You can thank eclectic Irishman for Chambers Bay Golf Course

If a local settler hadn’t chased off some Brits with a rifle in 1849, the U.S. Open might be taking place at Chudley Bay Golf Course.

When stars of the media and golf world descend on Pierce County for the U.S. Open next week, like most people around here, they’ll have no idea how the course and the body of water it overlooks got the name “Chambers Bay.”

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The town nearest Chambers Bay is Steilacoom, which is one of the oldest non-native communities in what’s now Washington state. While natives had been in this area for thousands of years, Europeans first settled at Steilacoom around 1832 &#8212 not long after the British-owned Hudson’s Bay Company established Fort Nisqually a few miles away.

In those early years of the 19th century, British and American interests were battling for domination of all of what’s now Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, along with parts of Montana, Wyoming, and British Columbia. The area was known then as the “Oregon Country;” a treaty signed in 1819 allowed the British and the Americans to jointly occupy the land.

The Hudson’s Bay Company was here to collect animal skins for sale in Asia, but Americans came here, too, as missionaries and settlers looking to homestead on the land. Under joint occupation, it was essentially a numbers game &#8212 if more Americans than British settled here, it would create the political will necessary for Oregon to become part of the United States.

Thomas M. Chambers was one of the tens of thousands of Americans who headed west to the Oregon Country in the 1840s. Chambers, along with his wife and six sons, left their native Kentucky and hit the Oregon Trail in 1845.

Before the winter of 1846 set in, they made it as far as The Dalles on the banks of the Columbia River in what’s now north central Oregon. From The Dalles, many emigrants went by boat the rest of the way to Oregon City, which was then the major settlement on the Willamette River south of present-day Portland. Thanks to those six Chambers boys, the family went to Oregon City in style. According to Bancroft’s 1890 history of Washington, “In February 1846, the sons constructed a flat-boat, 12 by 20 feet, with a whip-saw and hammer, using oak pins for nails and loading it with 13 wagons and the goods of seven families.”

The family settled in the Willamette Valley and planted crops for a farm, but Thomas Chambers was unsatisfied and became restless. He told his family that when he’d come west, he’d wanted to be near the salt water. So they packed up a boat with all of their belongings (perhaps the same flat-boat that the sons had built in The Dalles) and headed down the Willamette to the Columbia, and then up the Cowlitz River. After several weeks of exploring, father and several sons staked homestead claims near Olympia on land now known as Chambers Prairie.

But the elder Chambers didn’t stay out on the prairie for long. Sometime in 1849, he and his wife set out, once again, for the salt water that had drawn him from Kentucky.

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The political question of the Oregon Country had been settled in 1846, and “Oregon Territory” officially became part of the United States in 1848. But the British were still a factor here, and there was still friction between Americans and the Hudson’s Bay Company. This did not deter Thomas Chambers from settling on the creek and bay that would eventually bear his name.

According to a 1948 article in The Seattle Times:

“Mr. and Mrs. Thomas M. Chambers moved to a point near Steilacoom where he built a gristmill on what is now Chambers Creek. The land on which they settled was claimed by the Hudson’s Bay Company and they ordered him to vacate. Mr. Chambers was a small man but filled with Irish fighting spirit. Resting his rifle on the top rail of his new fence, he stated that he was there to stay and would maintain his rights at any cost. The Hudson’s Bay people left precipitately and never returned.”

Some historic sources say it was a lumber mill that Chambers built near Steilacoom and not a gristmill. But there’s no debate about the fact that Chambers was quite a character. That same Seattle Times article also related this anecdote:

“Mr. Chambers later was elected probate judge. His home became a center of hospitality for a wide area. He always maintained what he considered the dress of an Irish gentleman. His clothes were tailor-made and he wore a high silk hat, in which he carried his valuable papers. It is said that when John Meeker landed at Steilacoom, he was wearing a silk hat and that his brother [Washington pioneer Ezra Meeker] who met him, threw it on the ground and jumped on it, exclaiming, “You can’t wear that. Judge Chambers is the only man around here entitled to wear a silk hat.”

Chambers died in December 1876 at the age of 85. Several of his sons went on to illustrious careers in the Northwest, and granddaughter Viretta Chambers married Charles L. Denny, son of Seattle founder Arthur Denny &#8212 uniting two of Washington’s earliest pioneer names.

And speaking of names, the great Washington historian Edmond S. Meany notes in his “Origins of Washington Geographic Names” that an 1846 nautical chart published by the British Admiralty calls the tributary near Steilacoom “Chudley Creek.”

Lost to history is the origin of the name Chudley, and lost to Thomas Chambers’ rifle is the name itself.