Lloyd Reiman of Bremerton asks today, in a letter to the editor, why people call the area north of Port Washington Narrows "East Bremerton" when it is clearly north of Bremerton, according to his compass. "Was the Earth's magnetic field compromised?" he wonders.

Well, I contacted my new friend Russell Warren, who has been researching the history of Bremerton for years.

Everybody wanted to be Port Orchard.

The reason, it turns out, has a lot to do with the waterway named by Capt. George Vancouver in 1792, but there are a few interesting twists along the way.

One of the places they landed was in North Kitsap, where sawmills planted some of the first settlements in what today is Kitsap County.

From the first people came the first names.

The Twana, S’Klallam and Suquamish were the first inhabitants of the Kitsap corner of the Pacific Northwest, where archaeologists estimate settlements date back between 2,000 and 10,000 years ago.

While it may be a household name today, at some point someone somewhere has to have asked “What is Seabeck? And where did the name come from?”

Is it a combination of last names? Is it a name designated by an explorer who thought Hood Canal was the sea and it was beckoning him?

Turns out it’s neither.

"The Strong People" as told to Beatrice Charles by Sam Ulmer. From the Lower Elwha Klallam Web site.

One day there was a big gathering at Elwha. They ate salmon, clams,
wild-berries, and lots of good things from nature. They decided to see who
was the strongest. They decided to se who could lift a big log to the top of
a big house that they were building. All of the other Tribe tried to lift
the log. Each Tribe chose their strongest men. None of them could lift the
big log. It was time for the mighty Klallams. They remembered that logs
float in water. So they rolled the big log into the water. Then their
strongest young men walked out into the water until it was up to their
shoulders and walked out of the water carrying the log on their shoulders.
When they reached the longhouse, everyone shouted, “Shasume, Shashume!” On
the third time they all lifted it up to the top. All the other Tribes
thought that they mighty Klallams must be very strong to put the log up so
high, and smart to use the water to first get the log onto their shoulders.
They all shouted, “Klallam Klallam!” which means, “Strong People!” That is
how our Tribe received its name.
The Lower Elwha Klallam near Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula are one of three bands of the S'Klallam Tribe, which also include the Jamestown S'Klallams near Sequim and the Port Gamble S'Klallams of North Kitsap.
The tribe once had villages all along the Strait of Juan de Fuca extending up into British Columbia.
The tribal language is Klallam, one of a large family of Salish languages spoken by Pacific Northwest tribes and distinct from Lushootseed, the language of the other Kitsap tribe, the Suquamish. For a listen, click here.
There are about 1,000 enrolled members of the Port Gamble S'Klallams. About half live on the 1,340-acre Port Gamble Reservation, established in the 1930s after much delay following the tribe's removal from the Port Gamble Mill site in the late 19th century.

Most people know that Poulsbo was named after a town in Norway. That town's name, however isn't so clear.

Was Poulsbo named after Paulsbø or Poulsbomoen? Depends on what you read and who you believe.

Naturally, working in Poulsbo, I've always heard the version that you can find on the city's Web site.

In that account, Poulsbo was settled by Scandinavians in the 1880s, Jorgen Eliason being credited as the founder. Iver B. Moe and family arrived about a month later. Eventually it was Moe who decided the town needed a post office and applied for "Paulsbo". This is a lesson in the lost art of handwriting. The post master misread his application, and "Paulsbo" has been Poulsbo ever since.

Read more by clicking below:

VISIT TO THE SUQUAMISH HATCHERY

The name of the Suquamish Tribe, whose headquarters are on the Port Madison Reservation in North Kitsap that includes the unincorporated town of Suquamish, comes from the name of the tribe's ancestral village, D'Suq'Wub or people of the clear saltwater.
Like all Northwest Coast tribes, the Suquamish depended primarily on salmon and other marine life to sustain them, and through their hatchery and other related activities continue as partners in maintaining and enhancing the wild runs.

Suquamish Woman. Photo courtesy Northwestern University Library, Edward S. Curtis's "The North American Indian," 2003.
It should be noted that Curtis was from Gorst in Kitsap County.

If you're a Kitsap resident, you'd better sit down while reading this. Do you think you live on the Kitsap Peninsula? I'm sorry to break the news, but the Kitsap Peninsula does not exist.

Some may envy the peninsula's original city planners, breezing through the
street-naming process with the easy-to-remember and ubiquotous Firsts,
Seconds, Thirds, etc., mixed with the fairly self-explanatory Pacific
Northwest monikers like Rainier or Oyster Bay.
Then came growth, and with growth, subdivisions. And with subdivisions,
creativity.
At least most of the time.