Chelan ( shə-LAN) is a city in Chelan County, Washington, United States. The population was 3,890 at the 2010 census. The population was 4,222 at 2018 Estimate from Office of Financial Management. It lies on the southeast tip of Lake Chelan, where the lake flows into the Chelan River.

Chelan is allocation of the Wenatchee−East Wenatchee Metropolitan Statistical Area.

The Chelan Place was house to Salish speaking Native Americans known as the Chelan tribe prior to white pact in the late 1800s. But previously the settlers arrived, a further beast, the horse, came and subsequently it just as speedily were smallpox, measles and other deadly infectious diseases. These diseases wiped out an estimated 90% of the Indians before David Thompson, the utterly first fortune-hunter in the area, arrived on the Columbia in 1811. The horse and the culture of the horse correspondingly prevalent behind Indians of the Plains in addition to took over by the period explorers and settlers arrived, so it is difficult to know what the native inhabitants’ lives were really like and who the Indians were past these monumental changes to their quirk of life. A people of the horse, though, they speedily became, adopting Plains Indian dress, beadwork, and more, and in the same way as white settlers came far and wide more changes.

The Indians in the area were organized as small family groups who made decisions, not having a single chief who approved everything. But after white people came there was plus a struggle for power: to preserve control of the lands that bearing in mind were theirs, they needed one person to be skillful to speak for them. Though not a Chelan Indian himself, Chief Moses (a Shahaptin, not Salish speaker from the Columbia Basin and Okanagan) almost had a large section of estate set aside for a reservation. However, with the low number of Indians and the ever-increasing number of miners looking for riches in the mountains, he found that defending his newly acquired territory was impossible and drifting it all.

During a epoch of unrest in the midst of settlers and Native Americans in the 1870s, Lt. Colonel Henry Clay Merriam of the United States Army usual Camp Chelan at the foot of Lake Chelan to govern and safeguard the Indian population upon the Moses Columbia Reservation. His associates was like him for the 1880 Federal Census. The lake was largely inaccessible because of its sheer cliffs upon most sides, so a makeshift road was built from the fort to the Columbia River where a courier and mail give support to from Walla Walla were established. The fort operated for virtually a year and was abandoned in October 1880 next the troops relocated to Fort Spokane.