity of the workforce, local newspapers devoted extensive coverage to the Puyallup Valley harvest—the Seattle Post-Intelligencer had a designated hops reporter that season—and revealed an unusual level of detail about the industry and its workforce. One local reporter declared, “A drive through the Valley will . . . furnish one of the most industrious and interesting spectacles to be seen anywhere, and such a one as few who have the opportunity can afford to lose.”46
The workers who arrived in the Puyallup Valley that season encountered a farming community of approximately eight hundred residents. As the center of agricultural production in the Pacific Northwest, Puyallup developed primarily around the hops economy, with over thirty growers farming hundreds of acres throughout the valley.47 In 1870, Puyallup’s population was approximately three hundred, the majority consisting of white, American-born farmers—many of them early settlers, along with their families and employees.48 By 1877, however, the town was diversifying. Still dominated by farming, Puyallup was also attracting a scattering of skilled tradespeople as well as professionals and day laborers. Though most occupied the farmlands spread along the banks of the Puyallup River, a central town had also popped up with several general stores, a school, and a hotel. Chinese people maintained a presence in the region, with several dozen serving as laborers, farmhands, and cooks.49
A portion of the workforce that year also included Puyallup tribal members, whose displacement from their ancestral lands had allowed the first hop farms to emerge and the industry to expand throughout the valley. The name “Puyallup” comes from the anglicization of the Lushootseed word spuyaləpabš, meaning “people from the bend at the bottom of the river,” although over time the word also came to mean “generous and welcoming to all who enter our lands.”50 In 1854 the Puyallup had signed the Treaty of Medicine Creek, which created the Puyallup reservation near the present-day city of Tacoma. Dissatisfaction with the size and location of the reservation land, which was heavily forested and cut off from their pretreaty subsistence grounds, led some Puyallup tribal members into armed conflict with settlers and Indigenous allies in 1856. To smooth over tensions, the federal government agreed to greatly expand the reservation boundaries to include much of the Puyallup’s pretreaty lands. In the ensuing years, however, white settlers and railroad interests encroached upon these lands without penalty, leaving the Puyallup with very little beyond a poorly resourced reservation that encompassed only a tiny slice of what the government had promised them.51 Hop picking therefore provided a crucial means of survival and subsistence for the Puyallup, as it did for other Indigenous peoples, during a period of intense upheaval and impoverishment.
As the 1877 harvest approached, growers arranged their workers’ housing by race. Indigenous and Chinese pickers inhabited separate encampments located next to the hop fields. In the encampments, tents housed single families or groups of two or three; separate space was designated for cooking and leisure activities. Pickers stayed within the boundaries of their camps every day except Sunday, when they traveled into the town of Puyallup to socialize or trade with other pickers. White workers, on the other hand, boarded with growers and their families, or in facilities provided by growers. Though conditions varied by farm, white workers also ate meals in separate facilities, often prepared by the grower’s wife or a hired cook.52 On Ezra Meeker’s hop farm, for example, white workers received their housing for free, but paid for meals, which Meeker deducted from their paychecks at the end of the season.53
The racial stratification of workers’ housing served a critical function in the broader agricultural economy. By not offering permanent shelter to Indigenous and Chinese employees, growers saved money and also were better able to justify a racialized division of labor that relegated Indigenous and Chinese pickers to low-wage, temporary work. Unlike the salmon canneries, which employed nonwhite workers in a variety of positions in the labor hierarchy, on hop farms only whites held skilled and managerial roles, ranging from dryers and balers to ticket bosses, foremen, and firemen. Growers used the expense of housing as an excuse to not hire white pickers, whose so-called standards of living would require better accommodations. One grower declared that he “could not take care of white men even if [he] could afford to hire them,” adding, “The season is too short to warrant any outlay for that purpose, while Indians and Chinamen take care of themselves.”54 The temporary encampments further guaranteed that hop pickers left town at the season’s end, while white workers could stay on after the harvest or find work in the surrounding community. Housing functioned as a physical marker of race as well as a method of exploiting and shaping a racialized labor force.
Though growers had their own reasons for organizing the workforce this way, it does appear that Indigenous and Chinese pickers made the most of these encampments, at least during the 1877 harvest season. As historian Vera Parham argues, hop picking allowed Coast Salish peoples to work in the wage economy “without giving up their historical lifestyles”—seasonal migration, canoe travel with family, setting up camps, and conversing in their own languages.55 They could also earn a wage while pursuing fishing, whaling, and other economic endeavors. The encampments additionally offered pickers opportunities to engage in aspects of their culture deemed uncivilized by missionaries and government agents.56 “There are acres of Indian camps scattered through the hop fields here,” one local news report stated. “The bright fires blazing in every direction, Indians . . . and children lying around them. . . . Here and there amongst them their Indian game is in progress.”57 Here, Indigenous people could relax and socialize outside of the reservation and the constraints of colonial suppression.58
Indigenous encampment on a Puyallup Valley hop farm, c. 1870s. 1995.0.45, Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma (Wash.).
