Early Campus Stories

Throughout the 1800s, the land on which PLU was built had witnessed dramatic changes. Here we share the story of this land. Discussing the land itself can reveal much about a region’s history and its inhabitants’ relationships with natural places. As author and naturalist David B. Williams explains in his book Homewaters, “A biography of a place tells the stories of interactions among the more-than-human inhabitants as well as between the people and the landscape, the people and the flora and fauna, and the long-term residents and newcomers.”

PLU’s land story raises a series of questions. What does a focus on this land tell us about who used it and how their use of it shifted over time? What does it reveal about the people’s varying relationships with this land? What does it show us about the impact of white settlers on this region? How does it help us to understand our connections—as students, staff, faculty, and alumni—to this land, and what does it suggest about our responsibility to it and to the Indigenous people who originally cared for it, and continue to do so today.

The story of a place can tell us a lot about the larger, often violent histories of regions and nations. Indeed, PLU’s land story is a U.S. American story — a story of opportunities sought and connections developed. It is also a U.S. American story, because, as was true throughout this country, the development of this institution was dependent on the dispossession and occupation of Indigenous land.

The most recent Ice Age began around 17,600 years ago, and as the Puget Lobe glacier moved through the region, rivers running beneath it carved depressions in the landscape that would become the Puget Sound and other geographical features, including what would become Clover Creek.

Archaeological evidence demonstrates that the region was first inhabited at least 12,500 years ago, making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited landscapes in the contiguous United States. Maps and Indigenous oral traditions illustrate that the land that became PLU was used by various Southern Coast Salish people, including the Nisqually, Puyallup, Steilacoom, Squaxin, S’homamish, Stehchass, T’Peeksin, Squi-aitl, and Sa-heh-wamish. These Indigenous groups lived in permanent winter settlements composed of long cedar plank houses, each of which housed a range between 30 to hundreds of people. These residences were located throughout the region, although there is no evidence that Indigenous people lived permanently on the land that would later become PLU.

Many local people left their permanent homes during warmer parts of the year to harvest resources, and had extensive trade networks throughout the region — over the Naches Pass to the Yakama — that ensured communities had access to diverse goods. Evidence found along Clover Creek suggests that people may have inhabited the area seasonally or, at the very least, spent time there on occasion. They likely engaged with the land in a variety of ways: fishing for salmon in the creek, hunting in the surrounding areas, and gathering camas root and strawberries. In her writings about the Nisqually people and other Indigenous groups, Nisqually historian (and ‘66, ‘71 PLU double graduate) Cecelia Svinth Carpenter noted that the Nisqually and Puyallup shared “in-common lands” in the Parkland and Spanaway areas. It is possible that the prairie grasslands on which PLU was constructed were maintained as grazing grounds by Indigenous people.

People were also connected by intermarriage and through various social gatherings. Contemporary Puyallup and Nisqually elders recall that families convened each year to harvest camas, and came together for large intertribal celebrations that included feasts, sports competitions, marriages, and other ceremonies. The land on which PLU now stands was thus a coming together place, where extended families, bands, and tribes met for trade, entertainment, and relationship building. Despite these connections, these Indigenous groups were distinct, having different cultural practices and economic livelihoods. The Puyallup, for example, relied heavily upon fishing, while the Nisqually both fished and raised horses.

One of the things the diverse communities of the region did share was a commitment to resource management. This commitment shaped their relationships with the land. As Warren King George Jr., oral historian for the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, told David B. Williams in 2017 , “We were and are part of this place. We were caretakers. We didn’t have the perspective of ownership.” Local Indigenous communities thus supported themselves with the land’s resources, while also working to maintain and negotiate access to them. They saw themselves as stewards of the land, not its owners. As we shall see, this understanding of the land differed dramatically from that of early white settlers.

If the Indigenous people who used PLU’s land and the surrounding areas had looked west to the Puget Sound on a stormy spring night in 1772, they would have seen the first European vessel that had passed by this place. It was part of an expedition led by British Captain George Vancouver that intended to map the region and find the Northwest Passage, a waterway believed to connect the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. The explorers interacted with the region’s Indigenous inhabitants, with whom they shared food and gifts, had brief skirmishes, exchanged language lessons, sought directions, and, in at least in one instance, separated themselves from by drawing a line in the sand. Vancouver’s writings on the landscape leave its residents out, and detail what he wanted to happen in the region: “The serenity of the climate, the innumerable pleasing landscapes, and the abundant fertility that unassisted nature puts forth, require only to be enriched by the industry of man with villages, mansions, cottages, and other buildings, to render it the most lovely country that can be imagined.”

