It may be the misreading that launched a thousand theories, leaving storytellers, historians, and the entire community in Filucy Bay with an irresistible riddle on their hands. Draughtsman and mapmaker Oliver P. Anderson of Seattle likely never knew what he had wrought.
And then there is another equally irresistible riddle: Titusi Bay, the name of the bay on earlier maps that has no obvious lineage. No less a historian than Edmund Meany threw up his hands in his 1923 “Origin of Washington Geographic Names” when he noted that “no clue had been found” about the origin of that name — or, for that matter, about its relationship to the name Filucy.
But as it turns out, there are plenty of clues for both.
The story starts in the 1840s when, for a few years, the bay flirted with yet a different name.
Turnours Bay on Inskip’s 1846 chart, published 1849. Rare Books and Special Collections,
University of British Columbia Library, Chart 1947 1849
Inskip’s Turnours Bay
Charles Wilkes is widely credited as the first to name dozens of places in south Puget Sound following the U.S. Exploring Expedition’s surveys in 1841. But Wilkes’ charts of Admiralty Inlet and Puget Sound were not published until almost a decade later, starting in 1850. Pride of place for naming the bay on a published chart for the first time goes to English naval instructor Robert Inskip.
In May of 1846, five years after Wilkes, the Royal Navy’s H.M.S. Fisgard sailed into Puget Sound, anchoring near the Hudson’s Bay Company landing near Fort Nisqually, where she would remain until the middle of October. During that time, Robert M. Inskip, a young instructor on the crew, created the earliest version of British Admiralty Chart 1947, titled simply “Puget Sound.” Today the chart covers all of Admiralty Inlet and Puget Sound.
Inskip’s chart, published in 1849 and at least a year before Wilkes’, covered a relatively small area around Fort Nisqually. It did include the southwest part of the Key Peninsula, where Filucy Bay is called Turnours Bay, after Midshipman Nicholas E. B. Turnour on the Fisgard’s crew.
Some of the names on Inskip’s chart, such as Cormorant Passage between Ketron Island and the mainland and Eagle Island in Balch Passage, were adopted by the U.S. Coast Survey and appeared on the first chart of Puget Sound issued by the USCS in 1867. They are still in use today.
Turnours Bay did not make the cut; the coast survey preferred Titusi Bay, the name Wilkes assigned it.
Wilkes named the bay Titusi Bay on the chart of Puget Sound’s
inlets and anchorages (1850).Library of Congress
Wilkes’ Titusi Bay
On Wilkes’ orders, the inlets south of the Narrows were surveyed by Lt. Augustus Case and his crew from mid-June until late July 1841. For about a week during that time, Wilkes sent Case back to Hood Canal to recover a piece of equipment that had fallen into the hands of Natives. Lt. Thomas Budd was placed in charge during Case’s absence, surveying Carr Inlet and the yet unnamed Titusi Bay. Wilkes himself, an expert marine surveyor and exacting taskmaster, joined the survey crews in Case Inlet in July.
Wilkes generally named geographic features after members of the expedition’s crew; almost all of those names are still in use. Many lesser bays, points, and smaller islands on the charts for Carr and Case Inlet, however, bear unusual names. In Case Inlet, for example, the northwest tip of the entrance to Rocky Bay is Sota Point, and the headland at the entrance to Dutcher Cove is Kalila Point. The spit at Vaughn Bay is Talapas Point.
In Carr Inlet, Von Geldern and Mayo Coves combine as Talie Bay. Penrose Point is Sikwa Point.
There are 25 such names in the two inlets, 14 of which are on the Key Peninsula. Only two of those appear on the coast survey’s 1867 chart and subsequent charts and maps: Toliwa Shoal, spelled Toliva today, about a mile due south of Fox Island in Carr Inlet; and Titusi Bay, today’s Filucy Bay. None of the remaining names have survived; they only appear on Wilkes’ charts.
Wilkes and Case are silent on the origin of those names in their journals, but there are a few tantalizing clues that suggest possible sources.
First, a handful of those names are similar to words in Chinook Jargon, the trade language of the Northwest in the 19th century. The vocabulary of the jargon was drawn primarily from the language of the Chinook at the north entrance to the Columbia River, but it also included words from other Native languages, as well as French and English.
Lawyer and ethnographer George Gibbs published a dictionary of the jargon in 1863. A handful of words in that dictionary echo names on Wilkes’ charts. “Wau-wau” or “talk” may be the word in Wilkes’ Wawa Point, the site today of Camp Gallagher across from Herron Island. Talapas Point may be related to “Talapus,” “a sort of deity or supernatural being, the coyote.” Yawa Island, the small vanishing island in the channel west of Stretch Island could be Gibbs’ “yahwa, “beyond, over there.” (See “The Chinook Jargon Pocket Dictionary,” KP News, December 2020.)
A second possible source is the language Gibbs called Niskwalli, the language spoken by Native tribes in South Sound, known today as Southern Lushootseed. Gibbs’ “Dictionary of Niskwalli” appeared in “Contributions to North American Ethnology” in 1877, four years after his death. There is at least one possible match: Wilkes’ Haskuse Point, now Allen Point on the eastern shore of Carr Inlet north of Raft Island, may be related to Gibbs’ “hads-kus” (háacqs in today’s Southern Lushootseed orthography) meaning “long-nosed, long-pointed,” a possible reference to the shape of the point. The word is a compound of “háac” “long,” and “qs,” “nose.”
