About Us:

Fort Steilacoom played a significant, but little-known, role in the settling of Washington. Understanding the circumstances surrounding its formation in 1849 helps explain Fort Steilacoom's role in the migration of settlers to Washington, a wave that continues to this day. The fort was part claims validater, part civilizer and part protector. Its current role is that of reminder of our past.

Since British fur trading companies, like Hudson's Bay Co., were the first Europeans to call the Pacific Northwest home for any length of time and were reluctant to give up the land fertile land with both fur and flora. They came when the fur traders started forming trading posts around the Oregon territory between the 1820s and the 1840s.

Most notably of these posts where built in Vancouver, in 1824; in Langley British Columbia in 1825; and in Nisqually, in southern Pierce County in 1833. These post settlements were generally small satellite outposts, but they formed a trading network around the Pacific Northwest. American settlers at that time had largely settled south of the Columbia River. The settlers moved north as the availability of prime land in present-day Oregon shrank.

These newcomers moved and settled into areas largely without government other than that loyal to the British crown. But British law did not suffice for the settlers. Americans started murmuring about wanting their own government. That murmur became a cry to the U.S. Government after Indians attacked the Whitman mission in 1847, killing 15 people. The Whitmans were among the dead. The Americans wanted protection from such hostilities. An Indian attack on HBC's Fort Nisqually in May of 1847 struck at the heart of the rising tide of settlements along Puget Sound. Settler Leander Wallace was killed in the melee. The settlers formed a provisional government and gathered a militia the following year. Military forts sprang up around the Oregon territory that encompassed Washington, Idaho and Oregon. The first among them was Fort Steilacoom because of the large number of settlers already in the area as well as the practical point that the land had already been plowed and buildings were in place.