As a surveyor, engineer, US Army major, superintendent of Indian affairs, and, oh yeah, the first territorial governor of Washington, Isaac Stevens crammed a lot into just 44 years. What’s more, during his short gubernatorial tenure he managed to declare martial law and arrested a judge who tried to have him served and cited. With a reputation for being brash and short, Stevens was known during his Civil War service as “Little Napoleon.”

But his biggest impact may have been in the work he rushed through in two months in late 1854 and early 1855: snappy treaty councils with the Northwest’s Indigenous tribes. Each talk lasted about four days and was done with little respect for the tribes’ actual organization and representation.

Stevens was doing what so many government representatives of that century did—taking land. The first article of the Treaty of Medicine Creek, for example, kicks off with the pronouncement that those tribes “cede, relinquish, and convey to the United States, all their right, title, and interest in and to the lands and country occupied by them.” But then later, a brief mention that the “right of taking fish, at all usual and accustomed grounds and stations,” was secured.

At the time, those fishing rights were almost an afterthought. “None of them, the white settlers anyway, were really thinking about fisheries,” says Dr. Ross Coen, a lecturer in the history department at University of Washington. “And so when Native peoples insisted that their rights to fishing be respected, that was an easy thing for Isaac Stevens to give away.” The fisheries, specifically the salmon, were central to Northwest tribal life; an American Indian Law Review paper written a century and a half later reflects that they were “one of the few hunter-gatherer societies in the world that produced more food and material wealth than it needed for subsistence.”

By the twentieth century, the US government better understood the value of Washington waters and increasingly limited tribal access. Activists held fish-in protests in the mid-twentieth century, some organized by civil disobedience icon Billy Frank Jr. At one protest, actor Marlon Brando even showed up on the Puyallup River to get arrested. Tribes fought for their Stevens-era promises in the legal case that concluded in 1974 with the Boldt Decision; Washington’s Indigenous population secured much of the salmon access Stevens had hastily granted them in the 1850s. “It was an enormous victory for the tribes,” says Coen. 

So newsworthy was February 1, 1917—what with the US inching closer to joining the world war underway in Europe—that the assassination of Washington state industrial insurance commissioner E. W. Olson only made a tiny mention below the fold on the front page of the Seattle Daily Times. He’d been shot down inside the Olympia statehouse by an angry logger with an insurance claim. But a month and a half later, when another assailant showed up at the office of Gov. Ernest Lister, the paper took notice.

“Armed Man Chases Lister” shouted the banner headline, and the logistics read like an old-timey farce. First an armed gunman ran into the governor’s secretary’s office and yelled, “I’ll have this out with the governor.” Lister, overhearing the cry, quickly ran into the vault attached to his office, one used to hold documents—and then absconded into his secretary’s office while the gunman entered his.

Lister, born in England, lost control of his office while the assistant chief clerk of the House of Representatives (a “former army man,” noted the Times, but unarmed himself) negotiated with the assailant through a window. Eventually the gunman
surrendered.

The chaos of the event, along with Olson’s assassination, brought the issue of security to the governor’s office, which soon had armed guards. One of Lister’s most notable accomplishments in his two terms in office was his signing of a bill abolishing the death penalty in 1913. But it was reversed in 1919—possibly thanks to these two capital events.

They say you can’t fight city hall. But after World War II, Monrad Wallgren discovered that in Washington, you can’t fight the ferry system, either. It all began when the then-private network of auto ferry boats, which evolved from the passenger-only mosquito fleet that once crossed the Sound, raised fares. In 1947, Black Ball Line captain Alexander Peabody moved to hike passenger costs by 30 percent, and the whole state balked.

The state decreed that Black Ball couldn’t take fares that high, requiring the line to refund two-thirds of the increase. Peabody, in response, shut it all down. Starting on March 14, 1947, the Black Ball Ferries—the bulk of the boats operating on Puget Sound—didn’t run due to a strike. To compensate, Greyhound ran extra buses around the state. The navy sent an LST, the kind of ship used for the D-Day landing, from Bremerton to Seattle’s Pier 91 full of commuters, who yelled and booed when a rat ran through the passenger room on the lower deck. 

