The Untold Story of Fort Steilacoom in Lakewood: Battling Stigma, Saving History

“Timing is everything.”

An exaggeration, you wonder? It depends on the subject.

For example, let’s imagine John, Paul, George and Ringo had set up their amplifiers, drums and guitars outside the coronation of Queen Elizabeth I in 1559 outside Westminster Abbey.

Surely before they had finished “All My Loving” they would have been bundled up for the insane asylum or the Tower of London. 

And yet, that song worked out pretty well for the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. 

Timing can be everything.

I think about that saying a lot as a small group of volunteers try to maintain the first US Army fort in all of Puget Sound. Fort Steilacoom in Lakewood has history on its side, but definitely not timing. I wanted to share some thoughts on this subject as many of us work hard to tell stories coming from Lakewood’s first institution. 

Lost in the stigma of mental illness

The heyday of Western settlement museums has passed. Fort Steilacoom’s sister fort, Fort Vancouver, became a historic site in 1948. Throughout the United States, museums devoted to western expansion appeared throughout the 1920’s to 1950’s, fueled by patriotism and John Wayne movies and other Westerns.

In our area, citizens were told that Fort Nisqually was a United States fort. There are photos of the American flag at the fort at its 1934 dedication. For decades, people marked the arrival of the Army and US settlers at Fort Nisqually.

What’s weird is that if you look at some of the writing back then, it’s clear many people also knew that Fort Nisqually was a fort established through Great Britain during joint occupancy with the US. But Fort Nisqually was relocated to Point Defiance Park, a breathtakingly beautiful place, and the British heritage was conveniently forgotten or downplayed until the 1980s.

After all, if you wanted to pretend you were in a John Wayne movie, Fort Nisqually made for a very lovely setting.

Meanwhile, the actual US Army fort became the site of what was first called an insane asylum, and now what we call Western State Hospital. If there was one place you did not want to go in the 1930s and 1940s, it was an insane asylum. 

You all know 3,200 WSH patients were buried anonymously in what we now call Fort Steilacoom Park. The lives of each of those 3,200 individuals are far more tragic than anything to happen to a museum. But I make the comparison for a reason. 

Thousands of individuals were made anonymous because of the stigma of mental illness. 

So was an entire nationally significant historic site.

Nobody wanted to think about the US pioneers and the US Army at what became an insane asylum. It was much cooler to think of them at Fort Nisqually. How about that view of the water, huh?

Broadening the history of Puget Sound

This all got sorted out in the 1980s. Historians started flying the British flag over Fort Nisqually. And volunteers in Lakewood and Steilacoom saved the four remaining Fort Steilacoom buildings from demolition without government support. 

In the intervening years, history has incorporated a more holistic view of westward expansion. There is now a recognition that the US settlement of the Western United States, not just Washington, imposed a high, often fatal, price on Natives. 

For many of us, there’s never been a better time to understand this. Fort Nisqually and several Tribes organized a podcast series that gives a voice to the stories of Native Americans. I humbly offer that to be someone interested in Washington history, you must hear those podcasts. They share aspects of history we need to hear and understand.

Meanwhile, also in Tacoma, the Washington State Historical Society is preparing to remodel its ground floor into a massive lesson about Native American heritage. This is going to be fantastic, because it’s a rich and valuable history. The Puyallup Tribe, which operated an insightful mini-museum in Fife, will reopen a museum within a building now under construction by I-5. That too will be a great resource. And I wrote recently how Fort Steilacoom Park will have exhibits tied directly to the Nisqually Tribe. 

And I love all that, even recognizing that this is thus a very odd time to be promoting a museum dedicated to the US Army and the settlement of the Western United States. 

Making the best of the here and now

At Fort Steilacoom, we find ourselves doing things that should have been settled in the 1930s and 1940s, such as figuring out how to keep the fort open and maintain four 170-year-old buildings.

In every other US state, first forts are operated by educational institutions or the like, such as state or national parks services.

Fort Steilacoom is all volunteer, and with 1.3 percent of the budget of comparable sites. The City of Lakewood provides marketing support through the hotel bed tax paid by overnight stays in hotels, making Lakewood the one large entity in the entire state that supports the fort. 

Here’s the deal: Fort Steilacoom has stories to tell. US Civil War soldiers served there before, during and after the Civil War. San Francisco needed to start a fort to keep an eye on Confederate sympathizers; we already had Fort Steilacoom for that. 

The fort’s relationship with Natives is complex. It’s a story that should be told, even if it makes you wince, because a good telling of history should make you think.

The man who built our four buildings, Lt. August Kautz, married a member of the Nisqually Tribe and they have, a Tribal executive told me, about 50 descendants in the Tribe today. After the Treaty War was over, Fort Steilacoom’s soldiers did some things – though they could have done more – to protect Natives from the territorial militia which committed such acts as the Mashel Massacre. I’m not trying to sugar-coat the stories, just say the stories are complex.

Fort Steilacoom’s story is so complex, I question whether it should be left entirely to volunteers to tell it. 49 other states call on professionals to tell the story of their pioneer past. 

I get that Washington is special, but I don’t think special should include turning our back on the pioneer history of this state and hoping most people will forget it. At its best, Fort Steilacoom could be a place for dialogue and reflection on complex history, positioning it as a vital part of understanding Washington’s past. 

Is that a job to leave to volunteers? Apparently. 

Timing is everything. 2025 is a hard time to tell any sort of complex story, much less complex stories about people alive 175 years ago. And we try despite the headwinds of time. 

Postscripts: Our fort is midway through a series of online talks related to the 175th anniversary of the fort. The next one is Saturday, Jan. 19, 2025, by another Lakewood journalist, Steve Dunkelberger. Learn more here: https://historicfortsteilacoom.org/events/ Join us on Zoom!

And if you’re interested in the fascinating history of how Fort Nisqually got turned into an American fort for convenience, you can find a fuller account here: https://historicfortsteilacoom.org/2024/09/why-fort-steilacoom-disappeared-between-1868-and-1978/