City of Entiat, Chelan County, Washington

City of Entiat Chelan County, Washington

Mapped Location

City of Entiat: The mapped location is an approximation and should not be used for navigation or wayfinding.

Information

General information on City of Entiat

Feature Type: Incorporated

Official, historical, colloquial and alternative toponyms for City of Entiat

A brief list of names that this geographic feature has been named

Name	Description
City of Entiat	Official
Entiat	Official

Origin Notes and History of City of Entiat

References to City of Entiat that document the origin of its place name

ENTIAT RIVER, rising in the higher Cascade Mountains, it flows into the Columbia River nineteen miles above Wenatchee. At the junction of the two rivers there is a town by the name of Entiat, Chelan County. The name is an Indian word supposed to mean "rapid water." Silico Sasket, an Indian who has lived there all his life, says his forefathers as far back as tradition went always lived there. It was a favorite rendezvous for all the Indians for miles around. The Indian word has a difficult guttural ending partially represented by "Entiatqua." The name for the river appears on all the earliest maps of the region. It was applied to the town on February 1, 1896. (C. C. King, first postmaster, in Names MSS., Letter 310.)

Edmond S. Meany in Origin of Washington Geographic Names

Meany, Edmond S., Origin of Washington Geographic Names, 1923 University of Washington, pp 80 | Origin of Washington Geographic Names

Related Catalog Titles

A Bibliography for City of Entiat, Chelan County, Washington

A history of central Washington including the famous Wenatchee, Entiat, Chelan and the Columbia Valleys with an index and eighty scenic-historical illustrations by Lindley M. Hull

Published in 1929 and compiled by Lindley M. Hull for the Pioneer Association of Central Washington, A History of Central Washington is a massive, 624-page regional chronicle detailing the settlement of the Wenatchee, Entiat, Chelan, and Columbia valleys. Divided into two primary sections—"The Story of Pioneer Settlements" and "The Development Period"—the volume combines eighty scenic-historical illustrations with exhaustive biographical sketches of early white homesteaders. The text meticulously documents the physical transformation of the region, emphasizing the construction of irrigation ditches, the establishment of commercial orchards, and the founding of local civic institutions. Like many pioneer-driven histories of the era, the book operates as a triumphalist civic monument celebrating the rugged endurance and capitalist successes of the region's Anglo-American founders.

A keen insight drawn from the work is how the narrative conceptually weaponizes agricultural "development" to morally legitimize colonial displacement. By framing the region's history fundamentally around the engineering of irrigation canals and the cultivation of profitable cash crops, Hull’s compilation equates valid land ownership exclusively with industrial-scale agrarian capitalism. This historiographical maneuver effectively reduces the original Indigenous inhabitants and their complex, pre-existing territorial claims to mere background frontier trivia, occasionally noting them only as transient obstacles or linguistic curiosities. Consequently, the aggressive ecological enclosure and demographic replacement of the region is structurally sanitized, demanding that readers view the settlement of central Washington not as an act of territorial conquest, but as the righteous, inevitable unlocking of a previously "wasted" landscape's true economic destiny.

624 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

CIRC [ 1 ]

Biographies · 1st Edition · Shaw & Borden Co., Spokane, Wash., 1929
Related Catalog Items: City of Entiat · City of Wenatchee · Chelan County · Lake Chelan

Chelan County

Political Boundaries

Last updated: 2017-07-01