R.H. Espy circa 1918

Among my forebears are the garrulous Espys, the taciturn Espys and, on the Richardson side, the Scribbling Aunts. It is somewhat unfortunate that my DNA is liberally sprinkled with the scribbling genomes but that my great-grandfather, Major Robert Hamilton Espy, was the epitome of the strong silent type. So, although I’d love to write about him and how he spent his time after he and Clark founded Oysterville, he didn’t leave much to go on.

Here, on Shoalwater Bay, at the same time as my great-grandfather (and if the few facts we know about him are true) was James G. Swan. Mr. Swan left us a fabulous documentation of the life and times here from 1852 to 1855 in his book The Northwest Coast or Three Years’ Residence in Washington Territory. For the better part of 1853, Espy and Swan lived only a stone’s throw from one another – Swan at Stony Point and Espy on the Palix River. Yet neither ever mentioned the other as far as I know.

James G. Swan

Swan did write about Oysterville, however: We reached a settlement some fifteen or twenty miles distant, called Oysterville, where quite a number of oystermen had collected during my absence to San Francisco. (Swan had left the bay on January 1, 1854 and returned five months later which would jibe perfectly with the April 12, 1854, date of Espy and Clark’s arrival here and the accounts which say “in no time the town boomed.” Everyone apparently had the Oyster Fever.

Last night, Kathleen Sayce brought me two fairly extensive excerpts from the diary of James Graham Cooper (for whom Cooper ’s hawk is named). He was a naturalist and physician with Isaac Stevens’ Pacific Railroad Survey expedition of 1853 and took some time to explore this area. Kathleen is transcribing his diaries and brought me some printouts of his descriptions of Oysterville and his mention of Mr. Espy. On the other hand, Cooper doesn’t mention Swan. But, Swan mentions Cooper – twice.

James Graham Cooper

One wonders… just how much interacting and networking went on in Shoalwater Bay in the early 1850s? There were only a handful of permanent settlers on the bay when my great-grandfather arrived in 1852. Surely they all knew each other. Beyond the rivalries over the oyster bounty, was there some sort of pecking order as far as who was considered worthy of mention and who was not? Obviously, Great-Grandpa Espy treated everyone equally. He remained silent. Damn! If I hadn’t inherited that scribbling gene from his daughter-in-law (my grandmother) I probably wouldn’t care.