January 12, 2019 • 39 mins
Today we're revising a 2013 episode about the Suquamish chief who is best remembered for a speech he gave upon discovering that Governor Stevens wanted land to build a railroad. However, the speech's origins are nebulous (and in some quotations completely fabricated).
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday everyone. Coming up next week on the podcast,
we have a two parter on Sojourner Truth, and one
of the things that we are going to talk about
is the background of her most famous speech and questions
about how accurate the most well known version of it is.
That is the speech that is known today as ain't
Ile Woman. And along the way in that two parter,
we mentioned parallels to a similarly famous speech attributed to
(00:25):
Chief Seattle, and we talked about that back in March
of two thousand thirteen in one of the very first
episodes that the two of us did together on the show,
So this seems like a good time to revisit it. Also,
this is a really great example of how much we
have learned and how much we have forgotten since we
started working on this show. Like, for example, we talked
(00:47):
about a cooking technique of using heated rocks inside baskets,
and that came up again in Unearthed in July, and
by that point it sounds as though we've never heard
of such a thing. Well, by the time my brain
pushed it out, it's like I've never heard of it.
So it's fine, So enjoy. Welcome to stuff you missed
(01:10):
in history class From how Stuff Works dot com. Hello
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Fry. We are going to talk today about
something you may have learned about in school that you
may have learned about wrongly, and that is Chief Seattle
(01:33):
in a very famous oration that he made allegedly in
eighteen fifty four. Except except probably not. The reality is
a little different from what people are usually taught. Very true,
so Chief Seattle really was a real person. He was
chief of the Suquamish and other related tribes around the
area now known as Seattle through the mid eighteen hundreds
(01:55):
when settlers were moving into the area, and what many
people remember him for, in addition to the city of
Seattle being named after him, is a speech that he gave,
although many versions of the speech that circulate are absolutely
not by him at all. We will talk a little
bit more about that and just a bit so for
(02:16):
a little bit of background about the Suquamish people. Suquamish,
which is an Americanized pronunciation of their name, actually means
a place of clear salt water, and that they and
other nearby tribes were primarily fishers, hunters, and gatherers at
the time before American settlement of that part of the world.
(02:37):
They lived in cedar plank long houses in the winter,
and then in the rest of the year they would
travel around using dugout cedar canoes and stay in temporary
camps that were made of structures made from tree sap
saplings that were covered with mats made of woven cattail.
And they also were really well known for making these
hard watertight baskets from coiled cedar roots, and they could
(03:01):
actually use these baskets for cooking. They would heat rocks
up in the fire and drop them into liquid filled
baskets to create a very heated water source which they
could then drop other things into you and cook them. Yes,
this is a tribe that still exists today. It has
about nine and fifty members and about half of those
members live on a reservation up in the Pacific northwest UM.
(03:24):
The most notable famous person from this tribe is Chief Seattle.
And that also is an Americanized pronunciation, like many non
English names, and includes characters and phonemes that don't exist
in English. UM and an approximation of the actual pronunciation
of it. Is seat, and we don't really end words
(03:47):
with in that way, and so it's sort of gradually
became softened to Seattle. According to the Sequamish Foundation, the
tribe doesn't really object to him being called Seattle all.
He did himself have some misgivings about the city being
named for him at various points in his life. He's
sort of worried that, because of the importance of names
(04:10):
in his culture, that having people repeatedly use his name
in a context that was not about him and kind
of a casual, possibly dismissive way, might cause problems after
he was gone. But before his death, reportedly he had
come to think of it as a mark of honor.
Now we don't know a whole lot about Seattle's early
(04:31):
years because he doesn't really appear in the historical record
until he's an adult, right there. There are a few
official UH and tribal records from various points in his life.
A lot of the earliest part. You have really a
lot of different sources that contradict each other. Even when
you look at tribal sources, some of them contradict each other. UH.
(04:53):
By his own account, he was born on Blake Island
and central Puget Sound and his mother was named Sholiza.
She was a Duwamish woman from Green River, and his
father was shwi Abe from the Suquamish village and Agate Pass.
So he had a mother who was Duwamish and a
father who was Suquamish, and so his his bloodline sort
(05:14):
of united those two tribes. Um When he was born,
it was a time when huge amounts of illness were
spreading through the Native American population. About thirty percent of
the population in that area died within eighty years after
first contact with the white settlers because of introduced diseases,
and by Seattle's own account, he witnessed the first contact
(05:37):
between the Pacific Northwest and settlers when George Vancouver reached
Bainbridge Island in sevento in the h M. S Discovery.
Yes Uh Seattle had two important events that led to
his becoming chief. The first was that he went on
a vision quest for spirit power as a youth and
he received thunderbird power. Um thunder and lightning had a
(05:59):
really strong spiritual significance, and thunderpower was said to give
a person power as a warrior and as speaker. There
are accounts of Seattle, saying that he had a great
boom booming voice, and that if he yelled at you,
the ground would physically tremble, and that when he gave
speeches he could be heard like half a mile away.
Like there was a lot tied to him, this idea
(06:20):
of voice and speech and very powerful speech. And the
second other thing that is an important part of the
story of him becoming chief is that while defending a
settlement from raiders traveling down the White River, he had
warriors chopped down trees just downriver of a particularly dangerous bend,
and the incoming raiders canoes crashed and they couldn't get through,
(06:43):
so their water their riders were spilled into the water.
And it's fairly easy to defend yourself against people who
are floundering in the waters coming at you rapidly on boats. Right,
The incoming raiders were handily dispatched when they came around
this like treacherous curve and crashed to a tree, which
is pretty ingenious. Right. Word spread of that he was
(07:04):
named to be an important chief, and he became known
in his leadership as an intelligent and formidable leader. There
are several sources that say that he owned slaves who
he either freed after signing treaties with the settlers or
after the emancipation Proclamation. There sources kind of contradict each
other on when he's freed the slaves that belonged to him,
(07:26):
but owning slaves is a pretty common practice in many tribes.
Often people from the opposing tribe would kind of be
spoils of war and would become the slaves of the
conquering tribe, which is pretty common throughout all history and
many cultures. Yeah, I think I think some people have
the mistaken idea identity idea. Uh, there's only one culture
(07:49):
that enslaved other people, and there are many cultures that
have enslaved other people. But onto his wives. So his
first wife, Ladelia, he was really quite deeply in love with, uh,
and she died shortly after giving birth to their first child,
Kiki so Blue, who was also known to the settlers
as Princess Angeline. She's a notable historical figure in that
(08:10):
area and the area as well. Um Seattle was really
grief stipped stricken when his wife died, and he only
talked about her openly much much later in his later years.
He got married again to Uh, and I am going
to have trouble with this pronunciation um YoY ill. And
they had two daughters and three sons together. Now, an
(08:33):
interesting part of his story is that he was actually
baptized into the Catholic Church. I think sometimes it's easy
to forget that there really was some blending of culture
going on. Uh. And after the death of one of
his sons was when he was baptized, and he took
the name Noah Seattle at that time, and his children
were raised in the Catholic faith. And after Seattle's conversion,
(08:55):
he focused less on defending and occupying his territory and
more on building peaceful relations within the tribe and with
the settlers that were coming in right. The American settlers
had gotten to the Puget Sound area around eighteen forty six,
and Seattle established himself from the very start as a
welcoming and peaceful presence. He tended to make friends with settlers.