For Chinese pickers, the hops harvest and the relative autonomy of the encampments also appealed. Located far away from the industrial centers, hop farms offered a decent wage without the punishing kind of physical labor Chinese workers typically performed. Hop picking did not require standing for long periods, moving heavy loads, or handling machinery. Workers often sat on the ground or on chairs or wooden crates while picking the hop cones from the vines. The encampments, too, provided a protected space away from the foremen and labor contractors who controlled every aspect of their jobs in settings such as railroads or canneries. Chinese pickers did work under foremen in the hop fields, but their encampments remained free of the managerial surveillance that pervaded the factory system. A local observer toured the Chinese camps at night and described a relaxed and peaceful scene: “They are sitting around their camp-fires smoking and quietly chattering in their native tongue, and some are in their tents sleeping, the bright moon shining in on them through the open ways.”59
Though growers tried to maintain order by segregating and containing their workforce, the divisions fell apart on Sundays when all the pickers left the fields and joined local townspeople for a day of recreation and amusement. “Every hop yard is like a little boom town,” one hop foreman stated. “Tents pitched all around, bakers wagons, butcher carts, watermelon and fruit peddlers visit the yards.”60 Another noted, “The atmosphere literally buzzes with excitement, business is booming and money plentiful.”61 In Puyallup, these gatherings took place across the river from the main town, in an open field missionaries dubbed the Devil’s Playground. Visitors accessed the Devil’s Playground by ferry, which proved a “great source of revenue to its owner.” Horse racing, the main event, attracted mixed-race crowds as large as three thousand people a week. Indigenous pickers pooled funds to construct a dance hall that hosted weekly balls, while a group of white townspeople ran a refreshment stand that offered cider and root beer.62 Indigenous pickers also traded and sold goods including woven baskets, shells, and mats, which one newspaper described as “very durable for kitchen use.”63
Perhaps unsurprisingly, missionaries and government agents loathed the hops industry for pulling so many Indigenous people off the reservations and into areas outside of their purview. Myron Eells, a missionary on the Skokomish reservation, summed up the feelings of many in his position when he stated that the hops harvest “has not . . . always been a healthy place for their morals, as on Sundays and evenings, gambling, betting, and horseracing have been largely carried on.”64 Missionaries like Eells viewed Indigenous people as childlike and thus susceptible to the influences of “corrupt white men” like those who visited the Devil’s Playground and other hoprelated festivities.65 Another concern involved Indigenous children who traveled with their parents down to the hop fields. Colonial programs of assimilation focused on Indigenous children, forcing them to abandon connections to their culture and families through religious instruction and schooling.66 Indian agents and others who oversaw reservation schools throughout Puget Sound often discussed separating children from their families as a key objective. One official plainly stated, “In order to make an Indian school successful the children must be taken from the influence of their parents.”67 Hop picking thus undermined colonial control. But as much as missionaries disliked the hops harvest, there was very little they could do. Hop growers formed an influential class in Washington Territory and their economic interests far outweighed any other concerns.
