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Five years later, legislators were still concerned about too few geoducks but decided to reopen the tidelands and allow harvesting but only three per day and only for personal consumption none could be sold or canned. In response, in 1925, the state legislature banned catching, taking, or possessing a geoduck.
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Stearns, called the “boss clam of North America,” Puget Sound residents thought the clams were being over-harvested. Like all other similar plans to follow, it failed.Īlthough there was apparently only a limited local demand for what another early enthusiast, R.E.C. Hemphill then proposed a complicated scheme to ship live geoduck to the east coast so that those less fortunate might enjoy the fabulous bivalve. Remarkably, one of the first appearances in print of the word geoduck comes from the February 23, 1883, New York Times, where an unnamed writer described them as the “prince of clams.” The Times reporter had been influenced by malacologist Henry Hemphill, who had visited Puget Sound in 1881 and become smitten: Geoduck were the “most delicious of any bivalves I have ever eaten, not excepting the best oysters,” he wrote. Yet, the very name geoduck, variously spelled gwiduc, goeduck, gooeyduck, and gweduck, comes from the Lushootseed word gwidəq, meaning "dig deep," so clearly the great clams were well known, and probably eaten. They may not have ended up in middens, too, because they were processed on beaches at low tide and would have washed away. No shells appear in the archaeological record - perhaps because geoduck shells disintegrate easily and are therefore hard to distinguish from other shelled critters. Unfortunately, we have no evidence that the early residents ate geoduck.