Despite this call for settlement, the British did not inhabit the Puget Sound region until 1833, when the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) established Fort Nisqually on the Nisqually homelands, twelve miles east of today’s Olympia. The HBC hoped to expand the fur trade and British control in the region, which was jointly administered by the U.S. and U.K. By 1840, the HBC also began raising livestock, whose grazing grounds would have likely included the prairie around PLU. The Indigenous people the HBC employed as cowboys would have crossed these lands in this capacity, perhaps encountering others who continued to fish, hunt, and gather on this land.

Because of the HBC’s narrow economic focus and its small population relative to that of later white settlers, it did not make a significant effort to claim Indigenous land. Historian Alexandra Harmon argues in her book Indians in the Making that local peoples worked to incorporate HBC employees into their practices and tried to benefit from the increased opportunities for trade. For their part, the British settlers depended on Indigenous people for support and survival, including for food, knowledge, and labor. Cohabitation and marriage were also common between white HBC employees and Indigenous women. Harmon argues that the settlers and Southern Coast Salish people gradually constructed a bridge between them, “fashioned of mutually agreeable etiquette, including gifts and favors, shared pipes and libations, interpreters and the Chinook jargon [a trade language], bluffs and bargains, Sunday sermons and dances.” These associations were not perfect, but the two groups generally maintained amicable relationships that each side saw as beneficial.

In 1846, Britain ceded the land south of the 49th parallel (the modern U.S.-Canada border) to the U.S. This move was because of U.S. dreams of expansion, and it would also rapidly alter the landscape and Indigenous lives.

Their commitment to private land ownership was thus very different from that of the Southern Coast Salish people’s notion of stewardship. In 1850 Congress passed the Oregon Donation Land Claim Act (also known as the Donation Land Act), which supported this quest for ownership and which would have serious repercussions for the Indigenous population.

This act, which was intended to encourage white migration to the region, allowed settlers to claim up to 320 acres (one square mile) of land each or 640 acres for a married couple. Land was only available to U.S. citizens, and was limited to white individuals or people who were half white and half Indigenous. Settlers did not have to pay for the land; after working it for four years, they could legally claim it free of charge.

But the land they claimed was not, in fact, uninhabited. As Nettsie Bullchild, the Director of the Nisqually Tribal Archives, pointed out in a 2021 panel discussion hosted by the Fort Nisqually Living History Museum, “this territory wasn’t unclaimed. The tribal people were here. But that’s kind of the thought process [of U.S. settlers]: ‘Oh, this is unclaimed so any explorer that comes in can claim it.’… But that wasn’t true. You know, we were here. We’re still here.”

The Olympia Land Office processed 706 land claims under the Donation Land Act. One of these claims was that of Thomas and Agnes Tallentire, who hailed from the United Kingdom and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, respectively. They likely selected their 640-acre claim because part of Clover Creek ran through it, thus providing fresh water and ample opportunities for fishing and hunting. In 1851 the Tallentires and their two children became the first white settlers in today’s Parkland. Forty years later, the northern half of their claim would become PLU, as would some of a neighboring claim that a family named the Smiths soon occupied. Peter Smith, his wife Martha, and their son Ward would play an integral part in PLU’s founding.

Relatives of early Parkland settlers reported to Richard D. Osness in his book on Parkland history that settlers generally got along well with the Southern Coast Salish peoples, exchanging goods, knowledge, and sometimes shelter with them. Indigenous people continued to use the land and sometimes inhabited it, including during the time of the camas root harvest. Although these reports are from a settler perspective and sometimes reveal a sense of superiority, they do suggest that relationships between the settlers and Indigenous people were generally cordial. More widely, many Indigenous peoples engaged with the settler economy, selling furs, trading food, and working as hired laborers and loggers.

However, relationships soon grew more strained across the region. As the numbers of white settlers increased, so did the frequency of instances in which Indigenous people were cheated from or driven off their land. After all, the white settlers were interested in claiming land that was rich in resources, which put them in direct competition with Indigenous people. Settlers also continued to bring lethal disease to the area; an 1853 smallpox epidemic, for example, killed thousands of Indigenous people.

In 1853 Pierce County had only 513 white residents. With the region’s Indigenous population likely outnumbering whites by six to one, U.S. settlers intended to expand their control and dramatically increase their numbers. The coming years would be among the most difficult for local Indigenous communities since the arrival of the white settlers.

