DIRTY DAN HARRIS STEAKHOUSE

Food and Beverage > Seafood

Daniel Jefferson Harris was born in 1832 at Southampton, Suffolk County (Long Island) New York. He was the second child in a family of six children. His ancestors go back at least six generations to a George Harris, who was living in Southampton as early as 1657. Dan’s father and grandfather were farmers.
At the age of fifteen, Dan accompanied an uncle on a Artic whaling voyage. Later, at the age of 18 he was commissioned as a boat steerer (harpooner) on the whaleship Levant under the legendary Captain Mercator Cooper. For three years Dan hunted whales all over the Pacific Ocean. The ship is credited with the first U.S. landing on Victoria Land (East Antarctica). Dan is noted as the crew member who actually stepped out onto the ice! Dan departed the Levant in the summer of 1853 in Honolulu. He made his way to then Fort Victoria (British Columbia) the winter of 1853. He arrived on Bellingham Bay in the spring of 1854. In 1855, he filed for a Donation Land Claim on land originally settled by John Thomas, receiving a certificate for 146.44 acres in 1868 and a patent in 1871. Dan later purchased another 43 acres along the shoreline west of his claim. For many years Dan combined homesteading with trading on the wild undeveloped North Puget Sound, first as master of the Schooner "Phantom” and later of a vessel named "Bounding Ball,” in which he carried coal from a 148 acre tract of public land he bought a mile east of his claim.