The wild success of the 1877 harvest marked the beginning of a legitimate hops craze and thrust Washington Territory into the national spotlight. By the early 1880s, tales of abundant land and fantastic profits circulated from coast to coast. “The profits in the business beat anything in the farming hire that I have ever heard of,” marveled Charles Ayer, a visitor from Connecticut.68 Articles began to appear in national and international publications declaring Washington “the coming hop producing country.”69 For Washington boosters and territorial officials, hops represented an opportunity to lure capital and people to the Pacific Northwest. Further, they exploited this national interest to market hops as a symbol of the region’s agricultural potential. In 1884, Governor Watson Squire appointed Ezra Meeker as commissioner of Washington’s delegation to the New Orleans world’s fair. As Meeker later boasted to his investors, the “remarkable [growth] has been entirely due to the favorable conditions found to exist here for the development of this branch of agriculture.”70
Low-wage labor was crucial to hops’ expansion during this period. Flush with cash, growers expanded their agricultural holdings and invested in drying and baling facilities. By 1884, Puyallup Valley hop farms alone covered over two thousand acres of land, up from five hundred in 1877. Ezra Meeker’s hop empire swelled during this time. Equipped with ten industrial dryers, his Puyallup farm boasted “one of the most elaborate layouts in the Pacific Northwest.”71 He also became the region’s largest agricultural employer, hiring more than one thousand hop pickers at peak season. With his own personal wealth quickly ballooning, Meeker and his wife replaced their old log cabin with a seventeen-room Victorian mansion.72 Meeker later credited this hop boom with a blight that swept Europe in 1882, enabling Puget Sound growers to “[command] unheard-of prices.”73 While the failure of the European crop certainly drove up demand for Washington hops, Meeker and others profited from a mobile, racialized, and undercompensated labor force of Indigenous and Chinese workers. As Meeker himself admitted, Puget Sound growers cultivated hops at a lower price than any other region in the world.74
But the bubble would not last. The first inkling appeared in the fields as Indigenous pickers began to express dissatisfaction with their working conditions. During the early 1880s, several low salmon runs on the Fraser River caused the near collapse of British Columbia’s salmon-canning industry. Because their livelihoods depended largely on fishing, Indigenous workers turned to hop picking, among other work, to supplement this lost income. One government official on Vancouver Island noted, “Most of them are away to the American side for the hop picking . . . there being little work and low wages at the canneries in British Columbia.”75 With hop wages increasingly important for their survival, Indigenous pickers fought every effort by growers to reduce their pay. In 1883, a group of Indigenous pickers threatened to walk off the fields midseason to protest attempts by growers to undercut their wages. That next year, workers employed by Meeker staged a two-day strike, demanding a wage increase from $1.00 to $1.25 per box.76 Downplaying the incident, local newspapers declared rumors of a strike “entirely groundless!”77 Yet growers could not deny this growing discontent, which would explode into violent conflict in a few short years.
RAILROADS, RACE, AND LABOR
The mid-1880s was a time of transition in the hops industry, driven largely by changes in transportation. In 1884, the Northern Pacific completed a line from Tacoma to Seattle that gave the city its first connection to the transcontinental railroad. Investors had also funded a regional railroad line, the Seattle & Walla Walla, that linked Seattle with Newcastle and the outlying areas to the east. The railroad expansion transformed the hops industry in two major ways. The first change involved labor. Rail transportation untethered the industry from its reliance on the waterways of the Puget Sound and allowed growers to cast a much wider net in their procurement of labor. This dealt a devastating blow to Indigenous workers. Not only did they face new competition over precious hop-picking jobs, but they also lost a key point of leverage in their negotiations with growers. No longer dependent on maritime routes, growers had no reason to bargain with Indigenous pickers and could simply move on to other options in the case of strikes or demands for higher wages. While Indigenous workers continued to participate in the industry, their clout diminished.
The proliferation of railroads also shifted the geography of the hops industry. Instead of concentrating solely in Puyallup and White River valleys, growers began to enter the hops market and open up farms in new areas. The town of Squak (known today as Issaquah) and its surrounding valley emerged as a major hop-growing center largely because of the railroad. In the early 1870s, Seattle settlers had banded together to fund the Seattle & Walla Walla railroad line as a response to Northern Pacific’s decision to locate its western terminus in Tacoma. The work progressed at a snail’s pace and was headed for disaster when Henry Villard, a railroad baron and financier, decided to buy the company and rename it the Columbia & Puget Sound Railroad. Villard’s interest in the line stemmed from his ownership of the Oregon Improvement Company, which operated several highly profitable coal mines east of Seattle. With Villard’s financial backing, railroad construction diverted to the coal mines in Newcastle, with the Columbia & Puget Sound line soon offering both freight and passenger service to Seattle and back.78 Though this cut into the profits of the Puyallup and White River growers, Meeker capitalized on this new business by opening a brokerage firm that bought and sold Puget Sound hops to merchants in San Francisco and London.79
Situated approximately twenty miles east of Seattle, Squak Valley in the mid-1880s was a farming community with strong ties to the coal industry. Settlers came to Squak later than Puyallup or White River valleys, reflecting the new availability of railroad transportation. In 1880, the settler population hovered just under fifty residents, all European families whose primary occupation consisted of coal mining or farming.80 Hops had first arrived in the region in the late 1870s, planted by Inglebright and Lars Wold, brothers from Norway who had heard tales of Puget Sound hops and moved to Seattle to try their luck in the business. By 1880, the Wolds owned twenty acres of farmland; they expanded their holdings to thirty-five acres just two years later.81 Though this paled in comparison with Meeker, whose farm spread across five hundred acres and two counties, it nonetheless made them leading hop producers in the area. By the mid-1880s, other growers had begun to flock to Squak Valley—including George Tibbetts, who also owned the general store.82
In 1885, the Wold brothers sparked controversy around the valley when they hired sixty-five Chinese workers to pick hops for the season. Though growers had employed Chinese workers during the 1870s, anti-Chinese sentiment had spiked dramatically in the ensuing years. The federal government had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, limiting Chinese immigration to all but the elite classes. In places like Washington Territory, however, the legislation had little immediate impact.83 With the government expending few resources on immigration control, the border remained essentially untouched during the latter part of the nineteenth century, allowing Chinese workers to enter the United States through Canada. The Canadian government passed some restrictions, including a head tax on all Chinese immigrants, but this did not end the entry of Chinese laborers into Canada. Territorial officials in Washington publicly denounced the “hiving hordes of Chinese” at every turn, but took little further action.84 The economy of the Pacific Northwest continued to depend on a flexible labor force; without the Chinese and their system of labor contracting, area industries risked depression or even failure.
