Sultan is a city in Snohomish County, Washington, United States. It is located nearly 23 miles (37 km) east of Everett at the confluence of the Skykomish River and the Sultan River, a youthful tributary. The city had a population of 4,651 at the 2010 census.

The city was founded in 1880 at the site of a Skykomish village and initially fixed during a small gold rush. Sultan was platted in 1889, just prior to the dawn of the Great Northern Railway, and was a hub for mining and the lumber industry. It was incorporated on June 28, 1905, with a population of 700. The city was home to a Civilian Conservation Corps camp during the Great Depression and undertook several civic improvements in the post-war years.

Sultan has previously become a bedroom community for large employment centers in the Puget Sound region. The city has several public parks, a historic museum, and is located close outdoor recreation areas in the Cascade Mountains. It is aligned to easy to use cities by U.S. Route 2.

The area around the Sultan and Skykomish rivers was occupied by the Skykomish, a branch of the Snohomish people, prior to the arrival of American settlers. The Skykomish had a remaining village at the confluence named tʷ’tsɬitɬd, along next a available fishery named stək’talidubc. Following the discovery of a wealthy gold vein along the Sultan River, the land in the region of the confluence was claimed for a homestead by John Nailor and his wife in 1880. Among the first arrivals to the area were Chinese prospectors, who difficult settled the house but were evicted in 1885. Nailor built a little store and hotel to sustain miners and loggers, eventually serving as the first postmaster after the settlement time-honored a state office in 1885. The town and river were named “Sultan”, an anglicization of Tseul-tud (also known as Tseul-dan), then chief of the Skykomish tribe.

The Nailors sold 20 acres (8.1 ha) of their homestead to William B. Stevens in 1889, who filed the first plat for Sultan City that October. The Great Northern Railway placed a supply depot for its railroad workers in Sultan in 1891, meeting river steamboats and contributing to the town’s beforehand growth. Sultan gained its first sawmill in 1891 and a shingle mill in 1895, as the local economy transitioned away from mining and towards logging. Sultan was officially incorporated as a city upon June 28, 1905. At the time, the city had a population of 700 people and three general stores, along gone a variety of small industries. By 1912, the city had a public library, electrical service, paved streets, and was with a want to construct a hydroelectric dam that would also provide municipal water service. A bridge across the Skykomish River was built in 1908 to link up to new farms on the south bank.