The Kah Tai Valley, between the Straits of Juan de Fuca and Port Townsend Bay, once consisted of open prairies and estuaries. Development quickly transformed this landscape; however, due to benign neglect of a small area within Port Townsend Golf Course, a colorful relic of the last ice age still remains.
From the words of a native son of Port Townsend pioneers, James McCurdy, the valley once was a botanical delight: “Myriads of wild flowers transformed the valley floor into a many-hued carpet.”
— Washington Native Plant Society

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On a shortcut across the Port Townsend Golf Course, I suddenly found myself in the middle of a remarkable patch of wild flowers. They included some of the same diminutive species I had seen growing in the alpine meadows of the Olympic Mountains. I had seen none of these wildflowers anywhere else in town and wondered how they happened to be so abundant in this one place.

It felt like a secret garden that had fallen into neglect and ruin. The person who had once tended to the wildflowers was no longer with us. I took one last look, said my thanks and continued on my merry way.

Two weeks later I met Gerry Bergstrom, a local native plant enthusiast and member of the Washington Native Plant Society (WNPS). I asked Gerry about the wildflowers at the Golf Course. She had never seen them. Once she had, Gerry was equally curious about how they got there.

She contacted Nelsa Buckingham, one of the founding members of WNPS, who confirmed our suspicion that these were no ordinary wildflowers. They were a remnant of the northwest prairies that once dominated the regional landscape during the interglacial Ice Ages’ warm spells back when the mastodons and giant ground sloths roamed the prairies, and the skies were cloudy all day.

When the intermittent outbreaks of global warming became sufficient, shrubs and trees would start to squeeze out the prairies. The wildflowers and their grassy companions would hightail it back up to the mountains above the treeline.

With all their moving around, the northwest prairies adapted to a wide variety of conditions, but they never figured how to out-compete the trees and shrubs except in places that were especially rocky, wet or dry. When the Ice Ages ended, the northwest prairies were saved from extinction by the early northwesterners who kept the trees and shrubs at bay by their persistent burning of the grasslands.

These early North American pyromaniacs preferred the prairies over the magnificent old growth forest that swallowed up most of the land. In the grasslands a person could stretch out in the sun in the open park-like place. The grasslands provided better browse for game. They were where the locals grew their camas lilies, the staple vegetable crop of the region and the second most important trade item in the Northwest after smoked salmon. The bulbs were slow-baked in pits for a day and half until golden brown, then pounded into cakes.

From start to finish there was an art to making camas sweet cakes. A fire was started in the pit. At just the right time the fire was damped down with wet leaves and the bulbs were layered on top. Sometimes, herbs like lomatium root were added to the mix. The bulbs were covered with more wet leaves and wood. The pit was sealed with a layer of soil. The fire had to be carefully tended to damp out smoke spouts lest the bulbs become scorched. Other seasonings could be mixed in during the pounding of the cakes.

Our prairie remnant at Kah Tai Prairie Preserve is on a hilltop, not the best place to grow your favorite food crop. The lushest bulbs grew in rich, moist soils of the valley bottoms. Like everyone else the S’Klallam grew their staple crop in the wetland floodplain prairies. These wetland prairies were the first places settled by the agriculturalists who immigrated from Europe and Asia. They drained and filled the wet spots and soon erased all traces of the wetland prairie gardens. Tacoma, Seattle and Olympia were among the important sites of camas cultivation.

One Hundred Years of Neglect

Thanks to the efforts of our local chapter of the Native Plant Society, the prairie remnant at the golf course looks much better than it did when I first stumbled upon it. Back then, there was a ditch ripped through the middle of it; wild roses and the non-native grasses were crowding their way in. The wildflower patch appeared unkempt, unloved and run down. It’s not surprising that Nelsa Buckingham decided that the prairie remnant survived the management of the golf course by pure happenstance and benign neglect.

When the Kah Tai Prairie Preserve was inaugurated, it touched off a small brush fire war in the environmental battles of the time. Some of the older golfers claimed that it was Mark and Ann Welch’s grandfather George who planted the wildflowers at the golf course.

In the 1920’s there were no paved roads into the Olympic Mountains, and only the more adventurous souls made it into the remote areas of the future park. Among these adventurous souls were George and Lillian Welch.

Local environmentalists claimed that George and his buddies were the ones who brought the goats into what would later become the Olympic National Park. Try this for yourself sometime — bring up the folks who put the goats in the park with your environmentalist friends and wait for the spit to hit the fan.

We had better stuff to fight about back then, so the controversy was quickly forgotten with the opening of Prairie Preserve.

Anyone who has had experience with the various wildflower mixtures and herbal lawn recipes will realize how far fetched is the idea that George Welch or anyone else could have created a native prairie from scratch by bringing wildflowers down from the mountains.

