On April 15, 1903, as the steamship Clallam launched for the first time in Tacoma, Washington the woman who swung the bottle of champagne at her bow missed and the American flag unfurled upside down. The SS Clallam was off to a rocky start that would…

Forty-nine-year-old Richard Straub had been a local educator for more than a decade in the Puget Sound/Salish Sea area when he committed one of the more gruesome crimes in the history of the San Juans. On August 30, 1895, Straub enlisted the aid of…

Sitting at the center of Orcas Island in the San Juans of Washington state is a tiny peninsula that juts into East Sound. Now known as Madrona Point, the Lummi nation has deep ties to this land. Madrona Point is where the Lummi buried their people…

The coastal areas of the Pacific Northwest were among some of the most densely populated parts of Native North America. At the time of European contact, it is estimated that 150,000 Indigenous people lived in the Salish Sea region which spanned from…