Now according to the majority of anthropologists, agriculture is a pretty important factor in the creation of complex societies capable of brining together large groups of people who in turn create cities, build monuments, slap together complex hierarchies where everyone is uber aware of who is better than whom, and all those other things we generally identify as civilization whether we should or not. Part of the reason they hold this view is because throughout the arc of history its pretty much true across the board. One can argue the merits of a more egalitarian hunter gatherer society, but they tend not to be so good at creating stuff for us to remember them by. After all, one really doesn’t have time to worry about such things when they’re having to constantly wander around looking for things to eat. However, just because the majority of things are this way, doesn’t mean they all have to be.
A perfect example of this is the ridiculously complex multitude of civilizations jammed into what we today call British Columbia, the Pacific Northwest, and California. West of the Rocky and Cascade Mountains was a virtual paradise of food abundance; with a mild climate, oceans brimming with seafood, forests full of wild game, and prairies full of roots and berries. However, even more significant and unique, was the ass load of salmon who annually made their way from the oceans each year to literally fuck themselves to death in the region’s rivers and creeks. It was this abundance that originally drew the earliest Amarinds down the coast from Beringia, kicking off the widespread human settlement of the Americas, and as each subsequent group of Amarinds, and then Na-Dene, followed them south and spread across the two continents, groups broke off and stayed in that original area of plenty. After all, why keep going when the first place they found was pretty damn awesome. Unlike other areas where people had to travel far and wide for food, the tribes of the Pacific Coast could get the majority of their food needs from a relatively small area. Something that was helped by the use of controlled burns, fertilizing and tilling, streamscaping, and other methods to encourage greater natural production. As a result, the population along the Pacific Coast became the most genetically diverse in the New World, with a multitude of people crammed together, all speaking different languages and forming their own unique societies.
Now while salmon is a pretty awesome food source when its around, what with the rivers becoming teeming with literally millions of the bastards, it comes with the little caveat that its only around for part of the year, which isn’t really all that great. Though early people knew how to dry meat, it didn’t last for long, especially in wetter climates. This changed around 1,000 BCE when they figured out how to smoke meat, which changed salmon from a great food source when it was around to an all year diet staple. With salmon basically taking on the role of corn in Mesoamerican societies, the populations of the Pacific Coast exploded. Now having to move around even less to ensure nobody went hungry, these societies began building large long houses in which to live, decorating them with totem poles and intricate arts and crafts. With more time on their hands, they developed complex hierarchies and detailed social and religious ceremonies, with music and dancing playing a central role. Several tribes also developed a distinct look by purposefully flattening the foreheads of their babies, which became a mark of beauty.
Though often sharing similarities in basic technique and ideas, if anything the various tribes all crammed together became even more unique from one another. However, that did not negate them communicating. The ocean and various rivers made travelling long distances by canoe quite easy, resulting in a large amount of trade between the Pacific Coast tribes and the development of distinct trading languages as a central means of communication. The Pacific Coast tribes also traded with tribes from the interior, who were more than willing to pay out the nose for access to salmon and intricate artisanal crafts. One of the largest centers for this type of trade developed at Celilo Falls on the Columbia River, which provided easy access through the Cascade Mountains to the interior. Trade goods came from as far away as the Southwest, the Great Plains, and Alaska. This trade made the Pacific Coast tribes very powerful, with the Chiefs, who were either appointed or elected, showing off their wealth via complex events called potlatches, where they vied to prove who could give away the most elaborate gifts.
Mountain ranges and their large populations kept the Pacific Coast tribes safe from their neighbors in the interior, who had to work much harder to sustain themselves in the less productive deserts of the Columbia Plateau and Great Basin. For their part, the Pacific Coast tribes seemed to have little interest in expanding their influence into such less fertile lands, though they were more than willing to use interior tribesmen as slaves, leading to a situation where many of the interior tribes would attack each other in order to gain slaves to trade. These slaves were viewed as being ethnically inferior, and often their children were automatically considered slaves as well. The Pacific Coast tribes were also not above attacking each other, sometimes to secure resources, and sometimes as part of raids to secure more slaves. The various tribes had a complex relationship of constantly shifting alliances. Some raiders would travel as far as northern British Columbia to the coasts of California to capture slaves. For some tribes, more than a quarter of their number were slaves and it was not uncommon at times to kill slaves during potlatches as a show of power and a disdain for material wealth. This chaotic situation helped sustain the individuality of their various Pacific Coast societies over the millennia, but did not weaken them to the point that they were vulnerable to outside attack. Relatively isolated from early European contact, they retained their power into the nineteenth century.
