The People of the Bend: Puyallup and Commencement Bay

Before the trains came, before the sawmills, before the name Tacoma appeared on any map, the people called Puyallup had been living along the river and the bay for thousands of years. Their name, drawn from the Lushootseed language, means people of the bend, a reference to the winding river that gives this landscape its shape, the same river whose delta fans out into the bay you can see from the waterfront today. Commencement Bay takes its name from a naval expedition.

In eighteen forty-one, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the United States Exploring Expedition anchored here and commenced his survey of the southern reaches of Puget Sound, and so he called the inlet Commencement Bay, the place where the counting began. The Puyallup people had their own names for these waters long before Wilkes arrived, and their largest village stood at the mouth of the river, precisely where the industrial port district sprawls today. The Puyallup built six distinct types of canoes for navigating these waters.

They harvested salmon using weirs and traps strung across the river. They gathered shellfish from the tideflats, hunted in the forests that pressed down to the water's edge, and constructed cedar longhouses sized to hold whole extended families through the long winters of the sound. On December twenty-sixth, eighteen fifty-four, Puyallup leaders signed the Treaty of Medicine Creek with Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens.

The tribe ceded most of its historic territory to the United States. In exchange, it retained certain fishing and gathering rights and received a reservation of twelve hundred and eighty acres, a fraction of the land the people had occupied for millennia. Tribal records note that many of the signatures on that treaty were believed to have been forced or entirely forged.

The Puyallup Tribe endured. In nineteen eighty-nine, after decades of legal battles over land that had been taken or encroached upon since the treaty, the tribe reached a settlement with the Port of Tacoma and other parties worth one hundred sixty-three million dollars, at the time, one of the largest Indian land claims settlements of the twentieth century. The tribe today enrolls approximately four thousand citizens and operates significant enterprises on and near the bay that bears their river's name.