Eddie Bauer: A Young Man From Orcas Island, WA

As though fated from birth to become an avid outdoorsman, Eddie Bauer’s life began at the base of a mountain on Washington’s famed Orcas Island. However, had either international politics or his father’s itchy feet taken a different path, we may never have had the Eddie who revolutionized the outdoor industry.

In the late 19^th century, Eddie’s German-speaking parents joined thousands in emigrating from the Volga region of Russia to avoid the Czar’s increasingly strict crackdown of their community. While most of the Volga Germans settled in the Great Plains—which would become known as the Dust Bowl in only a few decades—Eddie’s parents headed west and arrived in Seattle in 1890. Within two years, the Bauers had made a strong enough impression that Rolland Denny, a member of one of the city’s founding families, gave them a two-acre plot of land in downtown Seattle.

Had they stayed put, they likely would have ended up as an extraordinarily wealthy family. Instead, Eddie’s father sold the property in 1897 and moved the family to Orcas Island to manage a plum orchard and prune-drying operation. Eddie was born there on October 19, 1899, in a “small farmhouse at the end of the wagon road at the beginning of the trail up Mt. Constitution.”

Eddie loved that story. The romance of being born in a trailhead cabin on a remote island teeming with wildlife and surrounded by the waters of Puget Sound fired his imagination. He was convinced that his origin story was symbolic of the life he would live and the passion for hunting, fishing, and outdoor adventure that would define his career.

However, his time on the island was short, and his true education in the outdoors didn’t start until after he had left. In 1903 the family moved back to the Seattle area, where his father managed a dairy on the eastern shores of Lake Washington. It was here where Eddie first learned to fish, and in the surrounding area where he learned to hunt.

After a short stint in the Madison Park area of Seattle where his father worked as a carpenter, the family moved yet again, this time to another island. When Eddie was 11, his father took a job as caretaker of the Bainbridge Island Country Club, and Eddie’s immersion into the natural world—particularly into hunting and fishing—really took off.

It was also on Bainbridge where he had his first experience with wildlife conservation. With the help of a wealthy landowner, he established a breeding program for Chinese ring-neck pheasants to seed the island’s store of game birds.

Reflecting back years later, he said it was “a great event in my life that taught me that while I loved to hunt and take game and fish, I should also contribute towards protection and propagation, and that it was my duty to always put back more than I took.”