Always enjoy the look back, as I call it. "The Mill" casino is on the site of a Weyerhaeuser mill complex (sawmill and plywood plant) on the east-facing banks of Coos Bay. In the 1970's the Weyco operation used logs from the two million contiguous acres it owned in the Coast Range near Coos Bay. Coos Bay was the biggest wood products-shipping port in the United States as it sent sawdust to particle board and paper-making plants while also exporting raw logs to the Japanese market which preferred straight, no knots, old growth fir for its particular use of wood in building construction. I lived in Coos County and did some freelance writing for Weyco, including marking the company's 100th birthday in 1975, in Minnesota. The company moved its headquarters to Washington State in 1900.
I know next to nothing about the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest. Like the locals elsewhere in North and South America when the white people arrived in the 16th century, 95 percent of them died from smallpox and measles (déjá vu?). Despite their best efforts, these survivors have little left of their lost culture and must survive on the “sins” of the white people (gambling and cigarettes).
Chief Dan George was a chief of the Tsleil-Waututh nation, a Salish tribe based on Vancouver Island. He acted in many films, most notably in one of my favorite films, Little Big Man, where he played Old Lodge Skins, a Cheyenne chief who adopts Dustin Hoffman’s character. I have often pondered on the wisdom he imparts to the Hoffman character (Jack Crabbe, aka Little Big Man) on the difference between the human beings (Cheyenne) and white people. “But the white man, they believe EVERYTHING is dead. Stone, earth, animals. And people! Even their own people! If things keep trying to live, white man will rub them out. That is the difference.”
Just what we need,casinos.
Always enjoy the look back, as I call it. "The Mill" casino is on the site of a Weyerhaeuser mill complex (sawmill and plywood plant) on the east-facing banks of Coos Bay. In the 1970's the Weyco operation used logs from the two million contiguous acres it owned in the Coast Range near Coos Bay. Coos Bay was the biggest wood products-shipping port in the United States as it sent sawdust to particle board and paper-making plants while also exporting raw logs to the Japanese market which preferred straight, no knots, old growth fir for its particular use of wood in building construction. I lived in Coos County and did some freelance writing for Weyco, including marking the company's 100th birthday in 1975, in Minnesota. The company moved its headquarters to Washington State in 1900.
I know next to nothing about the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest. Like the locals elsewhere in North and South America when the white people arrived in the 16th century, 95 percent of them died from smallpox and measles (déjá vu?). Despite their best efforts, these survivors have little left of their lost culture and must survive on the “sins” of the white people (gambling and cigarettes).
Chief Dan George was a chief of the Tsleil-Waututh nation, a Salish tribe based on Vancouver Island. He acted in many films, most notably in one of my favorite films, Little Big Man, where he played Old Lodge Skins, a Cheyenne chief who adopts Dustin Hoffman’s character. I have often pondered on the wisdom he imparts to the Hoffman character (Jack Crabbe, aka Little Big Man) on the difference between the human beings (Cheyenne) and white people. “But the white man, they believe EVERYTHING is dead. Stone, earth, animals. And people! Even their own people! If things keep trying to live, white man will rub them out. That is the difference.”