Colonial Despatches

Lummi Island lies east of the San Juan Islands. The Rosario Strait runs along its western shores and Hale Passage runs along its eastern shores. This roughly 15k m long and 3 km wide island was named Isla de Pacheco in the late 1700s by the Spanish explorer Francisco Eliza, and in the mid-1800s Wilkes changed its name to McLoughlin Island, in honour of HBC doctor John McLoughlin.1

The US Coast Survey adopted the name Lummi Island in 1853, after the Lummi Nation,2 or Lhaq'temish, who have lived on the Island and in the surrounding region for thousands of years.3

This despatch by Douglas mentions the Island as the southernmost point of the Gulf of Georgia and the start of the Vancouver Strait, which Douglas argues is the natural boundary mentioned in the Treaty of 1846.

• 1. James W. Phillips, Washington State Places Names (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971), 82.
• 2. Ibid.
• 3. Welcome to the Lummi Nation, Lummi Nation.