Lucy Slagham Gerand

Born in about 1843, Lucy was raised in a longhouse on the shore of Inner Quartermaster Harbor. Her people were the Sx̌ʷəbabš, which means “Swiftwater People.”  As a young girl, she went with her parents to witness the signing of the Treaty of Medicine Creek in 1854. The resulting treaty, negotiated between the tribes of South Puget Sound and Washington Territorial officials, resulted in extinguishing Native claim to all their territory except for small reservations.

 Native Sx̌ʷəbabš people, including Lucy and her family, were imprisoned on Fox Island during the treaty war of 1855-56. When the war ended, they moved to the Puyallup Reservation. In 1893, when the reservation was broken up into individual allotments, Lucy and her first husband, John Slagham, received an allotment on Hylebos Creek on the tidelands of Tacoma, where they lived on a houseboat. Lucy continued to travel to Vashon, where she was well-known to early settlers.

In about 1896, Lucy and John sold their reservation allotment and moved to Vashon. A year after John’s death in 1903, Lucy married Tom Gerand. They bought land on Maury Island in 1906, but lived on their houseboat in a small lagoon at Jensen Point. Lucy dug clams for trade with homesteaders and to sell to restaurants in Tacoma.

It is thanks to Lucy’s 1918 interview with anthropologist Thomas T. Waterman and her 1927 testimony about the sx̌ʷəbabš villages to a U.S. Court of Claims that we have first-hand evidence of the Sx̌ʷəbabš people’s longhouses and lifeways on Vashon-Maury Islands. Lucy died in 1929 and was buried in the Vashon Cemetery. In 2008, the Puyallup Tribe placed a headstone to honor their ancestor.