Fort Simcoe Historical State Park – state parks quest #44

Fort Simcoe feels remote. The 45-minute drive from Yakima to the park follows long, stick-straight roads through agricultural fields on the Toppenish Plain in the Yakama Indian Reservation. The plain is a broad expanse of land between Ahtanum and Toppenish ridges, two long geological folds called anticlines that are pushed up like carpet wrinkles by movement of tectonic plates and bound the plain on the north and south as it rolls to the Yakima River about 25 miles away.

The fort sits at the base of foothills leading into the Cascade Range, on a site important to the Yakama people. They know it as Mool Mool (bubbling water) for the spring there that provides clean, fresh water, and historically used it as a camp for hunting and gathering in the hills above. The location is on the historic Eel Trail, which connected Yakamas and other interior tribes to traditional fishing sites on the Columbia River via the Klickitat River valley.

In 1855, Mool Mool became a focal point in the conflict between American settlers and Indians over the Yakima Treaty, which forced natives to give up millions of acres of their homelands to make way for “manifest destiny,” the United States policy of westward expansion. 

The Walla Walla Council

In May 1855, Washington territorial governor Isaac Stevens held a treaty council at Walla Walla to negotiate ceding tribal land for white settlement. Stevens and his colleagues confederated 14 disparate tribes into the Yakama Indian Nation, listed in the treaty as the Palouse, Pisquose, Yakama, Wenatchapam, Klinquit, Oche Chotes, Kow way saye ee, Sk’in-pah, Kah-miltpah, Klickitat, Wish ham, See ap Cat, Li ay was, and Shyiks. The tribes relinquished 10.8 million acres of their homelands in exchange for a 1.3 million-acre Yakima Indian Reservation, money, and rights to fish, hunt, and gather in their usual and accustomed places. (Historically, the name has been written as Yakima, but in 1994 the tribe formally adopted Yakama as the preferred spelling.)

Not all Yakamas agreed with the treaty, especially Kamiakin, an important Yakama leader. He signed reluctantly, convinced that his people would lose their land and way of life. 

Treaty violations and Yakama response

The treaty prohibited settlement on the ceded lands until the U.S. Senate ratified the agreement, but Stevens posted newspaper ads promoting the region’s land in violation of the treaty terms. U.S. policy recognized Indian sovereignty only until treaties were signed, then conveniently ignored it so settlement could proceed apace. In summer 1855, gold strikes on the Colville River in northeastern Washington Territory prompted prospectors to head north from Walla Walla, illegally crossing reservation land and sometimes assaulting tribal members along the way.

Retaliating for the reported rape and murders of two Yakama women and a baby in August 1855, several Yakama including Qualchan, husband and father to the murdered women, killed six miners in one incident and two miners in another. In September 1855, a group of Yakamas encountered Andrew Bolon, the territory’s Indian subagent assigned to the Yakima Reservation, in what is now Klickitat County. They told him of the miners’ attack on Yakama women and the Yakama response.

Both Yakama and white interpretations agree that the Yakamas killed Bolon. The reasons why remain in dispute. Some Yakama accounts say Bolon threatened military retaliation for the miners’ deaths, the discussion escalated, and the Indians killed Bolon, seeing him as a threat to defense of their territory. Some white accounts say the Yakamas killed Bolon to delay word getting to the military based at Walla Walla and stall the inevitable military response to the miners’ killings.

Efforts by the Yakamas to resist incursion and assault by white settlers and miners prompted the United States to engage with native peoples in what became known as the Yakima War. 

In October 1855, U.S. troops under the command of Major Granville Haller fought Yakamas at the Battle of Toppenish Creek. With superior numbers and the strategic advantage, the Yakama forced Haller to retreat. But that was the only fight the natives won decisively. The next month, more than 700 U.S. soldiers forced 300 Yakamas to retreat from Union Gap, the site of a major Yakama village where the Yakima River pierces Ahtanum Ridge. Skirmishes continued throughout 1856.