(09:20):
He instructed the people in his tribes to try to
help people. They established fisheries in conjunction with the settlers,
and in particular, he was very close friends with a
man named doctor David S. Maynard, who was known as
Doc Doc Maynard was the first doctor and merchant in Seattle, UM,
and he was a prominent person. He owned most of
(09:42):
the land that is Pioneer Square in Seattle today, and
the settlement that actually became known as Seattle was established
in eighteen fifty two, which is just six short years
after the American settlers landed in the Puget Sound area.
So in March eighteen fifty three, WHI Shington was separated
out from the Oregon Territory and in October Governor Isaac Stevens,
(10:05):
who was thirty five at the time, arrived in Olympia,
the capital of Washington. In addition to being governor of
the territory, he was also the Commissioner of Indian Affairs,
and one of his jobs as the governor and as
the Commissioner for Indian Affairs was to secure land for
the Transcontinental Railroad, and that was going to require the
local tribes to see their land to him. So it's
(10:28):
in this context that Seattle has met Stevens for the
first time and Stephen wants to secure the land. That
Chief Seattle reportedly gave a speech. Allegedly this was delivered
to Stevens or in the presence of him on the
steps of Doc Maynard's office after he was introduced to
Stevens and heard that Stevens wanted to to get the
(10:48):
local land from the native population. Um. According to what
has been reported, this happened on Steven's first visit into
the town. But that's a little hard to concretely verify
because we only have a few situations in that the
history of the area when we know that Seattle and
(11:09):
Stevens were in the same place at the same time.
So there's been a lot of speculation about when exactly
this speech may have taken place, and it in many
of the accounts where it happened very um, almost immediately
after they met. It's a little bit tricky to get
your head around the idea of this great speech being
made pretty quickly after, like a handshake in a quick
(11:30):
discussion right there there. Yeah, we'll talk about that as
we talk about the text of the speech a little bit. Uh.
This is a speech that some people may have read
in school. What they read in school may not have
been remotely accurate. And here's why. Um. The first speech
was purportedly recorded by a doctor Henry Smith, as notes
(11:52):
as the address was was delivered. Um. He then reconstructed
that speech from his notes and published it in the
Seattle Sunday Star in seven so it was thirty two
or thirty three years after it was reportedly delivered. Occasionally
people say that this speech was made at the signing
(12:12):
of the Point Elliott Treaty. We know for sure this
is not the case because, uh, Smith says pretty specifically,
this happened in Seattle on the steps of Doc Maynard's office.
That is not where the Point Elliott Treaty was signed.
And Smith was also not present at Point Elliott's and
he would have not been able to make notes. No. Uh.
(12:33):
The second version is basically an edited, rewritten version of
Smith's that was published in the Seattle Sunday Star, which
was done by a poet named William Aerosmith. This is
the same content, but the grammar and structure are different,
so it's sort of like updating the Victorian English record
to be a little bit more modernized in its tone invoice.
(12:55):
And then the third and most famous iteration of the
speech that's attributed to chiefs Seattle is reported to be
a letter that Chief Seattle Seattle wrote to the President,
which would have been either Polk or Pierce, depending on
who you're looking at in terms of who cites this speech.
But it was actually written not at all by Seattle.
(13:15):
It was written so much later seventies by a guy
named Ted Perry for an environmental film called Home, which
was written for the Southern Baptist Convention. Uh, it's this
is where it just this is a lot of people
really dwell on the speech and whether it was authentic.
It's pretty clearly was not. But this speech has been
quoted in numerous anthologies. It was made into a children's
(13:38):
book called Brother Eagle Sister Sky. Joseph Campbell talked about
it in the Power of Myth. It's like made it
onto bumper stickers and T shirts all over the place.
It took on a life of its own, it really did.
And it sort of starts with this, uh, this thing
that was published in the Seattle Sunday Star. It starts
with some similarities to that, and then it veers off
in a very environmental direction with very bumber sticker quotable
(14:03):
quotes in it. Um, we know for sure that this
was not a letter to the president. Um. In addition
to the fact that James K. Polk was dead in
there's not any record of any such letter going from
Seattle to the president, and a letter from a Native
American chief to the President would have made several bureaucratic
stops on the way, and there's no record of it
(14:24):
in any of those places. There's also no record of
Chief Seattle asking anyone to write a letter for him,
and since he was illiterate, he would have needed to
do that. And then the cherry on top, Ted Perry
wrote it, and he says he wrote it. He says
he wrote it, He acknowledges authorship of it. Right. So
(14:49):
I'm going to take a minute and just sort of
read a little snippet of the Seattle Sunday Star version
and the Ted Perry version, and the there's a twofold
purpose here wants to give you an idea of the
tone of the speech that was allegedly given originally, and
the other is to give you an idea of how
completely different from that the Ted Perry version is. And
(15:09):
we're gonna talk a little bit more about the Sunday
Star version in a minute. So this is a snippet
from the Seattle Sunday Star version. Chief Seattle says Your
God is not our God. Your God loves your people
and hates mine. He folds his strong, protecting arms lovingly
about the pale face and leads him by the hand
(15:30):
as a father leads an infant son. But he has
forsaken his red children, if they are really his our God,
the Great Spirit, seems also to have forsaken us. Your
God makes your people wax stronger every day. Soon they
will fill all the land. Our people are ebbing away
like a rapidly receding tide that will never return. The
(15:52):
white man's God cannot love our people, or he would
protect them. They seem to be orphans who can look
nowhere for help? How and can we be brothers? It's
very sad, it is, But it's also very weird when
you remember that he was a Catholic. Yes, it's it's
weird with a lot of context that we'll talk about
in more detail. Um the the whole of it has
(16:13):
been categorized into this idea of of a farewell speech.
There are several speeches delivered by Native Americans within that
era that that sort of lament the death of Native
American culture and the face of white settlement. Another really
famous one would be chief Chief Joseph gave such an address. Um,
(16:34):
we'll talk a little bit more about why that interpretation
of this is kind of problematic in a few minutes.
But here's a piece of the Ted Perry version. Uh,
and it's it does start off following some similar points
to what I just read, but then it goes into
this environmental direction, with things like you must teach your
children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes
of our grandfathers, so that they will respect the land.
(16:57):
Tell your children that the earth is rich with the
lives of our in Teach your children that what we
will have taught our children, that the earth is our mother.
Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth.
If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.
This we knew. The earth does not belong to man.
Man belongs to the earth. This we knew. All things
(17:19):
are connected, like the blood which unites one family. All
things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons
of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life.