On the other hand, I was skeptical that the prairie remnant could have survived for nearly a hundred years of neglect. Without burning, intense grazing or regular mowing it takes about twenty to thirty years for grasslands in the Kah Tai Valley to be replaced by wild roses, snowberries, oceanspray and oregon grape.

The golf course faced even greater challenges than the S’Klallam people in maintaining the prairie remnant. The plants that came over with the European settlers and the Asian sojourners tend to outcompete the Northwest native prairie plants. As the prairie remnant got smaller and more isolated it became more susceptible to competition from the non-native grasses and weeds, especially around the edges.

According to one Oregon State University Extension Service lawn and turf specialist, no matter what seed you plant, what kind of turf you roll out, no matter how well you take care of your lawn… in seven years it will revert to the same pasture and vacant lot grasses threatening to invade the prairie remnant at the golf course.

It would have taken some seriously potent benign neglect for the prairie remnant at the golf course to have survived for all that time.

Mr. Whiskers and the Golden Paintbrush

There was one plant growing in the prairie remnant that seemed a possible candidate to have made that trip down from the Olympics in George Welch’s rucksack. Geum triflorum or Old Man’s Whiskers is supposedly rare in lowland prairies. It behaved differently from its neighbors in the Prairie Preserve. While most of the other plants were dispersed throughout the prairie site, Mr. Whiskers was growing in clumps in a few places and appeared to propagate mostly vegetatively rather than by seed. If George helped put the goats in the Olympic Mountains, it didn’t seem so far fetched that he might have planted a few of his mountain favorites in the prairie remnant at the golf course.

Messing with mother nature is a very human trait. When the Makah tribe discovered the South American potato, they planted it in their prairies. The result of the tribe’s years of potato cultivation is the Ozette potato, an heirloom variety that is still grown in the Pacific Northwest.

Likewise in 2004 the Native Plant Society planted the seeds of the Golden Paintbrush, a rare and endangered species, in the Prairie Preserve.

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile: What about the Goats?

The internet is riddled with stories of the goats ravaging the Olympic alpine meadows and dramatic videos of helicopters airlifting them out of the park.

But it doesn’t have much about how they got there in the first place, other than an obscure 2009 interview in the Peninsula Daily News with Mary Ann DeLong and Ann Welch, “both fourth-generation descendants of pioneer Olympic Peninsula families”:

“My granddad [Jack Pike] was the Clallam County game warden who supervised the release of mountain goats in the Olympics in 1925,” DeLong said.  [Ann Welch’s great-uncle Van Welch] “was game warden in 1929 when the second group of goats was released.” …

 

Ann’’s grandfather, George Welch, was also present at one of the goat releases…

 

Both women said that while their ancestors often are blamed for introducing the goats into the Olympics, they were only carrying out instructions — others, including the Clallam County Game Commission and the U.S. Forest Service, made the decision to import them from the Canadian Selkirks and Alaska, they said.

 

“It was a time before they understood the devastation that a non-native species could cause,” Ann Welch said. “They thought the goats would look cool.”

 

Jack Pike, pictured in the photograph as a dark-haired man with a black mustache, was an avid hunter and fisherman who campaigned against the damming of the Elwha River because it would ruin the fish runs, DeLong said.

 

Her grandfather was also known as the game warden with a heart, she said, because he would look the other way if he came across a deer taken illegally by a man who had a family to feed.

George Welch’s early photographs of the mountains were one of the ways proponents of an Olympic National Park brought the Olympics to the attention of the average person.

The goats were another effort to draw attention. Not only would they “look cool,” they would attract the interest of hunters. In fact it was the Great White Hunter, Teddy “Bull Moose” Roosevelt who established our first national parks.

In 1937 Teddy visited the Olympic Mountains, and in 1938 Franklin Roosevelt established the Olympic National Park. Hopefully Teddy snagged an Olympic mountain goat along with a rack of Olympic bull elk antlers for his collection.

When the Olympic National Park was established, hunting was outlawed. Without predators to keep the population in check, the goats went on to become a real problem in the park.

Besides chewing the alpine meadows and rockeries down to the nubbins, they treated hikers like walking salt shakers and sometimes became aggressive in their pursuit of a scarce resource. In any case the experiment failed and the goats are now in the final phases of culling and relocation.

It seems a harsh judgment when two generations later, granddaughters feel they must apologize for an experiment done by forebears with good intentions and the understanding of the time.

Lillian and George’s Wildflower Garden

Ann says that the family believes that it was her grandmother Lillian who took care of the wildflowers at the golf course. In the seventies when Ann worked there, they still burned the prairie remnant every year, just like their S’Klallam predecessors.

It’s time to set aside the foolish notion of benign neglect, an idea that reflects an environmental ethos that nature is better off left to itself, free from human intervention. Our Northwest prairies represent an ecosystem that depends on the human touch for their continued existence.

We should honor Lillian and George Welch for their efforts in preserving the prairie remnant at the Port Townsend Golf Course.

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