By Patrick Hamilton
In 1844 the first Americans to settle on the Puget Sound in what is now Washington State were led through the frontier by George Washington Bush, a man of African and Irish descent. Bush, along with his wife (b.)Isabella James, established a farm named Bush Prairie in what is now Tumwater. Accounts of Bush’s personality emphasize his generosity, diligence, warmth and charity. This cooperative spirit is cited by many historians as an element of why his settlement was so successful.
While little is known about his early life, it’s widely accepted that George was born in Pennsylvania around 1789 to his father Matthew Bush, a sailor of African descent born in India, and his mother, whose name has been lost to history but was a maid born in Ireland. Some of the only things that can be known for certain about his parents is that they were employed by a wealthy English merchant named Stevenson for most of their lives, and that they married in 1778. The fact that they were married two years before anti-miscegenation laws were repealed in Pennsylvania has led some historians to speculate that they may have been married in secret at a Quaker meeting, a claim reinforced by George’s Quaker education and upbringing. After Stevenson’s death, due to his lack of living relatives, his estate was inherited by Matthew and George’s mother before their own death, at which point it passed on to George.
When he came of age, he traveled first to Tennessee and then to Illinois, where he became involved in a rapidly expanding cattle industry, leading him to grow his own wealth substantially. It was around this time that he served under Andrew Jackson in the war of 1812 where he fought in the 1815 battle of New Orleans. Since the US army didn’t allow black soldiers until 1863, it’s likely that he served in the Tennessee State Militia. Likely sometime after his time in the army, he traveled west and became one of the first “mountain men” fur trappers in Oregon territory. As an independent trapper working for the Hudson’s Bay Company, it is said that he worked his way as far south as the Santa Fe trail, where he met Kit Carson, and as far north as Vancouver Island.
He returned from the frontier sometime before 1828, because that year he purchased 80 acres in Missouri with cash, as homesteading and land grants were not open to black people until during Reconstruction after the Civil War. In 1830, in spite of the anti-miscegenation laws in Missouri, he married a white woman named Isabella James, the daughter of a Methodist preacher. One theory is that George Bush was able to get married by making a deal with the newly appointed Justice of the Peace who married them, while others have said that the laws weren’t seen to have applied to him because he was independently wealthy and had never been a slave.
George and Isabella would go on to have 9 sons, 5 of whom would survive and eventually come along on their journey westward. Most accounts say that their greatest reason for moving west was, as another pioneer who knew Bush said, “George Bush doubtless left Missouri because of the virulent prejudices against his race in the community where he lived“. Merchants would refuse to accept his money, and his children had to be educated by tutors, as they were not permitted to attend the public local schools which the other children did. Some historical accounts remark on how while in Missouri he was injured while serving in the state militia during the Black Hawk Indian War in Missouri.
In 1844, the Bush family and some of their good family friends decided to make the trek west. Bush assembled and provisioned 6 Conestoga wagons for his family, and according to Bush family legend, in one wagon he built a false bottom where he hid thousands of dollars in precious metals. He also helped two other families, the Kindreds and the Joneses, secure adequate supplies. With his dear friend Micheal Simmons and other families they knew in Missouri and Tennessee they formed the Bush-Simmons party, and joined Col. Cornelius Gilliam’s wagon caravan about 30 miles west of St. Joseph. While the trek was laborious and elements of the caravan slowly broke off for different locations, it remained uneventful given the circumstances until their arrival in Oregon territory.
While the Bush-Simmons party was moving west from Missouri, another settler from Missouri, a white man by the name of Peter Burnett, was serving in the Oregon Territorial legislature and sought to solve the problem of increasing racial tensions by banning black people from the territory entirely. “Punishment for violation of this act was 39 lashes, delivered in a public whipping, repeatable every six months until the person departed”. Facing this reality, Bush was left with a choice that he pondered while wintering at The Dalles: Would he proceed north of the Columbia, which while formally considered part of Oregon territory by the US, was under de facto jurisdiction of the UK and the Hudson’s Bay Company? Or would he turn south to California, at that time still part of Mexico?
When spring came around, they found passage across the Columbia. Until then, the UK had denied American settlers access to the region, with the aim of consolidating their own control over the region. It is speculated that one possible reason the Bush-Simmons party was allowed passage was because of Bush’s previous employment by the Hudson’s Bay Company as a trapper decades earlier. Nonetheless, at a pace of 100 miles in 35 days, the Bush-Simmons party gruellingly expanded the small foot paths through the dense Pacific Northwest forest to make them wide enough for their wagons to pass through.
Upon reaching the southernmost tip of Puget Sound in what is now Tumwater, the six families of the Bush-Simmons party founded Bush Prairie. The first couple years and particularly the first winter were incredibly difficult, living in crude wooden structures. The families had to use all means at their disposal including hunting, fishing, gathering, and trading with both the British and the indigenous to survive. By the end of 1845, Simmons and Bush had together built the first grain mill as well as the first lumber mill.
As the endeavour slowly gained success, examples of Bush’s famously nurturing and positive disposition became more apparent. He and his wife established a free hotel for travelers so that anyone passing through could have a warm place to get a home cooked meal and rest for the night before sending them off with gifts of food grown on the farm. When offered incredibly high prices for his grain by a speculator, he replied, “I’ll just keep my grain to let my neighbors who have had failures have enough to live on and for seeding their fields in the spring. They have no money to pay your fancy prices and I don’t intend to see them want for anything in my power to provide them with.” The settlement also maintained excellent relations with the surrounding indigenous people as George and Isabella helped nurse many of them through the epidemic which was spreading through their population. Bush would die in 1863 in Tumwater, but despite attempts in the 20th century to white-wash him out of history, the impact of his life is still felt today. Some historians credit the Bush-Simmons party “as having been in large part responsible for bringing the land north of the Columbia River — the present-day state of Washington — into the United States,” especially if it was true that he was only allowed to settle North of the Columbia due to his connections with the Hudson’s Bay Company. His eldest son William Owen Bush would go on to serve in the Washington State Legislature for two terms. The legacy of his trek west is memorialized today with a butternut tree, descendant of a seed brought over in his wagon, which is planted on the Washington State Capitol Campus.
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