He is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does
to the web, he does to himself. That has two
bits of it that often show up on T shirts
and bumper stickers and that kind of thing. Well, and
(17:41):
it's easy to see why. I mean, it is very
moving and you know, really quotable, very quotable, sort of
poignant from an ecological standpoint, which I think part of
the reason that myth grows and you know, continues this
attribution of these words with Chief Seattle is that we
(18:03):
normally associate that sort of awareness of the earth and
the planet as something bigger than just what we're you know,
sort of running on day to day. We associate that
closeness more with Native Americans than we do with the
European settlers. Right, it really did take on a weird
life of its own. Um And the reason it's so
(18:24):
quotable is because it was written for a film. It
was written to be quotable. Yes, So I've read lots
of things that kind of dissect all the ways in
which that particular version of the address does not make
any sense in the context of the time. But we're
not going to really get into them, because we know
the real story already that Ted Perry wrote it, Like,
(18:44):
we don't really need to go and dissect all the
ways in which it was not would not make sense
for Chief Seattles who have said something about trains when
he never saw a train, because we know that Ted
Perry wrote it. So for the really the rest of
this podcast, the the version of the address that we're
talking about is the one that was printed in the
Seattle Sunday Star. Um. It was reprinted many times throughout
the year. Was reprinted, not not as many times as
(19:06):
the ten Berry version, but it did get it got
its share of attention. UM. At various points that text
was reprinted in pamphlets and books and histories and things
like that. At some point along the line, somebody added
a thirteen word finish. Um. He he ends with the
idea of not to dismiss the dead because the dead
(19:27):
are not powerless. And somebody added a sort of thirteen
word word coda that says dead. I say there is
no death, only a change of worlds. And that's not
in the original Sunday Star version. So that got added
in and then sort of picked up and passed along
as it was reprinted. Um. We're going to sort of
talk now about how even when we have this text
(19:50):
that came from the Seattle Sunday star. We're still not
really sure how authentic it is or how well it
actually represents the words that were spoken at the time.
And it begins with the guy who wrote it down. Dr.
Henry Smith was a scholar and sources said that he
was bilingual in English and Duwamish. And that is a
little weird because what the Duwamish tribes actually spoke was
(20:13):
a language called lu showed Seed and I apologize if
I have pronounced that wrongly. Um. Any address that Chief
Seattle gave would have been made in this language and
then translated to the Chinnook jargon, which was sort of
a common tongue uniting all of the people that lived
in that in that area, then it would have been
translated into into English. We don't really know which of
(20:34):
the versions Dr Smith was listening to when he took
his notes. Um. And it is worth noting that the
fact that Seattle either didn't speak at the jargon or
said he didn't speak the jargon jargon kind of sets
him apart from other people in the area, Like, that's
kind of a weird decision to make to say, I
just I don't speak this common tongue. I lead all
of these tribes who speak a language I do not, right. Um,
(20:56):
but that meant that he had to have an interpreter everywhere,
which sort of became mark of status. Like, if we
are going to entertain this, this diplomat from these tribes,
we're going to need to make sure that we do
this thing of getting an interpreter for him. So we
don't really know which of these three versions that were
probably being delivered was the one that Dr Smith took
(21:17):
his notes from. And we do know, I mean, he
is a fairly reliable figure in that he was a
superintendent of local schools, he was a member of the legislature.
So it's not like he was just a self proclaimed
scholar who swooped in and claimed to understand these things.
He really was pretty ingrained in the area. Um, you know,
(21:38):
he wasn't just a someone claiming to be knowledgeable about
these things. He was an established part of the community.
But the place where it gets a little weird, though,
is that the column and the Sunday Star where he
published this speech, in addition to it being thirty two
or thirty three years after the fact, was part of
an eleven part series that was celebrating the pioneers of Seattle. Um,
(22:00):
it was, as we often see generational divides happening. There
was this generational divide happening between the people known as
the Old Seattle, which were the pioneers that had settled
the area and established the city, and New Seattle, which
was the young entrepreneurs who were gradually taking those people's
places in society. So the fact that he was trying
(22:21):
to put Old Seattle in its best light might have
influenced the way Smith reinterpreted and reconstructed his notes when
he was making the version that he put in the
Seattle Sunday Star. And even his description of Seattle at
the address kind of exemplifies this. He describes the chief
as putting his hand on the head of a visible
(22:43):
nobleman and then taking up a posture that resembles what
we think of in ancient Roman senators. Yeah, Like if
if you look at old pictures of people giving orations,
like paintings of people giving orations in Rome, and they
have this very noble bearing and they have sort of
a hand lifted up, That's that's the trade that Smith
paints when he's introducing this speech. Um, it definitely comes
(23:06):
off as prophetic because it talks a lot about the
decline of the Native American population in the face of
white settlers. It's possible that the reason that it comes
off as prophetic is because Smith reconstructed it with knowledge
of what happened in the next thirty years, which really
was an orchestrated attempt by the government and lots of
(23:27):
places to push Native Americans out of land and to
break up tribes so that their original culture would be
less prevalent or or just removed from their way of life.
Like he knew about all that stuff because it had
happened in the interim, right, it had happened in the interim.
Another thing that had happened in the interim was the
(23:49):
what we mentioned a little earlier, which was Chiefs Joseph's
sort of farewell speech that happened in eighteen seventy seven.
So it's possible that some of the fatalism in the
tone is influenced by its Smith's knowledge of what happened
later and of the kind of speeches that other Native
Americans we're making elsewhere in the United States. And additionally,
(24:11):
it's we should note that Seattle already had a reputation
for being really friendly and welcoming to the white settlers
that were coming long before Governor Stephen's arrival. So it's
pretty uncharacteristic that he would suddenly have this sort of negative, um,
very dark speech. It was full of pessimism and mourning
(24:31):
and it's a sense of impending doom. But he had
a pretty favorable relationship with a lot of white settlers
in the area, so it seems that he may have
been concerned about about land being removed from his tribe.
But the overwhelming sense of sadness um seems possibly not
(24:52):
characteristic of his other encounters with white settlers. And there's
also no record of this speech in the Smithsonium, it's
none in the National Archives, it's not in the Library
of Congress. The primary source that we have is something
that was written down in the note form in note starting,
a note form more than more than thirty years after
the fact. We do though have as a reference to
(25:15):
short speeches that Seattle made at the Point Elliott Treaty Council,
which was from December eight fifty four UM. And these
are from the record of the proceedings and the Bureau
of Indian Affairs and the National Archives. They are so
dissimilar in style and wor wording to the Seattle Sunday
Star piece. They're so different. I can read you both
(25:37):
of them, which I am going to do. Um. The
first is I look upon you as my father, I
and the rest regard you as such. All of the
Indians have the same good feeling toward you, and we'll
send it in paper to the Great Father. All of
the men, old men, women and children rejoice that he
has sent you to take care of them. My mind
(25:59):
is like yours. I don't want to say more. My
heart is very good towards Dr Maynard. I want always
to get medicine from him. That's the thing. One. The
other is is presumably after the treaty was signed, and
he says, now by this we make friends and put
away all bad feelings, if ever we had any. We
(26:20):
are the friends of the Americans. All the Indians are
of the same mind. We look upon you as our father.
