The Pre-History of Lake Forest Park

The Duwamish people have lived in the watershed of that name in western King County for millennia.  For them the beaches, rivers, lakes, forests, and open parks of their homeland had profound natural and supernatural dimensions.  Both traditions informed them how to manage resources and flourish in a powerful world.  

Evidence of ancient settlement survives in Lake Forest Park north of Seattle on the northwest shore of Lake Washington.  For the last year I have researched the area while writing this small city’s long prehistory.  Its revelations are deep and abiding.

Humans have lived in western Washington for at least 14,000 years, from the Ice Age to the present.  We know them from 19^th century tribal names: Duwamish, Muckleshoot, Suquamish, Tulalip, etc.  Today, the issues of fishing rights and casinos make headlines, but the tribes’ profound antiquity and management of the environment is less well known.  

To start with the geography. Two creeks pass through Lake Forest Park: McAleer Creek draining Lake Ballinger and Lyon Creek headwatering in south Snohomish County.  An 1859 township map shows them joined a half mile above the lake shore; later maps show them separate.  A single village on each salmon creek operated a fishing weir upstream.  Villages intermarried with others to withstand hardship, as when a creek’s fish run failed.

In the early 20^th century, native memory recalled place names associated with creeks.  In the native Lushootseed language, Lake Ballinger was SAH tsu, “Face.”  The mouth of McAleer Creek was SAH tsu tseed, “Mouth of the face.”  Lyon Creek was Sts KUL, “a certain small bird,” probably Schuh chul, the winter wren Troglodytes, a small forest bird whose tinkling voice peacocks into bejeweled song.

Lake Ballinger’ bathymetry reveals an avalanche deposit that left a “face,” (as we describe bared slopes as faces) on the west shore.  The lake was dangerous, but SAH tsu tseed, “Mouth of the Face,” conjures a greater surreal image of its ambivalence: breathing spawning salmon in to their deaths and breathing out fry to begin their anadromous odyssey at sea.

In the Sheridan Beach neighborhood an immense monolith — boulder fails to describe it — looms on shore: Bs CHUH tlah, “Place [of the] big rock.”  Before the lake was lowered nine feet in 1916, that boulder rose above the surface during low water, a landmark. From it trails left the lake for camps inland.  These camps had names to mark them as widely known destinations for prolonged stays.  

One trail headed for See SAHLH tub, “Calm down a little,” known today as Haller Lake.  Linguist Dr. Nile Thompson believes the name came from the refuge it offered away from slave raiders coming south in large black canoes.  Stone projectile points found by gardeners reveal it to have also been a hunting and gathering camp.  Trails led to cranberry bogs at the Denny swamp near North Seattle Community College, Ronald Bog on NE 175^th and Bitter Lake’s strawberries.

Another trail leaving the lake paralleled McAleer Creek to Lake Ballinger.  It continued westward over a rise near Chase Lake separating the lake’s watershed from the valley of Sbahl, Shell Creek, the locus of powerful shamans sought for curing and killing powers.  Crossing the pass, for that is what it is, creek and trail ended on the beach at Edmonds Marsh, Bs oh lahl, “where there are cattails.”  At the trail’s foot, Snohomish and Snoqualmie people had a fishing camp. 

An ancient route, this trail is still possible to walk or bike and feel the land rise and fall as we pass through what was a matrix of tall, widely spaced trees and open areas now crowded with homes.  The trail is the oldest human feature connecting us to an ancient landscape.

After global warming melted ice more than 3,000 feet thick, and huge meltwater lakes drained into the sea, a corrugation of narrow hills and marshy valleys appeared,  aligned in the direction the ice had ground south.  The new land supported cold, dry shrub tundra eventually replaced by grassy savannah dotted with fir and oak groves.  Hunter-gatherer bands ranged over this, sheltering in pit houses and intermarrying with others to expand their economic base.  Around 6,000 years ago, as weather moderated, rains increased and western red cedars grew to immense size.

Stone and antler tools split these logs into lumber, and raising high the roof beams, carpenters built longhouses large enough to shelter a hunter-gatherer band under a single roof.  The dynamic social unit that birthed humanity had at last the shelter and comfort to build the Northwest Coast culture with its monumental forms.

To keep a burgeoning forest from stunting herbage that browsing elk and deer required, the people adapted fires used to drive game into open land and to burn expanding forests every few years, ridding them of deadwood and disease and keeping gardens open in a verdant parkland. 

Surveys carried out in the 1850s reveal varied tree diameters.  Large trees’ bark protected against recurrent burns but more of the trees (between four and 18 inches thick at breast height) were smaller than many growing in Lake Forest Park today.  This well-managed parkland provided ample berries, nuts, birds and herds of protein.  The words lake and forest and park that appealed to Seattle developers Ole Hanson (later a mayor) and Alex Reid who platted Lake Forest Park in 1910, unwittingly described the world native people brought into being ages before. 

