The Sammamish River and the Coast Salish

The tidy green ribbon of water beside the trail here is the Sammamish River, but its story runs far deeper than its calm surface suggests. Coast Salish peoples have lived along these waters since time immemorial. Early settlers called the local Native people the Squak, and so the river became known as the Squak Slough long before it was renamed the Sammamish.

In eighteen fifty five, the valley was among the vast territories ceded in the Treaty of Point Elliott, signed at Mukilteo, in exchange for federal recognition of hunting and fishing rights. Today the treaty rights for this area are held by the Muckleshoot Tribe. The river you see is not the river the Woodins knew.

In the nineteenth century it was a shallow, twisting waterway, roughly thirty miles long, that ran from Redmond to Kenmore and flooded the valley almost every year. When Lake Washington was lowered in nineteen sixteen for the ship canal, and later when the river was straightened and dredged for flood control, the wild slough became the narrow, engineered channel of today. That taming of the water is exactly what dried out the valley floor and opened it to the farms, and eventually the wineries, that define Woodinville now.