We will never change our minds, but since you have
been to see us, we will always be the same. Now,
now do you send this paper so vastly different in
tone from from this other address that was supposedly delivered.
(26:42):
You know, within a year or so of this. Um,
we could get into things that are kind of trouble
like the the deferential tone that that people might think
is is troubling in this particular set of addresses. But
I'm more interested in looking at how that sounds so
much different from this thing that was allegedly delivered on
Documentard's office steps. Yes, and several people that were supposedly
(27:07):
there have no had no memory of such an address
that was that longer impassioned. A local interpreter by the
name of BF Shaw was there, he didn't remember it.
David S. Maynard's widow, Catherine, was there, and she had
no recollection of a long impassioned speech. Uh. And there
aren't any other contemporary records of Seattle delivering any speeches
like it. Uh. You know, the newspaper in Olympia did
(27:29):
not report any similar things. There's really no historical record
of speeches of that nature being made by him, right. Uh.
One of the primary chroniclers of the history of the
Pacific Northwest from that time is a man named Clarence B. Bagley.
He moved with his family to the Pacific Northwest when
he was nine, and, in addition to working a lot
(27:51):
of other jobs from painting to running minds. He was
a newspaperman, and he became like a really prominent local historian.
He was part of the founding of the Washington State
Historical Society, and he wrote two three volume histories, one
of Seattle and one of King County, which is the
county that Seattle is in UM, and both of these
are still looked on as achievements in the documenting of
(28:13):
the Pacific Northwest history. UM. He mentions more than once
in his book that Chief Seattle and Doc Maynard were
great friends. UM, and this speech supposedly happened on Doc
Maynard's office steps. So it seems sort of odd too
many historians today that the friendship between Seattle and UH
(28:33):
and Doc Maynard would have been important enough to mention
more than once in these histories, but that a speech
of that length with that tone would not be UM.
The last thing that kind of makes people question how
authentic this recording from the Seattle Sunday Star is is
that Smith said on his deathbed that the account was
(28:54):
true and accurate, which seems a little strange to people
that that would be what you spend your death, your
dying breath, UH reiterating that thing that I wrote in
the Seattle Sunday Star was really a thing that happened, Yes,
especially since there's really no corroborating evidence for it. It's
(29:15):
just it's an, as you said, it's an odd last
words scenario. The general consensus, I mean, there's there's a
surprising maybe not surprising, there's a there's a fair amount
of debate about lots of aspects of this speech, and
(29:37):
that the general consensus is probably there was an address
of some sort, probably that happened when Chief Seattle was
introduced to Governor Stevens. But that probably what we have
today is a record of it is not a hundred
percent what actually was said. It just it's not quite
feasible for something to be reconstructed from notes thirty years
(30:00):
for the fact to be accurate to what had happened
at the time. Well, and it's also important to take
into account that we were still early on in our relationship,
you know, in terms of Native Americans and the settlers
and pioneers coming in. That relationship was still very early.
It was so the linguistic development between them, like learning
(30:23):
each other's languages, was probably you know, still in its
infancy in many ways, so there were probably lots of
nuances of language that were not clear to each side.
So in terms of interpretation, there's some great area. Right.
It continues to be an important address. I think it's importance.
(30:43):
Some of it has to do with this whole backstory
of understanding better, uh, the context in which it may
have happened, and the relationships among the people involved, and
a lot of that leads into the legacy of Chief
Seattle and of this speech. Um. He had a pretty
well coming attitude toward settlers for his entire life really
(31:04):
and especially his time as chief, and this didn't really
make him popular with all of the rest of the
Native American population, especially when he signed the Point Elliott
Treaty in eighteen fifty five. That treaty relinquished all of
the tribal claims to most of the land in the area.
What was supposed to happen was that the tribes would
get access to hunting and fishing grounds, healthcare, education, and
(31:28):
a reservation in exchange for doing all of that. Uh.
That is, as we all know, not really what happened.
And it took three years for the treaty to be
ratified and by the time it was ratified, it was
very different from what people had originally agreed to you,
So there was a whole lot of unrest among the
(31:49):
Native American people. Um it's it's pretty telling when you
look at historical accounts. A lot of the most mainstream
ones talk about how Seattle was always a friend to
the settlers and he signed this this treaty out of friendship.
When you look at tribal records, the tone is more
that he was afraid of a military conflict that he
(32:10):
knew there was no way to win. So it's something
that you can definitely look at from multiple angles thinking
about the relationships between these two people, which from this
point was definitely not as positive as it had been
in the very earliest days of the founding of Seattle.
Well and the Native Americans did accuse Seattle of uh duplicity,
(32:31):
and it really led to a lot of ongoing problems,
especially because of how the treaty actually played out once
it was in effect. There were wars between the native
tribes and the settlers in the mid eighteen fifties all
through those lots of things, lots of areas of the
Pacific Northwest where they were wars between the Native Americans
(32:52):
and the settlers, and Seattle continued to remain an ally
and tried to keep his tribes out of the battle
um at. In some points he would warn the American
settlers of incoming attacks by other tribes. So he continued
to stand by the white settlers, even as a lot
(33:12):
of the other Native tribes nearby, and the ones that
were maybe not part of his his particular collection of tribes,
really fled back against the settlers. And after the town
of Seattle was incorporated in eighteen sixty five, ordinance actually
forbade permanent Indian houses within the city limits, so he
(33:33):
had to give up his home, yeah, which he had not.
