Washington State’s Mississippi-Style Gambling Boat Sails into Sunset After 25 Years

It’s the end of an era for the Emerald Queen, the Mississippi-style paddlewheel riverboat that was, for a quarter of a century, a familiar sight in the port of Tacoma, Wash. The elegant 300-foot former gambling palace was towed away to Seattle Thursday.

The Emerald Queen was to Spectral Crane and Marine, a Seattle-based equipment rental company of barges and marine assets, according to a statement from the Puyallup Tribal Council at the time. She will be repurposed, but details are unclear.

The Puyallup tribe operated the riverboat, which was moored at the Blair Waterway on the Tacoma waterfront, as a casino from 1997 to 2004.

Spectral Crane and Marine’s owner, Boyer Halverson, told The Tacoma News Tribune that nothing was finalized, but the boat might be converted into a barge. He declined to disclose how much he paid for the vessel, other than that it was “probably too much.”

The tribe purchased the Emerald Queen for $15 million. She was built in 1995 by a Louisiana-based shipyard and styled in the fashion of the classic paddlewheels that plied the waters of the Mississippi River in the 19th century.

The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) opened up opportunities for Native Americans to build casinos on their reservations in the late 1980s, and since the Puyallup’s reservation formed part of the Tacoma waterfront, the tribe settled on a riverboat.

In states such as Louisiana and Missouri, floating casinos were a legal requirement, but they were a novelty in Washington.

The vessel played an important role in assuring the Puyallups’ economic self-determination. But in 2004, the tribe agreed with the Port of Tacoma to shutter the vessel to accommodate additional commercial development of the waterway.

In return, the Puyallups were permitted to build a brick-and-mortar Emerald Queen Casino in nearby Fife, which opened later that year. In 2020, the tribe Emerald Queen venue in Tacoma.

The tribe hung onto the original Emerald Queen for 19 years before last year’s sale, and they looked after her. The broker in the deal reported that she remained in “pristine condition.”

“The riverboat served our Tribe well and laid the foundation for us to open and operate the two premier casinos in the Northwest,” the Puyallup Tribal Council said in a statement.