People of Gray's Harbor Gone With the Wind

Location 1 is the Minard Site. As in this reference

In my last post, I opined about the Westport Museum's "convenient as opposed to real" history about the so-called "hostile indians." Today, I have a little more about these people. Mostly, they have vanished off the earth, and no longer exist as the Lower Chehalis Tribe. There is a local (as in Ocean Shores) connection. As it turns out, an archeological site existed on the North Beach. The location is shown in the image at the top of this post. While reports suggest the site was discovered by a farmer plowing in the 1920's, "official" records date back to 1947 when Richard Daugherty reported the site. There may have been dozens of native graves; probably of the Lower Chehalis Tribe. Certainly, the site dates back to about 1000AD, and at least 11 individuals were buried there. See here and here for more details.

Sadly, there is no marker to note this site anywhere near Ocean Shores, and, since the Lower Chehalis Tribe no longer exists, the remains were eventually transferred to the Chehalis Reservation (mostly Upper Chehalis Tribe). Most Lower Chehalis people either were assimilated, or moved to either the Quinault or Shoalwater reservations. While the Consolidated Chehalis Reservation was intended to house both upper and lower tribes, the two tribes spoke different languages and the Lower Chehalis tended to migrate mostly to the Quinault Reservation once they realized there was no longer a place for them in their own homeland. There is more here, including the information that Hoquiam was originally a Lower Chehalis village.

As for Robert Gray, who was credited with discovering Gray's Harbor after George Vancouver missed the entrance - well, he was at least 1,000 years late...

Shoalwater Bay by Edmond Curtis in 1913, from here