They had already, you know, already figuratively there had been
of giving up of the homeland. And then he literally
had to move out of the city. He moved to
the Port Madison Sequamash Reservation, and he died there after
a brief illness in June of eighteen sixty six, at
about the age of eighty. Since we're not completely sure
(33:56):
exactly when he was born, that's an estimate. We know
that his funeral involved both Catholic and Native rights, but
there wasn't a record of it in the newspapers at
the time, not really involved in any of the records
of the local white settlers. Uh to our knowledge. No
leaders who had known him and who had helped found
(34:17):
the city with his assistants attended his funeral, so by
that point, by the point of his death, he was
not well known in the area anymore, at least among
the settlers. The Seattle Weekly Intelligent Intelligencer printed an article
about his funeral in eighteen seventy, so it was some
years after it happened, and then the Seattle Sunday Star
(34:37):
with his speech, came out in eighteen eighty seven. He
started to become a folk hero at that point, and
the Ted Perry speech from the seventies made him into
more of a household name, and some history minded people
put up a marker in eighteen ninety that read Seattle,
Chief of the Suquamps and Allied tribes died June seventh,
eighteen sixty six, from friend of the Whites, and for him,
(35:00):
the city of Seattle was named by its founders. The
reverse side Read's baptismal name. Noah's self age probably eighty years,
so there is a marker, but it didn't go up
for I didn't go up until some people decided that
there should be one. It was sort of marked with
a rough year twenty four years later. Yes, it was
(35:21):
roughly marked before that point. The Suquanas tribe opened a
museum in Seattle in September, which is about the tribe's
history and culture. Chief Seattle does play a small part
in the overall museum, but he's not the center focus
of it. The Seattle Times quotes the museum director as saying,
I think the tribe is consciously trying to move away
(35:44):
from Chief Seattle being the beginning, middle, and end of
the tribe. It's in no way a reflection of less
esteem or less respect. It was not there yet the
last time I was in Seattle. Nope, now I want
to go either. It's quite recent. Uh so, yeah, I
want to go to Yeah. It's it's so interesting to
(36:06):
see how history treats him, right, you know, in terms
of him having it once been. I mean, I know,
for me growing up in the seventies in just outside
of Seattle, there was lots of Chief Seattle talk. So
it's very interesting now to know that in the museum,
at least, his role is played down a little bit
(36:28):
right well, and I can imagine it being since the
city was named after him, growing up in the area,
growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I think that people's
exposure to Chief Seattle and who he was and what
his legacy was, and what the Native Americans in the
area are like is probably vastly different from much of
the rest of the United States. I would imagine, yes,
(36:51):
having not grown up in the rest of the United
States to compare, I guess I love Seattle. I think
it's an awesome, beautiful part of the world, and I
am glad that we have the records that we do
have of what the settlement there was like. It is
as many parts of American history are. When it comes
(37:12):
to the relationship between settlers and Native Americans, is very distressing,
especially when you consider that after the time period that
we've talked about, there were some pretty orchestrated efforts by
the government to try to basically breed out in quotes,
Native Americans. That was like sending Native American children to
boarding schools so that they wouldn't be exposed to their
(37:33):
native culture, uh, that type of thing. So the fact
that the Squamish tribe has been able to survive in
the face of all that is is noted as an achievement.
Uh that there are still nine fifty members after all
of that. Indeed, I feel like we're ending on a
sad note. I know, I'm trying to think of a
way to make it happy. But there's a new museum.
(37:57):
There is a new museum, and the pictures of it
look beautiful, gorgeous. They look really beautiful and like a
really wonderful place to go and learn more about cultural
history of that part. Anytime you travel in the Pacific
Northwest and the Native American influence is so visible in
a lot of places, and so being able to see
where that all comes from instead of it just being
(38:17):
sort of the facade stuck on the building, I think
is a wonderful thing to be able to do. Yes,
maybe we should have a pilgrimage. Let's do let's have
a history field trip. We can visit my brother. I
also have a brother and a sister. There were covered.
(38:38):
Thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday.
If you have heard an email address or a Facebook
you are l or something similar over the course of
today's episode. Since it is from the archive that might
be out of date. Now. You can email us at
history podcast at how stuff works dot com, and you
can find us all over social media at missed in History.
And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
(39:01):
Google podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else
you listen to podcasts. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com m
Happy Saturday everyone. Coming up next week on the podcast,
we have a two parter on Sojourner Truth, and one
of the things that we are going to talk about
is the background of her most famous speech and questions
about how accurate the most well known version of it is.
That is the speech that is known today as ain't
Ile Woman. And along the way in that two parter,
we mentioned parallels to a similarly famous speech attributed to
(00:25):
Chief Seattle, and we talked about that back in March
of two thousand thirteen in one of the very first
episodes that the two of us did together on the show,
So this seems like a good time to revisit it. Also,
this is a really great example of how much we
have learned and how much we have forgotten since we
started working on this show. Like, for example, we talked
(00:47):
about a cooking technique of using heated rocks inside baskets,
and that came up again in Unearthed in July, and
by that point it sounds as though we've never heard
of such a thing. Well, by the time my brain
pushed it out, it's like I've never heard of it.
So it's fine, So enjoy. Welcome to stuff you missed
(01:10):
in history class From how Stuff Works dot com. Hello
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Fry. We are going to talk today about
something you may have learned about in school that you
may have learned about wrongly, and that is Chief Seattle
(01:33):
in a very famous oration that he made allegedly in
eighteen fifty four. Except except probably not. The reality is
a little different from what people are usually taught. Very true,
so Chief Seattle really was a real person. He was
chief of the Suquamish and other related tribes around the
area now known as Seattle through the mid eighteen hundreds
(01:55):
when settlers were moving into the area, and what many
people remember him for, in addition to the city of
Seattle being named after him, is a speech that he gave,
although many versions of the speech that circulate are absolutely
not by him at all. We will talk a little
bit more about that and just a bit so for
(02:16):
a little bit of background about the Suquamish people. Suquamish,
which is an Americanized pronunciation of their name, actually means
a place of clear salt water, and that they and
other nearby tribes were primarily fishers, hunters, and gatherers at
the time before American settlement of that part of the world.
(02:37):
They lived in cedar plank long houses in the winter,
and then in the rest of the year they would
travel around using dugout cedar canoes and stay in temporary
camps that were made of structures made from tree sap
saplings that were covered with mats made of woven cattail.
And they also were really well known for making these
hard watertight baskets from coiled cedar roots, and they could
(03:01):
actually use these baskets for cooking. They would heat rocks
up in the fire and drop them into liquid filled
baskets to create a very heated water source which they
could then drop other things into you and cook them. Yes,
this is a tribe that still exists today. It has
about nine and fifty members and about half of those
members live on a reservation up in the Pacific northwest UM.
(03:24):
The most notable famous person from this tribe is Chief Seattle.
And that also is an Americanized pronunciation, like many non
English names, and includes characters and phonemes that don't exist
in English. UM and an approximation of the actual pronunciation
of it. Is seat, and we don't really end words
(03:47):
with in that way, and so it's sort of gradually
became softened to Seattle. According to the Sequamish Foundation, the
tribe doesn't really object to him being called Seattle all.
He did himself have some misgivings about the city being
named for him at various points in his life. He's
sort of worried that, because of the importance of names
(04:10):
in his culture, that having people repeatedly use his name
in a context that was not about him and kind
of a casual, possibly dismissive way, might cause problems after
he was gone. But before his death, reportedly he had
come to think of it as a mark of honor.
Now we don't know a whole lot about Seattle's early
(04:31):
years because he doesn't really appear in the historical record
until he's an adult, right there. There are a few
official UH and tribal records from various points in his life.
A lot of the earliest part. You have really a
lot of different sources that contradict each other. Even when
you look at tribal sources, some of them contradict each other. UH.
(04:53):
By his own account, he was born on Blake Island
and central Puget Sound and his mother was named Sholiza.
She was a Duwamish woman from Green River, and his
father was shwi Abe from the Suquamish village and Agate Pass.
So he had a mother who was Duwamish and a
father who was Suquamish, and so his his bloodline sort
(05:14):
of united those two tribes. Um When he was born,
it was a time when huge amounts of illness were
spreading through the Native American population. About thirty percent of
the population in that area died within eighty years after
first contact with the white settlers because of introduced diseases,
and by Seattle's own account, he witnessed the first contact
(05:37):
between the Pacific Northwest and settlers when George Vancouver reached
Bainbridge Island in sevento in the h M. S Discovery.