This process began in 1854 with the Medicine Creek Treaty. That winter Governor Stevens invited tribal leaders to meet northeast of Olympia at a creek the Nisqually called She-nah-nam and that the settlers referred to as Medicine Creek. Reports suggest that hundreds of Indigenous people attended the gathering, which occurred over several rainy days in late December.

There were several problems with how the treaty was negotiated. First, Governor Stevens and his supporters arrived with a fully drafted treaty, so the Southern Coast Salish people could have minimal input on the treaty’s terms. Second, all communication took place in English and Chinook, a limited regional trade language. As Cynthia Iyall, Nisqually Elder and Tribal Administrator, explained in a 2021 lecture, “This negotiation of a treaty, to be presented in English to the people who were going to live in this treaty, that was not communication and it certainly wasn’t negotiation. There was no attempt whatsoever to fairly communicate what was going on.”

The treaty ultimately ceded 4,000 square miles of Indigenous land to the U.S. government. Simultaneously, it relegated Indigenous communities to reservations in undesirable locations that did not have adequate access to resources. For example, while the Nisqually’s main villages were along waterways, the treaty relocated them to a rocky bluff without water access. The reservations were also small: the Puyallup and Nisqually reservations were each two square miles, or the equivalent of the Tallentires’ and Smiths’ land claims combined. As part of the treaty, tribal communities were offered payment for their land and support on their reservations, including schools, doctors, carpenters, and blacksmiths. They were also guaranteed the right to hunt and fish in their traditional areas (though later court battles were necessary to secure these rights). While these treaties ostensibly treated the tribes as sovereign nations, they also worked to bring them further under the U.S. government’s control.

Historical accounts suggest that Chief Leschi, a Nisqually leader, urged his counterparts to reject the treaty and left the negotiations; this suggests that many Indigenous people in attendance understood that the treaty’s terms were unfavorable and that they would not be allowed to alter them significantly. As Brandon Reynon, the Assistant Director of the Puyallup Tribe’s Historic Preservation Department, explained in the Fort Nisqually panel discussion series, in the aftermath of the treaty many Indigenous people felt that “This treaty is really sentencing us to death. They are cutting us off from all resources, which means starvation. So what are you going to do? … You’re going to start fighting for the land where you would traditionally go.”

It is not surprising, then, that in the fall of 1855 skirmishes broke out between settlers and Indigenous populations. This conflict would become known as the Puget Sound Treaty War. Both the Army and a volunteer militia represented the U.S. side, fighting a few hundred Southern Coast Salish people.

While neither side experienced substantial loss of life, the war was bookended by tragedies. The White River Massacre occurred at the start of the conflict, in which Indigenous people killed nine white settlers who were inhabiting their traditional land. In the Mashel Massacre, the last major event of the war, militia members killed 18 to 30 Indigenous people, primarily elders, women, and children. Furthermore, many Southern Coast Salish people died in the miserable conditions of the Squaxin and Fox Island internment camps, to which the U.S. government relocated over 5,000 “friendly” Indigenous community members.

The land that would become PLU likely saw members of each side passing through during the conflict, and at least one wartime incident occurred on it. In October of 1855, Indigenous fighters attacked a small party of U.S. militia members, killing two of them. As the remaining soldiers made their way back to Fort Steilacoom they stopped at the Tallentire claim, and Thomas Tallentire and a Nisqually man searched for (and found) an exhausted member of their party whom they had left behind.

Even during the war, relationships between settlers and Indigenous people varied. Some settlers offered a degree of support to the Indigenous cause or tried to remain neutral, while some Coast Salish people aided the U.S. government. In Parkland, Peter Smith’s house was burned, likely because he had enlisted in the U.S. army and allowed its soldiers to camp on his land. However, Christopher Mahon, another early Parkland settler, remained on his claim during the conflict, asking his Indigenous friends to tell him if trouble was coming.

The war petered out in the spring of 1856. By late summer the U.S. government and tribal communities renegotiated the treaties, agreeing to new reservations that were larger and, in some cases, in different locations from the first. The new Nisqually reservation now had access to water and the Puyallup reservation increased to 18,000 acres. Although this was an improvement from the conditions under Isaac Stevens’ first treaty, expanding white settlement would continue to marginalize them from land they had long used.

In the war’s aftermath, Chief Leschi was condemned to death and hanged at the site of today’s Oakbrook Plaza, a shopping center in Steilacoom, about six miles from PLU. His execution occurred despite conflicting evidence at his trial, including questions over whether he had been present at the murder he was charged with. Chief Leschi was later exonerated in a 2004 trial. No U.S. troops were tried for murdering Indigenous people during the conflict.