Fort Simcoe 

Charged with responding to what whites termed “Indian resistance,” Colonel George Wright recognized the advantages of Mool Mool as a location from which the Army could monitor the movements of Yakama people. He selected the site for the construction of Fort Simcoe, the name of which comes from the Sahaptian word sim quwe, pronounced sim’ ku we, which means a saddle-like dip between two hills. He ordered construction to begin in summer 1856. The military moved in by that fall and began monitoring the movements of Yakamas in the area.

End of the Yakima War

By summer 1858, the U.S. Army’s punitive attacks on indigenous peoples had largely moved 150 miles east to the Palouse, where Colonel George Wright had been ordered to retaliate against natives involved in the Steptoe incident early that spring. Colonel Edward Steptoe, ignoring provisions of the 1855 Fort Walla Walla treaty that prohibited crossing native land without permission, led about 200 people from Fort Walla Walla to Fort Colville across Indian territory. Near present-day Rosalia, they found themselves surrounded by hundreds of native warriors from the Palouse, Spokane, Yakama, and Coeur d’Alene tribes. The tense standoff ended when the natives let Steptoe’s group skulk away under cover of night. 

Sent to retaliate for Steptoe’s ignominy, Colonel George Wright did not hesitate. In September 1858, without benefit of trial, Wright hanged Qualchan just 15 minutes after the Yakama leader surrendered. Wright asserted Qualchan was involved in the Steptoe incident, and wrongly believed Qualchan was responsible for Bolon’s death. Wright ordered the killings of at least 10 Palouse men around the same time, and captured Qualchan’s father, Owhi. On the way to Fort Walla Walla, Owhi tried to escape. A sergeant who had been part of the Steptoe debacle shot and killed him. 

In October 1858, Fort Simcoe commander James Archer summarily hanged two Yakamas, Wap-pi-wa-pi-clah and Stok-an-chan, whom he believed had participated in Bolon’s killing. The deaths of the two Yakamas and of Qualchan and Owhi, and Wright’s revenge campaign in the Palouse effectively marked the end of organized Indian resistance and the end of the Yakima War. 

Treaty ratified, fort closed

In 1859, the Senate ratified the Yakama treaty and the prohibition on white settlement was formally removed. In service for less than three years, Fort Simcoe was turned over to the Department of Indians Affairs and became the Yakima Indian Agency until 1923, when the agency moved to Toppenish over the objections of the Yakama Tribe. 

The first on-reservation Indian boarding school

In 1860, the Indian Agent at Fort Simcoe hired Methodist missionary James Wilbur to establish a school there. The Fort Simcoe Indian School was the first on-reservation Indian boarding school in the United States, launching an intentional, traumatic program designed to erase native traditions and force Indians to assimilate and become “civilized.” 

Wilbur and the school’s teachers punished children for speaking their native tongue and forced them to learn English. They gave the children American names, forced them to wear clothing favored by whites, and cut their hair in styles deemed more acceptable in white society. Forced to work to maintain the school, children grew, harvested, prepared, and ate food preferred by whites. Wilbur required the children to adopt his version of Christianity and forsake their spiritual traditions in what became known as the “Bible and plow” model adopted by Indian boarding schools across the country. 

Each day the “students” woke at 5:00am, did chores until 9:00am, then attended school and did more work until dinner, after which they went to church before going to bed at 8:00pm. Wilbur’s program taught vocational skills, like farming and construction, as well as reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion.

Wilbur’s legacy is mixed. In the paternalistic mode of missionaries in the West, he provided food and shelter to hundreds of Paiute Indians after the 1878 Bannock War and had positive relationships with many individual Yakamas. But there is no doubt that the Fort Simcoe school sowed the seeds of generational and cultural trauma still deeply felt in the Yakama Nation.