Yes Uh Seattle had two important events that led to
his becoming chief. The first was that he went on
a vision quest for spirit power as a youth and
he received thunderbird power. Um thunder and lightning had a
(05:59):
really strong spiritual significance, and thunderpower was said to give
a person power as a warrior and as speaker. There
are accounts of Seattle, saying that he had a great
boom booming voice, and that if he yelled at you,
the ground would physically tremble, and that when he gave
speeches he could be heard like half a mile away.
Like there was a lot tied to him, this idea
(06:20):
of voice and speech and very powerful speech. And the
second other thing that is an important part of the
story of him becoming chief is that while defending a
settlement from raiders traveling down the White River, he had
warriors chopped down trees just downriver of a particularly dangerous bend,
and the incoming raiders canoes crashed and they couldn't get through,
(06:43):
so their water their riders were spilled into the water.
And it's fairly easy to defend yourself against people who
are floundering in the waters coming at you rapidly on boats. Right,
The incoming raiders were handily dispatched when they came around
this like treacherous curve and crashed to a tree, which
is pretty ingenious. Right. Word spread of that he was
(07:04):
named to be an important chief, and he became known
in his leadership as an intelligent and formidable leader. There
are several sources that say that he owned slaves who
he either freed after signing treaties with the settlers or
after the emancipation Proclamation. There sources kind of contradict each
other on when he's freed the slaves that belonged to him,
(07:26):
but owning slaves is a pretty common practice in many tribes.
Often people from the opposing tribe would kind of be
spoils of war and would become the slaves of the
conquering tribe, which is pretty common throughout all history and
many cultures. Yeah, I think I think some people have
the mistaken idea identity idea. Uh, there's only one culture
(07:49):
that enslaved other people, and there are many cultures that
have enslaved other people. But onto his wives. So his
first wife, Ladelia, he was really quite deeply in love with, uh,
and she died shortly after giving birth to their first child,
Kiki so Blue, who was also known to the settlers
as Princess Angeline. She's a notable historical figure in that
(08:10):
area and the area as well. Um Seattle was really
grief stipped stricken when his wife died, and he only
talked about her openly much much later in his later years.
He got married again to Uh, and I am going
to have trouble with this pronunciation um YoY ill. And
they had two daughters and three sons together. Now, an
(08:33):
interesting part of his story is that he was actually
baptized into the Catholic Church. I think sometimes it's easy
to forget that there really was some blending of culture
going on. Uh. And after the death of one of
his sons was when he was baptized, and he took
the name Noah Seattle at that time, and his children
were raised in the Catholic faith. And after Seattle's conversion,
(08:55):
he focused less on defending and occupying his territory and
more on building peaceful relations within the tribe and with
the settlers that were coming in right. The American settlers
had gotten to the Puget Sound area around eighteen forty six,
and Seattle established himself from the very start as a
welcoming and peaceful presence. He tended to make friends with settlers.
(09:20):
He instructed the people in his tribes to try to
help people. They established fisheries in conjunction with the settlers,
and in particular, he was very close friends with a
man named doctor David S. Maynard, who was known as
Doc Doc Maynard was the first doctor and merchant in Seattle, UM,
and he was a prominent person. He owned most of
(09:42):
the land that is Pioneer Square in Seattle today, and
the settlement that actually became known as Seattle was established
in eighteen fifty two, which is just six short years
after the American settlers landed in the Puget Sound area.
So in March eighteen fifty three, WHI Shington was separated
out from the Oregon Territory and in October Governor Isaac Stevens,
(10:05):
who was thirty five at the time, arrived in Olympia,
the capital of Washington. In addition to being governor of
the territory, he was also the Commissioner of Indian Affairs,
and one of his jobs as the governor and as
the Commissioner for Indian Affairs was to secure land for
the Transcontinental Railroad, and that was going to require the
local tribes to see their land to him. So it's
(10:28):
in this context that Seattle has met Stevens for the
first time and Stephen wants to secure the land. That
Chief Seattle reportedly gave a speech. Allegedly this was delivered
to Stevens or in the presence of him on the
steps of Doc Maynard's office after he was introduced to
Stevens and heard that Stevens wanted to to get the
(10:48):
local land from the native population. Um. According to what
has been reported, this happened on Steven's first visit into
the town. But that's a little hard to concretely verify
because we only have a few situations in that the
history of the area when we know that Seattle and
(11:09):
Stevens were in the same place at the same time.
So there's been a lot of speculation about when exactly
this speech may have taken place, and it in many
of the accounts where it happened very um, almost immediately
after they met. It's a little bit tricky to get
your head around the idea of this great speech being
made pretty quickly after, like a handshake in a quick
(11:30):
discussion right there there. Yeah, we'll talk about that as
we talk about the text of the speech a little bit. Uh.
This is a speech that some people may have read
in school. What they read in school may not have
been remotely accurate. And here's why. Um. The first speech
was purportedly recorded by a doctor Henry Smith, as notes
(11:52):
as the address was was delivered. Um. He then reconstructed
that speech from his notes and published it in the
Seattle Sunday Star in seven so it was thirty two
or thirty three years after it was reportedly delivered. Occasionally
people say that this speech was made at the signing
(12:12):
of the Point Elliott Treaty. We know for sure this
is not the case because, uh, Smith says pretty specifically,
this happened in Seattle on the steps of Doc Maynard's office.
That is not where the Point Elliott Treaty was signed.
And Smith was also not present at Point Elliott's and
he would have not been able to make notes. No. Uh.
(12:33):
The second version is basically an edited, rewritten version of
Smith's that was published in the Seattle Sunday Star, which
was done by a poet named William Aerosmith. This is
the same content, but the grammar and structure are different,
so it's sort of like updating the Victorian English record
to be a little bit more modernized in its tone invoice.
(12:55):
And then the third and most famous iteration of the
speech that's attributed to chiefs Seattle is reported to be
a letter that Chief Seattle Seattle wrote to the President,
which would have been either Polk or Pierce, depending on
who you're looking at in terms of who cites this speech.
But it was actually written not at all by Seattle.
(13:15):
It was written so much later seventies by a guy
named Ted Perry for an environmental film called Home, which
was written for the Southern Baptist Convention. Uh, it's this
is where it just this is a lot of people
really dwell on the speech and whether it was authentic.
It's pretty clearly was not. But this speech has been
quoted in numerous anthologies. It was made into a children's
(13:38):
book called Brother Eagle Sister Sky. Joseph Campbell talked about
it in the Power of Myth. It's like made it
onto bumper stickers and T shirts all over the place.
It took on a life of its own, it really did.
