Tsamosan

Tsamosan, also called Olympic Salish, is a Salishan branch of western Washington's Southwestern Coast Salish peoples — the Chehalis, Quinault and Cowlitz — villages lining Grays Harbor, Willapa Bay and the Chehalis River around the Olympic Peninsula.

They had no tribes in the political sense: independent villages linked by language and marriage lived on salmon, shellfish and game in cedar-plank longhouses, and the name Chehalis itself means sand, from the main Lower Chehalis village at present-day Westport. Lower Chehalis words also entered the Chinook Jargon.

The sea captain Robert Gray entered Grays Harbor in 1792, the first recorded European contact; after the Hudson's Bay Company built Fort Vancouver, the Chehalis became fur-trade middlemen. Malaria epidemics in the 1830s, above all in 1830, emptied villages and merged surviving groups such as the Willapa Bay Lower Chehalis and Lower Chinook.