Copalis Erotic

The Copalis were a small Coast Salish people of the Washington coast who lived along the Copalis River and the ocean beaches between Joe Creek and the north side of Grays Harbor, from long before European contact into the late nineteenth century, when the survivors of epidemic and displacement merged into their Quinault and Chehalis neighbors. They no longer exist as a separate tribe. Their descendants are found today among the members of the Quinault Indian Nation and the Chehalis communities.

What set them apart was mostly the ground they held: a flat, surf-beaten run of sand backed by spruce forest and tidal marsh, with some of the most productive razor clam beds in Washington. The Copalis dug clams, netted smelt in the surf, took salmon from the river in season, and hunted elk inland. They wintered in cedar plank houses near the river mouth and traveled by dugout canoe. Their language belonged to the Tsamosan branch of the Salishan family, generally grouped with Lower Chehalis and closely related to Quinault, spoken by the larger people just to the north. Marriage and trade tied them in both directions, and south through the Chehalis to the Chinook traders of the Columbia.

Religious life followed the regional pattern. Young people sought a guardian spirit through fasting and solitude, and the power they gained shaped their skills and standing and was shown in winter dances. Society was ranked, with well-born families, commoners and slaves, and free-born infants had their foreheads flattened on the cradleboard as a visible mark of status.

Lewis and Clark never came this far north, but at Fort Clatsop in the winter of 1805 and 1806 they wrote down what Native informants told them: about 200 people in ten houses. By 1888 only five were reported. The decades between brought smallpox and other introduced diseases, then American settlement around Grays Harbor. The Quinault Reservation, enlarged by executive order in 1873 for the "fish-eating Indians" of the coast, took in survivors from small groups like this one.

The name has outlasted the tribe. It sits on the river, on the communities of Copalis Beach and Copalis Crossing, on a national wildlife refuge of offshore rocks, and on the Copalis ghost forest, a stand of dead red cedars in the river's tidal marsh. Those trees died when the coast dropped and saltwater flooded in during the great Cascadia earthquake of January 1700, an event dated by their rings and by tsunami records in Japan. The families living at the river mouth that winter were, in all likelihood, forebears of the people later called Copalis.