Washington Our Home

Built in 1849 to project American power and secure American interest in the Puget Sound Region, Fort Steilacoom played a key role in helping to settle what was then Oregon Territory. It served as the focal point for the Treaty Wars of the 1850s and played witness to the judicial murder of an innocent man - Chief Leschi of the Nisqually Tribe - about which you can learn more in my Medicine Creek Treaty podcast episode. Fort Steilacoom also rose to the forefront of history during the San Juan Island Pig War of 1859, again which you can learn about from that episode of the Washington Our Home podcast.

Just after one o'clock in the morning, on a frigid, starless night in March 1910, more than a hundred souls aboard Great Northern Railway's Spokane Local No. 25, a passenger train, and Fast Mail Train No. 27 slept tightly bundled in their cars. They'd been stuck near Wellington in King County, Washington, for almost a week...waiting as railroad crews attempted to clear the tracks of snow, which had been accumulating at a record pace. Each time they tried, their enormous rotary plows either broke down, ran out of fuel or got stuck, forcing crews to try digging out from the five-to-eight-foot snow drifts by hand while passengers hunkered down and waited for the blizzard to pass. But it didn't pass. The snow just kept on coming. High above them loomed the peak of Windy Mountain, and below them, the Tye Creek ravine. On the last day of February, the snow turned to rain. Lightning and thunder erupted across the Cascade Mountains, and one fateful lightning strike touched off the deadliest avalanche in United States history.

Two weeks after Valentine's Day, 2001, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck the south sound region of Washington state near where the Nisqually River empties into Puget Sound. It was nearly 11 a.m. on a Wednesday, and the state legislature was in full swing. The violent tremors lasted nearly a minute, rocking the state capital of Olympia and the nearby cities of Lacey, Tumwater, Nisqually, DuPont, and Shelton. The shocks registered as far away as Oregon, Idaho, and Canada. Property damage estimates up and down western Washington totaled in the billions. One person died of a heart attack and nearly four hundred were injured. This was a large earthquake that hit in the Puget Sound region…but it wasn't the first. Not by a long shot.

Born Esther Pariseau in 1823, the third of 12 children, in a farmhouse three miles from Saint-Martin, Laval, Quebec, this Canadian Religious Sister grew up to lead members of her congregation to the Pacific Northwestern United States where they established a network of schools and healthcare facilities to serve the American settlers in that new and remote part of the country. She was the first female architect in British Columbia, and she had a profound impact on what would become Washington Territory and later, Washington State. This is the story of Mother Joseph of the Sacred Heart, who became known as "The Builder" after she designed and supervised construction of 29 schools and hospitals in Washington, one of which was Seattle's very first hospital.

Marcus and Narcissa Whitman were Christian missionaries who left their homes in upstate New York and traveled with another missionary couple, Henry and Eliza Spalding, to what was then called Oregon Country in 1836. Their mission? To "Christianize" Indians. In fact, Oregon wasn't even a territory yet. The United States government didn't have any programs in Oregon Country, which at the time consisted of the present-day states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and parts of Wyoming and Montana. The Whitmans and the Spaldings were among the very first Americans of European decent to travel across North America by land to the western part of Oregon Country. Eleven years after the Whitmans arrived, a group of Cayuse ambushed and killed them along with eleven other people in what became a pivotal event in Washington state and Pacific Northwest history called The Whitman Massacre, but the story you might think you know may very well be appended - or upended - or both by the time we're is finished.

Slade Gorton was an esteemed intellectual, an accomplished attorney, a shrewd political opponent, an Air Force colonel, a baseball nut…and one of the greatest public servants Washington State has ever known. After 92 years of working on behalf of others, the nonagenarian solon died last month, on August 19th. If you've never heard of Slade Gorton, you'll get a great idea of who the man was by reading his obituary from the Washington Post. No one knew Slade better than his wife, his children, his closest friends…and perhaps his biographer, Chief Historian for the Washington Secretary of State's Office, John Hughes. In 2011, Hughes published a 384-page book titled "Slade Gorton: A Half Century in Politics," on behalf of the Washington State Heritage Center's Legacy Project - now known as Legacy Washington. It is probably the most historically accurate, exquisitely detailed, and anecdotally entertaining work about the man known as a scion, a patrician, and one of the most intellectually astute politicians this state has ever seen.

In Part 1, we learned how to pronounce some of thestate's challenging county names. In Part 2, we reviewed dozens of tricky city names around Washington. And in Part 3, we started tackling some of those indigenous names found so often around Washington. But there were too many to cover in a single episode...so this, my friends, is Say WA Part 3.5! We'll cover the rest of the Tribes found in western Washington and learn about some of our state's place names that have their origin in the various indigenous dialects. All that and more coming up on this episode of the WashingtonOur Home Podcast.

In 1854, the Medicine Creek Treaty between regional Native American tribes and Washington's territorial government kicked off a years-long conflict that forever changed the story of the Pacific Northwest. Sixty-eight years later, in 1922, the Sacajawea Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution placed a bronze plaque commemorating the momentous treaty, upon the single remaining Douglas Fir that remained at the place where the treaty was signed. It became forever known as "Treaty Tree." Today, that tree is gone, but the clues left behind may be able to point us to the exact spot where it once stood among a grove of fir trees that bore witness to a pivotal moment in the history of Washington state.

We've talked about the state's challenging county names. We've reviewed dozens of tricky city names around Washington. Now, in Part III of our Say WA! pronunciation series, we'll be tackling those tribal names found so often around our great state. There are 574 federally recognized Indian Tribes in the United States, and 29 of them have ancestral lands here within the Washington state borders. There are also a handful of non-federally recognized tribes, some still fighting to gain recognition and independence. From east to west and north to south, the influence of our region's indigenous people is embedded in everything.