The Isaac Stevens Treaties: Six Deals in Twelve Months

Isaac Ingalls Stevens arrived in the Washington Territory in November of eighteen fifty-three as its first governor, a thirty-five-year-old Army officer and civil engineer who had graduated first in his class at West Point. He had been given two large assignments simultaneously: govern the territory and open it. Opening it meant negotiating treaties with the Indigenous peoples whose land he intended to make available for settlement. He set about this with the systematic efficiency of a military campaign.

Between December of eighteen fifty-four and January of eighteen fifty-six, Stevens negotiated six treaties with Puget Sound tribes and others in the territory. The Medicine Creek Treaty, the Point Elliott Treaty, the Point No Point Treaty, the Treaty of Neah Bay, the Quinault River Treaty, and the Hellgate Treaty. Six treaties. Twelve months. Millions of acres.

The negotiations were conducted in Chinook Jargon, a simplified trade language developed by Pacific Northwest fur traders. It had a vocabulary of a few hundred words. The tribes Stevens was negotiating with spoke Lushootseed, Klallam, Makah, Quinault, and other languages, none of which Stevens or his interpreters fully commanded. Multiple tribal leaders testified in later years that they had not understood the terms they were agreeing to. Stevens was aware that his timeline was compressed; federal policy required treaties to be completed before the territory's settlers arrived in numbers that would make them impossible to negotiate fairly. He was compressing the timeline deliberately.

What the treaties preserved, almost as an afterthought, were fishing and hunting rights at the tribes' usual and accustomed places. Stevens appears to have regarded these provisions as inconsequential. The tribes knew their rivers and their fisheries. The fishing rights were not inconsequential. They survived everything else: the reservation shrinkages, the allotment acts, the boarding schools, the century of encroachment. In nineteen seventy-four, Federal Judge George Boldt read the treaty language Stevens had written in a twelve-month rush and concluded it meant exactly what the tribes had always said it meant. The fishing rights provisions turned out to be the most important words in any of the six documents.