The Duwamish River is the name of the lower of
Washington (state), Washington state's
Green River Green River may refer to:
Rivers
Canada
* Green River (British Columbia), a tributary of the Lillooet River
*Green River, a tributary of the Saint John River, also known by its French name of Rivière Verte
*Green River (Ontario), a tributary of ...
. Its industrialized estuary is known as the Duwamish Waterway. In 2009, the Duwamish Longhouse and Cultural Center was opened on the west bank of the river as part of the tribe's reassertion of its historic rights in the area and its continuing struggle for federal recognition of tribal status.
[Blecha, Peter-"Seattle's Duwamish Tribe celebrates new Longhouse and Cultural Center on January 3, 2009; HistoryLink.org Essay 8894; http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=8894 retvd 12 14 15]
Name
The native
Lushootseed
Lushootseed (txʷəlšucid, dxʷləšúcid), also Puget Salish, Puget Sound Salish or Skagit-Nisqually, is a language made up of a dialect continuum of several Salish tribes of modern-day Washington state. Lushootseed is one of the Coast Salis ...
name of the Duwamish River (and of the Cedar River) was ''Dx
wdəw''. The Lushootseed name of the
Duwamish tribe
The Duwamish ( lut, Dxʷdəwʔabš, ) are a Lushootseed-speaking Native American tribe in western Washington, and the indigenous people of metropolitan Seattle, where they have been living since the end of the last glacial period (c. 8000 BCE ...
was ''Dx
w'Dəw?Abš'' or ''D
khw'Duw'Absh'', meaning 'People of the Inside'.
[Duwamish Tribe-culture and history; http://www.duwamishtribe.org/culture.html retvd 12 13 15] Both of these have been anglicized as ''Duwamish''.
History
![Seattle topo map showing old route of Duwamish River](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Seattle_topo_map_showing_old_route_of_Duwamish_River.jpg)
![Duwamishvalley1899-1959](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4b/Duwamishvalley1899-1959.png)
Until 1906, the
White
White is the lightest color and is achromatic (having no hue). It is the color of objects such as snow, chalk, and milk, and is the opposite of black. White objects fully reflect and scatter all the visible wavelengths of light. White o ...
and
Green Rivers combined at
Auburn, and joined the
Black River at
Tukwila to form the Duwamish. In 1906, however, the White River changed course following a major flood and emptied into the
Puyallup River
The Puyallup River ( ) is a river in the U.S. state of Washington. About long, it is formed by glaciers on the west side of Mount Rainier. It flows generally northwest, emptying into Commencement Bay, part of Puget Sound. The river and its tribu ...
as it does today. The lower portion of the historic White River—from the historic confluence of the White and Green Rivers to the conjunction with the Black River—is now considered part of the Green River. Later, in 1911 the
Cedar River was diverted to empty into
Lake Washington instead of into the Black River; at that time, the lake itself still emptied into the Black River. Then, with the opening of the
Lake Washington Ship Canal in 1916, the lake's level dropped nearly nine feet and the Black River dried up. From that time forward, the point of the name change from Green to Duwamish is no longer the confluence of the Green and Black Rivers, though it has not changed location.
When the first European-Americans arrived in the area in 1851, they found
the Dkhw’Duw’Absh people living in more than 90 longhouses, in at least 17 villages, in modern-day Seattle and environs. Radiocarbon-dating of artifacts indicates that indigenous tribes have lived along the Duwamish since at least the Sixth Century AD. The Dkhw’Duw’Absh traditionally used the river to hunt ducks and geese, fish for salmon, cod, and halibut, harvest clams, and gather berries, camas, and other plants for food and medicinal purposes.
[
Native villages on the Duwamish were eventually supplanted by white settlement and commercial use, and there was evidence of deliberate burning of Indian longhouses in 1893.][ Duwamish people continued to work and fish in the area, using man-made "Ballast Island" on the Seattle waterfront as a canoe haul-out and informal market, but by the early 20th Century, most remnants of traditional life along the river had disappeared. The last year-round native residents on the river - an old man named Seetoowathl, and his wife - died of starvation in their float-house on Kellogg Island in the winter of 1920.
In 2009, the Duwamish Longhouse and Cultural Center was opened on the west bank of the river as part of the tribe's reassertion of its historic rights in the area and its continuing struggle for federal recognition of tribal status.][Blecha, Peter-"Seattle's Duwamish Tribe celebrates new Longhouse and Cultural Center on January 3, 2009; HistoryLink.org Essay 8894; http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=8894 retvd 12 14 15]
Duwamish Waterway
As of the present day, the Duwamish Waterway empties into Elliott Bay
Elliott Bay is a part of the Central Basin region of Puget Sound. It is in the U.S. state of Washington, extending southeastward between West Point in the north and Alki Point in the south. Seattle was founded on this body of water in the 1850s ...
in Seattle
Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...
