This property was situated on the Blair Waterway and was highly valuable land, with the Tribe seeing it as an opportunity to pursue a higher form of economic development. The Tribe proceeded to develop some of its property on the Tacoma waterfront.

With the bingo hall providing some revenue, plans for utilizing more of the land that the Tribe had acquired under the settlement to support gaming endeavors got underway. Payment for the bingo hall was made possible through monies provided to the Tribe under the Land Claims Settlement. In 1992, the Tribe opened a 36,993-square-foot bingo hall just off Interstate 5 in Tacoma, costing approximately $2.1 million and seating upward of 1,500 people. Similar to other tribes across the United States, the Tribe also viewed bingo as gateway to future forays in the realm of gaming. With the notion of economic self-sufficiency for the Puyallup Tribe increasingly becoming a reality after the settlement, the Tribe decided to pursue gaming as a possible solution to its depleting federal revenue. This was in response to the claims to ownership of reservation land that the Tribe had pursued over the decades against local governmental, private, and commercial interests. In the Puyallup Land Claims Settlement of 1990, the Puyallup Tribe was provided a settlement package of $162 million in land, fisheries, economic and social development, and the construction of the Blair Navigation Project in exchange for relinquishing its claims to much of the 18,000 acres of reservation land allocated to the Tribe in the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek, which over the years had been occupied and developed by non-natives, including most of the valuable waterfront property on which the Port of Tacoma's harbor facilities were located. Following a contentious negotiation process between the Puyallup Tribe and the Port of Tacoma regarding the future development of the Blair Waterway and the location of the original casino, an agreement provides the opportunity for the Puyallup Tribe to greatly expand casino gaming, with new or enlarged facilities at both the Fife location and at the Emerald Queen Casino I-5 just off the Interstate in Tacoma.Ĭonsidering Gaming as a Source of Development

On December 29, 2004, the Puyallup Tribe of Indians' new Emerald Queen Casino opens in Fife in northern Pierce County, following reduction in road access to the original paddlewheel riverboat casino located on the Blair Waterway in Tacoma to allow for development of a Port of Tacoma container facility for the shipping conglomerate Evergreen Marine Corporation.

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