Salt River Bay preserves overlapping Indigenous, European, colonial, and industrial histories on the north coast of St. Croix. Archaeological evidence shows human use of the bay for roughly two thousand years before European arrival. Communities established settlements, gathered marine resources, traded through the Caribbean, and created a ceremonial complex that included a ball court. Pottery, burials, middens, and earthworks document changing lifeways often grouped under Saladoid, Taíno, and Kalinago or Carib labels, although those categories cannot capture every local identity.

On 14 November 1493, during Christopher Columbus's second voyage, Spanish ships anchored at the island he called Santa Cruz. A landing party entered the bay seeking water and encountered Indigenous people returning in a canoe. Fighting broke out, leaving casualties and captives on both sides. Columbus's men called the location Cabo de las Flechas, or Cape of Arrows. The clash is one of the earliest documented armed encounters between Europeans and Indigenous people in territory now under the United States, and it foreshadowed conquest, forced migration, enslavement, and demographic catastrophe across the Caribbean.

European powers competed for St. Croix during the seventeenth century. Dutch and English settlers occupied the vicinity, and a violent confrontation in 1645 helped end their shared settlement. Spanish forces from Puerto Rico expelled the English, only to be displaced by the French. Fortifications were raised near the entrance to control the anchorage; remains commonly associated with French occupation include earthworks known as Fort Salé. The Knights of Malta administered St. Croix before France transferred the island to its crown, and Denmark purchased it in 1733.

Under Danish rule, plantations transformed the island through the coerced labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Salt River Bay served local agriculture, shipping, and coastal defense within an economy dominated by sugar. The United States acquired the Danish West Indies in 1917. Twentieth-century dredging, industry, tourism proposals, and shoreline change threatened archaeological and ecological resources, but investigations also revealed the bay's exceptional concentration of evidence. A marine research facility from the 1960s left a conspicuous legacy in the landscape.

Congress created Salt River Bay National Historical Park and Ecological Preserve in 1992, bringing the National Park Service into a partnership intended to protect cultural sites, mangroves, reefs, a submarine canyon, and a bioluminescent bay. Research and preservation remain complicated by erosion, hurricanes, development, and the sensitive interpretation of human remains and colonial violence. Salt River Bay is important because its history is not confined to Columbus's landing. The ceremonial landscape, the violent 1493 encounter, rival colonial occupations, plantation slavery, and modern conservation all survive within one watershed where cultural and natural systems have always been inseparable. The park's interpretation increasingly centers Indigenous survival rather than treating the 1493 clash as the beginning of island history. Descendant communities challenge older accounts that described the Caribbean as culturally empty after colonization. Archaeology, oral history, and environmental science together show how the bay's fisheries, wetlands, and protected anchorage shaped every occupation. That longer view makes European arrival one violent turning point within a much deeper human history.