An Ancient Secret Emerges from the Wishkah River
While gardening on the banks of the Wishkah, a local couple unearthed a human skull and a mysterious stone tool, reigniting local legends about the 'Stinking Waters.'
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Last week, while William Thompson and his wife were engaged in gardening at their place up the Wishkah River, near the Wishkah boom, they raked up a few bones that aroused their curiosity and led them to dig deeper. They found buried in the clay, at a depth of about eighteen inches, the front and rear portions of what they concluded once was an Indian's skull, several rib bones, and a pestle-like implement of dressed stone. The discovery is significant because the Wishkah River is traditionally shunned by Indigenous people, who believe a great eagle once carried a whale to the headwaters, where its decaying body poisoned the river. According to this tradition, the river—whose name in the local tongue means 'Stinking Waters'—caused a great epidemic, and the area remains dangerous to this day.
“Their tradition is that many, many ages ago some great eagle captured an enormous whale on the coast and carried it to the headwaters of the river, and that the whale's decaying body poisoned the entire river.”
The discovery highlights the intersection of colonial expansion—gardening along the river—and the enduring Indigenous presence in Aberdeen. While the 'Stinking Waters' legend was recounted here with the dismissive tone of the 1890s, the Wishkah remains a site where the landscape still holds the history of the original inhabitants, often buried just inches beneath the soil.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.