Part I — Before There Was DuPont
The Nisqually Homeland and the First Story of This Land
By DeAndre, Duke of Hanumanteshwar
Every city has a founding date.
Few places have a story that began thousands of years earlier.
Stand for a moment beside Sequalitchew Creek.
Listen to the water as it winds toward Puget Sound. Look across the prairie surrounding modern DuPont. Families walk the trails. Children play in neighborhood parks. Cars move steadily along Interstate 5. It is a peaceful community, known today for its carefully planned neighborhoods, beautiful green spaces, and its close connection to Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
Now imagine peeling away the layers of history.
The interstate disappears.
The neighborhoods fade.
The railroad is gone.
The explosives plant has vanished.
Fort Nisqually no longer stands.
Keep going.
What remains is not an empty wilderness waiting to be discovered. It is a homeland that had already been known, understood, and cared for over thousands of years.
This is where the story of DuPont truly begins.
A Homeland, Not an Empty Wilderness
Most histories of DuPont begin in 1833 with the establishment of Fort Nisqually, the first permanent European settlement on Puget Sound. Others begin in 1906, when the E. I. du Pont de Nemours Company built the explosives plant that eventually gave the city its name.
Both moments changed the history of the Pacific Northwest.
Neither represents the beginning.
According to the Nisqually Indian Tribe, their people have lived within this region for approximately 10,000 years. Their ancestral homeland once stretched across nearly two million acres, extending from present-day Olympia and Tenino through the prairies surrounding modern DuPont and east toward Mount Rainier.
The city we know today occupies only a small part of that homeland.
That realization changes everything.
This place was never simply a location on a future map.
It was home.
A Landscape Shaped by Knowledge
When many people imagine the Pacific Northwest before European settlement, they picture untouched forests and wild prairies shaped only by nature.
The landscape tells a different story.
For countless generations, the Nisqually carefully managed these prairies through the use of cultural burning. Fire was not simply something to survive. It was a tool of stewardship.
Controlled burns renewed the grasslands, encouraged the growth of camas, berries, and medicinal plants, improved habitat for wildlife, and prevented shrubs and trees from overtaking the prairie.
What later settlers often viewed as natural open grassland was, in many places, the result of generations of ecological knowledge.
Modern science is increasingly confirming what Indigenous communities had understood for centuries.
Healthy landscapes require thoughtful stewardship.
People of the River. People of the Grass.
The Nisqually describe themselves with a phrase that beautifully captures their relationship with this homeland.
People of the River. People of the Grass.
Those words are far more than a description of geography.
The Nisqually River brought salmon returning from the Pacific each year. Those salmon nourished families, supported trade, shaped ceremonies, and connected one generation to the next. As the Tribe explains, salmon were not only the mainstay of their diet but the foundation of their culture.
The surrounding prairie provided camas bulbs, berries, medicinal plants, wildlife, and open travel corridors linking villages throughout the region.
River and prairie were never separate worlds.
Together they formed a living homeland.
Beneath Our Feet
History is not always preserved in books.
Sometimes it survives beneath the ground itself.
Archaeological investigations around Sequalitchew Creek have documented significant shell middens, village sites, and other cultural deposits that reveal thousands of years of Indigenous life. These sites preserve evidence of fishing, shellfish gathering, tool making, food preparation, trade, and community life.
Yet archaeology tells only part of the story.
These are not simply places where artifacts accumulated.
They are places where children learned from their parents.
Where elders shared knowledge.
Where families gathered.
Where loved ones were remembered.
Every path through modern DuPont crosses a landscape layered with human experience.
A Coast Connected by Water
Long before roads crossed the Pacific Northwest, water connected it.
Puget Sound was not a barrier.
It was a highway.
Coast Salish peoples traveled these waters in cedar canoes carrying families, trade goods, diplomacy, knowledge, and stories from one community to another.
The Nisqually developed an intimate understanding of tides, estuaries, rivers, fisheries, and seasonal cycles over thousands of years.
When Europeans eventually entered Puget Sound, they did not introduce commerce to an isolated landscape.
They entered an existing world.
A Living Nation
One of the greatest misconceptions about Indigenous history is that it belongs only to the past.
The Nisqually tell a different story.
Today, the Nisqually Tribe continues to preserve and strengthen sEalifucid, the Southern Lushootseed language, through the Nisqually Language Resource Center. Their vision is not simply to remember the language but to see it flourish once again as a living part of everyday life for future generations.
The Tribe continues its leadership in fisheries restoration, environmental stewardship, education, language revitalization, cultural preservation, governance, and community services.
The Nisqually are not simply preserving history.
They continue to shape it.
Seeing DuPont Through Different Eyes
Standing in DuPont today, it is easy to appreciate its parks, trails, historic village, and welcoming neighborhoods.
All deserve recognition.
Yet the most remarkable part of this landscape may be the history we cannot immediately see.
Long before this became a company town...
Long before Fort Nisqually...
Long before the arrival of the SS Beaver...
This place already possessed everything that would attract generations of newcomers.
Fresh water.
Rich fisheries.
Open prairie.
Protected shoreline.
Abundant natural resources.
An established transportation network.
And above all, a people whose knowledge of this land had been refined over thousands of years.
The Hudson's Bay Company recognized those advantages.
The crew of the SS Beaver recognized them.
The Du Pont Company recognized them.
The United States Army recognized them.
Each chapter of DuPont's history was written upon a landscape whose first story had already endured for millennia.
Tomorrow, thousands of people will drive through DuPont on Interstate 5 without realizing they have just crossed one of the oldest continuously inhabited cultural landscapes in the Pacific Northwest.
History often hides in plain sight.
Sometimes all it takes to discover it is learning where to stand.
Next in the Series
Part II: Why Here?
How Fort Nisqually Became the First Permanent European Settlement on Puget Sound
Author's Note
This series grew from my collaboration with Jeremy Holm, President of the DuPont Historical Society, while helping interpret the history of the SS Beaver. What began as research for one exhibit quickly became an exploration of a landscape whose story reaches back thousands of years.
I do not write as an academic historian or museum professional. I write as someone who believes history becomes most meaningful when we ask not only what happened, but why it happened in a particular place. Through collaboration, careful research, and a lifelong appreciation for museums, heritage, and storytelling, I hope to help readers discover the many layers of history that often remain hidden beneath the places we pass every day.