In “Early Days of the Key Peninsula,” R.T. Arledge suggested that Titusi may derive from “tatuktus” in Gibb’s 1877 dictionary, a command derived from the word “takt” (t’aq’t in today’s orthography) meaning “inland” and used to mean “make for the shore, keep in.” Arledge suggested that Wilkes and his officers may have learned that from Natives directing them to make for the protected waters of the bay during a storm. While the story is contrived, looking for a source in a dictionary of the Native language spoken at the time is promising.
At just under 2,000 words, Gibbs’ 1877 dictionary is nowhere near a complete inventory of the vocabulary of Lushootseed, but more extensive dictionaries exist that may hold the key to the source of the 21 remaining names, including Titusi.
The 1867 chart of Puget Sound used Wilkes’ Titusi Bay.
NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Collection
Unnamed on 1853/1854 U.S. Land Office Survey
By the 1850s, surveys of the new U.S. territory in the Northwest were well underway. In September 1853 and February 1854, deputy surveyors George Hyde and Josiah Preston surveyed the southern third of the future Key Peninsula, from Devil’s Head to roughly today’s Lakebay and from the east part of Harstine Island in Case Inlet to McNeil Island and parts of Anderson and Fox Islands in Carr Inlet. The inlets are identified by name in Hyde and Preston’s field notes, suggesting that the Surveyor General and the land office had access to Wilkes’ charts. None of the bays or points are named, however, either in the field notes or on the final plats compiled by the draughtsmen at the land office.
Shettleroe’s Bay
According to Arledge, the bay was known as Shettleroe’s Bay. Joseph Shettleroe, the first and until the mid-1880s only settler in the bay, is said to have arrived around 1859, filing the first homestead claim for 160 acres in 1868 that he logged and farmed. In 1879 and 1885, Shettleroe bought and logged an additional 64 acres nearby, selling some of it to William Sipple in 1887.
The name Shettleroe’s Bay is not attested on any known maps. As it turns out, by the late 1880s the bay would sport a new name: Filucy Bay.
The name Filucy Bay appeared for the first time on Anderson’s atlas of Pierce County,
published ca. 1888.Tacoma Public Library Northwest Room
Filucy Bay
The earliest known atlas of Pierce County is Oliver P. Anderson’s “Township Plats of Pierce County, Washington Territory,” published around 1888. The atlas consisted of individual maps of the county’s townships and subdivisions as laid out on the government’s surveys. For the first time, the atlas also showed the names of landowners, based on deeds recorded at the county auditor’s office. Immigration to Puget Sound increased significantly after the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1883; owners’ maps showing available land were in high demand.
Plummer’s 1889 atlas of Pierce County also used Anderson’s
Filucy Bay.Tacoma Public Library Northwest Room
It is in Anderson’s atlas that the name Filucy Bay makes its first appearance, the only bay on the peninsula to be identified by name. By contrast, the “Atlas of Pierce County,” a township and owners’ atlas compiled by civil engineer and Pierce County deputy auditor Fred G. Plummer in 1889, names Lake Bay, Taylor Bay, Whiteman Cove, Reynolds Bay (now Dutcher Cove), and Vaughn Bay in addition to Filucy Bay. A full map of the county published a year later, in 1890, added Balch’s Cove (now Glen Cove), Joe’s Bay and Rocky Bay.
Titusi or Filucy?
With the publication of the two county atlases, the bay now had dueling names. The coast survey charts and several editions of the Pacific Coast Pilot, a guide to navigators still in publication today, continued to use Titusi Bay into the early 1900s. Maps of Pierce County only used Filucy Bay.
The discrepancy eventually came to the attention of the United States Board on Geographic Names, an office created by President Benjamin Harrison in 1890 to resolve “all unsettled questions concerning geographic names” on maps, charts, and other documents published by the federal government.
The board’s deliberations have not survived, nor has an account of how the matter ended up before it in the first place, but a report published in 1908 for the 1906-08 biennium was clear and firm: The bay west of the junction of Pitt, Balch, and Drayton Passages was to be known as Filucy Bay, “not Filuce Bay, Longbranch Bay, or Titusi Bay.” Filuce had been an alternate spelling, and the bay was sometimes called Longbranch Bay.
That sounded the death knell for Titusi Bay, although evidently not for the spelling Filuce, which survived on topographic maps issued and reissued as late as 1948.
The Missing Link: Anderson and the 1886 Coast Survey Chart
It would be ironic if the Board on Geographic Names settled on a name that was the result of a cartographic error. Yet that may be exactly what happened, capping the long, tortuous story of Filucy Bay.
Anderson likely misread the name of the bay on the 1886 coast survey chart as Tilusi or Filusi.NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Collection
In 1886 the coast survey, by then the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, issued a new chart titled “Sea Coast and Interior Harbors of Washington.” The bay is still called Titusi Bay, but unlike earlier charts where the name was engraved clearly and legibly, this time it can be read as Tilusi or Filusi. Anderson relied on data from existing maps of the county; he certainly would not have visited the entire county to confirm the many place names sprinkled throughout.
The spelling Filucy on Anderson’s 1888 map cannot be readily explained, although it might have been an attempt to normalize it by analogy to the name Lucy. Plummer could have copied the name from Anderson. If Arledge is right, the bay was still known locally as Shettleroe’s Bay at the time, so the name Filucy Bay may in fact have been introduced and popularized by Anderson’s and then Plummer’s maps rather than the local name Filucy finding its way to the map.
William Sipple never claimed that his tale of Filucy explained the origin of the name. Rather, he was inspired to weave his romantic story by the evocative name, a name that he may well have learned from Anderson’s map.
This is the second of a two-part series. Read part one here.
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