Marker on Territory Road

     When you live in a community as small as Oysterville, you find many opportunities to practice the art of diplomacy.  You learn to listen, to proceed with caution, to negotiate carefully, and to live with end-results that you think are wrong, wrong, wrong.  It’s never easy but, on a small scale, it’s the way of the world.
     Fifteen or twenty years ago, our friend Emmett Oliver approached the Oysterville Restoration Foundation with an idea.  Emmett had recently retired from his position as head of the Indian Affairs branch of the Superintendant of Public Instructions.  He was working on an autobiography and turning his attention to his roots.  They led him to Oysterville.
     Here, his grandparents were James (“Captain Jimmy”) and Cecelia Jane Haquet.  They lived in a house on the south side of the present-day Oysterville Church.  Through his grandparents, Emmett could trace his ancestry – and the ancestry of his many cousins and their descendants – to chiefs of both the Chinook and Quinault tribes.
     Emmett’s request was to place a marker near the spot where the Johnson house once stood.  He waited a year for a reply that was never forthcoming,  and although his several queries resulted in polite and encouraging responses, there was never an official yea or nay.  Passive aggressive decision making? 
     I was not yet living in Oysterville at that time, nor did I own property in the National Historic District, so I was not party to the discussion about the “Johnson Home site Sign.”  But I heard the grumblings from the townspeople.
     “It will just open Pandora’s box,” said some.  “We’ll have to mark every ghost site in town.  We’ll have more markers than structures.”
     Finally, Emmett took matters into his own hands.  He had small, granite stone carved, threw a sack of cement, a shovel, and a bucket into his car and, with water borrowed from a nearby hose bib when he reached Oysterville, he set the marker.  For whatever reason, he asked me to witness his “illegal act.”
     I, too, thought this might be the beginning of a signage problem that could run amok.  On the other hand, I felt strongly that Oysterville had never given any visual credit to the Native Americans who were here long before the settlement of Oysterville and who were an important part of the community in pioneer times.  I thought this might be a nod of recognition in the right direction.
     In more recent years, the Oysterville Restoration Foundation has mounted a sign on the fence adjacent to Emmett’s marker.  It says:

                   1870-1896
                   HOMESITE
                of
                 Capt. James R. &
             Jane Haquet Johnson
             Whose Ancestors Included
            Chiefs of the Chinook
               & Quinault Tribes.
              Their Ninth Child,
              Myrtle Johnson Woodcock
           Was The Last Indian Princess
            Born in Oysterville