The People Of The Moon -- Before Treaties Took Away Their Land And Led Them To Work For White Settlers, The Eastside's Snoqualmie Indians Were One Of The Largest And Most Feared Tribes In The Puget Sound Area.

--------------------- The story of the Moon ---------------------

"It happened a long time before anyone wrote anything down. The Moon Child, Snoqualm, said goodbye to his wife in the western ocean and walked up the river toward the home of his mother, wife of the Red Star.

"As Moon walked up the river he confronted fierce monsters. He transformed them into plants and animals to create a home where the people could live. When he came to the place where Raven had built a fish weir across the river, Moon turned that fish weir into stone.

"At this place with the river pouring over the lip of the stone, Moon created the first man and woman, then climbed into the sky to stay. Forever."

- A version of the creation myth of the Snoqualmie Tribe, as told in the documentary video "For All People, For All Time."

Deep in the Valley of the Moon, there is music: the sound of water from Snoqualmie Falls crashing to the hard earth and the wind whistling through stands of cedar and fir. There is peace out here where the first people of the Eastside chased the seasons and looked to the sky, hoping to find their creator lounging in the crook of a crescent moon.

They are known as the Snoqualmie Indians, once one of the biggest and most feared tribes in the Puget Sound area. The Snoqualmies, who recently received federal recognition, make up one of two main tribes that call the Eastside home.

A certain sense of peace remains in the Snoqualmie Valley, more than 140 years after a treaty signed between Native Americans and white settlers caused whole villages to be erased from the map - villages that once hunkered along lakes and rivers throughout the Eastside.

The Eastside was not stereotypical Indian country, with smoke swirling out of tepees or Native Americans carving totem poles. Instead, the landscape was dotted with cedar-shake cabins and long houses that held 30 to 40 people.

Many roads that now cut through the Eastside originally were Indian trails. The forests now being stripped away to make room for homes were a supermarket of sorts for Native Americans, providing them with deer and mountain goats, salmonberries and tiger-lily bulbs.

Areas closest to Lake Washington, where Bellevue, Kirkland and Redmond are now, were not considered Indian country, although there were traces of Native-American life through the 1850s. The long houses were torn down to make room for encroaching white homesteaders.

A couple of long houses once stood near Yarrow Bay, and two others were at the tip of Mercer Slough, close to where Interstate 90 and 118th Avenue Southeast are now. Warriors from Central Washington slept and stored supplies there during the Indian War of 1856, according to historical accounts.

Land swapped in treaty

As part of the Point Elliott Bay Treaty of 1855, tribes in the Puget Sound region swapped hundreds of acres of their land, much of which was on the Eastside, with white settlers in exchange for reservation land elsewhere and certain privileges, including fishing rights.

Angry at the terms, some Native-American groups began warring with white settlers shortly after the signing of the treaty. But the settlers, with the help of the Snoqualmie Indians, squashed splinter groups that were battling them. Eventually, most Indians moved to crowded Western Washington reservations set up by the federal government.

Many who left their homes came back to the Eastside in the late 1800s to make money working the hop fields of white farmers. Eastside towns including Issaquah, Fall City, Snoqualmie and Carnation served as cultural junctions for Native Americans back when hop farms covered vast stretches of land on the Issaquah Valley floor and in the Snoqualmie Valley.

More than 1,000 Native Americans were recruited to pick hops at a 1,500-acre valley farm known as the Hop Ranch, a spread known today as the Meadowbrook Farm. Records from the late 1880s indicate Native Americans came from as far away as Alaska and Yakima, by canoe and pony, to work the fields.

A hop louse that swept through the region in the early 1900s wiped out the entire Eastside hop industry, and the Indians turned to logging.

The dark, rich soil in the Snoqualmie Valley was ideal for other crops, including potatoes.

Leona Eddy, a 79-year-old Snoqualmie elder, remembers the backbreaking labor of digging small fingers into the dirt and pulling up the vegetable by the root.

"There was such huge big potatoes raised up and down the valley there," Eddy recalls.

She worked beside her grandfather, Jerry Kanim, who was the last lineal chief of the Snoqualmie Tribe.

The inception of the Native-American Shaker religion occurred during the hop craze, founded by a couple from the Olympia area who were part of the annual migration east to work the fields. Mary Slocum, wife of John Slocum, a Squaxin Indian who claimed he died but was refused entry into heaven and instead was sent back to exhort others to abandon their sins, introduced the practice of shaking during worship, which was said to rid people of ailments and sin.

The religion worked its way into the lives of many Snoqualmie Indians, including Eddy.

"Grandma had the Shaker church in our home," Eddy said.

Native Americans jammed into the tiny home in Carnation, where Eddy was raised. They broke into a feverish sweat as they violently shook their bodies to stamp out all things evil.

Many Native Americans practiced the religion privately in each other's homes until 1892, when the Slocums and their followers incorporated their movement as the Indian Shaker Church, giving it legal status. The religion took off and Shaker churches still can be found on Native-American reservations throughout the state.

Other tribes

The Duwamish Indians are the other tribe whose homeland is found on the Eastside. Their villages once lined the water's edge along the southern shores of Lake Washington, lands that now are the industrial shoulders that support the city of Renton.

Members of the Duwamish Tribe still live in the Renton area. They are currently appealing a decision by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs that denied them federal recognition.

Although only two tribes lived on the Eastside, many Native-American communities sprung up around lakes and rivers, including Lakes Sammamish and Washington, and the Snoqualmie and Cedar rivers. They were known as hah-chu ah bsh, or "lake people," and they represented tribes east of the Cascades and around the Puget Sound area that set up temporary villages along these waterways, following their food supply.

"The water was the centerpoint for life," said Greg Watson, director of the Snoqualmie Valley Historical Society. Watson and his staff are culling photographs and myths as part of a new exhibit, which will open in the spring, focused on Native Americans of the Snoqualmie Valley and Puget Sound area.

Native Americans used the waterways to travel to trade with other Indians, to fish and to bathe.

European settlers homesteaded in clearings where Native Americans had laid down leather blankets to sleep under the open sky.

Road routes, such as the Interstate 90 corridor, came courtesy of Native-American guides who showed early settlers how to get to such places as Snoqualmie Falls and how to get past the huge mountain walls of the Cascades.

"We're following, quite literally, in Native-American footsteps," Watson said.

Putsata Reang's phone message number is 206-515-5629. Her e-mail address is: prea-new@seatimes.com