Puget Sound Mosquito Fleet

The Puget Sound mosquito fleet was a large number of private transportation companies running smaller passenger and freight boats on Puget Sound and nearby waterways and rivers. This large group of steamers and sternwheelers plied the waters of Puget Sound, stopping at every waterfront dock. The historical period defining the beginning and end of the mosquito fleet is ambiguous, however the peak of activity occurred between the first and second World Wars.

Puget Sound and the many adjacent waterways, inlets, and bays form a natural transportation route for much of the western part of the State of Washington. For navigation purposes, Puget Sound was sometimes divided into the "upper Sound" referring to the waters south of the Tacoma Narrows, and the lower sound, referring to the waters from the Tacoma Narrows north to Admiralty Inlet.

The first steamboat to operate on Puget Sound was the Beaver, starting in the late 1830s. Beaver was a sidewheeler built in London, which reached the Northwest under sail, with her paddle wheels dismantled. In 1853, Hudson’s Bay Company brought a new steam-powered vessel into the area, the Otter, a propeller-driven bark.

The Native Americans traversed Puget Sound in well-built cedar canoes, as they had for thousands of years, and for some time so did the American settlers, who only began to arrive in very small numbers in 1846. In 1851, Olympia became the only formal American town on Puget Sound. In November 1851, the schooner Exact disembarked passengers at Alki Point, which was the beginning of the city of Seattle. In February 1852, three of the settlers, Arthur A. Denny, C.D. Boren, and William N. Bell took soundings on the east side of Elliott Bay, found the water to be deep enough near the shore to form a port, and staked land claims along the water.

The first American steamboat on Puget Sound was the sidewheeler Fairy built in San Francisco in 1852. Captain Warren Gove, born in Edgecomb ME in 1816 (one of three Gove brothers involved in early maritime affairs) brought Fairy to Puget Sound on the deck of the bark Sarah Warren and lowered her into the sound on October 31, 1853. Fairy was the first steamboat on Puget Sound to have a formal schedule, published for the first time on November 12, 1853 in the Columbian newspaper of Olympia. The "splendid steamer" Fairy, as she was advertised, was supposed to make two trips a week between Olympia and Steilacoom, and one trip a week from Olympia to Seattle. Fares were high, $5 for Olympia-Steilacoom, and $10 for Olympia-Seattle. Fairy however proved unseaworthy in the rougher winter weather in the lower sound, and after a few runs from Olympia to the then very small village of Seattle was eventually replaced by a sailing schooner, which ran irregularly and, more predictably, by mail and passenger canoes. These were owned and crewed by the First Nations. It took in those days at least two days and often three to make the trip from Seattle to Olympia, and travellers camped on the beach at night. (Following her failure on the upper sound, Fairy was placed on the much shorter Olympia-Fort Steilacoom run, until 1857 when her boiler exploded. No one was killed, but that was the end of her.)

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