Tokeland, Washington is a small community accessible from Highway 105. It has very interesting characteristics. Whether you come to Tokeland from Raymond or from Westport, you will pass through the Shoalwater Bay Indian Reservation. All of Tokeland is not reservation. The reservation is approximately a one mile square at the mouth of the peninsula. For Tokeland residents that are not tribal members, they must drive right through the reservations community to reach their homes.

     Rick Wilcox, who is of Euro-American descent, was born in December of 1952 and was raised in Tokeland. He has happy memories of his childhood that grew with him to manhood. He watch as the two communities grew apart from the perspective of his childhood. His passion for community is displayed in his volunteer service. He has spent the last 18 years serving with the fire department that services Tokeland.

     It was a lot simpler back then. Now, remember I am 59 years old, so we are talking back into the ‘50s, and we didn’t have the worries of kids being out and strangers abducting them. We had the run of the town. The beach was our back yard, so to speak. That’s where we played and had fun during the summer time and spring time. Winters, of course, we didn’t spend a lot of time on the beach. I grew up in a family of four kids. I’ve got two brothers, of which I am the middle boy, and my sister. That really was family, my playmates, the people who you were hanging around with, ran around with, however you want to put it. Family was our core. I didn’t really know a lot of the neighbors. I knew some of them, but they knew who we were, we were the Wilcox boys. Tokeland at that time was, in a way, you could say everybody was family. Everybody watched out for everybody. They had the attitude of neighbor-helping-neighbor, which we’ve lost with all the influx of big city folk, so to speak. The people who came down here from Seattle to retire, they look after themselves. They don’t look after their neighbors. Tokeland back then was neighbor helping neighbor. If a guy was out cutting wood, it was not uncommon for somebody to stop and help him. It was a simpler time, just put it that way.

     The economy at that time, most everybody was involved in the fishing industries. Crab fishermen during the winter time, salmon in the summer. The only employer per se that we had of any good size was Nelson Crab. The crab processing plant down there, they employed most everybody in Tokeland. We had a couple of small businesses. The grocery store, which was family owned and operated, my parents ended up buying it in 1962, which we had for oh, 10 years or so. That is the one down in between the Tokeland Hotel and Nelson Crab. The building is there, a big red two story building that was the grocery store and post office. Captain’s Tavern, interesting place, the only tavern in town. That’s where everybody of legal drinking age hung out. It was also the one place where you could go every Friday night and see the Friday night fights live at the bar stool next to you. There was nothing to do down here but drink. Captain’s was more or less the local hangout for a lot of the people. I don’t know where they got them, but there were a couple of old tombstones, grave markers, in the place, actually inside the building. They had a couple of pool tables there. You had to know how to play the pool tables in order to play good. They weren’t exactly level. You never knew if you were aiming for the side pocket whether that ball was going to go into the side pocket or the back corner pocket. But if you knew the tables, you could really do good against somebody who didn’t know the tables.

     We had the Coast Guard station, which was moved in the mid ‘50s from the North Cove area because it was washing out in that area, down to Tokeland. It was open until somewhere around the mid ‘70s when they closed it down and consolidated with Westport. Big highlights, was seeing helicopters coming in every once in awhile to the Coast Guard station landing down at the dock area.

     In 1958, I started first grade in Tokeland School – two rooms, two teachers and one cook. Grades 1st, 2nd and 3rd were in one room, 4th, 5th, 6th in other room. Maybe 20-25 students, depending on how many families were there with the Coast Guard that had kids. That helped our enrollment quite a bit.

     At the time I grew up, there really was not a reservation. The way we looked at it, the tribal members were our neighbors – it was all just a big part of Tokeland. We all felt that there were no boundaries. The other entities, the governments, whatever, felt there were definite boundaries, with the laws they had enforced at the time. But we didn’t look at anybody any differently – we were all part of the Tokeland area. They really didn’t have any type of tribal government until the ‘70s, and that is when they started to develop the counsels, actually start to get organized and be an Indian tribe. They were just another group of people. They lived on the reservation, but they were Tokeland. We played with their kids and grew up with their families. It was just part of everyday life.

