Point Elliot Treaty Site
Point Elliot
Mukilteo, WA

Point Elliot is a small piece of land that projects into Possession Sound, a body of water that separates Puget Sound from Saratoga Passage. It is immediately adjacent to the community of Mukilteo.

Originally, the area was a small beach backed by marshes and a steep bluff, but both man and nature have altered the site greatly since the signing of the treaty. Most of the area is paved with asphalt for use as a parking lot for boat-launching facilities and a Coast Guard light station occupies another portion of the site.

The precise location of the treaty signing is not known. Several lo-cations have been named as the proper place but none seem to carry any more authenticity than another. Probably the earliest and most repu-table attempt at location was conducted in 1919, by historians Clarence Bagley and Edmund Meany. They verified the site and planned to erect a granite pylon but the project was never accomplished. Apparently, they never recorded the location in a published source. In 1930, the Daughters of the American Revolution erected a bronze plaque mounted on a granite slab to memorialize the event but the marker is located on a hillside which would have been heavily timbered in 1855. Such a location would be an unlikely meeting place. In 1953, the local Vet-erans of Foreign Wars erected a memorial to the event in the form of a bench. The present information officer of the post is not familiar with the location of the memorial and does not know of its whereabouts. A fourth location for the treaty signing is adjacent to the Coast Guard property and one hundred feet from the beach. The coordinates included in this nomination mark a location on Point Elliot which is represen-tative only and is not the established site of the treaty signing.

Statement of significance:

Isaac Ingalls Stevens, first territorial Governor of Washington, rail-road surveyor and West Point graduate, promoted a series of treaties in the mid-l850's, with a number of Indian tribes. The purpose of the treaties was to cede Indian lands to the public domain of the United States. Once this was done, settlers acting under the Donation Land Law could select properties of their choice. The Indians were guaranteed their rights to hunt and fish and were to be paid for their lands. The Indians would be removed to reservations where, it was believed, they would be free from the degradation of White society.

The Point Elliot Treaty was one of four signed with coast tribes. It affected the territory of 22 tribes west of the Cascades to Puget Sound and north of Tacoma to the Canadian border. Such important leaders as Sealth (After whom the City of Seattle was named), Patkanim, Goliah, and Chow-Its-Hoots signed the treaty.

Although handily developed by Stevens, the treaties were not success-ful. Instead of providing for a smooth passage of Indian lands to the federal government while maintaining the rights of the Indian, they were actually a central cause in the outbreak of Indian wars in 1856.

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