The proximity of Squak Valley to Seattle made Chinese workers a convenient source of labor, particularly as railroad transportation expanded. Washington’s Chinese population had jumped from 253 in 1870 to over 3,300 just a decade later.85 No longer organized primarily around the Columbia River canneries, Chinese residents by 1885 were laboring in road construction crews, logging camps, and coal mines across the territory. Seattle’s coal industry had grown into a particularly lucrative enterprise, and Squak Valley was located in the center of this mining activity, adjacent to Newcastle, the second largest mining operation in Washington. The Oregon Improvement Company, owners of the Newcastle mines, employed a large Chinese workforce; the sixty-five Chinese pickers who arrived in Squak to work for the Wold brothers came from Newcastle, diverted temporarily for the three-week harvest.86
These shifts in labor and geography enabled growers like the Wold brothers to undercut Indigenous demands. Though they denied it, the Wold brothers brought the Chinese workers to Squak Valley during a dispute with their Indigenous labor force. A few days earlier, a group of Indigenous pickers working for the Wold brothers had rejected a proposed wage cut from the standard payment of one dollar a box to seventy-five cents.87 The price of hops had plummeted that year and decreasing wages allowed the Wolds to maintain their profit margin. In the face of growing protest, they turned to Chinese labor contractors in Seattle, where they recruited sixty-five workers and agreed to pay them ninety cents a box.88 The Chinese contracting system had emerged to fill the demand for large-scale seasonal labor in the railroads and lumber mills; contractors provided a critical service by organizing and supplying temporary workers who could be both quickly assembled and easily dismissed, a necessity for employers facing perennial labor shortages during the peak summer months. As intermediaries, contractors organized networks of labor on both sides of the Pacific, recruiting workers from China and funneling them into various seasonal jobs in the United States and Canada.89
The first team of thirty-five Chinese pickers arrived on Saturday, September 6, from the mines at Newcastle and set up camp in the Wolds’ orchard. Known as the “China Camp,” their sixteen tents stood isolated from the rest of the farm, located on a “little peninsula formed by a creek” and encircled again by a fence.90 Workers slept two to a tent on wooden boards and brought with them tin cans and coffeepots. The next day a group of residents intercepted the second team of Chinese workers on the road leading to Squak, forcing them to turn back to Newcastle. Fearing for their safety, the Chinese workers already camped out on the farm made motions to leave, but “were told that everything would be all right and they could go to work tomorrow.” On the evening of September 7, 1885, a group of white and Indigenous men walked over from George Tibbetts’ general store, climbed the fence separating the Wold brothers’ hop farm from the main road, and opened fire on the tents scattered in the orchard. Three Chinese workers were killed and three wounded in a spray of bullets so intense that, according to one survivor, it “sounded all same China New Year.” One man attempted to burn down the entire camp, but the fire failed to spread, leaving the orchard littered with bleeding bodies and tents “thoroughly perforated and almost riddled with bullets.”91 With no cover or place to flee, many of the Chinese pickers jumped into the creek and waited there until dawn.
News of the attack spread quickly, and the next day, authorities in Seattle dispatched the sheriff, coroner, and prosecuting attorney to investigate. By the 1880s, Seattle’s influence had spread well beyond the borders of the city itself and into the surrounding areas. The sheriff’s office and court system extended to Squak Valley and beyond, showing the broad reach of the municipal state that had formed in the 1850s to police and manage the mobility and autonomy of Duwamish and, later, Chinese residents in Seattle. The Seattle-based team conducted a preliminary investigation and decided to charge five white men and two Indigenous men with murder. The Seattle newspapers had reacted with shock to the Squak Valley massacre, as it became known, though not out of empathy for the victims. In fact, reporters agreed with the sentiments fueling the violence. As one editorial put it, “The people of King County may be said to be unanimous in their recognition of the evils entailed by the employment of Chinese contract labor.” The writers objected instead to the “unmanly” and “unnecessary” display of physical violence, which reflected poorly on the city of Seattle and could potentially damage Washington’s bid for statehood.92 In their eyes, a trial was crucial in upholding respect for the laws such vigilantism openly flouted. As it became clear, the outcome of the trial did not matter as much as the appearance of justice it represented. Despite testimony in which one man admitted to the shooting, the jury acquitted all parties, a verdict overwhelmingly supported by the Seattle public.
