The Changing Experience of Nature: Historical Encounters
with a Northwest River

Linda Nash

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something . . . which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river. . . .

. . . a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face. . . .

. . . All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat.1

In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain writes of how learning to pilot a steamboat changes an individual's experience of the Mississippi River. In Twain's story, the acquisition and application of technical knowledge about the river gradually overwrite the narrator's earlier and seemingly more naïve response to the river as beautiful scenery. With the emergence of new forms of mediation—the objects, technologies, and cultural practices interposed between the individual and her surrounding environment—earlier ways of experiencing a place are pushed aside. In Twain's case, the steamboat and the knowledge required for piloting replace romantic appreciation.	1
In this article I study something similar. This essay is a historical, rather than a literary, investigation of the changing experience of nature along the Skagit River in western Washington State. (See figure 1.) This essay asks how, and how much, culture has shaped what individuals saw and experienced when they arrived on the Skagit. By holding the object of observation somewhat constant, I trace how culture shaped perceptions of nature at particular historical moments.	2
Typically, works on the cultural construction of nature have tended to trace individual views of nature to underlying social and economic interests. While such analyses have been indispensable, they often fail to acknowledge that views of nature depend not only upon individual and institutional interests but also upon the language and forms of mediation available in particular times and places.2 Such broader cultural developments cannot be reduced simply to interests, even where interests come into play. Language and forms of mediation change over time. Native American maps and bark canoes are replaced by stream gauges and concrete dams. Moreover, individuals can never impose completely new understandings on a river; they must build upon the discourses and understandings that precede them. Even those who oppose dam building, for instance, learn to talk about rivers in terms of average annual streamflow and hydroelectric potential. Constructions of nature are always, to some extent, historically progressive.	3
In what follows, I focus on technical documents that describe the Skagit in order to chart a shift in the scientific discourse applied to the river from the 1850s to the 1930s—a period when the value of technical and "objective" knowledge was becoming culturally and bureaucratically enshrined. This article traces the development of a more rigid and quantitative approach to the river, in which knowledge was mediated by complex instruments and subjective involvement with the river was increasingly repressed or denied. By focusing on a single river, I show that the shift in scientific understanding was not instantaneously imposed by Anglo-American engineers and scientists but took place gradually. My central assumption is that the documents may reflect not only narrow institutional interests but also the authors' individual experience and allegiance to a broader group of scientifically trained professionals and a corresponding ideal of professional objectivity. Abstract understandings of the Skagit River, while underlain by institutional needs, were also driven by modernist hopes for perfect knowledge.3	. . .