Everson signage explains local history & more

By Jack Kintner

The country around Mt. Baker is young as measured by those for whom European settlement marked the beginning of history, but as ancient as any in the world when the perspective of the area’s native people is taken into account. Thanks to an interpretive sign project carried out in Everson 13 years ago as a part of a bridge rebuilding project, that perspective is a little easier to see for the casual visitor, as are some of the basic characteristics of this living, undammed river.

Author Binda Colebrook and Janet Boyhan designed and silkscreened interpretive signs that were erected in Everson’s Riverside Park in 1994. The park is located at the west end of Main Street on the north side of the river.

The signs are like exhibit labels in a zoo, except that they’re much bigger and instead of an animal the river itself is right behind them, providing graphic examples of what the signs describe. Some deal with the river’s physical characteristics, some with native vegetation and wildlife and others with local history.

One sign looks at the location of native settlements at the time of European contact and early homesteading. It shows that the location of some of the major Nooksack Indian settlements coincides with the location of the present towns of Lynden, Sumas, Deming and especially Everson, making it a good place to start looking for some of the old village locations as well as some of the remnants of structures built in the early years of European settlement.

State Highway 544 crosses the Nooksack River near a point once known as the Crossing, where an ancient Indian trail that ran from Bellingham Bay northeastward toward Sumas met the Nooksack and crossed it by canoe. Despite the fact that the Nooksack, like all rivers in flat country, meanders back and forth, often obliterating evidence of earlier settlements, the point where the old trail crosses the river appears to have been stable over countless native generations perhaps because the crossing happens to be in a narrows where the river, too, doesn’t move around much.

Riverside Park was an island in the days that white settlers crossed the river by Indian canoe or later by ferry. If you continue west out Stickney Island Road you will come to a red house on the left side of the road that is located very near where the sign says the ancient ferry landing was located on what was then the north bank of the river. An old roadbed seems to be visible in a field just east of the house and runs off toward the present day river in the same direction as the crossing indicated on the sign. An early settlement gathered around a hotel known as the Crossing House that was located a little farther on where the road turns due west, according to the sign.

A good look is provided by the Englishman and artist Edmund Coleman, who wrote in the account of his first ascent of Mt. Baker (1868) that the primary Nooksack village was at the point where the South Fork joins the main river, at the south end of what is now the Highway 9 bridge east of Deming and south of the Mt. Baker Highway. This is 14 river miles upstream from the crossing and, according to the interpretive sign, there were villages all along the river and beyond to where the middle and north forks converge.

In a story for Harper’s Magazine in 1869, Coleman wrote about coming to “...the mansion of Umptlalum, the chief of the Nooksacks ... [He] is a venerable looking man, and looks every inch a chief. He is benign and intelligent in aspect. His snow-white hair was parted in the middle and combed down behind his ears. He is apparently 80 or 90 years old. He said he was glad to have [us] come to our country, that we should be treated well, and told [our Indian guides Squock and Talum] that they were responsible for our safe return to the village.”

For the person willing to explore a little, there are historical relics all over the Mt. Baker area, from sections of the old Bellingham Bay and B.C. Railroad grade to the station houses the railroad built, both of which are now private residences in Maple Falls (next to the Library) and Glacier (behind Graham’s store). There’s a preserved river canoe similar to the type used by Coleman’s party on the second floor of the Gerdrum House museum near Silver Lake, and there is a collection of old drill cores from the Great Excelsior Mine on Wells Creek, one of the most productive gold and silver mines in the Cascades.

For more information and resources, start with the nearest branch of the Whatcom County Library in Lynden, Sumas, Everson, Deming or Maple Falls.