Though depicted at the time as a fight between the white workingman and the degraded Chinese laborer, the real issue concerned rival hop growers and their efforts to stoke racial tensions for financial gain. A depression in the hop market that season had driven down prices around the globe, hitting newer growers particularly hard. George Tibbetts had recently opened a hop business with his partner George Hill, former Indian agent at Neah Bay.93 Their first substantial harvest occurred in 1885, and things did not go well for the newcomers. In a letter to Hill, Tibbetts lamented, “The hops will fall far short of my expectations.”94 With such a low yield, Tibbetts worried they would not fulfill the terms of their contract with a San Francisco hop merchant. Though authorities never formally charged Tibbetts— his status in the community shielding him from blame—the trial transcripts show that he spearheaded the effort against the Wolds and their Chinese pickers. He assembled the perpetrators just before the murders, firing eight shots into the air as a signal for the group to gather in his store, and provided them with guns and ammunition. Several of the accused also worked for Tibbetts, including an employee of his general store and the foreman of his hop farm.95 With the Chinese gone and the Wolds’ harvest destroyed, Tibbetts could eliminate a major competitor.
All of the involved parties exploited racial fears of Chinese labor that were circulating across the Anglophone settler world. The Wolds capitalized on racial divisions to discipline Indigenous laborers; George Tibbetts and his associates mobilized to rid the area of the so-called Chinese menace. In doing so, they drew on racial discourse about Chinese labor that stretched back to the Civil War. Historians Alexander Saxton and Moon-Ho Jung have argued that opposition to Chinese laborers, cast as slavelike and thus a threat to the white worker, allowed white supremacy and capitalist exploitation to flourish in the era of emancipation. The notion of the Chinese as inherently cheap labor had nothing to do with actual Chinese workers, who desired and fought for decent wages as much as everyone else. Growers in the Pacific Northwest had in fact stopped relying on Chinese laborers in the late 1870s because they had become too unpredictable, often choosing to stay in occupations that offered better wages and job security. But the image of the “coolie” proved a powerful method of fragmenting the workforce along racial lines as well as justifying the actual exploitation of Chinese workers, relegated to manual labor and other lowpaying jobs.96
The role of Indigenous men in the massacre against Chinese pickers remains less clear. In the aftermath of the shooting, Seattle newspapers sensationalized the violence between the two groups, declaring it a “war of the races.”97 Tensions did exist between Indigenous and Chinese workers; in this case, the decision by the Wold brothers to hire Chinese pickers directly threatened the livelihoods of Indigenous pickers who relied on hop picking as a means of survival. This distinguished them from the white perpetrators, none of whom worked as hop pickers or even manual laborers. And yet transcripts from the murder trial hint at a more complicated story. The Indigenous men involved in the violence did not come from far away to pick hops, but lived in and around Squak Valley and personally knew the white men who spearheaded the massacre. Those who testified at the trial reported that the white men had burst into their homes and coerced them into joining, threatening that “if the Indians did not come that they would be shot.”98 Another spoke about how he remained in the back of the group and “got frightened and ran away” when he heard the gunfire.99 Both speculated that the white men wanted Indians involved so they could blame them afterward for what happened.100 While Indigenous hop pickers did have real grievances about the presence of the Chinese that harvest season, their responses were also shaped by the local context of Squak Valley and their own vulnerability to white settler violence.
