The First People of the Plateau and Shore

Before the first European ship rounded the Olympic Peninsula, this land was home to dozens of sovereign peoples, each with its own language, trade network, and understanding of the world.

Along the coast and the inland sea, the Coast Salish peoples, the Lummi, the Nooksack, the Tulalip, the Puyallup, the Muckleshoot, and many others, built their lives around cedar and salmon. They carved ocean-going canoes from single red-cedar logs, raised the longhouses that held whole extended families, and harvested the sea through knowledge accumulated across hundreds of generations. Their trade routes reached from Vancouver Island south to the Columbia River mouth, exchanging dried fish, woven baskets, and carved regalia.

Inland, east of the Cascade Mountains, a different world unfolded across the Columbia Plateau. The Spokane, the Colville, the Yakama, the Nez Perce, and the Cayuse peoples gathered at Celilo Falls on the Columbia each year, one of the great trading fairs of the entire continent, drawing nations from the Pacific coast to the northern plains. The falls thundered year-round, and the salmon ran so thick in season that a person could cross the river on their backs, or so the old accounts said.

The Chinook peoples held the Columbia mouth. They were the traders of traders, and the Chinook trading language, a pidgin that eventually incorporated French and English words, became the commercial tongue of much of the Pacific Northwest through the nineteenth century.

When the Oregon Trail emigrants arrived in the eighteen forties, they found not empty wilderness but a populated landscape crossed by a thousand years of human roads. The history of Washington State begins here, long before any flag was planted on the shore.