Tumwater: First American Settlement North of the Columbia

The falls you hear below this bluff give the town its name: Tumwater, from the Chinook Jargon word for tumbling water. But the story of how this spot became the first permanent American settlement north of the Columbia River is even more striking than the scenery.

In eighteen forty-four, a free Black man named George Washington Bush joined a party of emigrants heading west on the Oregon Trail. Bush had money, skills, and cattle, and he was exactly the kind of settler the frontier needed. But when the wagon train reached the Willamette Valley, Oregon's Provisional Government made its position clear. A newly enacted exclusion law declared that Black residents could be publicly flogged and driven out. The law put Bush and his family at risk all the same.

His trail companion, Michael Simmons, refused to abandon him. The party kept moving north, past the Columbia, into territory the Provisional Government had no jurisdiction over. In November of eighteen forty-five, they staked a claim at these falls on the Deschutes River. Simmons built the first gristmill and sawmill north of the Columbia, and Bush settled on six hundred forty acres nearby, on a prairie that still bears his name.

Even here, though, the law was slow to treat him fairly. For a decade, Bush's land title remained in legal limbo because he was Black. It took a petition from the Washington Territorial Legislature and an act of Congress in eighteen fifty-five to formally grant him the land he had already farmed for ten years.

Tumwater became Washington Territory's cradle. The mills Bush and Simmons built fed the early settlement, and the falls powered the region's first industry. A century and a half later, the state erected a monument on the Capitol grounds in Olympia honoring George Washington Bush and his family: the unlikely pioneers who, turned away at one border, walked until they found ground the law could not yet reach.