The Squak Valley massacre pushed the issue of Indigenous labor into the public spotlight. As anti-Chinese hostility and violence exploded around Puget Sound, Indigenous people became the desirable workers, praised for the very qualities supposedly lacking in Chinese labor. In 1879, a White River valley hop grower, for example, explained his preference for Indigenous pickers in terms of Chinese foreignness. “Farmers think it more politic to employ a class that will empty their earnings into the coffers of the country,” he declared, “than to pour the thousands into the lap of some long-tailed celestial in the Flowery Kingdom.”101 Statements like this stressed pickers’ Indigeneity not to recognize their status as sovereign peoples, but rather to bolster calls for Chinese exclusion while still maintaining a population racially suited to agricultural labor. In 1884 Governor Watson Squire noted in a report on the hops industry, “Indians appear to excel the whites in their ability for picking.”102 Hop growers, politicians, and those involved in agriculture drew heavily on the colonial idea of the Indian as inherently premodern; Indigenous peoples’ connection to the land, seen as natural and thus evidence of their inability to live in modern times, justified their relegation to agricultural forms of labor.103 This thinking aligned with federal assimilation efforts of the time. Just two years after the Squak Valley case, the US government would pass the Dawes Act of 1887, which sought to break up tribally held communal lands to sell off to settlers and push Indigenous people into farming.104
Squak Valley marked the beginning of a sustained effort to purge the Chinese from industrial labor and remove them completely from the region. After the massacre, the violence spread to the coal mining center in Newcastle, where white town residents threatened Chinese workers and burned down their housing. In response the Oregon Improvement Company, which operated the mines, discharged its Chinese workforce. By October, agitation had spread to Tacoma; it erupted in early November when white mobs expelled the entire Chinese population from the city. Seattle followed suit a few months later. On February 7, 1886, a group of white men rounded up the city’s Chinese residents and forced them onto a ship leaving for San Francisco. Governor Watson Squire declared martial law the next day, and federal and state troops stormed the city. By the end of 1886, not a single Chinese person remained in Pierce County, and many of those living in King County had fled to other regions.105 The Chinese did not disappear completely from the Pacific Northwest; in the words of historian Chris Friday, Chinese workers who decided to stay “became more valuable assets to canners and contractors and accordingly demanded and received better wages.”106 Even so, the Chinese community in Washington never fully recovered, and by the turn of the century, employers throughout the region had begun to turn to other sources of labor.
The expulsion of the Chinese from the Pacific Northwest created a vacuum in the agricultural industries, and hop growers faced labor shortages. Unlike the canneries, hop growers did not hire Chinese workers again, fearing another outburst of violence would further damage their profits and long-term prospects in the region. The labor shortfall was exacerbated by the success of the British Columbia fishing industry, which had rebounded from its near collapse earlier that decade. Healthier salmon runs meant fewer Indigenous workers coming down to the Puget Sound hop fields. In 1888, scouts returned from British Columbia in advance of the hops harvest with dire news, reporting “pickers harder to get this year.”107 The Fraser River salmon runs had occurred much later than usual, and many Indigenous workers had decided to stay on the Canadian side and fish. “I expected to employ British Columbia Indians,” remarked White River hops grower C. P. Hayes, “but some pressure was brought to bear on the Indians on the other side . . . as it was feared the fisheries on the Fraser River would suffer.”108 Advertisements for hop-picking jobs in the Puyallup and White River valleys flooded the local newspapers, and growers proclaimed the labor situation “very serious.” “I am in sore distress this year,” admitted a grower, “and will lose thousands of dollars if more pickers cannot be obtained very shortly, as the hops are now ripe and must be picked this month.”109
Though no longer physically present, the mere threat of Chinese labor still proved quite useful in serving the interests of the grower class. As picking season approached, rumors began to spread around the valleys that growers were bringing teams of Chinese workers from as far away as Vancouver, sending townspeople around Puget Sound into a panic. In the city of Tacoma, residents organized committees to investigate each aspect of the labor problem and devise solutions that would prevent the “re-introduction of Chinese into Pierce County.” The mayor and his team negotiated successfully with the Northern Pacific Railway to lower its rate and furnish a special train that would leave Tacoma every morning at 6:00. Though the mayor declared the rate change a victory for anti-Chinese politics, profits most likely drove the rail company’s decision. The hop business was a potentially lucrative source of revenue for the railroad, which had just completed work on its transcontinental line. Committee members in Tacoma convinced local schools to extend summer vacation so white children could pick hops alongside their parents. Though missionaries and Indian agents had demonized Indigenous parents for taking their children to the hops harvest, accusing them of negligence and using it as further justification of parental unsuitability, authorities applauded white parents’ and children’s efforts to save the harvest and respond to these “emergency” circumstances.110
