The Fort Nisqually Census of 1838-1839

Abstract

This paper is designed to present an hitherto unpublished census of the Puget Sound area conducted by the Hudson's Bay Company. It is not proposed to discuss the census in detail at this time since a longer paper entitled The Aboriginal Population of the Puget Sound Area is now in preparation. No attempt is made in the present study to correlate names of tribes in the census with terms au courant in Northwest Coast anthropology. Cognoscenti of the ethnology of the area will recognize most of the tribes, and the matter will be discussed in a later publication. There is appended to the census a pair of tables, however, presenting proportions of males, females, slaves, horses, guns, and canoes by tribe, and some comments on the census. First known contact of Europeans with the Puget Sound Indians occurred on Vancouver's voyage in 1792. There are rather frequent notices of the groups in Hudson's Bay Company records from the second decade of the 19th century on. However, the earliest published censuses date from the 1840's and 1850's. These censuses include: (1) a list of Indian tribes, location, and population returned in the House of Commons in the years 1848-1849, based primarily upon Hudson's Bay Company data, and compiled by Lieutenants Warre and Vavaseur;1 (2) the report of the American explorer, Lt. Charles Wilkes, published in 1844;2 (3) a table of Indian tribes, country