>> The following is a presentation of KBTC Profiles.

>> The story of Puget Sound is the story of water, and it's the story of landscape and how that relationship is brought together through canoes, through the Mosquito Fleet, through the ferry system.

[ Music ] >> Before the arrival of Europeans, the Puget Sound was pristine.

The landscape was heavily forested with old-growth timber.

>> Massive trees came down right to the water everywhere in the Puget Lowland, no matter where you went.

>> The main way of travel was canoes, the Salish Sea, our ancestral highways, all the way up to the Canadian border for Suquamish.

>> The Coast Salish people, the original inhabitants of this area, are expert canoe carvers.

They have dugout canoes of western red cedar.

Some of them could be 50 feet long and carry a ton of cargo, or many, many paddlers.

>> That's the way it was for 10,000-plus years until you get the arrival of Europeans.

Then you have the Americans.

>> The next rage was something by sail.

Of course, with the sail, you were subject to the weather, to the winds, to the tides, and a lot of rigging on the boat, with a pretty good-sized crew to handle that.

Then along came steam.

Steam was one engine and a couple of people to operate it.

Steam also got people going where they wanted to go.

Unless the weather was terrible, they'd fire it up and go, not waiting for winds and things of that nature.

>> In 1836, you have the first steamship to arrive in this waterway, and that changes everything.

It was an incredible boat.

It was called The Beaver.

>> The Beaver was a side-wheel steamship, originally built on the Thames in England.

The Beaver sailed around South America and arrived on the Columbia River, where the paddle wheels were assembled and it was steamed up.

However, in Fort Vancouver, they didn't really want a steamboat, so The Beaver was very quickly sent along to Fort Nisqually.

At that time, Fort Nisqually, in what is now Steilacoom, was the only non-Native settlement in the Puget Sound.

>> I like to think of The Beaver as sort of the early-day UPS general store, connecting different ports that the Hudson's Bay Company owned.

The Beaver lived up to its name.

It went through wood like crazy.

You could go something like 12 hours by steam and then you'd have to stop for a day to cut down trees.

>> The first ferry to offer regularly scheduled passenger service was the appropriately named Fairy, F-A-I-R-Y, which was a small side-wheel steamboat.

It was the first American-built steamboat on the Puget Sound.

The Fairy lasted not very long before she exploded leaving Steilacoom one day.

The mid-to-late 1800s was a big time in the world of steam technology with a lot of innovations constantly occurring.

The Beaver burned 40 cords of wood a day, which is an enormous amount of wood.

In the 1890s, the steamship Flyer was burning 24 cords of wood a day, half the consumption of The Beaver, and the Flyer produced more than twice the speed.

>> Well, the Mosquito Fleet boats were known for many things, but their real signature was their steam whistle, so that when you lived in a certain town along the area, the children even came to know the boats by the whistle.

[ Whistling ] >> Yes.

[Laughter] [ Music ] >> People would live in these far-flung places.

They had jobs.

You need people to cut wood.

You need people to build ships.

>> The Mosquito Fleet was a great piece of the economic development of the area.

>> We estimate probably close to 350 different locations where the Mosquito Fleet stopped.

>> As the Mosquito Fleet grew, competition between steamboats became a fairly big deal.

>> This gentleman, Joshua Green, merged with many other companies, and they would run big battles back and forth.

"Mine's 25 cents."

"No, yours is going to be free today if you ride my boat," taking all the customers from the other ferry companies, and so on.

He would get them to the point where, pretty much, they wanted to sell to him and get out of the business, and they did.

>> The Puget Sound Navigation Company became the largest fleet in the Puget Sound, constantly buying up smaller companies and absorbing their fleets.

The company later became the Black Ball Line.

The Black Ball Line ended up operating pretty much all of the ferries in the Puget Sound region until they were bought by Washington in 1951 to form Washington State Ferries.

[ Music ] >> By the turn of the century, transportation had evolved and had grown to now adding trains and automobiles as well as additional transportation methods.

>> The arrival of the car basically killed the Mosquito Fleet because people could get around that way.

With the arrival of the car, you had a new way to move around the Sound, and that was the development of the ferry system.

It starts out small with the Mosquito Fleet vessels adapting where you could actually drive up to a dock, and there would be a lift on the Mosquito Fleet vessel that would lift the car onto the boat.

Then you get the development of actual ferries where people could drive a vehicle on.

Whatever you needed to do, the Mosquito Fleet was what allowed you to move through Puget Sound.

It made it this maritime highway, and that really knit together the community.

Those boats, hundreds of them of all sizes, there are only two left in the Puget Sound area.

One is Virginia V, and the other is Carlisle II, which is the ferry boat out in Bremerton.

You can ride on a ship that has been operating since 1917, basically the same route the entire time.

>> The best is that she's one of living legends.

There are very few left that are this size.

>> Well, it's a real honor to be captain of this vessel, to be able to drive a beautiful ship like this that's in such great shape.

Hopefully, you can come down and see there's not any wood rot at this point in time.

[ Music ] >> When you look at modern transportation now, it's pretty incredible just to see how many options are available to us.

It's incredible to think about our forebears who settled here.

I think they'd be truly blown away.

[ Music ] >> The Salish Sea is our ancestral highway that still connects people today.

>> For more than 10,000 years, Puget Sound has been a maritime highway.

From canoe culture to Mosquito Fleet to the ferry system, moving people has been essential to the story of Puget Sound.

[ Music ] >> Funding for this edition of KBTC Profiles is provided by the KBTC Association.

>> KBTC Profiles are available at kbtc.org.