Above the Clouds
On August 11, 1774, the men on the Spanish ship Santiago emerged from a persistent coastal fog to spot a towering mountain on the far shore. Captain Juan Perez dubbed it Cerro Nevada de Santa Rosalia, giving the first European place name to a feature of the future Washington state. After Spain ceded the region to Britain in 1790, Perez's peak was renamed Mount Olympus, the highest in a mountain range called the Olympics.
In 1890 an expedition led by U. S. Army Lieutenant Joseph P. O'Neil made the first recorded ascent of Mount Olympus, and the trek to the mountain and back made quite an impression on the men and their leader. When O'Neil made his report to Congress in 1896, he noted that the region would serve admirably as a national park. A year later, one of outgoing President Grover Cleveland's last official acts was the proclamation of the Olympic Forest Reserve, which placed nearly two thirds of the Olympic Peninsula under government control.
In 1909 President Theodore Roosevelt issued a proclamation creating Mount Olympus National Monument, but conservationists pressed for more protection of the peninsular wilderness. This took time, but in 1937 President Franklin Roosevelt – after hearing arguments both for and against creation of the national park – visited the Olympic Peninsula to see for himself. He liked what he saw, and in 1938 signed legislation creating Olympic National Park. Joseph O'Neil, who had risen to the rank of brigadier general, died four months later, having seen his dream fulfilled.
The Madness of Crowds
Maybe it's because of the warm August weather, but this week in Washington history has seen its share of unruly mobs getting a bit hot under the collar. We begin on August 14, 1895, when an angry crowd hanged Sam Vinson and his son Charles Vinson, accused of killing two popular Ellensburg citizens during a drunken rampage. On the same date nearly half a century later, an Italian prisoner of war was lynched at Fort Lawton during a 1944 riot by the camp's guards. Twenty-eight African American soldiers were court-martialed and convicted for the deed. It took more than six decades for the army to acknowledge the innocence of the men, by which time all but two had died.
Seattle was shaken by another round of riots beginning on August 10, 1969, when hundreds of young people clashed with police at Alki Beach in West Seattle. The following night the battle shifted to the University District, and turned "the Ave" into an intergenerational war zone before neighborhood volunteers enforce a tense truce on August 15. Attorney and civic leader Cal McCune helped to restore peace to the neighborhood, which led to Seattle's first Street Fair the following year.