. The waterway was completed after the completion of the man-made Harbor Island in 1909. The waterway is now divided into two channels, the East and West Waterways.
In 1895, Eugene Semple
Eugene Semple (June 12, 1840 – August 28, 1908) was an American politician who served as the 13th Governor of Washington Territory and the unsuccessful Democratic candidate to be the first governor of Washington State.
Early life
Eugene Sem ...
, who had earlier served as Governor of Washington Territory
The Territory of Washington was an organized incorporated territory of the United States that existed from March 2, 1853, until November 11, 1889, when the territory was admitted to the Union as the State of Washington. It was created from the ...
, outlined a plan for a series of major public works projects in the Seattle area, including the straightening and dredging of the Duwamish River, both to open up the area to commercial use and to alleviate flooding. In 1909 the City of Seattle formed the Duwamish Waterway Commission in order to sell bonds and oversee the re-channelling of the river. Work began in October, 1913, and the oxbows gradually disappeared, with a few recesses in the channel left to accommodate high water flows and turning ships. Parts of the Georgetown and South Park neighborhoods once on quiet riverbank found themselves inland; the Georgetown Steam Plant
The Georgetown Steam Plant, located in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, was constructed in 1906 for the Seattle Electric Company to provide power for Seattle, notably for streetcars.
History
The plant was originally built by St ...
was now almost a mile from the river, and special water pumping facilities had to be installed. By 1920, 4½ miles of the Duwamish Waterway had been dredged to a depth of 50 feet, with 20 million cubic feet of mud and sand going into the expansion of Harbor Island. The shallow, meandering, nine-mile-long river became a five-mile engineered waterway capable of handling ocean-going vessels.[Boeing-History of the Duwamish Waterway; http://www.boeing.com/principles/environment/duwamish/history.page retvd 12 13 15]
The Duwamish basin soon became Seattle's industrial and commercial core area. Activities included cargo handling and storage, marine construction, ship and boat manufacturing, concrete manufacturing, paper and metals fabrication, food processing, and countless other industrial operations. Boeing Plant 1 Boeing Plant 1 (also known as Boeing Oxbow Plant) was the first airplane production facility of The Boeing Company, serving as its headquarters between 1917 and 1965 in Seattle, Washington, USA. Boeing Plant 1 was used for all aspects of the product ...
was established on the Lower Duwamish in 1916, and Boeing Plant 2
Boeing Plant 2 (also known as Air Force Plant 17) was a factory building which was built in 1936 by The Boeing Company in King County, Washington in the United States. By the time production ceased in the building, the plant had built half of the B ...
, further upriver, in 1936.[
]
Bridges
The Duwamish Waterway is spanned by four major, public bridges: the First Avenue South Bridge
The First Avenue South Bridge is a pair of double-leaf bascule bridges built between 1956 and 1998 that carry State Route 99 over the Duwamish River about three miles (5 km) south of downtown Seattle, Washington
Washington commonly refers ...
, the South Park Bridge
The South Park Bridge (also called the 14th/16th Avenue South Bridge) is a Scherzer rolling lift double-leaf bascule bridge in Seattle, Washington, United States. The bridge is operated by the King County government,[Spokane Street Bridge
The Spokane Street Bridge, also known as the West Seattle Low-Level Bridge, is a concrete double-leaf swing bridge in Seattle, Washington. It carries Southwest Spokane Street over the Duwamish River, connecting Harbor Island to West Seattle. ...]
, and, directly above the latter, the West Seattle Bridge
The West Seattle Bridge, officially the Jeanette Williams Memorial Bridge, is a cantilevered segmental bridge that serves as the primary connection between West Seattle and important highways such as State Route 99 (and the tunnel through downt ...
. Historically, the West Spokane Street Bridge
The West Spokane Street Bridge was a pair of bascule bridges that crossed the west fork of the Duwamish River in Seattle, Washington, United States. The bridges connected the SoDo and West Seattle neighborhoods over the river. The original br ...
also crossed the west fork of the Duwamish Waterway from 1924 until the 1970s
File:1970s decade montage.jpg, Clockwise from top left: U.S. President Richard Nixon doing the V for Victory sign after his resignation from office following the Watergate scandal in 1974; The United States was still involved in the Vietnam War ...
and 1980s
File:1980s replacement montage02.PNG, 420px, From left, clockwise: The first Space Shuttle, ''Columbia'', lifts off in 1981; US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev ease tensions between the two superpowers, leading to the ...
.
Pollution
Due to 20th century industrial contamination
Contamination is the presence of a constituent, impurity, or some other undesirable element that spoils, corrupts, infects, makes unfit, or makes inferior a material, physical body, natural environment, workplace, etc.
Types of contamination
...
, the lower of the Duwamish Waterway was declared a Superfund site by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is an Independent agencies of the United States government, independent executive agency of the United States federal government tasked with environmental protection matters. President Richard Nixon pro ...