In the early 1860s Thomas and Agnes Tallentire divorced, and Agnes sold the northern half of their claim (which would ultimately become part of PLU) to Martha Smith. By the mid-1870s, Peter and Martha Smith owned a thousand acres between them. With Tacoma now named the terminus of the Northern Pacific railroad, they certainly must have felt like this had been a smart investment.

By 1890, Tacoma was booming, boasting a population of 36,006. The Smiths, likely wanting to take advantage of this growth, had their land surveyed and plated, hoping to sell plots to settlers. However, there wasn’t a lot of interest in the area. When the Parkland Townsite was filed in April of 1890, there were only 40 white settlers in the whole community. The land promoters who formed the 97-acre community told the mapmaker, “Call the place Parkland. It sure is pretty as a park!”

During this period, the region as a whole was also characterized by a growing Scandinavian immigration population. Although most of the early Scandinavian migrants to the U.S. settled in the Midwest, by the late 1880s they had also begun coming to the Pacific Northwest, partly encouraged by advertisements in Norwegian-language newspapers and letters from friends and relatives. Many were Lutheran—by 1890 there were 67 Lutheran congregations in the Northwest, with 6,055 members. In 1890, the Rev. Bjug Harstad was tasked by the Norwegian Synod, which was headquartered in the Midwest, to start a school in the Pacific Northwest to cater to the growing Lutheran population. He founded the PLU Association, a group focused on accomplishing this task.
While Harstad was scouting locations, Ward T. Smith (the son of Peter and Martha) offered him the land that would become PLU, on generous terms. The family had earlier set aside a portion of their land for a university, probably hoping to increase settlement in the area. Their talks with an Eastern school fell through, but Harstad and the Association accepted the deal. As part of the arrangement, the Association agreed to sell thousands of tracts of land surrounding the school; they would receive a percentage of the sales to support their venture. Smith thus secured a way to help him sell the land, which went for $50 to $100 a plot, and Harstad secured a location and a potential source of revenue to build PLU’s campus.

Since selling this land was integral to the potential success of the institution, the Association hired agents to help with this process. University leaders also frequently traveled east to do so. The Administration also started a Norwegian-language newspaper to share news of the project and solicit funds.

Ultimately, many of the lots sold, and many Norwegians and other Scandinavians moved to Parkland to be in close proximity to the school. During the construction of Old Main (today’s Harstad Hall) in the early 1890s, Parkland expanded as well. By the opening of PLU, the community boasted a feed store, post office, bakery, butcher, drugstore, slaughterhouse, and horseshoe and wagon-making shop, as well as many private residences.

Parkland residents included Scandinavian construction workers who helped build Old Main, as well as other recent Nordic immigrants from North Dakota and Minnesota, who welcomed the opportunity to purchase relatively inexpensive land on the outskirts of Tacoma, as well as the possibility of living in a Scandinavian enclave. The historical record does not say much about what their relationships would have been like with local Indigenous groups. It is likely that such interactions would have been greatly diminished as the proportion of white settlers increased. Writing about Norwegian immigrants’ perceptions of race in the Pacific Northwest during this period, historian Hans-Petter Grav notes that they “typically described Native Americans in exotic terms, or as an aspect of the local ecosystem, assessed almost with the interest of a naturalist studying the natural environment.” Such views were not uncommon in the nineteenth century, and they indicate that the demarcation between white settlers and Indigenous people was strong.

The land that the new institution stood on had undergone many changes in the century preceding its opening. It went from being used by Indigenous people as a place for fishing, hunting, and gathering to being claimed by white settlers who began to farm it. A treaty took it from Indigenous communities, and the subsequent conflict touched it as well. It passed through various white hands and was eventually set aside for the university in order to further the white settlement of the area. University founders furthered this venture, depending on the selling of land and the settlement of Parkland for the school’s very existence.

The biography of this land thus leaves us with a series of questions. How are we, as people who study or work at PLU, now tied to this history? What are our responsibilities as beneficiaries of a history that is part of a larger story of the displacement and dispossession of Indigenous peoples? And how should we, as people who use this land today, interact with and respond to it and to other land that we live and work on that might have a similar story? How might this history guide decision making as the university leaders work on developing campus? These questions do not have neat or easy answers, but as beneficiaries of this land, it is important that we engage with and act on them.