That is partly why visitors will not find interpretation at the park about the boarding school period. When I mentioned to a friend that I’d visited Fort Simcoe, they complained about the lack of signage about the boarding school. But from the Yakama perspective, such interpretation is likely to be sharply painful, a gut-wrenching reminder of what was lost. The Fort Simcoe Indian School is a physical symbol of those losses, a sickening example of United States government policy that rationalized cultural genocide.

From agency to state park

In the 1930s, after the Indian agency moved to Toppenish, the National Park Service considered making the fort a national historic site or national monument to commemorate its role in the Indian wars. But in the Great Depression, the NPS did not have the funds. Around 1938, members of an Indian Conservation Corps forestry unit housed in one of the old school buildings at the fort completed some preservation work on the decaying structures, including shoring up foundations, roofs, and floors, and some exterior painting. The advent of World War II ended those efforts, and the fort sat silent during the war years.

In the 1950s, several people interested in preserving Fort Simcoe formed the Mool Mool Restoration Society to bring attention to the decaying fort and advocate for its preservation as a park. In 1953, State Parks signed a memorandum of understanding with the Yakama Tribal Council for a 25-year lease to manage 140 acres around the fort as a state park. Two years later, the parties renegotiated the lease, adding 60 acres to the park and extending the terms to 99 years to allow State Parks time for significant restoration efforts. 

In 1956, one hundred years after it was built to monitor residents on the Yakima Indian Reservation, Fort Simcoe opened as a state park. Visitors to Fort Simcoe today experience a mix of original and reconstructed buildings, mostly focused on the three-year fort era.

Fort architecture

Six original fort buildings remain: three captain’s houses, the commandant’s house, the jail, and one blockhouse.

The four residences are particularly interesting. When Col. Wright ordered the construction of Fort Simcoe in summer 1856, he assigned Major Robert Garnett to the task. Garnett worked with Louis Scholl, a civilian architect serving the Army in the Pacific Northwest, on the layout of the fort. 

Scholl was influenced by the 1850 book The Architecture of Country Houses, by landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing. His design for Fort Simcoe was a sharp departure from the simpler U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans used at earlier installations such as Fort Vancouver. This is most apparent in the design of the commandant’s house, which is clearly copied from a Downing design and is the oldest example of the style in the state. The graceful carpenter Gothic house features pointed eaves, a steeply pitched roof, decorative verge board, and narrow windows. 

In the preface to the book, Downing wrote that “a good house…is a powerful means of civilization” and “there is a moral influence in a country house—when, among an educated, truthful, and refined people, it is an echo of their character—which is more powerful than any mere oral teachings of virtue and morality.” It’s not hard to draw a line from those words to the concept of a military fort being a “civilizing” influence on native peoples, albeit through brute force more than architectural design. Scholl also designed Downing-influenced buildings at Fort Walla Walla, Fort Colville, and Fort Dalles.

Even after the Indian Conservation Corps worked on the buildings in the late 1930s, the houses were open to the elements and, almost unbelievably, used as cow barns. After the fort became a park, State Parks restored the four residential structures, adding period furniture inside. Tours are available by reservation.

The four houses face east, looking out over the Toppenish Plain from the west end of the parade ground. As part of their work, Indian Conservation Corps workers also restored the parade ground, removing an orchard planted and tended by students at the boarding school during the Indian Agency era.

The blockhouse and guardhouse

Fort Simcoe originally had four blockhouses, positioned at the four corners of the fort. Only one remained by the time State Parks took over, and it was in terrible condition. Now restored, its position on a slight rise above the fort grounds offers a good perspective on how soldiers might have monitored the comings and goings of Indians. State Parks later reconstructed two more blockhouses, including one at the southeast corner that had been used as an icehouse during the Indian Agency era before being dismantled for firewood.

What remains of an original guardhouse stands just beyond the officers’ housing, at the west end of the fort. Originally positioned at the east edge of the parade ground, after the fort shut down the building was moved to nearby White Swan and used as a jail. When Fort Simcoe became a state park, the guardhouse’s owner donated the structure to State Parks, which returned it to the site.

