PORT TOWNSEND — It is an iconic Olympic Peninsula photograph: a group of men in front of a cedar-shingled shack, an elk carcass hanging from a pole.
Some of the men are sitting, others stand. All stare out from the frame of the past century as they wait for the camera’s flash.
The photograph is one of Ann Welch’s favorites from the collection that her grandfather, George Welch, took in the Olympic Mountains in the early decades of the 20th century.
But until recently, she didn’t know exactly where or when he took the picture or who the other men were.
Then Mary Ann DeLong saw the photograph at an exhibit at the Olympic Peninsula Gateway Visitors Center and knew she had seen it before.
“I went home and dug in my box of photos, and sure enough, there it was,” DeLong said. “The group is seated outside my granddad’s hunting cabin on the Elwha.”
DeLong and Welch are both fourth-generation descendants of pioneer Olympic Peninsula families, DeLong through the Winters of Port Angeles and Welch from the Eisenbeis family of Port Townsend.
Both now live in Port Townsend and are on the board of the Jefferson County Historical Society, which manages the visitors’ center where the exhibit of historic photographs was displayed.
But since discovering the connection through the photograph, DeLong and Welch also have discovered that DeLong’s grandfather, Jack Pike, and Welch’s great-uncle, Van Welch, led parallel lives, including playing a part in a watershed Peninsula event.
“My granddad was the Clallam County game warden who supervised the release of mountain goats in the Olympics in 1925,” DeLong said.
“Welch was game warden in 1929 when the second group of goats was released.”
Pike and Van Welch also both became Clallam County sheriffs, then members of the Port Angeles Police Department, Pike as a lieutenant and Welch as police chief.
Ann’s grandfather, George Welch, was also present at one of the goat releases, she said.
Goats, dams
Both women said that while their ancestors often are blamed for introducing the goats into the Olympics, they were only carrying out instructions — others, including the Clallam County Game Commission and the U.S. Forest Service, made the decision to import them from the Canadian Selkirks and Alaska, they said.
“It was a time before they understood the devastation that a non-native species could cause,” Ann Welch said. “They thought the goats would look cool.”
Jack Pike, pictured in the photograph as a dark-haired man with a black mustache, was an avid hunter and fisherman who campaigned against the damming of the Elwha River because it would ruin the fish runs, DeLong said.
Her grandfather was also known as the game warden with a heart, she said, because he would look the other way if he came across a deer taken illegally by a man who had a family to feed.
Pike knew what it was like to be poor — after his father was lost in a shipwreck in New Zealand, Jack immigrated to the United States from New Zealand, arriving around the turn of the century with friends who were going on to the Yukon gold rush.
While working at a shingle mill in Snoqualmie, he met Sibyl Winters, who was employed at Snoqualmie Lodge. They were married in 1905 at her parents’ house in Port Angeles, DeLong said.
Port Angeles memories
DeLong, whose maiden name was Ennis, grew up in Port Angeles.
She remembers helping her grandmother make lye soap and pick water buckets full of wild blackberries for pie.
After graduating from Roosevelt High School, she went to college in Seattle, then lived in Alaska and Texas before returning to the North Olympic Peninsula 10 years ago with her family, who owns a Port Townsend landmark, the Old Consulate Inn.
DeLong also remembers coming home in the mid-1960s to attend her grandfather’s funeral in Port Angeles.
Pike had worked for the police department until he retired at age 75, she said, and died at the age of 90.
Another parallel: both he and Van Welch were Masons and had Masonic funerals, she said.
She has newspaper articles and a booklet about her grandfather and a number of photographs, including the one George Welch took at the hunting camp, which he made into a postcard.
On the back of the postcard, Delong’s mother, Mary Ellen Pike Ennis, had written the date, 1915, and the names of everyone in the photograph except the man kneeling on the right.
Ann Welch, who created the print from her grandfather’s negative, knew only that the kneeling man was her grandfather.
“Now we have all the names,” DeLong said.
A mystery remains: Was Van Welch, whose full name was Vander William Welch, the same person to whom Pike referred as “Billy Welch”?
If so, he was also “The Wandering Scribe” who write a column for The Peninsula Evening News, DeLong said.
A William Welch was also present at the first goat release, and according to one account, was chased by an angry billy goat.
Ann Welch said the hunting group photograph is one of her favorites because of the composition, the strong portrayal of its subjects and the fact that it includes the name of the shack, which later burned down.
And the origin of the name, “Camp Darwin”?
“I haven’t a clue,” DeLong said.
________
Port Townsend/Jefferson County reporter-columnist Jennifer Jackson can be reached at jjackson@olypen.com.
