Ebey's Landing

A trail climbs from the small beach at the end of Ebey Road onto a bluff that runs north above the Strait of Juan de Fuca, with the farms of Ebey's Prairie on one side and the Olympics across the water on the other. Isaac Ebey, one of the first Americans to file a claim on Whidbey, settled the prairie in 1850 and had his house just above this landing.

The landing is where a chain of reprisals came ashore. In the fall of 1856 the Navy steamer Massachusetts found a camp of northern raiders, Tlingit of the Kake people of southeast Alaska, near Port Gamble, across the water on the Kitsap side. When they refused to leave, the ship opened fire, and twenty-seven died, a chief among them. The next August a Kake party came south looking for a man of equal standing. On the night of August 11, 1857, they beached their canoes here, climbed the bluff, called Ebey out of his house, and killed and beheaded him; his wife and children got away to the blockhouse his father had built on the ridge. Kake tradition holds that a woman related to the dead chief led the raid. A Hudson's Bay Company captain recovered Ebey's head after a two-year search.

In August 2014 a Kake delegation came to Ebey's Prairie and walked this ground with the reserve's staff, and in 2024 the Navy formally apologized to the Kake for shelling and burning their villages in Alaska in 1869, another turn of the same cycle a dozen years on.