White women also flocked to the fields that season, offering growers a new source of temporary labor. Though the literature on Pacific Northwest history has focused overwhelmingly on men, white women established a significant presence in Washington, first as missionaries and pioneer wives, then in greater numbers as teachers, nurses, domestics, secretaries, and professionals. In the 1880s, with railroad transportation expanding and their population increasing, they became a viable alternative to Chinese or Indigenous labor. Washington’s overall female population rose from 29,000 in 1880 to 131,000 in 1890; in Pierce County alone the number of women jumped from 1,300 to 18,700.111 Greater numbers, however, did not necessarily translate into more jobs. Women faced limited employment options in the Pacific Northwest, where the economy revolved primary around the labor of male migrants in seasonal industries.112
Hops proved the exception. By the 1890s white women occupied a significant part of the hops workforce. Seattle again served as a hub of white women’s labor, as it had with Chinese and Indigenous workers. Hop growers recruited white women pickers primarily through the Seattle Public Employment Office, a free city-run service that connected workers with temporary and permanent jobs in the region. The City of Seattle established this office in 1894 as a response to the growing influence of private employment agencies, which charged all work seekers a fee and thus incentivized high turnover. Records from the office’s first year in business show that most requests for workers came from hop growers during the late summer months. That year, demand for white women pickers nearly doubled that of white men, and only increased during the following year. By the end of the nineteenth century, hop picking was one of the most common forms of employment for white women in Seattle, second only to housework, and the only nondomestic form of labor the public office offered white women; all other positions involved cooking, cleaning, or nursing.113
The numbers at the employment office reflected the popularity of hop picking among white women. But for hop farmers, the growing reliance on white women pickers created new problems. Until that point, hop picking had largely been considered “Chinaman’s work, Indian’s work,” racialized labor deemed unsuitable for white people and especially white women.114 The entire industry’s organization relied on the racial distinction between temporary pickers and permanent employees. With the introduction of white women, growers began to shift their language around hop picking, presenting it more as leisure than as actual work. With white women in the fields, hop picking became a “time of festivity, as the vintage is in wine growing countries.” One commenter stated, “Shop girls consider it a good way to put in a vacation; some for fun, some for money, and some for their health.”115 Hop picking certainly did appeal to white women, just as it did to other groups; it offered a decent wage with minimal time commitment, and its communal organization allowed single women to go to the fields with friends and married women to bring along husbands and children. But portraying these women as solely seeking leisure or festivity erased their role as laborers while using their presence to promote hop picking as a less stigmatized occupation—in Washington territorial governor Eugene Semple’s words, “clean and respectable.”116
It’s notable as well that despite this discursive shift, white women encountered the same low wages and rough conditions their Chinese and Indigenous counterparts did, at least in comparison with white male employees in managerial or permanent positions. As white women began arriving in the fields for the first time, growers initially tried to build them permanent housing “suitable for white peoples to live in.”117 Ezra Meeker built a separate facility for up to one hundred white pickers, while a grower in the White River valley “made hasty preparations for white people,” which included food and shelter.118 But apart from Meeker and a handful of others who could afford the cost of construction, food, and materials, most growers provided rough shacks with no amenities or housed women and children in tents. James Hunter Shotwell, a hop grower in Olympia, noted that his fields “were overflowing with women and children. They are camped in the orchard and all about.”119 When filled with Chinese or Indigenous pickers, these accommodations were physical markers of racial inferiority; with white women, they represented a fun adventure or festive activity.
Some local residents welcomed the arrival of white women, believing they would bring respectability to their towns during the harvest. Interracial sociability had become a point of contention among local townspeople. Though some looked forward to the harvest and the money it generated, others viewed the Sunday gatherings as a nuisance. “Horse racing and gambling were carried on regularly every Sunday,” declared a Puyallup resident, “and the business was in no manner neglected during the week, despite our severe law for its prohibition.”120 Another resident complained about the unknown outsiders and other undesirables drawn to the harvest festivities, telling a newspaper “a lot of the roughest and dirtiest looking men that has ever been in the valley are hanging around here at present.”121 Because harvest gatherings figured so centrally in stimulating local economies, residents had little authority to stamp out these activities. Communities therefore welcomed white women pickers, believing their presence would bolster their towns’ declining standards of respectability and help transform the gatherings from spectacles of vice into decorous affairs. “I wish [the grower] would hire all white pickers instead of Indians,” one white hop worker lamented. “Then we could have dances in the warehouse and have some pretty good times.”122
Indigenous family on a Puget Sound hop farm. University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, NA 4189.