One longhouse, approximately 50 by 100 feet, rose at the mouth of Thornton Creek, now Matthews Beach Park.  The longhouse group, the old hunter-gatherer band, consisted of three to five closely related biological families, 15 to 30 men, women, and children – an autonomous, self-sufficient group, highly disciplined by shared authority.  

The keystone group was the elderly – grandparents who cared for children while parents were out gathering.  Homo sapiens live longer than any other primates, and the evolutionary advantage provided by longevity and collective wisdom gave the band the cohesion and abilities necessary to master the world.

The longhouse site at Matthews Beach was called Tu KHU beed, “Quieted,” a reference linguist Dr. Thompson thinks is descriptive of the locale’s great silence.  Another house stood at SAH tsu tseed, the mouth of McAleer Creek, and at Sts KUL, Lyon Creek.  These groups would be been named, respectively, Tu khu bee DAHBSh, Sah tsu tsee DAHBSH and Sts kuh LAHBSH.  Savor these, for not since the Duwamish were driven from their homeland has research enabled us to know and speak their names.

The United States and Great Britain partitioned the Oregon Country in 1846.  Oregon Territory became part of the U.S., and Congress offered free land to encourage settlement.  As surveyors mapped, native groups were forced onto distant reservations to empty the land for white settlement.  The 1853 discovery of coal on the Duw in newly organized Washington Territory increased land value, and officials made sure the Duwamish had no reservation in their homeland.  But most refused to leave.

Settlement began on Lake Washington as timber companies paid settlers for logging rights.  Towns appeared on the east shore, and in 1877, over 60 “Ro-choabsh” were transported out to the Suquamish reservation.  This was the closest Americans officials came to pronouncing the Lake people’s Lushootseed name, Khah chu AHBSH, from KHAH chu, “Big Lake,” and AHBSH, “people.” 

Historically, native people moved close to settlers to trade and work, and settler farmers located near native villages to obtain casual labor.  As Arthur Denny observed at Alki Point when the Denny party landed in November 1851: “soon after we landed and began clearing the ground for our buildings [the Indians] commenced to congregate, and continued coming until we had over a thousand in our midst.”

At the lake’s north end, villages generally had a single longhouse, but as the Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Railroad was built north along the west shore in the 1880s, remnant families from the Thornton and McAleer Creek villages appear to have moved to the Lyon Creek site where a sawmill and pier would become Lake Forest Park.  Three houses of “Siwash” or Snohomish Indians survived there until 1903.

While the settlement stood, a native woman took note of settler need, calculated market rates  and canoed to Brackett’s Landing, a lumber camp that became Bothell, to purchase commodities.  Back home, she set up a popular store.  The use of Siwash (from the French sauvage, “wild,” (savage in English, a slur) suggests settlers regarded the village as recent.  Snohomish from the Edmonds fishing camp had a name settlers could manage. But after 1903, the native presence disappears.

What happened to them?  Where did they go?  An answer may be found in the 2020 federal census of communities around Lake Washington.  Where perhaps a thousand Khah chu AHBSH lived around the lake, over a million people do today.  And because the census queries ethnicity, we know that over 7,000 Native Americans are included.  A vast majority will have come from elsewhere, but not all.  Today’s Duwamish Tribe counts some 600 members, many living in their homeland.  Against all odds they did not vanish but are part of us.

Today, the composite vitality of Sts kuh LAHBSH resonates at The Commons, where Bothell Way, N.E. and N. E. Ballinger Way meet near the Town Center at Lake Forest Park.  Between the two creeks, at the site of the 1903 village, this gathering place echoes the real estate truism about location, location, location. It was foreshadowed in a final Lushootseed place name: STAH tah bub, “Lots of people talking.”  

Before being bridged, the Lake Washington’s long reach allowed southerly winds to raise surf on a beach near Lyon Creek.  The normally serene lake echoed like a voluble crowd.  In his famous oration, Chief Seattle, whose first wife came from the lake, is recalled having said, “In all the earth, there is no place dedicated to solitude.”  Echoing through millennia, his people’s voices in their beautiful homeland could never be stilled.  If we listen, we will hear them. 

What I have found in historical research provides a focus for meditation on what it means to be human amid the tumult of history.  

Judicious burning maintained large gardens in open lands and kept forest growth in check so enough sunlight nourished the undergrowth large game herds required.  Organizing river fisheries sustainably, autonomous winter villages along mainstreams shared in the catch and kept the fish coming. That environment is largely destroyed, but memories of the supernatural connections the Duwamish honored retain the capacity to surprise and teach. 

Many group discussions about the scope and outline of the work have taken place in Third Place Commons, a central plaza for the town with eateries, Third Place Books, and the city library down the escalator, all protected under a single roof. 

This is significant, as is the urban plumbing that directs McAleer Creek, draining Lake Ballinger, and Lyon Creek east of it around the shopping center and into the lake.  Where the two streams once met in a marshy area, where Highway 104 (Ballinger Way) meets Highway 521 (Bothell Way), three or four longhouses sheltered the last group of Lake Forest Park’s earlier native residents until 1903.

We can still hear their voices.