Doe Island Marine State Park History

Doe Island Marine State Park preserves an entire island along the southeastern coastline of Orcas Island in the San Juan Archipelago. It takes its name from the prevalence of deer in the area—nearby place names include Doe Bay, Deer Point and Buck Bay.

A Rocky Island

The San Juan Islands are distinct from most of Puget Sound in that they feature shorelines with exposures of hard bedrock, rather than the bluffs of clay, sand and gravel left by Ice Age glaciers that are predominant on most of Washington’s Salish Sea, the state’s inland saltwater passages.

The rocks that make up Doe Island are part of a group of rocks that may have begun forming around a mid-ocean rift in a tectonic plate. The basalt lava erupted at the rift was slowly buried. Chert (a form of the mineral quartz) formed as tiny oceanic organisms died and sank into the depths, covering the volcanic basalt. Sediments eroded from nearby landmasses in turn covered the chert as the tectonic plate slowly moved over the Earth’s mantle, driven by heat currents within the planet. Geologists are still puzzling out the sequence of events that ultimately thrust these rocks over younger rocks as they collided with the North American continent millions of years ago.

Paddlers approaching the island will see fractured, jumbled rocks at the shore, many covered with a veneer of bright orange lichens.

Indigenous Land

The park lies within the traditional territory of Coast Salish Indigenous people whose present-day descendants include members of the Lummi Nation, Samish Indian Nation, Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, and First Nations in Canada.

For thousands of years the lands and waters of the San Juan Archipelago have provided habitat for a diverse community of life that forms the basis of their cultures. As winter days lengthen into spring, herring and herring roe collect in the eelgrass beds near shore. A little later, spring Chinook salmon pass through the island channels. Early summer brings sockeye salmon, harvested for millennia with reef nets. Sea urchins are gathered by expert divers in late summer, and clamming peaks in the fall.

European Competition

In the 1700’s many European nations attempted to discover and claim a “Northwest Passage” connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The Spanish Crown claimed exclusive rights to colonize the west coast of North America based on the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. Eight expeditions between 1774 and 1790 charted parts of today’s Pacific Northwest coast and established a Spanish settlement at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island. In 1791, Spanish Naval Officer Francisco de Eliza y Reventa was sent to reinforce the Spanish presence at Nootka Sound and direct further exploration of the Strait of Juan de Fuca as a possible Northwest Passage.

Spain claimed the area as part of its Territorio de Nutka but relinquished the claim to the United States in the 1819 Adams-Onis Treaty, later confirmed by newly independent Mexico. Dual claims to the region by the US and Britain were negotiated and resolved in 1846, but the status of the San Juan Archipelago remained disputed until the competing claims were adjudicated by a commission appointed by German Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1872.

Local tribes had ceded ownership of the area to the US federal government under duress in the Treaty of Point Elliot in 1855, in spite of the as-yet unsettled colonial administration of the San Juan Archipelago.  The tribes reserved rights to harvest natural resources in their usual and accustomed places, including the lands and waters surrounding Doe Island.

Though much of the land on the larger islands was transferred to private owners after government surveys were completed, Doe Island remained a part of the federal public domain lands.

Making a Park

On June 14, 1926, the US Congress passed the Recreation and Public Purposes Act, authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to “dispose of any public lands to a State…for any public purposes.” In the 1960s, the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission (WSPRC) realized the growing desire and need for marine recreation in the state. They sought to acquire some of the individual San Juan Islands with outstanding potential for recreational use that remained part of the federal public domain lands, then administered by the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

On December 15, 1964, the BLM transferred the entire 6 acres of Doe Island to the WSPRC, establishing Doe Island Marine State Park.