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History - What Happened to the Steh-chass People?

By Pat Rasmussen

The Steh-chass people lived in a permanent village at the base of Tumwater Falls for thousands of years. The village was a ceremonial site, a sacred site, where at least five tribes - the Nisqually, Squaxin, Chehalis, Suquamish and Duwamish - gathered for ceremonies, feasts, potlatches and to harvest and preserve salmon, clams, mussels, whelts, and moon snails, as well as crabs, barnacles, Chinese slippers, oysters and cockles, by drying, smoking or baking in rock-lined underground ovens. The village was named Steh-chass and the river, now the Deschutes, was named Steh-chass River. The Steh-chass people, a sub-tribe of the Nisqually Indians, fished and gathered seafood all along the shores of Budd Inlet. The Steh-chass people were led by Sno-ho-dum-set, known as a man of peace.

Their other main village, Bus-chut-hwud, "frequented by black bears," was located near what is today the corner of 4th Avenue and Columbia Street in Olympia. All along the beach there were Indian huts and the beach was lined with canoes. Chief Seattle wintered with 250-300 Duwamish and Suquamish Indians on the peninsula near Bus-chut-hwud, north of today's State Street.

The first white settlers to come to Washington State displaced the Steh-chass Indians from their villages below Tumwater Falls, today the site of Tumwater Historical Park, and Olympia and the Capitol campus.

In the late fall of 1845, the first white settlers to come to Washington State, led by Michael T. Simmons, arrived at Steh-chass and settled there. The Simmons party met Chief Leschi, a Nisqually, at Tumwater Falls.

Michael T. Simmons built a grist mill on the site and later a saw mill. In 1851, Clanrick and Phoebe Crosby arrived in Tumwater, bought the land from Michael T. Simmons and filed a land claim under the Land Donation Act of 1850 for 640 acres, virtually all of the land on both sides of Tumwater Falls and including the Steh-chass village site. Crosby's claim to the land under the Land Donation Act of 1850 depended on extinguishing Indian title through the Treaties and removing the Indians. By 1854 there were only twenty Indians counted in Tumwater. By fall of 1855, Michael T. Simmons rounded up any remaining Indians in the South Sound and put them in internment camps on Squaxin and Fox Islands, where hundreds died.

In the winter of 1846, Levi Smith and Edmund Sylvester arrived at the Bus-chut-hwud village (centered at today's 4th Avenue and Columbia Street) and staked a joint claim of 320 acres, taking over the Indian village and the entire peninsula comprising Olympia and the State Capitol of today. Smith built a cabin among the Indians, trading with them on a daily basis, and enclosed two acres for a garden and livestock near the current intersection of Capitol Way and Olympia Avenue. When Smith drowned in 1848, Sylvester alone held the claim.

January 12, 1850, Sylvester platted the town, named it Olympia after the Olympic Mountains, and donated blocks for a public square, a school, a customs house and 12 acres for the Capitol grounds. The area around Chinook Street (Columbia Street today), which once housed a thriving Coast Salish community, was now dotted with cabins and a few store fronts.

By 1855, the Indian village had disappeared, the past residents of Bus-chut-hwud no longer called the peninsula their home. A massive stockade had been built along 4th Avenue where their village was located and most tribal people were living in internment camps. After the stockade, Indians never returned to settle in any considerable numbers in the immediate neighborhood of the town.

In the Medicine Creek Treaty Council of December 24-26, 1854, Governor Isaac Stevens had attempted to force the Nisqually Tribe to accept a reservation on a forested bluff rather than by the river where they could find food. Nisqually Chief Leschi said they would move to a reservation, but it had to be by the river.

Stevens persisted in his position, precipitating the Indian War. Major General John Wool, the U.S. Army Pacific Coast commander, would not help Stevens force the Nisqually to move because he disapproved of Stevens' treatment of the Indians. So Stevens formed a volunteer militia to force the Indians from their lands and into the internment camps on Squaxin and Fox Islands. Stevens instructed the militia that any Indians not in the internment camps were to be exterminated. Peaceful Indian families were massacred while fishing. Indians were shot and hung.

Finally, the War Department in Washington, DC ordered Stevens to give the Nisqually and Puyallup reservations by their rivers and Congress stripped Stevens of his appointment as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Yet Stevens persisted in a vendetta against Chief Leschi until Leschi was hung.

This tragic history of our home is documented in the eighteen page report, "What Happened to the Steh-chass People?" online at: http://oly-wa.us/EdibleForestGardens/PDF/HistoryOfSteh-chassPeople.pdf


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Updated 2015/01/07 21:14:22