Downtown Seattle and the Space Needle at dusk from Queen Anne Hill, Mount Rainier on the horizon — Daniel Schwen / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Washington · Region

Seattle & Puget Sound

Coast Salish country on the Sound — Leschi and the Medicine Creek treaty, the city named for Si'ahl, the Bainbridge Island exclusion memorial, and the state ferries.

5 places to explore

The Sound is Coast Salish country. Duwamish, Suquamish, Muckleshoot, Nisqually, Puyallup, Squaxin Island and their neighbors fished its inlets and the rivers that feed them. In December 1854 Governor Isaac Stevens gathered the southern Sound bands at Medicine Creek, on the Nisqually delta, and offered the Nisqually a reservation of two square miles with no access to the river they lived on. The Nisqually leader Leschi refused it, and when fighting broke out in 1855 he led warriors from several tribes. In 1858 he was tried twice for the death of a militia officer killed in the war and hanged near Fort Steilacoom; the hangman said afterward that he believed he had hanged an innocent man. In December 2004 a historical court of seven present and former justices of the state supreme court ruled that Leschi had been a lawful combatant and should never have been tried.

Seattle carries the name of Si'ahl, a leader of the Duwamish and Suquamish. The Duwamish, whose villages stood where the city now stands, are still without federal recognition. Across the water on Bainbridge Island, on March 30, 1942, soldiers walked 227 Japanese American residents down to the Eagledale ferry dock, the first people taken from their homes under Executive Order 9066, ahead of more than 110,000 along the West Coast. The memorial on the site of the old dock carries the names of all 276 islanders of Japanese descent and the words Nidoto Nai Yoni, let it not happen again.

The state ferries run as part of the highway system, out of Seattle, Edmonds and Tacoma to Bainbridge, Bremerton, Kingston and Vashon, and I-5 runs the length of the Sound from Olympia, the capital, through Tacoma and Seattle to Everett.

What to See in Seattle & Puget Sound

5 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Natural Areas

The elevated boardwalk running out across the tidal flats and channels of the Nisqually estuary under a pale spring sky

Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge

Olympia

A delta given back to the tide in 2009, and named for the Nisqually fisherman who was arrested more than fifty times for fishing his own river.

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Historic Sites

Eagle Harbor seen from the memorial, boat sheds and moored sailboats in front and the Seattle ferry at its terminal across the water

Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial

Bainbridge Island

A cedar wall running down to the dock where the first Japanese Americans were taken, and the story of the island newspaper that wanted them back.

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Old Man House Park

Suquamish

An acre of beach on Agate Passage where the largest winter house on the coast stood until the government burned it in 1870.

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Tacoma Chinese Reconciliation Park

Tacoma

A waterfront park near the site of the Chinese settlement Tacoma's mayor and leading citizens marched out of town on November 3, 1885.

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Towns & Gateways

Duwamish Longhouse and Cultural Center

Seattle

The only longhouse in Seattle, built by the people the city grew up on top of, on land they bought back themselves.

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Stories from Seattle & Puget Sound

History

The Spite Mounds

Seattle washed most of Denny Hill into Elliott Bay to make room for a downtown that did not come for half a century. The towers of dirt left standing on two lots became the regrade's most famous image, and its most misread.

5 min read

Seattle & Puget Sound rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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