Cold, fun, empty surf in the PacNW. Photo: Screenshot//Catch a Northwest Wave Documentary
Last week, I discovered something that completely changed my understanding of surfing history. That’s certainly a bold assertion, so let me explain. Way back in 2006, a feature that ran in the August periodical, The Surfer’s Journal, volume 16, issue number 5, titled “Aloha Washington,” purported to turn the entire history of surfing in North America on its head by revealing a thriving pocket of surf culture that existed on the coast of Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, in the year 1907. The story’s subhead read, “An Unlikely Discovery of Pre-Freeth Mainland Surfing.”
Unlikely was right — for the longest time, I thought it was a fake
The Freeth referred to was George Freeth, the talented hapa-haole waterman from Honolulu who, for almost a century, at least, was credited for introducing surfing to the West Coast of the United States in May of 1907 (seemed a lot of surf historians forgot about the three Hawaiian princes, David Kawananakoa, Edward Keli’iahonui and Jonah Kuhio Kalaniana’ole, who, while attending a Northern California military academy, spent their weekends surfing in nearby Santa Cruz on hand-shaped redwoods).
In usurping Freeth’s claim to fame, however, the feature’s author, whom I’d never heard of, still played the Hawaii card. Apparently, while attending prestigious Stanford University in 1906, the son of a Washington timber magnate befriended a scion of Hawaii’s fruit-industry monopolizing Dole family, also attending school in Palo Alto, and convinced him to head north for the summer and work at his father’s lumber mill, which just so happened to be located near the beach at Gray’s Harbor, Washington. Once there, so the story goes, Dole, impressed by the local beachbreak, taught Emerson to mill beautiful alaia boards from local cedar shakes, and the pair became the first to ride the waves of the Washington coast.
That all this actually occurred, and that not a single history of surfing had ever made mention of such a significant tab on the sport’s timeline, triggered my skepticism. Yet, it was the photos accompanying the story that really piqued my suspicion. The images, faded and authentically sepia-toned, showed various members of a large Washington family, wearing era-appropriate beachwear, enjoying themselves at the beach. Plain enough. In those photos, however, can also be seen wooden surfboards, propped behind men and women, boys and girls, held under their arms, standing up next to them. And not just any wooden surfboards, but very sophisticated-looking craft, some with contemporary, curved templates that wouldn’t be seen in Hawaii or California for another 20 years or so. One shot in particular highlights this anomaly, as two versions very much resembling modern equipment are posed next to a more typical, early 20th century plank. I could only assume that these boards were cleverly Photoshopped into the images, the result being a very convincing hoax.
I was wrong. This, I recently discovered, when, while watching the latest Nathan Florence slab demolition derby on YouTube, another video popped up off to the side titled “The History of Surfing in the Pacific Northwest.” After spending a few minutes watching Nathan ride waves that looked more like calving glaciers, I switched over to the earnest Northwest surfing documentary, which, along with including many culturally relevant tidbits, also featured an interview with a gentleman named Gavin Kogan. Turns out, it was Kogan who wrote the story in the Journal, being the great grandson of one Ralph D. Emerson, who along with his Stanford college buddy Wilford Dole…well, you get the picture. In fact, the business Emerson eventually formed was called “Aloha Lumber,” his mill would require a railroad depot that led to the development of a town called Aloha, today located two miles east of the Pacific, in Washington’s Gray’s Harbor County.
Fascinating, to be sure, but not the revelation I was talking about. This came when I was doing a bit of follow-up, Googling the town of Aloha. One entry, in particular, included a side reference noting that a 1912 Tacoma newspaper account mentioned “indigenous surf-riding.” I jumped on one of those newspaper archive sites, signed up for a week’s free trial, and began combing the stacks, looking for what would have to be considered an entirely unexpected chapter in North American surf history.
I found it on page seven of the August 26, 1912 edition of the Tacoma Times. A brief filler paragraph, wedged between imminently more arresting headlines, like that Democratic presidential candidate Woodrow Wilson might not be giving a speech in Tacoma during that year’s primary season, or that six persons in St. Louis, Missouri, were recently killed during a particularly violent thunderstorm. But for me, the little four-line story couldn’t have been more profoundly interesting.
“EXCURSION TRIP WAS A SUCCESS,” read the all-caps headline. “Loaded to capacity with tired but joyous excursionists, the Northern Pacific train pulled in at the depot last night without a single accident having marred the pleasure of a day at Moclips Beach. Surf-riding by the Quinalt [sic] Indians was one of the entertainments of the day at the beach [my italics]. Dancing and other picnic sports occupied the day. Another trip for next Sunday may be arranged.”
Think about that for a minute. “Surf-riding,” one of the entertainments of the day. Provided, apparently, by the local Quinault tribe (an anglicized version of kʷínayɬ, in their own tongue), a Southwestern Coast Salish people who for millennia have populated the region known today as the Olympic Peninsula, in Washington state. Also known as “The Canoe People of the Cedar Tree,” this ocean-faring tribe’s culture was as intrinsically linked to their watercraft as any Polynesian clan, with sophisticated dugouts utilized for everything from open-water coastal exploration and transit, to beach and back-bay fishing, to…surf-riding. At which they were obviously quite experienced and adept. An additional bit of research uncovered this excerpt from Astoria: or Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains, written by famous 19th century author and historian Washington Irving, published in 1836:
“As the Indians of the plains who depend upon the chase are bold and expert riders, and pride themselves upon their horses, so these piscatory tribes of the coast excel in the management of canoes, and are never more at home than when riding upon the waves…it is surprising to see with what fearless unconcern these savages venture in their light barks upon the roughest and most tempestuous seas.”
Sound familiar? Descriptions of this sort are frequent in accounts by the first Europeans to reach the Hawaiian Islands in the 18th and 19th centuries. But upon reading records like Irvings’ from 1836, and evidence, as on that Moclips beach in 1912, showing that indigenous peoples like the kʷínayɬ obviously rode waves in their canoes for sport, it’s hard not to contest that North America’s first surfers weren’t the trio of Hawaiian princes riding waves at the mouth of the San Lorenzo River, in Santa Cruz, but intrepid, surf-savvy indigenous tribes practicing the art along the cold, rugged coast of the Pacific Northwest.
Intriguing concept, you have to admit. But it kind of makes sense, especially when you consider that The Ventures, the innovative instrumental group who in the early 1960s delivered Billboard Top 10 “surf music” classics like “Walk Don’t Run” and “Pipeline,” hailed not from Santa Cruz or Huntington Beach,…but from Tacoma, Washington.
