Meeting Minutes

The meeting went on a break, but the meeting recording continued. Stopping it would have broken it into two files which was problematic in those early days of technology-enabled meeting minutes. Except for a few people dialed in over the phone bridge, most attendees were in the little conference room in North Cove, WA discussing the transfer of land from the U.S. Coast Guard (technically the U.S. Lighthouse Service according to the deed) to the Bureau of Indian Affairs on behalf of the Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe. It was bureaucratic formality for two reasons. First, tribe had long since resumed their role as caretaker of the land ever since the Coast Guard lighthouse and lifesaving station were abandoned in the 1940s. Second, and related to why the facilities were abandoned, most of the land and remains of the facilities was now underwater due to the unrelenting power of coastal erosion at the mouth of Willapa Bay.

Since it was a formality, the tribe included their honorary elder in full customary dress to oversee the event. It felt wrong, like someone wearing a tuxedo at a Waffle House restaurant. The drab conference room in the small town’s offices simply did not do him justice. The elder, who simply went by George, was probably at least 90 years old. Born around 1920, he had witnessed not only the demise of the Coast Guard facilities but also the demise of the surrounding town and his own tribe. His great-grandfather had been a young man when the land originally went to the U.S. government in the 1850s and perhaps he thought that even ceremonially regaining the lost land would help the tribe regain more of its lost luster. In any event, he looked magnificent.

The hot microphone during that break caught want many assumed to be small-talk ramblings of an elder. But sprinkled into his otherwise unrecognized sentences, probably in the Salishan language, English words like “Andrew Johnson”, “Keeper Wells”, and “Lighthouse Charlie” stood out. It would not have mattered had it not been for the attentiveness of Elizabeth and the happenstance that she was also in graduate school. She normally used these recording to write meeting minutes in her role as contracted support to the Coast Guard’s Pacific Area real estate office in Oakland, CA. In her spare time, she was also a grad student at UC Berkeley where she happened to share the hot mic story, and later the recording, with a professor not knowing what would unfold.

In 1858 W.B. Wells started serving as the keeper of the new Willape Bay Lighthouse on the southwest coast of Washington, one of the first such structures in the area that was then known as the Oregon territory. He had been a very successful sea captain and businessman in the area previously and this government job was to be a stable complement to his adjacent farming work. Unfortunately, Keeper Wells, as he was known locally, was forced to leave the job when the lighthouse unexpectedly closed temporarily a few years later. When it reopened, he fought hard to return to duty only to die in 1863 when the ship he was on capsized. His wife never found his will or, it was rumored, his stash of other valuables.

What the Berkeley professor would figure out through translators analyzing the meeting recording and comparisons with other oral histories was that Wells and a Tribal elder in those early years had been close and respectful friends. The chief had spent so much time visiting Keeper Wells that he became known as Lighthouse Charlie. Lighthouses, especially remote ones, often evoke strong feeling as their purpose-built structures juxtapose with rugged coasts and tumultuous seas. In the case of Willape Light, it evoked confidence and trust. Lighthouse Charlie, sensing more forceful action by the federal government soon, entrusted much of the tribe’s treasures to Keeper Wells who stored them along with his own treasures in a hidden part of the lighthouse’s foundation.

Lighthouse Charlie’s suspicion were proven prescient when in 1866 President Andrew Johnson issued an executive order forcing the tribes onto reservations. By that point both Keeper Wells and Lighthouse Charlie had both died but the story of the hidden valuables was still well known in the tribal community. With that founding friendship gone, the suspicion of the government turned into outright distrust that extended to the successor keepers at Willape Light who were seen as the government’s representative. No attempt was made to recover the items and instead the story was simply passed from generation to generation until the winter of 1940.

While most people in the area stayed warm inside after celebrating Christmas or Solstice holidays, the Coast Guard dynamited the lighthouse into the ocean. By that point, erosion that was literally at the doorstep of the building made the structure unusable and a public hazard. The structure’s remains were lost to the sand and eventually to the sea as the mouth of the bay shifted south over the years. George was about 20 at the time of the demolition and remembered how the event set off a brief frenzy of activity in the tribe as they collectively recalled the story of the hidden valuables. Too poor to mount a formal or serious search, they eventually resigned themselves to an accustomed fate of loss. 70 years later, the ceremonial return of the former lighthouse’s land brought all the memories and stories surging back into old George’s mind. They also fortunately were caught on the recording because he died later that year.

As 2019 turned into 2020, divers were planning their investigation of site of the former lighthouse which by then was in an offshore sandbar. The professor had spent about a year translating, investigating, and corroborating the story. Working closely with the tribe, he then spent another 8 years navigating the wickets of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Historic Preservation offices, Environmental Protection offices, and other government stakeholders. This highlighted an immutable truth: the government will never simply give you million dollars to do something, but it will spend twice that telling you how you need to do it or, more often, that you are not permitted to do it at all.

Fortunately, the professor was persistent and eventually gained permission to investigate the site by emphasizing its connection to the Shoalwater people. Peaking white guilt in the 2010s didn’t hurt. Once onsite, the divers quickly found the old stone foundation of the lighthouse. It was slightly disaggregated and weathered but recognizable for what it was. Using the full suite of salvage technologies and tools, the team eventually recovered approximately 200 pounds of valuable. There were many decorative beads and artifacts found in the rubble but most of the haul, easily spotted by metal detectors, was gold coins.

The professor and team would determine that the coins originated from the tribe’s early trading days with the Spanish, predating the lighthouse, and lending credence to the oral traditions of Lighthouse Charlie’s precautions passed down through the years. The recovery was also seen as fulfilling the magnificently dressed George’s unspoken goal of the ceremony returning more than land to his people which by that point numbered in the hundreds. This story is not well known for two reasons. First, COVID dominated the news and drowned out almost all other stories that year.  Second, it was all made up. The land transfer meeting including George the tribal elder and Elizabeth the note taker did occur, but the story of trust and treasure did not exist, except in Joe’s head as his mind wandered longer than usual, while waiting for a meeting to start back at Coast Guard Headquarters.~