Hops And Dreams

SNOQUALMIE VALLEY saw a short-lived boom in the 1880s that brought steady employment to local tribal members - and a legacy for today's residents.

When a hop blight threatened the British ale supply in 1881, farmers from the Snoqualmie Valley kept the taps flowing.

Hundreds of growers tried to get rich quick by exporting a variety known as cluster gold. Hops were an ideal business because they yielded a crop the first year. And at the industry's peak, hops brought in an astounding $1 per pound.

In the shadow of Mount Si, settlers formed the Snoqualmie Hop Ranch, a 1,200-acre expanse of woods, orchards and gardens that included 450 acres of hop rows.

A three-story hotel on the site attracted tourists from Boston, San Francisco and Seattle who watched the September spectacle of a thousand workers, mostly Native Americans, stripping cones off the vines.

The industry collapsed in the 1890s. Today only a few artifacts remain, the most visible being George Davis Rutherford's hop-drying kiln in Fall City - the last of 80 kilns in the area.

"It marks a transition into the agricultural era in the Snoqualmie Valley," said Allen Minner, a leader in the hop shed preservation group. "After the hops craze in the valley, what else was there?"

An essential crop

Greg Watson, director of the Snoqualmie Valley Historical Museum, believes hop plants first reached the Northwest on British ships of the Hudson's Bay Co., which traded at Fort Nisqually in 1833 and on the Columbia River before that.

"It's hard to imagine any Englishmen coming out here without the means to produce beer," he said. Without hops, which impart a snappy, bitter flavor, beer would taste like soggy bread.

In 1865 entrepreneur Ezra Meeker planted a large hop farm in Puyallup and taught other settlers to do likewise. Fields soon reached as far north as Issaquah, and Kent was named for England's scenic hop-growing region. England bought most of the crop, though Meeker's clients included Oregon brewer Henry Weinhard.

The state Board of Horticulture bragged that at 1,327 pounds per acre, Washington hop farms in 1892 were twice as productive as those in England or Germany.

But the most important effect of hop commerce in the Snoqualmie Valley wasn't the small fortune a few people earned, rather the means it provided displaced Native-American families "to `hang on' during a period of social and economic change," writes Kenneth Tollefson, a retired Seattle Pacific University anthropologist.

Singing in the fields

Hop pickers wore straw hats as sun shields and brass badges printed with their payroll numbers. Most were Snoqualmie tribal members, but there were also many white homesteaders who needed cash. Other Natives canoed in from as far away as British Columbia.

"Hop pole!" they'd yell, as a man would wrestle a 10-foot hop pole with vines attached out of the dirt, laying it against an X-shape frame so women and children could reach the cones. One adult could usually fill a 100-pound bin or two per day, earning about $1.

Children worked the fields at age 5 alongside their extended families. Women carried infants on their backs in wooden cradleboards, with sticks extending down from the bottom that allowed the cradleboards to be set on the ground so mothers could easily squat and nurse babies without disrupting the work routine. Sometimes they would hang cradleboards from trees. Men carried loads, picked or worked as hunting and fishing guides.

Natives insisted on being paid in silver dollars because they didn't trust paper money. The income went for modern needs such as flour and knives, as well as to gambling. The Snoqualmies' weekend horse races also attracted white tourists.

Naturalist John Muir wrote after an 1890 visit, "About a thousand Indians are required as pickers at the Snoqualmie Ranch alone, and a lively and merry picture they make in the field, arrayed in bright, showy calicoes, lowering the rustling vine-pillars with incessant song-singing and fun."

The Snoqualmies, who had just become landless refugees, lived a "semi-subsistence" lifestyle that required money to supplement other resources such as salmon and gardening. In turn, whites relied on their labor. Unlike other Native Americans, the Snoqualmies tied and cultivated hops several months a year because they lived in the area.

The tribe established a village along Lake Sammamish, in "shacks and hovels at the head of the lake," an Issaquah writer said. They'd leave for the hop fields for four to six weeks at a time. Migrating native workers carried woven mats throughout the county for a source of portable shelter.

A boatload of 37 Chinese arrived in Issaquah in the early 1870s willing to work for lower wages and provoked resentment among local pickers. A group of five whites and two Snoqualmies fired into Chinese tents at night, killing three and wounding three.

Lice invade

In 1892 the tiny hop louse invaded Washington, Oregon and British Columbia. A female could produce a trillion descendants in one summer, and one photo shows 1,000 lice on a single leaf, sucking out the moisture.

The most effective treatment was a mixture of whale oil and South American quassia-tree bark that Meeker invented, but it was used inconsistently. At the same time, European fields recovered, and world markets glutted, driving the price down.

George Davis Rutherford, a small farmer in Fall City, made only 11 cents a pound for one of his 1893 shipments to New York, according to records that his granddaughter Maryln Everett Hunt still keeps in a home closet. That amounted to $613 for 28 bales, apparently one-fourth of the previous year's harvest. It all went to shipping fees and paying off debts. Some years he sold off land to stay solvent.

Under such conditions, hops practically disappeared from the area by the turn of the century. The Snoqualmie Hop Ranch, Rutherford farm and most others reverted to food crops. But hops still thrived in the Yakima Valley, where hot weather killed off lice. The Snoqualmies moved throughout the state picking berries and apples.

Some stubborn hop vines continue to grow at the original Snoqualmie Valley Ranch site. To preserve the living legacy, Watson transplanted some to the museum grounds and his Enumclaw home. He brews a strong amber ale that could have passed for a British pub drink a century ago.

Sources include Rutherford family records; documents from the Fall City Hop Shed Foundation; "Ventures and Adventures of Ezra Meeker" by Ezra Meeker; Snoqualmie Valley Record newspaper articles; "The Snoqualmie Indians as Hop Pickers" by Kenneth Tollefson; and "Columbia," a journal of the Washington State Historical Society, winter 1994-95.

Mike Lindblom's phone message number is 206-515-5631. His e-mail address is mlindblom@seattletimes.com

---------------- How kilns worked ----------------

Hop-drying kilns were essential to keep the crop from turning moldy at sea.

The George Davis Rutherford kiln, built in 1888 at the confluence of the Raging and Snoqualmie rivers, followed the common Western Washington design.

Farmworkers or a horse-drawn cart carried freshly filled bins up a ramp, where the cones were tossed onto an elevated kiln floor at a 1- to 3-inch depth. The floor had gaps that were covered with burlap, allowing 140-degree heat to rise through the cones.

On the floor sat a woodstove, its flue curving overhead so warmth moved evenly. Some kilns were stoked through an outside chute, and farmers hired boys to keep the fires going overnight.

Rutherford's kiln was sold, moved and converted into a root cellar in 1904. A community group replaced the foundation and roof in 1997. The kiln can be viewed in Fall City Community Park, across the Snoqualmie River from downtown.