Hop picking’s transformation from work to festivity depended upon projecting a wholesome family atmosphere, which involved not only white women but also Indigenous workers, who remained a vital force in the hops industry during the 1880s and beyond. Unlike the all-male teams of Chinese laborers, Indigenous pickers arrived in the fields as families; fathers, mothers, children, and even grandparents worked together during the harvest. This family structure made Indigenous pickers more easily assimilable into the quaint image of the hops industry growers and townspeople alike hoped to construct, and placed them apart from the Chinese, whose deviation from normative family life was used to justify their continued exclusion. In an 1888 report Governor Semple stated, “Hop growers will doubtless next year be better prepared to accommodate white labor . . . as there is now an apparent assurance that women and children will not come into contact with Chinese coolies.”123 Here Semple conjures the figure of the Chinese laborer as threatening to the white family, making its violent expulsion from the industry a necessary precursor to the employment of white women and the transformation of the hops business into a respectable, family-oriented affair. This new vision of hop picking—a harmless, leisurely pursuit, undertaken by festive townspeople on small family farms, devoid of the violence and power structures that created the industry—required the erasure of the Chinese. It also relegated Indigenous pickers to an imagined, premodern past, stripping them of their status as autonomous workers and presenting them as mere extensions of the landscape itself.124
THE DECLINE OF PUGET SOUND HOPS
In 1892, a hop lice epidemic swept the Puget Sound region, infesting the soil and foliage of the hop vines just before picking season. Ezra Meeker recalled, “I walked down to the yards, a quarter mile distant, and there I saw the first hop-louse. The yard was literally alive with lice and [they] were destroying.”125 Farmers in Puyallup Valley alone lost over $100,000 that season. “We do not now expect to see a recovery from the present decline,” Meeker lamented as the meager profits trickled in.126 The hop louse inflicted far more than just physical devastation. It also damaged the region’s reputation as an ideal agrarian landscape. The Puget Sound was now marred by the same diseases that had wiped out crops in Europe. The “richness of the soil” that had served as a prime selling point for the area’s hops industry no longer worked to attract investors and commercial buyers. After a few more disappointing harvests, Meeker shut down his farm. “I quit the business,” as he put it, “or, rather, the business quit me.”127
Though Meeker describes the end of Puget Sound hops as “a clap of thunder out of a clear sky, so unexpected,” the louse infestation only accelerated a process already underway.128 With the expansion of railroads and land-based transportation, the centers of agricultural production began to shift from the Puget Sound region. The Eastern Washington town of Yakima surpassed Puyallup in hop cultivation even before the lice epidemic hit. During the early twentieth century, Yakima was transformed into a major hop-producing region; today it continues to grow the majority of hops in the United States.129 Many hop growers in the Puyallup and White River valleys, like Meeker, sold off their land and moved on to other business pursuits.
Hop growing continued to some extent in the Puget Sound region, but it took a very different form into the twentieth century. The proliferation of railroads allowed greater access to Seattle and the surrounding areas, giving rise to a thriving tourist industry. Some hop growers shifted their focus from commercial production to tourism as their farms became magnets for white visitors eager to catch a glimpse of what Paige Raibmon calls the “authentic Indian.”130 The town of Snoqualmie, located near the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, became a tourist hub that revolved around the hop harvest and its predominately Indigenous workforce. Tourists and photographers, both professional and amateur, snapped thousands of images, which depicted the hop harvest as a romanticized view into an imagined past.131 These images made their way into local historical societies and archival collections, forming the bulk of today’s primary source materials on the history of hop production in the Puget Sound region. Tellingly, only a handful of photographs in the major repositories of University of Washington and Washington State Historical Society depict Chinese hop pickers.132
The decline of Chinese and Indigenous labor in the Puget Sound hops industry went hand in hand with the marginalization of these groups within the city itself. While Coast Salish and other Indigenous hop pickers and workers continued their seasonal migrations through Seattle, Duwamish people endured further displacement and destruction of their homelands. Municipal projects such as the construction of the Lake Washington Ship Canal served as a major driver of Duwamish dispossession, along with individual acts of violence against local Indigenous communities.133 In 1893, for example, a white settler burned down a group of Duwamish homes in West Seattle, forcing them to flee “in large numbers . . . with their canoes and belongings.”134 They relocated to Ballast Island, a small patch of land in Elliott Bay formed by the ballast dumped from passing ships. Until that point, Ballast Island had served as a temporary camping ground for Indigenous hop pickers as they made their way to the fields in late summer. This group, along with others who joined them, formed a permanent community on Ballast Island until the early twentieth century.
Chinese hop pickers and encampment in Puyallup. 2010.0.345, Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma (Wash.).
Seattle’s Chinese population also experienced intense marginalization during this period through both anti-Chinese violence and immigration restriction. Some Chinese did remain in Seattle following the 1886 anti-Chinese mob attack, but their role in the seasonal economy diminished significantly through legislation that sought to curtail Chinese immigration into the United States. While Seattle’s Chinese community did grow over time and remained a crucial presence, their economic impact would never reach the heights it did before Chinese exclusion. With immigration restriction in place, the transpacific movement of labor was no longer possible, and many Chinese merchants and labor contractors either returned to China or transitioned to other business pursuits.
The 1890s saw the end of Puget Sound’s hops industry and the urban networks that sustained it. But the industry’s impact was far-reaching. Hop growing helped establish Seattle as a regional and transnational hub of labor, setting the stage for future industrial expansion and migration. Lumber companies, in particular, built on the hop industry’s foundation, turning to Seattle on a much larger scale to recruit and hire workers—specifically foreign-born workers from regions including Japan and Northern Europe. As Seattle became more deeply entwined with the regional and global economy, lumber company owners and managers found themselves confronting the same issues as hop growers: an inability to control or contain their workers, and a rising labor militancy fostered by the very conditions that made the industry possible.