Quilleute Tribal History
The Quileute tribe can trace their ancestry to the Ice Age. Their dialect comes from the Chimakuan race of Native Americans. Past Quileutes hunted seam mammals and fished, being accomplished at whaling and sealing. They built their own heavy duty canoes and spun dog hair into blankets.
Extended families of Quileute resided in long winter houses at the mouths of streams. Each structure was occupied by a headman, nobility, commoners, and sometimes slaves taken from neighboring tribes. During the summer, they disbanded into small units, some heading upriver to hunting camps.
Quileutes relied upon, and were answerable to, supernatural powers. Youths searched for their personal guardian power (taxilit) on individual “spirit quests.” The first-salmon ceremony ensured the salmon spirit’s good will. Other similiar rituals addressed the spirits.
The Quileute people remained isolated from white contact until American captain Robert Gray arrived in May 1792 and took up trading with them. There also are early accounts of shipwrecked Spanish explorers who ended up living with them.
Aggressive, land-hungry settlers began to arrive in the 1830s. The first official contacts with the U.S. government occurred in 1855, when the Quileutes and others negotiated the Quinault River Treaty with representatives of Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens. On January 25, 1856, Chief How-yak and two assistants trekked to Olympia to ink the treaty.
In so doing, they relinquished more than 800,000 acres of old-growth timberland, flush with fish and wildlife, in the Quillayute River basin. In exchange, the treaty provided rights for the Quileute to hunt, fish and gather in the ancestral way on relinquished lands. In addition, they were promised health care, schooling and vocational training. The document also assigned the Quileute people to live on the Quinault Reservation in Taholah, but they refused to move. However, the Quileute territory was so remote that the stipulation was not enforced.
TwiTwitters La Push 