History at Ebey's Landing
It is August 11, 1857, midnight.
They waited in the dark with their guns on the rocky beach below the two cabins. Their cedar canoe was tied to a large log lying above the tideline. Her two sons and three nephews sat around a tiny fire with her sister. The conversation from the cabins on the bluff fell silent. She waited until the moon rose high and sparkled on the water before nodding them up the hill. They approached the cabins in the dark. The dog barked, growled, rushed them, and returned to the porch. The Tyee-man of the house came out on the porch and said: “Who is it? What do you want?”
Her oldest son fired first and hit the Tyee in his left side. Younger brother fired a moment later, hitting him in the head. The Tyee staggered around the corner to the rear of the cabin. There were screams and shouts from those inside. Her son went around the cabin and chased the Tyee back to the front yard. Her nephews fired together, and he fell dead off the porch. A window smashed, a door slammed, and the people inside the cabin - women and children - ran into the night and disappeared into the forest.
The men ransacked the cabins, broke the remaining windows, cut open the mattresses, and threw all the clothing - dresses, undergarments, suits, boots, and shoes - in a heap on the floor. They weren’t looking for riches; they just wanted to destroy, to terrorize. She knelt by the lifeless body, her sister held up the head, and, with a quick flash of her bejeweled wéiksh (knife), decapitated the corpse.
She called to the men, and they trotted back to the canoe with their grisly prize. As they pushed off the beach and paddled away into the dark sea, shouts and lights showed on the bluff. The head of this Tyee will be enough, she thought. We will dance our victory for many nights to come - a victory that eases the terrible shame of the day when cannons shredded the canoes, tore the people to pieces, and killed her husband. The dleit ḵáa are aroused and vigilant now. Soon, their shgóonaa with the horrible cannons will return and hunt for us. We must travel fast and return to ne-il, home, where they cannot find us. We have our revenge; our honor is restored. We are Tlingit.
So was assassinated Isaac Neff Ebey, namesake of Ebey’s Landing and the first white settler on Whidbey Island.
I thought about this violent episode while hiking the Bluff Trail in Ebey’s Landing National Historic Reserve. Where I walked was Isaac’s original 640-acre claim. From high on the bluff, the view of the Olympic Mountains, Cascade Range, and Admiralty Inlet was superb. The Bluff Trail is a three-mile loop along the crest of the old moraine above the beach, and you return on the beach. Two bald eagles in an old Douglas Fir sat not thirty feet above my head. They chittered to each other as the dog, and I walked on by—a quarter mile further, a falcon glided below us. On the beach, pigeon guillemots flocked and fluttered when we approached. Echo chased sticks in the surf and rolled in the gravelly sand. It was an epic day to be outside, to be alive.
Surrounded by such rare beauty, why, then, the violent past?
Isaac returned to his home at Ebey’s Landing on Whidbey Island in June 1857. He and his family temporarily relocated across Admiralty Inlet to Port Townsend to manage business interests and calm his wife, Emily. Indians roamed the waters in their big canoes and sometimes came ashore to ransack and steal. They were particularly troublesome after the treaties were signed in 1855. The treaties retained fishing and hunting rights for the Indians in the accustomed territories but forced them to relocate to various reservations scattered throughout the region. This “relocation” was intended to open up more land for white immigrants and settlement. A naked land grab. Some Indians refused relocation and decided instead to make life difficult and dangerous for white settlers.
Emily felt unsafe living in the exposed cabins at the Landing with just herself, the boys, and her daughter while he was away. He understood. He and Emily had only been married for eighteen months. She was a widow with a young daughter, and he was a widower with two young sons. She was yet to get comfortable with her new role as wife and mother to his two sons, trying to homestead an isolated claim on a remote island. Even though his brother lived less than a mile from her, it was better if Emily came to Port Townsend with him.
