Indigenous peoples occupied the land around Leque Island for thousands of years before European settlers arrived. The surrounding waters provided abundant fish and marine resources, and the island served as a portage point for travel to the Olympic Peninsula. Early written accounts describe a local leader known as Split-Lip Jim who operated what amounted to a canoe rental service, lending boats and hiring women to row them for travelers crossing the waterways. In the 1870s, Split-Lip Jim partnered with three men -- his brother-in-law Andy Danielson, Nils Eide, and Nels P. Leque -- to purchase the island for farming. It is Nels Leque whose name stuck. The partnership between an Indigenous leader and Scandinavian immigrants reflects the complicated, pragmatic alliances that characterized the early settlement of Puget Sound, where survival often mattered more than the racial divisions hardening elsewhere in the territory.

Farming Leque Island required fighting the water that defined it. Dikes were built around the perimeter to hold back tidal surges and river flooding, and man-made drainage ditches channeled the groundwater that seeped up through the saturated soil. For decades the system worked well enough. But dikes on river deltas are temporary bargains with geography, and chronic failures became an ongoing headache. The Stillaguamish River deposits nutrients and sediment continuously, reshaping the island with every flood cycle. The dike failures forced difficult conversations about whether to keep patching the levees or to let the river reclaim what it had built in the first place. For the private landowner trying to preserve farmland, the answer was obvious -- keep the dikes. For the salmon, the answer was equally clear.

A study by the Stillaguamish Tribe's Natural Resources Department, funded through Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery grants, established something remarkable about the waters around Leque Island: the Port Susan area hosts two genetically distinct populations of Chinook salmon. Juvenile Chinook depend on the estuary habitats surrounding the island -- the tidal channels, mudflats, and shallow marshes where young fish feed and grow before heading out to open water. The study recommended restoring these habitats to their wild state, which meant removing portions of the dike and allowing tidal exchange to resume. Plans called for dismantling the southernmost section of the perimeter dike and using those materials to build a setback dike closer to the highway, protecting the road while giving the estuary room to function. The permitting process proved tortuous, requiring extensions from Snohomish County and additional expenditures, but the ecological case was compelling: threatened Chinook needed the habitat that farming had taken away.

Today Leque Island operates as a Wildlife Recreation Area managed by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. Birdwatchers come for the shorebirds, raptors, and waterfowl that use the delta as a feeding and resting ground. Photographers stake out positions along the dike trails at dawn. In hunting season, the island draws duck and goose hunters, along with pheasant hunters pursuing birds that are stocked on-site. The restoration work continues in the background, a slow, expensive process of undoing a century of agricultural engineering to recover the ecological functions that sustained Chinook salmon and Pacific herring long before anyone thought to build a dike. Leque Island is small and flat and easy to overlook, but it sits at the intersection of everything that makes Puget Sound's estuaries both valuable and vulnerable.