The island’s first dwellers were the peaceful Taino Indians, a tribe of the Arawak Indians.  They left behind ancient utensils and little else.  But the island we call the Isle of West Caicos would have looked much the same to them as it does to us today.  They named the island “Makobish”, which means West Caicos.  They were the native culture that Columbus would have encountered in 1492 or perhaps later, by Ponce de Leon – even that remains a hotly disputed debate.  The descendants of the Tainos or Lucayans – as Columbus called them – are scattered among the Caribbean Islands.

The Caicos Banks – south of the Caicos group, where in the space of 1,00 yards the water depth changes from 6,000 to 30 feet – claimed many of the Spanish ships lost in the central Caribbean from the 16^th to the 18^th century.

West Caicos was cleared in the 1850s for salt production and later in the 1890s for the cultivation of sisal.  Both enterprises failed due to financial conditions at the time.  Yankee Town, as it was then know, is now a ghost town on the west coast near the shores of Lake Catherine, a saline body of water that rises and falls with the tides.  The lake is now a National Park that is home to flocks of flamingos.  This abandoned settlement, still contains a sisal press, the ruins of railroad tracks, engines, and the remnants of an old stone wall crested with an elaborate osprey’s nest.  For more than a century, West Caicos has been uninhabited and has remained a natural habitat for sea birds, iguanas, turtles and other wildlife. 

Following Spanish, French and British control, Trujillo – dictator of Santo Domingo – attempted to purchase the entire island of West Caicos as a hideaway shortly before his assassination, but a clear title count not be negotiated.  As late as 1972, a large oil company wanted to develop a large oil refinery on the island and built an airstrip in anticipation of that happening.  It didn’t.  The airstrip remains today and the Isle of West Caicos, thankfully has been left in its pristine state, a Dependent Territory of Great Britain.