Dead Man's Island: Early Names and Burial Traditions of Cutts Island, Puget Sound

Overview

Cutts Island is a small, 2-acre, tree-covered marine state park in Carr Inlet, about half a mile offshore from Kopachuck State Park in Pierce County, Washington.¹ Modern charts label it as Cutts Island State Park, but among residents of Gig Harbor and the Key Peninsula the island is still commonly called "Dead Man's Island."²

Over the last two centuries the island has been recorded under several different names. British and American naval expeditions in 1792 and 1841 called it "Crow Island" and "Scotts Island" respectively, while more recent guidebooks list the local name "Deadman's Island" and repeat a tradition that the island once served as a Native burial place where the dead were placed in canoes in the forks of trees.^{3, 4, 5} The official origin of the present name "Cutts Island" is unknown in the published record.^{1, 6}

Early Recorded Names of the Island

Crow Island (1792)

The earliest known Euro-American name for the island comes from Lieutenant Peter Puget's exploration of southern Puget Sound in May 1792. A modern summary of Puget's journal notes that his boat crew stopped at the small island now called Cutts, where they encountered so many crows that they dubbed it "Crow Island."³ This episode matches later park and guidebook accounts that list "Crow Island" as the island's first recorded name.^{1, 4}

Scotts Island (1841)

During the United States Exploring Expedition under Charles Wilkes in 1841, many features in south Puget Sound were renamed. In this period the island appears as "Scotts Island," honoring Thomas Scott, quartermaster of the expedition. Multiple modern summaries of the island's history list "Scotts Island" as the second major historic name after "Crow Island."^{1, 4, 6}

Cutts Island (20th-century official name)

Today the official name on Washington State Parks materials and on NOAA charts is "Cutts Island State Park."¹ Several reference works make the point that, while the earlier names and the local nickname "Deadman's Island" have clear explanations, the origin of the name "Cutts Island" itself is not known; no definitive namesake has been identified in the public historical record.^{1, 6, 7}

The Origin of the Name "Dead Man's Island"

Modern descriptions consistently note that Cutts Island has also been known as "Deadman's Island" or "Dead Man's Island." State-park and natural-history summaries explain the name by reference to a belief that the island once served as a burial ground for Coast Salish people, who were said to place their dead in canoes set in the forks of trees on the island.^{1, 2, 6, 7}

A paddling guide produced for Kopachuck State Park and the Cascadia Marine Trail describes Cutts Island (about a twenty-minute paddle away) as "also known as Deadman's Island," adding that local lore portrays it as an Indian burial ground where the dead were placed in hollowed-out log canoes and then "placed in the forks of trees so they would be closer to heaven."⁵ A regional hiking and park guide repeats essentially the same tradition, noting that saltwater tribes were believed to have buried their dead in canoes lodged in the trees on the island.⁴

Recreational sources, including a geocache description, likewise list "Deadman's Island" alongside "Crow Island" and "Scotts Island" as historic names for the same feature, reinforcing that by the late twentieth century the burial-ground story and the "Dead Man's" name were well established in local usage.^{7, 8} None of these sources, however, cites a specific nineteenth-century chart or written account where the name first appears, so its exact date of origin remains uncertain.

Tree and Canoe Burials in the South Puget Sound Region

The tradition that Cutts Island was once a burial place is not an isolated story. Ethnographic work on Coast Salish peoples of the Puget Sound region documents above-ground burials in which bodies were placed in canoes or cedar-plank boxes that were then supported in trees or on platforms, sometimes ten to fourteen feet above the ground.^{9, 10, 11}

A detailed summary of Puyallup and Nisqually mortuary customs, for example, describes how the wrapped body might be placed in a fishing canoe and tied to the trunks or branches of adjoining trees, or set in conveniently located forks; people who did not own canoes might instead be bound to cedar planks and suspended in the same manner.⁹ Other Coast Salish communities also practiced tree and canoe burials, which became increasingly common in the late pre-contact and early historic periods.¹¹

A closely related example lies only a short distance from Cutts Island in Hale Passage. The island now called Tanglewood Island was historically known as "Grave Island" and is described in local histories and reference works as a sacred site of the Nisqually people, where honored dead were placed in dugout canoes high in the fir trees. By the late nineteenth century, non-Native collectors had removed many of the burial goods and remains, and the island's Indigenous mortuary features were largely dismantled.¹⁰

In this broader context, the tradition that Cutts Island once held canoe burials in trees fits into a known pattern of burial islands and above-ground mortuary practices in southern Puget Sound, even though no detailed archaeological or tribal report specifically confirming such burials on Cutts Island appears in the published sources surveyed here.

The Dadisman Oral Tradition from Home Colony

On the western shore of Carr Inlet, not far from Cutts Island, the late-nineteenth-century anarchist community of Home Colony was established at Von Geldern Cove. The colony's founders organized as the Mutual Home Association in 1898, and within a few years the Dadisman family had donated additional acreage that allowed the community to grow.^{12, 13}

Historical accounts note that members of the Dadisman family were among the key early landholders at Home, and that by the mid-twentieth century David ("Dave") Dadisman was regarded as one of the last of the old-time residents who remembered the community's early decades.¹³

In local oral history, Dave Dadisman is remembered as saying that, as a younger man, he had seen a canoe or box with a human skeleton high in one of the trees on "Dead Man's Island." According to this recollection, the remains were at some point taken down and buried. This anecdote has not been located in a published interview or archival transcript available online, so it should be treated as an uncorroborated but locally significant memory rather than a documented archaeological observation.

Nonetheless, the details of the story—a canoe or box containing a skeleton placed in a tree on a small offshore island in southern Puget Sound—align closely with the broader ethnographic descriptions of Coast Salish tree and canoe burials and with the better-documented case of nearby Grave (Tanglewood) Island. For that reason, the Dadisman account is often seen by local historians as supporting, rather than originating, the older "Dead Man's Island" tradition.

Assessment

Taken together, the available evidence suggests the following sequence:

• In 1792, Puget's exploration party used the descriptive name "Crow Island" for what is now Cutts Island.
• By the mid-nineteenth century, American naval surveying had introduced the name "Scotts Island" in honor of an officer on the Wilkes expedition.
• At some point in the later nineteenth or early twentieth century, local English speakers adopted the name "Deadman's" or "Dead Man's Island," explicitly linked to stories of earlier Native burials in canoes placed in trees on the island.
• In the twentieth century, the official name "Cutts Island" was established on state and federal maps, even as the local nickname "Dead Man's Island" remained in common use.

Because no specific early chart or written document using the term "Dead Man's Island" has yet been identified in accessible sources, the precise moment when that name entered the record remains uncertain. However, the explanatory tradition attached to the name is consistent across modern guidebooks, park descriptions, and local stories, and it closely matches documented Coast Salish mortuary practices elsewhere in southern Puget Sound.

In the absence of direct archaeological confirmation, it is prudent to treat Cutts Island's "Indian burial ground" reputation as a mixture of genuine Indigenous mortuary history, later settler recollection, and twentieth-century storytelling. Whatever the exact details, the convergence of ethnographic evidence, the Grave Island parallel, and local oral histories such as the Dadisman account all suggest that the "Dead Man's Island" name preserves a memory—however fragmentary—of Coast Salish burial practices on or very near the island.