Legends & Tales Of Mount St. Helens

Language of Loowit & Seatco

When first researching the term 'Seatco', the word itself did not have much explanation behind it. Derived from Chinook, a surviving language from Salish, Seatco is generally thought of as a meaning of 'evil spirit' or 'evil one'.

In the 1860s, Webster sold his claim and sawmill to Oliver Shead who named the settlement "Seatco". The Northern Pacific Railroad located their station at Seatco in 1872 and from then, the settlement was plagued with bad luck, death, and paranormal happenings.

Later the town was renamed Bucoda, using the first two letters of three principal investors in local industries—Buckley, Coulter, and David.

In the 1880s investors began operations to mine coal in the area, but the coal was of poor quality and operations were sporadic. From 1874 to 1888 Bucoda was the site of Washington's first territorial prison that was given the settlement's old name: Seatco, a fitting name for a violent place.

It garnered a reputation as a harsh institution as the inmates were used for dangerous and brutal manual labor in local industry. It was discontinued when the state opened the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, Washington.

Bucoda was officially incorporated on June 7, 1910. The town had a water tower that was scrapped in the early 1980s. The Mutual Lumber Mill was so productive that the town was once billed as the 'Town with the Million Dollar Payroll.' The mill, however, burned down and was rebuilt only to have demand wane and once again it was consumed by flames.

Inmate George France wrote about his first day in the Seatco prison:

'When the prisoners came in from work, the sight and clatter of chains was deafening and damnable, nearly all being in heavy double irons, riveted to their legs, wearing them day and night, sick or well, all the time.'

--Franz Gnaedinger

The long name of Mount Saint Helens would have been a double formula combining Ca-las inverse Las-ca and the snow cap on top of the former cone as abode of the moon Ca-lun (meaning 'sky of the full round form'), indicating a place from where the moon, twice a year, passed just above the top of the cone and seemed to rest for a while on the snow cap.

As for the Spirit Lake Basin that rest at the foot of Las-ca, it was known as Ad-las-las-ca-ca-lun-ad-las wherefrom the easily pronounceable double formula Las-ca-ca-lun—Ad-las-ca-lun abbreviated to Las-ca-ca-lun-ad-las—la ca l ad la—La-we-l-at-la

Lawelatla is the name of Mount St. Helens in the language of the local Cowlitz people, a Salishan tribe, and may also be an over forming - if hypothetical Ca-lun shortened to Ca-l and turned into we-l was overtaken by wel (retracted, darkened vowel meaning 'to burn, bright, shine' ) in reference to a minor eruption of the volcano in earlier times.

The hypothetical hummingbird calendar sanctuary and lunisolar observatory on the southern shore of Lake Spirit may be dated to somewhere between, say, 8 000 and 5 000 BP. Then a minor eruption combined with a drought and a social crisis...the region too remote for a cultural seed having taken root? Exceptional leaders followed by bad ones?

The era of that sanctuary would have come to an end, and the shore of Lake Spirit turned into a haunted place. Beginning of a legend told by Roy Wilson of the Cowlitz people:

"Spirit Lake was always a bad place.

My ancestors feared going there because that was where the evil spirits of the departed bad Indians went. You might hear the sound of things that were not really there, or you might see things that were not really there."

The evil spirits are called Seatco, perhaps from Sal-ad-kal – Se-ad-ka –Se-at-co as name of a now drowned cave on the shore of the lake of the watery ground of the valley Sal where bad souls entered and went toward Ad the Underworld.

Kal is a complementary place on the slope of Mount Saint Helens, now buried under pumice, may have been the place from where good souls climbed the heavens.