Isaac remembered when he first came to Whidbey Island in 1851 and staked his 640-acre claim on the rolling, flat prairie. He thought his parcel was paradise with access to the beach, a spring, and free of forest. By 1853, he convinced his entire family to move to the island from Missouri. His mother, father, brother, and sister crosed the plains and now lived up the hill in a frame house a mile from his home above the beach. Other farms sprinkled the little valley as more settlers claimed their free land. The population of white settlers grew, and soon they needed courts, schools, and doctors. By 1857, Isaac was a pillar of this community. He was a farmer, lawyer, and customs inspector with political ambitions; everyone knew and respected him.
Echo and I hiked back down the beach and up the road where it cut down through the bluff. Across a field of sprouting oats stood a large house weathered grey. We walked around a wooden gate (“Welcome to the Ferry House, Be a good neighbor and stay out of the fields”) and down a tractor path to the house. It was empty, but through the windows, I could see wooden bracing in one room, torn wallpaper in another, and plans, drawings, and old photographs in another.
The Ferry House was built in 1860 by Isaac’s brother, Winfield, to serve as an inn, post office, and saloon for travelers. After the murder, Winfield demolished Isaac’s original cabins and built the Ferry House from some of the salvaged timbers. Emily, bereft and terrified, left the island forever with her daughter, abandoning Isaac’s sons. Winfield hoped the Ferry House might support what was left of Isaac’s family.
Haunted by the old building, the beach, the beauty, and the history of Ebey’s Landing, I wanted to know more about the Tlingit —the dreaded Northern Indians, as they were called - who had perpetrated the crime.
In the 1800s, the Tlingit were a matrilineal, aggressive, nomadic warrior tribe of multiple bands. They were devoted to family and clan and ranged freely across much of what is now Southeast Alaska. As the tribes local to Puget Sound - the Samish, the Skagit, the Nisqually, the Sammamish - were relocated and impoverished by white settlement and warfare - their historic enemies from the North - The Tlingit - were emboldened to attack. In 1856, a band of more than one hundred Tlingit made their way from their home to as far south as Steilacoom near present-day Tacoma - an astonishing 800 miles of wicked tide, dense fog, and chilling wind - via exquisite cedar canoes. The US Army in Steilacoom deterred them from attacking any settlements in the south Salish Sea, so they paddled north to Port Gamble at the entrance to Hood Canal. Port Gamble was a mill town, shipping more timber than the rest of the region combined - a rich prize.
Unfortunately for the Tlingit, the Army alerted the steam frigate USS Massachusetts that a party of Tlingit was marauding through the Salish Sea. Soon, the Massachusetts came thumping and smoking into the bay at Port Gamble. The frigate’s captain proposed that the Tlingit surrender their weapons, and he would tow them in their canoes to Victoria. The Tlingit refused. The next day, the frigate opened fire on the Indian encampment and canoes with her cannons and a nasty little mortar. When it was over, 17 Tlingit were wounded and 28 dead, including one of their chiefs. The Navy gave the Tlingit a day to bury their dead, then took them aboard and delivered them to Victoria without canoes, weapons, or supplies. The British in Victoria were not amused.
It was this massacre in 1856 - especially the death of a chief - that the Tlingit avenged in 1857 with the assassination of Isaac Ebey. The entire conflict was a fascinating and tragic collision between a matrilineal, nomadic warrior culture and a patriarchal, settled, statutory culture.
Today, Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve is 19000 acres of village and farm that extends from the ferry terminal at Admiralty Head to Blowers Bluff in the northeast and Partridge Point in the northwest. Within the reserve are the town of Coupeville, Fort Casey and Fort Ebey state parks, the Pratt preserve owned by the Nature Conservancy, and miles of hike and bike trails.
Isaac’s claim, known locally as Ebey's Prairie, is a captivating feature at the heart of the reserve. It is a vast expanse of rolling farmland framed by the majestic Olympic and Cascade mountain ranges. Its serene beauty, with its sweeping vistas and tranquil ambiance, offers a stark contrast to the bustling modern world and its own violent past. Like Antietam, Gettysburg and Little Big Horn, it is the prettiest, and most haunted of places.
Peace.
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