Story of a young county

The federal government began slashing a north-south road through the woods after Indians ceded most of their ancestral lands around Puget Sound by treaty.

Soon, white settlers would stake claims to areas along the Snohomish River and the Sound: the future cities of Snohomish and Mukilteo.

Thes

e pioneers who arrived in the 1850s laid the political groundwork for Snohomish County. They were lured by the prospect of making money, through trade, transportation and often illusory rumors of gold. Some would profit handsomely.

The newcomers included a d

isproportionate share of men from New York. The outsiders, Republicans and Democrats, brought with them their old political connections — and baggage.

“From day one, some of the flavor of regional and national politics was on the ground,” said David Dilgard, an Everett Public Library historian. “They kind of hit the ground in this backwater with these political connections. It was hard to get here, and once you got here, there wasn’t much to do except for chop down gigantic trees and risk getting killed.”

Last week, Snohomish County marked its 150th anniversary. A modest celebration Friday commemorated Jan. 14, 1861, the date Washington’s Territorial Legislature granted a petition from settlers in what was then Island County to form a new county.

In the year ahead, county officials and local historians are planning more events to remember the past century and a half. One event planned for this summer will pay tribute to the county’s first elections in July 1861 with a mock debate. That election moved the county seat from Mukilteo to Snohomish, where it would remain for 36 years.

Local history, obviously, long predates the county. Native Americans had lived in the areas of the Snohomish and Stillaguamish rivers for thousands of years.

When British naval Capt. George Vancouver anchored off Tulalip Bay in 1792, he concluded that the Snohomish Indians he met had never before encountered Europeans or white Americans. Even so, diseases from Europeans in British Columbia had probably arrived first, and already were ravaging the local population, according to the 2005 book, “Snohomish: An Illustrated History.”

Over the next century, new illnesses would kill off an estimated 80 percent of the Indians in the Puget Sound region.

Settlers erected a sawmill at Tulalip Bay after arriving in 1852. After the Treaty of Point Elliott in 1855, the federal government forced them to leave. The treaty, signed by Indian leaders and Washington’s first territorial governor, Isaac Stevens, set up a reservation at Tulalip.

The people who today identify as Tulalip Tribes members are descendents of the Snohomish, Snoqualmie, Skykomish and other groups that signed the treaty.

“The treaty conferred sovereignty,” Tulalip Tribes Chairman Mel Sheldon said last week. “We are a governmental entity and sometimes that gets forgotten.”

At the county’s sesquicentennial event Friday, Sheldon stood alongside County Executive Aaron Reardon and County Council Chairman Dave Somers. Sheldon credited the current county leadership for treating the tribes with respect, but said things haven’t always been that way.

“I think it’s going in the right direction,” he said. “It took a long time.”

During the mid-19th century, the U.S. government was busy establishing the northwest corner of its empire.

In 1846, the U.S. and Great Britain had established a boundary along the 49th Parallel and the Straight of Juan de Fuca. Tension remained between the two powers, though.

“(O)ne of the objects in establishing forts in Western Washington was to protect the interests of America against the British,” noted William Whitfield in his 1926 tome, “History of Snohomish County Washington.”

The U.S. government built forts in Steilacoom, just south of Tacoma, and at Bellingham Bay. Government leaders decided to blaze an inland road to connect the forts.

Eventually, the road reached up through the Snohomish and Stillaguamish valleys.

“At no point in Snohomish County was this road more than a narrow pathway slashed through the forest,” Whitfield wrote.

Some enterprising men saw the potential for profit along the Snohomish River where the military road would cross.

One of the men who arrived in 1859 was Edson Cady, whose name gave rise the community’s original name — Cadyville. Later, it would become the city of Snohomish.

The following year, New York-born carpenter Emory Ferguson arrived. He and Cady eventually obtained a permit to operate a ferry over the river.

Ferguson, a prominent Republican, would branch out into a variety of businesses and political activities. He eventually earned the unofficial title, “father of Snohomish.” He would run the Blue Eagle Saloon, which early on served as a combined drinking establishment, home, post office and courthouse, Whitfield’s history noted.

Around the same time pioneers were arriving on the Snohomish River, two businessmen began setting up shop at Mukilteo. Both of them were natives of Dutchess County, N.Y.

Morris Frost, the older of the two, had served as customs officer in Port Townsend. Frost convinced the young Jacob Fowler to leave a struggling hotel on Whidbey Island for their ventures on the mainland. Frost, a loyal Democrat, would later lose out to Ferguson, the Republican, as they vied to put the county seat on their respective turfs.

In Mukilteo, Frost and Fowler opened a store, a hotel and the area’s first post office. They started shipbuilding, exported salted fish and obtained the county’s first liquor license.

For many years, Mukilteo had the only store between Seattle and the north shore of Camano Island, historian Eldridge Morse noted in the 1870s.

When Washington Territory was created in 1853, Snohomish County didn’t exist. It was part of Island County.

In fall 1860, Ferguson drafted a petition asking Washington’s Territorial Legislature to change that. The request to form Snohomish County included 20 signatures. The territorial Legislature granted the petition on Jan. 14, 1861.

In his history, Whitfield notes that many people saw Snohomish County’s birth as an attempt to give Western Washington more political clout relative to Eastern Washington.

Dilgard, the Everett Library historian, suggested another factor in his 1991 book, “Dark Deeds”: safety in the wake of the murder of T.P. Carter, a settler at Cadyville. Though based on historical research, the book is written in the lurid style of a penny dreadful.

Like Ferguson, Carter was a carpenter from New York. A census from around that time described him as a 31-year-old who had recently been living in Olympia. He moved to Cadyville, where he established a trading post.

“A year or two earlier only Indians lived on the banks of the Snohomish and the uncertainty of relations with these natives had not encouraged settlement,” Dilgard wrote. “But the Point Elliott Treaty was finally ratified in 1859 and a trickle of white migration followed.”

In Dilgard’s recounting, an elderly Snohomish chief and his two sons tried unsuccessfully to attack a settler at Tualco in November 1860. They later stopped by Ferguson’s place on the Snohomish River, but he turned them away.

The next day, the settlers found Carter slain. The brothers accused in the slaying were caught that winter, though the father was said to have died while on the run.

This is how “Dark Deeds” interprets the killing:

“For the handful of pioneers living on the Snohomish River Carter’s death was a tragic catalyst which spurred political action. At meetings hastily convened in Cadyville and Mukilteo there was prompt consensus. Military protection was needed immediately but the real remedy was representation as a separate county.”

Sasha Harmon, an associate professor at the University of Washington’s Department of American Indian Studies, said settlers might have had monetary motives for how they portrayed Carter’s death.

“Settlers had learned that demands for government protection from Indians could bring in soldiers, which could bring in more non-Indians and economic opportunities,” she wrote in an e-mail.

In March 1860, two months after Snohomish County’s birth, commissioners met for the first time in Frost and Fowler’s Mukilteo store. One of the first orders of business: planning roads. One would go from Snohomish to Wood’s Prairie, near present-day Monroe, and another from Mukilteo to Snohomish.

At the time, the county’s population of white settlers was 49. There were no women or children among them.

That summer, Snohomish wrested the county seat from Mukilteo by a 17-10 vote. The county’s seat of power would remain there until 1897, when it moved to Everett after a heavily contested, controversial election.

Noah Haglund: 425-339-3465, nhaglund@heraldnet.com.