And it sort of starts with this, uh, this thing
that was published in the Seattle Sunday Star. It starts
with some similarities to that, and then it veers off
in a very environmental direction with very bumber sticker quotable
(14:03):
quotes in it. Um, we know for sure that this
was not a letter to the president. Um. In addition
to the fact that James K. Polk was dead in
there's not any record of any such letter going from
Seattle to the president, and a letter from a Native
American chief to the President would have made several bureaucratic
stops on the way, and there's no record of it
(14:24):
in any of those places. There's also no record of
Chief Seattle asking anyone to write a letter for him,
and since he was illiterate, he would have needed to
do that. And then the cherry on top, Ted Perry
wrote it, and he says he wrote it. He says
he wrote it, He acknowledges authorship of it. Right. So
(14:49):
I'm going to take a minute and just sort of
read a little snippet of the Seattle Sunday Star version
and the Ted Perry version, and the there's a twofold
purpose here wants to give you an idea of the
tone of the speech that was allegedly given originally, and
the other is to give you an idea of how
completely different from that the Ted Perry version is. And
(15:09):
we're gonna talk a little bit more about the Sunday
Star version in a minute. So this is a snippet
from the Seattle Sunday Star version. Chief Seattle says Your
God is not our God. Your God loves your people
and hates mine. He folds his strong, protecting arms lovingly
about the pale face and leads him by the hand
(15:30):
as a father leads an infant son. But he has
forsaken his red children, if they are really his our God,
the Great Spirit, seems also to have forsaken us. Your
God makes your people wax stronger every day. Soon they
will fill all the land. Our people are ebbing away
like a rapidly receding tide that will never return. The
(15:52):
white man's God cannot love our people, or he would
protect them. They seem to be orphans who can look
nowhere for help? How and can we be brothers? It's
very sad, it is, But it's also very weird when
you remember that he was a Catholic. Yes, it's it's
weird with a lot of context that we'll talk about
in more detail. Um the the whole of it has
(16:13):
been categorized into this idea of of a farewell speech.
There are several speeches delivered by Native Americans within that
era that that sort of lament the death of Native
American culture and the face of white settlement. Another really
famous one would be chief Chief Joseph gave such an address. Um,
(16:34):
we'll talk a little bit more about why that interpretation
of this is kind of problematic in a few minutes.
But here's a piece of the Ted Perry version. Uh,
and it's it does start off following some similar points
to what I just read, but then it goes into
this environmental direction, with things like you must teach your
children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes
of our grandfathers, so that they will respect the land.
(16:57):
Tell your children that the earth is rich with the
lives of our in Teach your children that what we
will have taught our children, that the earth is our mother.
Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth.
If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.
This we knew. The earth does not belong to man.
Man belongs to the earth. This we knew. All things
(17:19):
are connected, like the blood which unites one family. All
things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons
of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life.
He is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does
to the web, he does to himself. That has two
bits of it that often show up on T shirts
and bumper stickers and that kind of thing. Well, and
(17:41):
it's easy to see why. I mean, it is very
moving and you know, really quotable, very quotable, sort of
poignant from an ecological standpoint, which I think part of
the reason that myth grows and you know, continues this
attribution of these words with Chief Seattle is that we
(18:03):
normally associate that sort of awareness of the earth and
the planet as something bigger than just what we're you know,
sort of running on day to day. We associate that
closeness more with Native Americans than we do with the
European settlers. Right, it really did take on a weird
life of its own. Um And the reason it's so
(18:24):
quotable is because it was written for a film. It
was written to be quotable. Yes, So I've read lots
of things that kind of dissect all the ways in
which that particular version of the address does not make
any sense in the context of the time. But we're
not going to really get into them, because we know
the real story already that Ted Perry wrote it, Like,
(18:44):
we don't really need to go and dissect all the
ways in which it was not would not make sense
for Chief Seattles who have said something about trains when
he never saw a train, because we know that Ted
Perry wrote it. So for the really the rest of
this podcast, the the version of the address that we're
talking about is the one that was printed in the
Seattle Sunday Star. Um. It was reprinted many times throughout
the year. Was reprinted, not not as many times as
(19:06):
the ten Berry version, but it did get it got
its share of attention. UM. At various points that text
was reprinted in pamphlets and books and histories and things
like that. At some point along the line, somebody added
a thirteen word finish. Um. He he ends with the
idea of not to dismiss the dead because the dead
(19:27):
are not powerless. And somebody added a sort of thirteen
word word coda that says dead. I say there is
no death, only a change of worlds. And that's not
in the original Sunday Star version. So that got added
in and then sort of picked up and passed along
as it was reprinted. Um. We're going to sort of
talk now about how even when we have this text
(19:50):
that came from the Seattle Sunday star. We're still not
really sure how authentic it is or how well it
actually represents the words that were spoken at the time.
And it begins with the guy who wrote it down. Dr.
Henry Smith was a scholar and sources said that he
was bilingual in English and Duwamish. And that is a
little weird because what the Duwamish tribes actually spoke was
(20:13):
a language called lu showed Seed and I apologize if
I have pronounced that wrongly. Um. Any address that Chief
Seattle gave would have been made in this language and
then translated to the Chinnook jargon, which was sort of
a common tongue uniting all of the people that lived
in that in that area, then it would have been
translated into into English. We don't really know which of
(20:34):
the versions Dr Smith was listening to when he took
his notes. Um. And it is worth noting that the
fact that Seattle either didn't speak at the jargon or
said he didn't speak the jargon jargon kind of sets
him apart from other people in the area, Like, that's
kind of a weird decision to make to say, I
just I don't speak this common tongue. I lead all
of these tribes who speak a language I do not, right. Um,
(20:56):
but that meant that he had to have an interpreter everywhere,
which sort of became mark of status. Like, if we
are going to entertain this, this diplomat from these tribes,
we're going to need to make sure that we do
this thing of getting an interpreter for him. So we
don't really know which of these three versions that were
probably being delivered was the one that Dr Smith took
(21:17):
his notes from. And we do know, I mean, he
is a fairly reliable figure in that he was a
superintendent of local schools, he was a member of the legislature.
So it's not like he was just a self proclaimed
scholar who swooped in and claimed to understand these things.
He really was pretty ingrained in the area. Um, you know,
(21:38):
he wasn't just a someone claiming to be knowledgeable about
these things. He was an established part of the community.
But the place where it gets a little weird, though,
is that the column and the Sunday Star where he
published this speech, in addition to it being thirty two
or thirty three years after the fact, was part of
an eleven part series that was celebrating the pioneers of Seattle. Um,
(22:00):
it was, as we often see generational divides happening. There
was this generational divide happening between the people known as
the Old Seattle, which were the pioneers that had settled
the area and established the city, and New Seattle, which
was the young entrepreneurs who were gradually taking those people's
places in society. So the fact that he was trying
(22:21):
to put Old Seattle in its best light might have
influenced the way Smith reinterpreted and reconstructed his notes when
he was making the version that he put in the
Seattle Sunday Star. And even his description of Seattle at
the address kind of exemplifies this. He describes the chief
as putting his hand on the head of a visible
(22:43):
nobleman and then taking up a posture that resembles what
we think of in ancient Roman senators. Yeah, Like if
if you look at old pictures of people giving orations,
like paintings of people giving orations in Rome, and they
have this very noble bearing and they have sort of
a hand lifted up, That's that's the trade that Smith
paints when he's introducing this speech. Um, it definitely comes
(23:06):
off as prophetic because it talks a lot about the
decline of the Native American population in the face of
white settlers. It's possible that the reason that it comes
off as prophetic is because Smith reconstructed it with knowledge
of what happened in the next thirty years, which really
was an orchestrated attempt by the government and lots of
(23:27):
places to push Native Americans out of land and to
break up tribes so that their original culture would be
less prevalent or or just removed from their way of life.
