- Fort Steilacoom (1849-1868) (historylink.org)
- Clarence Bagley in writing an introduction for the “Journal of Occurrences at Nisqually House, 1833” for the Washington Historical Quarterly gives a good account of Fort Nisqually: “Fort Nisqually was the first permanent settlement of white men on Puget Sound. Fort Vancouver had been headquarters since 1825 and Fort Langley was founded near the mouth of the Fraser river in 1827. Fort Nisqually was, therefore, a station which served to link these two together. “While the primary object of the Hudson’s Bay Company was to collect furs, nevertheless, the great needs of their own trappers, and the needs of Russian America(Alaska), and the Hawaiian Islands and other places for foodstuffs, caused that the Company branch out into other lines…. “A subsidiary company, the Puget Sound Agricultural Company, was formed in 1838 for the purposes of taking advantage of the agricultural opportunities of the Pacific…From that time Fort Nisqually became more an agricultural enterprise than a furtrading post.”
- Fort Steilacoom was an ex-sheep ranch of the Puget Sound Agricultural Co., an off-shoot of the Hudson Bay Co., being no longer needed, was gladly leased to the Quartermaster’s Department for the use of the troops.1 Bennett Hill’s Co. of the First Artillery was the first to occupy it and we were his successors with Company C. of the Fourth Infrantry.2 The location was on the plain which is now the site of the Insane Asylum, and has many advantages.3 The soil was level and hard and had produced some magnificent oak trees on the edge of the parade ground overshadowing the officers’ quarters.
- During the spring I met many of the old pioneers. Dr. Tolmie, the thrifty Scotch manager of the Hudson Bay Co. at Fort Nesqually, and I formed a friendship and our acquaintance, which was kept up by letter when separated, lasted until he died. His assistant, Mr. Huggins, was also to be found in the doctor’s household in those days. He remained on American territory when the company relinquished their rights to the United States, and has for years been one of the reliable and hard-working officials of his county.
- This broad salt marsh is covered by rich grass and intersected by canals, which could not be more suitable for navigation if they had been made artifically. The Indian houses are built after the fashion of the buildings of the Hudson Bay Company. I visited one of the camps, of which there are a great many, and found the Indians gambling, as usual. They have ten little chips of wood. Nine of them are supposed to be klootchmen(Indian women) and the tenth one a man. These they shuffle in cedar bark, and an Indian takes five in each hand and his opponent guesses which hand holds the four klootchmen and one man. They play in this manner for whole days and nights. Gambling seems to be inherent in the savage as well as the civilized man. The propensity to plunder our fellow creatures without giving an equivalent other than an equal risk is so widespread that it may be regarded as natural, if not right in the light of Christianity.