The new dimensions have remained to this day, and with the same boundaries.Īs a result of the General Allotment Act of February 8, 1887, whose spirit was to encourage an agrarian life among Indians, allotments of land to individual Indians on the Quinault Reservation were made, beginning in 1905. To accommodate that many additional Indians, the reservation was expanded to nearly 200,000 acres by an order of President Ulysses S. The treaty commission’s intent was to concentrate numerous coastal tribes onto this reservation. In exchange, the Quileute, Queets, Hoh, and Quinault gave up all the lands north of Gray’s Harbor up to the homeland of the Makah tribe. That treaty established a 10,000-acre reservation around the village of Taholah. Later, a new treaty was drawn up that the Indians did sign, on January 25, 1856. Because the land chosen was poor, Indian leaders balked and the first treaty was never inked. Stevens said that they would all be moved to a reservation intended to be the Quinault Reservation as it is known today. To accommodate land-hungry whites, Washington territorial governor and Indian agent Isaac Stevens drew up a treaty for the Indians to sign, that said that they would relinquish almost all the coastal area of Washington. Although the Quinault were initially friendly and helped their new white neighbors, increasing numbers of pioneers arrived with their radically different ways, which created friction.

Fishing and lumber communities mushroomed and dotted the region. Industry followed homesteading as whites began to tap the area’s natural resources. In the 1820s, white trappers, traders and settlers began to discover the Quinault and other western Washington tribal homelands. The Quinault people remained isolated from European contact until they visited the Spanish vessel Sanora in their canoes on July 13, 1775.

Lewis and Clark, on their famed trek to the Pacific Ocean, noted that the craft were “…upward of 50 feet long, and will carry 8,000 to 10,000 pounds’ weight, of from 20 to 30 persons….” The original Quinault flourished with access to good fishing (especially salmon and steelhead), hunting, berry picking and wood gathering. Taholah is the heart of the Quinault Indian Nation. The word Quinault evolved from kwi’nail, the name of the tribe’s largest settlement once situated at present-day Taholah, at the mouth of the Quinault River. The Quinault people reside on a reservation of 189,621 acres in northwestern Grays Harbor County, along Washington’s coast.

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