     The road crews had been working on the road from Raymond for quite some years. It had been actually completed from Raymond, coming down through the flats at Baleville, down past the airport to what used to be the old garbage dump for Raymond. That remained completed for quite some time, and then they started punching from there to Tokeland. They got that completed in mid-1962. They had their grand opening and ribbon cutting ceremony on July 4th weekend, 1962. It gave us another avenue. If we wanted to go to Raymond before that, we had to go all the way to Aberdeen and come around on 101. And just to go to Raymond was an all day trip. Now Raymond was only 20 miles away. Made it a lot easier to get a lot of things done. The big city was closer to us. Before that, going to Aberdeen which was about 35 miles, now Raymond was twenty miles. They had a Safeway, a big supermarket. Even though it was a little place, it was a big supermarket for us – it had more than two isles in it. They had shopping carts too. Boy, that was neat. The Dennis Company (a sporting goods store) – we didn’t have big places like that. Our idea of a big trip back then was going to Grayland to the hardware store. They also had a variety store in Grayland. I think it used to be Spiegel’s, a catalog kind of place, clothing and that kind of stuff. That is where we did our shopping. Aberdeen was a once a year trip. We would go into Aberdeen at Christmas time for Christmas shopping. Pretty much we stayed home.

     When they opened the Raymond-Tokeland road, they changed the name of the state highway out here from State Route 13 to State Highway 105 because now it looped all the way into Raymond. That section in Tokeland became the Tokeland Road because basically it was a smaller road, and the state wanted to get away from using it or maintaining it. So they struck up an agreement with the county and turned it over to the county highway system. The county said great. But Tokeland had an erosion problem for years. Down where I live just past the hotel, there used to be three city blocks on what is now basically beach and mud flats. In 1962, there was a big push to save Tokeland. The county said yes we will take the road over, but you have to help us in putting in this rock groin along the road down past the hotel so we don’t have to worry about the continual road maintenance that would have to go on. Now it used to be every year, during winter storms, that section by Nelson Crab might get washed out because of the tide and waves. So the state agreed, and it was a joint effort between the county and the state. What they did is they went from 4th Avenue around the corner at the cannery and just down a little bit from there. That was basically phase 1. That, you could say, is what kept Tokeland there. It was October 12th when they finished that section. They pulled out all the equipment out for the winter and said OK that’s it, bye, we’re done. And that night we had winds over 130 miles per hour come through this area, the Columbus Day storm. I can remember from that storm, part of our garage blew out and was lying against the trees. Windows were sucked out of the houses. Woke up the next day and went outside and there was a log in the middle of the road, probably 21 feet long and three feet in diameter, that came up over the rock pile. Luckily, it sat in the middle of the road and didn’t go through anybody’s house. That whole area down there was under water from the tide. So you can say that is what saved Tokeland.

     I joined the Navy because at that time, actually when I got out of college, Grays Harbor College, I knew my parents couldn’t afford to send me to a four year college and I couldn’t afford to go to a four year college. I wanted to get away from the small town. I guess you can say I wanted to get away from Tokeland, and I looked to the Navy as an education opportunity. Went into their electronics program and thought, well I’ll go into electronics study that, and work that for six years, get out, come back and get a job. Twenty years later, I finally moved back to Tokeland. I like the small town. I couldn’t wait to get out the hell out of town and spent 20 years away from the town and couldn’t wait to get back to it. I spent a lot of time in the San Francisco area, big cities, east coast, west coast. My last ten years was in the San Francisco Bay area and just the congestion down there, the dealing with traffic. It was nothing for my commute home to be three hours, and that was going thirty miles. It had been six hours sometimes. I was tired of the big crowds and wanted to get to kick back and relax the neighbor-helping-neighbor type of atmosphere.

     A lot of the older people that I knew at that time when I moved out, of course, are gone, passed away or moved on. There weren’t the young people in town with kids, they were now all the old people with married kids that had moved away to look at jobs and opportunities. New faces had shown up. People had come in from Seattle, Tacoma, Vancouver, Portland – the big cities. I’m also looking for that. I’m retired now – kick back, relax and enjoy. They didn’t know about the neighbor-helping-neighbor. They looked out for themselves. If their neighbor had a problem that was their problem – they weren’t going to get involved in it. Big city attitudes. It was the influx of real big city folk in the ‘90s when we did get a group of people who moved in, again, outsiders, people moved down here from places like Seattle, Tacoma, and the big cities that retired and formed a group called the Concerned Citizens of Tokeland. I used to affectionately refer to them as the Concerned Bigots, because a lot of their stuff was aimed toward the tribe. There were bad feelings and I would say some racism and some bigot type of attitudes that they brought in with them. The tribe tries to each out quite a bit. I know with my involvement with emergency management, they do want to reach out. Any types of training programs are always open to the community. I have never seen anything restricted to just tribal. There was a time, it was probably in the early ‘90s to mid ‘90s, when the tribe did have a couple people that were on their counsel, that were, ah, anti-white. And so they kind of sent out bad feelings amongst the community. White man had done wrong with the Indians. Yeah, we did. I will admit there was a lot of racism, bigotry and that, through the time when the white man settled over here.

~Interviewed & transcribed
by Tracy McCormick