(EPA) in 2001. The contaminants include PCBs, PAHs, arsenic
Arsenic is a chemical element with the symbol As and atomic number 33. Arsenic occurs in many minerals, usually in combination with sulfur and metals, but also as a pure elemental crystal. Arsenic is a metalloid. It has various allotropes, ...
, mercury, and phthalate
Phthalates (, ), or phthalate esters, are esters of phthalic acid. They are mainly used as plasticizers, i.e., substances added to plastics to increase their flexibility, transparency, durability, and longevity. They are used primarily to soften ...
s, discharged from multiple industries.
The cleanup of the river has been controversial: one plan for an "early action" or hotspot cleanup proposed to dredge contaminated sediment and dump the resulting sludge
Sludge is a semi-solid slurry that can be produced from a range of industrial processes, from water treatment, wastewater treatment or on-site sanitation systems. For example, it can be produced as a settled suspension obtained from conventional ...
in Tacoma's Commencement Bay
Commencement Bay is a bay of Puget Sound in the U.S. state of Washington. The city of Tacoma is located on the bay, with the Port of Tacoma occupying the southeastern end. A line drawn from Point Defiance in the southwest to Browns Point in ...
, to the southwest. Opposition to this plan in both Seattle and Tacoma forced the sludge to be shipped to Klickitat County
Klickitat County is a county located in the U.S. state of Washington. As of the 2020 census, the population was 22,735. The county seat and largest city is Goldendale. The county is named after the Klickitat tribe.
History
Klickitat Count ...
in south central Washington (state), Washington instead of disposal in Puget Sound. EPA has identified responsible parties for the pollution and in 2014 it published a final cleanup plan. By late 2015, 50 percent of the PCB-contaminated sediment had been removed. As of 2022, cleanup and restoration efforts are ongoing.
The Duwamish River faces many types of pollution, in addition to the contaminants named above. One major pollutant is fecal coliform
A fecal coliform (British: faecal coliform) is a facultatively anaerobic, rod-shaped, gram-negative, non-sporulating bacterium. Coliform bacteria generally originate in the intestines of warm-blooded animals. Fecal coliforms are capable of growth ...
bacteria, caused by combined sewer overflow
A combined sewer is a type of gravity sewer with a system of pipes, tunnels, pump stations etc. to transport sewage and urban runoff together to a sewage treatment plant or disposal site. This means that during rain events, the sewage gets dil ...
s. Even if these overflows were to be cleaned up, the overall quality of the water would not improve much. The river's most common pollutant is petroleum. Other contamination would still occur from farms, surface runoff, or failing septic tanks.
With the spread of ecological concerns in the 1970s, various environmental, tribal, and community organizations became interested in the severely polluted Duwamish River and Waterway. Kellogg Island, the last remnant of the original river, was declared a wildlife preserve, and nearby terminal T-107 was converted into a park, creating a substantial natural area near the mouth of the river.
Wildlife
Despite the industrialization of the Duwamish river, it remains an important habitat for the thousands of salmon and trout that visit the marshes and estuaries each year to spawn. The Duwamish supports chinook, coho,
chum and steelhead, as well as the more rare sockeye, sea-run cutthroat trout and bull trout. Pink salmon run in the millions every odd-numbered years in recent history.
Many of the animal species found in or around the river contain an unhealthy amount of contaminants. For example, other than salmon, any type of fish or shellfish found in the river is unfit for human consumption. It was found that PCB levels in fish and crab that live in the waterway most of their lives are 35 to 110 times higher than in Puget Sound salmon. The Ecological Risk Assessment also found that river otters from the Lower Duwamish River might be exposed to such high levels of PCBs that the growth or survival of their offspring may be reduced.
Recreation
The Port of Seattle owns several properties along the Duwamish River and industrial channels. In 2020, a set of six parks were renamed to use indigenous Lushootseed
Lushootseed (txʷəlšucid, dxʷləšúcid), also Puget Salish, Puget Sound Salish or Skagit-Nisqually, is a language made up of a dialect continuum of several Salish tribes of modern-day Washington state. Lushootseed is one of the Coast Salis ...
names following consultation with local tribes.
See also
*List of rivers of Washington
This is a list of rivers in the U.S. state of Washington.
By drainage basin
This list is arranged by drainage basin. Respective tributaries are indented under each larger stream's name and are ordered downstream to upstream.
Fraser River (Britis ...
References
External links
*
*
* Three of a long series publ. by Seattle Post-Intelligencer in Nov-Dec 2007.
1
River Lost?
Seattle Pi, 11 Nov 2007.
2
Many question if Seattle's Duwamish waterway can ever be restored
Seattle Pi, 25 Nov 2007.
3
River: Dead or alive?
Seattle Pi, 1 Dec 2007.
{{Authority control
Rivers of Washington (state)
Ports and harbors of Washington (state)
Rivers of King County, Washington
Superfund sites in Washington (state)