Governor Wallgren stepped in to negotiate with Peabody and the ferry representatives, eventually resolving the strike, but a year later Peabody instituted another one. As Wallgren entered the 1948 campaign for a second term, he faced the man he’d defeated in 1944, Arthur Langlie. The idea of a government-owned system, rather than private, loomed over the election, but Wallgren’s failure to create that system torpedoed him. Despite being pals with then-president Harry Truman, Wallgren lost, and Langlie took the reins again—and managed to buy Black Ball from Peabody and create the Washington State Ferries in 1951.

These days, Washingtonians probably know Albert Rosellini as the namesake for the 520 floating bridge across Lake Washington. But Rosellini, a Democrat born in Tacoma who served as governor from 1957 to 1965, had a colorful life: he was a boxer, a Pike Place butcher, a hand on an Alaska steamer, and a clerk to Warren G. Magnuson. 

But because of his last name, Rosellini was also constantly being accused of ties to the Mafia. After his death, reporters unearthed the governor’s thick FBI file—a treasure trove of unsubstantiated rumors that went straight into the ear of director
J. Edgar Hoover. One informant even told the feds that Rosellini’s father was the head of the Seattle branch of La Cosa Nostra (not true).

But those rumors didn’t remain in sealed files. In 1972, Rosellini ran to get his old job as governor back and won the Democratic primary. During the general election, supporters of incumbent Dan Evans, referencing the biggest movie in America at the time, printed up bumper stickers that said, “Does Washington Really Need a Godfather?” Years later, Rosellini said he thought it cost him the election. “That Mafia crap really hurt,” he said. “Overnight I dropped 12 percent in the ratings. I don’t think people believe it so much as it scared the hell out of them.”

The guest of honor wore a floor-length jade green gown embroidered with fir cones on the collar and cuffs, the whole outfit topped by a green cape. The champagne salute began “We toast a reign supreme” and the orchestra played “Hello, Dolly!” before the 2,300 guests. Quite the glamorous start for a governor who had to be cajoled into wearing blouses, not men’s shirts, during her years in office—but it was only the first of 10 balls to inaugurate 62-year-old Dixy Lee Ray.

Unconventionality defined the single-term governorship—heck, the whole life—of the marine biology professor, Pacific Science Center director, and Atomic Energy Commission member. Mother Jones dubbed her “Madame Nuke” for her support of nuclear power, but a “dynamo, steamroller sensation,” equally notable for being utterly tactless and a “hell of a dancer.” Her biography is littered with outrageous, possibly true details, like that she claimed ancestry to Robert E. Lee (and named herself after him) and led a mutiny on a scientific research ship in the Indian Ocean.

Over the course of her term (which Ralph Nader called “gubernatorial lunacy”), she supported industrial expansion and atomic power, and became known for her bold moves and quotability. “She always felt she was the smartest person in the room,” says historian Coen. “And quite frankly, most of the time, she was probably right.” When Mount St. Helens threatened eruption in May 1980, she issued executive orders to evacuate the area. She was defeated in the primary later that year.

But Ray left behind dozens of stories, including that of her 14-day marathon of inaugural balls across the state, in Richland, Spokane, Wenatchee, Aberdeen, and other cities. Almost 10,000 Washingtonians attended one or more. Ray wore the same green gown, handmade by her sister, to every single one.

Everyone expected the first Bob Ferguson. After all, he was elected three times as Washington state attorney general and served on the King County Council before that. He announced his run for governor in September 2023, more than a year out from the general election.

What no one saw coming was the other Bobs Ferguson. In a stunt the Seattle Times called “Three Bob Night,” two other Washingtonians with the same name filed to run for the office—right before the filing deadline in May. With $7 million already in his campaign coffers, the attorney general Ferguson was expected to sail through the August 6 primary, from which the top two vote getters proceed to the general. But the last-minute entrants made it suddenly unclear if voters would know which Bob Ferguson they were choosing.

Glen Morgan, a conservative activist who has filed campaign finance complaints in the past, urged the two newcomers to file, saying he had hoped to get as many as a dozen Bobs in the race. The state’s RCW 29A.84.320 does make using a name “with intent to confuse and mislead the electors” a class B felony. The attorney general—Bob Prime, if you will—sent cease-and-desist letters to his name twins, and both late-joining Fergusons pulled their names right at the withdrawal deadline.