Full Circle — [Stories from Upcreek]
The Upcreekomish, once a proud nation feasting on the yearly salmon runs, wanted for nothing. Their hunting and fishing prowess was known up and down the coast, their art was envied, their canoes admired. They traded with the coastal clans, but for the most part they kept to themselves upriver. When the whites settled nearby, trapping and mining, the Upcreekomish shook their collective heads but maintained peaceful relations. Who knew they would lose everything to these men with shovels and saws?
The Otter Creek Trading Post — at least according to Three Finger Bill, a hapless logger who made it back out of the woods before he started whittling away toes and feet with his 40 inch chainsaw — claims the Post was the old Grabbinrun Mining Company’s general store back in the late 1880’s. The Upcreekomish traded furs for canned food, salmon for bad hooch and various totem carvings for tobacco. Was it a bad trade? Three Finger will tell you he’s got a cedar chest ornamented with a beaver totem the professors down at the University offered 6 figures for, about the number of his fingers still usable. Bill tells me he doesn’t need the money and besides, he uses the box to keep his bad hooch, cigarettes and canned Spaghetti-O’s in. Sometimes life comes full circle.
Bill’s uncle Walter ran the store after the mines closed and the company script ended. A few salty dogs kept panning, built small cabins and settled in for an early Depression. The store survived, but like the miners and the Upcreekomish, just barely and not much to recommend the life. Tourism brought a few fishermen and backpackers through, and the store, ever adaptable, supplied them with high priced rods, reels, fishing supplies and the ever popular corn dog and microwaveable burrito. Mostly the store makes its profit on tobacco and alcohol, plus Lotto.
I guess you could say the locals are still getting the short end of the stick, but if you crave Spaghetti-O’s, maybe you don’t mind.
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