Reconstructed and vanished buildings

State Parks has reconstructed five buildings to further evoke the fort era. In addition to the two blockhouses, a barracks and a guard house on the eastern end help convey the orderly layout of the fort in the late 1850s. State Parks rebuilt the barracks and blockhouses in their original locations. A reconstructed sentry house, built on stilts to maximize the viewing field, stands just behind the officers’ housing.

A number of fort-era buildings are gone, including several barracks, lieutenants’ housing, servants’ quarters, laundresses’ quarters, storehouses, a blockhouse, a hospital, a sawmill, and a bakery. A map near the parking lot shows where these structures stood. A walking route passes markers set into the ground to mark their original locations.

Indian Agency presence

Fort Simcoe was an army fort for barely three years. It spent more than six decades as the Yakima Indian Agency, but only two buildings from that time remain. One is the painted brick commissary, once used as an interpretive center but now closed due to structural issues, and the other is a metal jailhouse dating to 1910 and built using beams from one of the now-gone barracks. Other buildings, such as the school boarding house, are gone.

Hiking the park

The fort buildings and formal grounds occupy the center of the 200-acre park, but walking the perimeter gives visitors an idea of life beyond the routines of the fort. From the picnic area next to the parking lot, a trail leads to two gravesites. The first marks the resting site of Nathan Olney, a friend of James Wilbur who homesteaded nearby and served as Indian Subagent on the Yakama Reservation. He married a Yakama woman called Annett, and a number of their descendants live in the Yakima area. Olney died young, after a fall from a horse aggravated an earlier injury.

About 600 feet further on, in a small copse of oak trees near a creek, the second gravesite is that of Second Lieutenant Ruffin Thomson. A Confederate Civil War veteran who worked briefly as clerk at the Yakima Indian Agency, Ruffin died after a short illness. Continuing on the trail leads back to the fort, ending at one of the reconstructed blockhouses. 

By heading up to the restored original blockhouse on a small knoll above the fort, we got an excellent view and a better understanding of the fort’s strategic location. A trail leads downhill and through a grove of oak trees before turning to parallel Fort Simcoe Road and connecting with the parking lot.

A rare opportunity

Fort Simcoe is one of only a few pre-Civil War Army forts still standing in the Pacific Northwest. While visitors may find it remote today, it was a crossroads of activity in the treaty era. The fort’s role in Washington history offers clues about relationships between the people who have lived here since time immemorial and those who arrived much more recently. Facts about the conflict over the 1855 treaty may be broadly accepted, but they need to be considered through diverse cultural lenses. Fort Simcoe provides a place to contemplate how natives and whites experienced a rapidly transformed world as the U.S. expanded westward. 

Fast Facts about Fort Simcoe Historical State Park

• 200-acre day-use park, open April-October
• Discover Pass required, $10 daily or, for a very reasonable $30, purchase an annual pass
• restrooms 
• picnic tables, horseshoe pits 
• hiking, wildlife viewing, birdwatching
• interpretive signage, house museum (by appointment)
• park brochure
• park map

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Land Acknowledgment

Yakima Sportsman State Park occupies the traditional lands of the Yakama people, who have lived, traded, and travelled here since time immemorial. In 1855, the Yakama and 13 area tribes signed a treaty with the United States government ceding 10 million acres of their homeland in return for a reservation of about 1.25 million acres and other rights. Although the terms of the treaty stipulated that the ceded lands could not be opened to white settlement for two years, territorial governor Isaac Stevens declared the lands open for settlement less than a month after signing and several years before the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty. The Yakamas and other tribes went to war to oppose this betrayal until open hostilities ended in 1859, although disputes about encroachments on reservation land contained well into the twentieth century. Today the reservation and the Yakima Valley are home to the Confederated Tribes of the Yakama Nation, which has more than 30,000 members.

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