Seattle’s biggest park almost stayed a military base forever. Discovery Park’s more than 500 acres of bluffs, forest, and beach used to be Fort Lawton, an active Army post for about seventy years — and the only reason you can walk any of it today is that a group of Native activists occupied the land in 1970 and refused to leave until the city negotiated.
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An army post that saw more paperwork than combat
Construction started on Magnolia Bluff in 1898, and the post was named Fort Lawton in 1900, after Major General Henry W. Lawton. It sat mostly underused between wars, until World War II, when it processed troops headed to the Pacific and held up to 1,400 German and Italian prisoners of war.
By the late 1960s, the Army barely needed the place. That’s when things got interesting.
The occupation that got the land back
In March 1970, activist Bernie Whitebear and the United Indians of All Tribes staged an organized takeover of part of Fort Lawton, claiming land they argued belonged to the region’s tribes. The story made national news, and after five months of negotiations, the city agreed to a 99-year lease for what became the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center, completed in 1977…