Like he knew about all that stuff because it had
happened in the interim, right, it had happened in the interim.
Another thing that had happened in the interim was the
(23:49):
what we mentioned a little earlier, which was Chiefs Joseph's
sort of farewell speech that happened in eighteen seventy seven.
So it's possible that some of the fatalism in the
tone is influenced by its Smith's knowledge of what happened
later and of the kind of speeches that other Native
Americans we're making elsewhere in the United States. And additionally,
(24:11):
it's we should note that Seattle already had a reputation
for being really friendly and welcoming to the white settlers
that were coming long before Governor Stephen's arrival. So it's
pretty uncharacteristic that he would suddenly have this sort of negative, um,
very dark speech. It was full of pessimism and mourning
(24:31):
and it's a sense of impending doom. But he had
a pretty favorable relationship with a lot of white settlers
in the area, so it seems that he may have
been concerned about about land being removed from his tribe.
But the overwhelming sense of sadness um seems possibly not
(24:52):
characteristic of his other encounters with white settlers. And there's
also no record of this speech in the Smithsonium, it's
none in the National Archives, it's not in the Library
of Congress. The primary source that we have is something
that was written down in the note form in note starting,
a note form more than more than thirty years after
the fact. We do though have as a reference to
(25:15):
short speeches that Seattle made at the Point Elliott Treaty Council,
which was from December eight fifty four UM. And these
are from the record of the proceedings and the Bureau
of Indian Affairs and the National Archives. They are so
dissimilar in style and wor wording to the Seattle Sunday
Star piece. They're so different. I can read you both
(25:37):
of them, which I am going to do. Um. The
first is I look upon you as my father, I
and the rest regard you as such. All of the
Indians have the same good feeling toward you, and we'll
send it in paper to the Great Father. All of
the men, old men, women and children rejoice that he
has sent you to take care of them. My mind
(25:59):
is like yours. I don't want to say more. My
heart is very good towards Dr Maynard. I want always
to get medicine from him. That's the thing. One. The
other is is presumably after the treaty was signed, and
he says, now by this we make friends and put
away all bad feelings, if ever we had any. We
(26:20):
are the friends of the Americans. All the Indians are
of the same mind. We look upon you as our father.
We will never change our minds, but since you have
been to see us, we will always be the same. Now,
now do you send this paper so vastly different in
tone from from this other address that was supposedly delivered.
(26:42):
You know, within a year or so of this. Um,
we could get into things that are kind of trouble
like the the deferential tone that that people might think
is is troubling in this particular set of addresses. But
I'm more interested in looking at how that sounds so
much different from this thing that was allegedly delivered on
Documentard's office steps. Yes, and several people that were supposedly
(27:07):
there have no had no memory of such an address
that was that longer impassioned. A local interpreter by the
name of BF Shaw was there, he didn't remember it.
David S. Maynard's widow, Catherine, was there, and she had
no recollection of a long impassioned speech. Uh. And there
aren't any other contemporary records of Seattle delivering any speeches
like it. Uh. You know, the newspaper in Olympia did
(27:29):
not report any similar things. There's really no historical record
of speeches of that nature being made by him, right. Uh.
One of the primary chroniclers of the history of the
Pacific Northwest from that time is a man named Clarence B. Bagley.
He moved with his family to the Pacific Northwest when
he was nine, and, in addition to working a lot
(27:51):
of other jobs from painting to running minds. He was
a newspaperman, and he became like a really prominent local historian.
He was part of the founding of the Washington State
Historical Society, and he wrote two three volume histories, one
of Seattle and one of King County, which is the
county that Seattle is in UM, and both of these
are still looked on as achievements in the documenting of
(28:13):
the Pacific Northwest history. UM. He mentions more than once
in his book that Chief Seattle and Doc Maynard were
great friends. UM, and this speech supposedly happened on Doc
Maynard's office steps. So it seems sort of odd too
many historians today that the friendship between Seattle and UH
(28:33):
and Doc Maynard would have been important enough to mention
more than once in these histories, but that a speech
of that length with that tone would not be UM.
The last thing that kind of makes people question how
authentic this recording from the Seattle Sunday Star is is
that Smith said on his deathbed that the account was
(28:54):
true and accurate, which seems a little strange to people
that that would be what you spend your death, your
dying breath, UH reiterating that thing that I wrote in
the Seattle Sunday Star was really a thing that happened, Yes,
especially since there's really no corroborating evidence for it. It's
(29:15):
just it's an, as you said, it's an odd last
words scenario. The general consensus, I mean, there's there's a
surprising maybe not surprising, there's a there's a fair amount
of debate about lots of aspects of this speech, and
(29:37):
that the general consensus is probably there was an address
of some sort, probably that happened when Chief Seattle was
introduced to Governor Stevens. But that probably what we have
today is a record of it is not a hundred
percent what actually was said. It just it's not quite
feasible for something to be reconstructed from notes thirty years
(30:00):
for the fact to be accurate to what had happened
at the time. Well, and it's also important to take
into account that we were still early on in our relationship,
you know, in terms of Native Americans and the settlers
and pioneers coming in. That relationship was still very early.
It was so the linguistic development between them, like learning
(30:23):
each other's languages, was probably you know, still in its
infancy in many ways, so there were probably lots of
nuances of language that were not clear to each side.
So in terms of interpretation, there's some great area. Right.
It continues to be an important address. I think it's importance.
(30:43):
Some of it has to do with this whole backstory
of understanding better, uh, the context in which it may
have happened, and the relationships among the people involved, and
a lot of that leads into the legacy of Chief
Seattle and of this speech. Um. He had a pretty
well coming attitude toward settlers for his entire life really
(31:04):
and especially his time as chief, and this didn't really
make him popular with all of the rest of the
Native American population, especially when he signed the Point Elliott
Treaty in eighteen fifty five. That treaty relinquished all of
the tribal claims to most of the land in the area.
What was supposed to happen was that the tribes would
get access to hunting and fishing grounds, healthcare, education, and
(31:28):
a reservation in exchange for doing all of that. Uh.
That is, as we all know, not really what happened.
And it took three years for the treaty to be
ratified and by the time it was ratified, it was
very different from what people had originally agreed to you,
So there was a whole lot of unrest among the
(31:49):
Native American people. Um it's it's pretty telling when you
look at historical accounts. A lot of the most mainstream
ones talk about how Seattle was always a friend to
the settlers and he signed this this treaty out of friendship.
When you look at tribal records, the tone is more
that he was afraid of a military conflict that he
(32:10):
knew there was no way to win. So it's something
that you can definitely look at from multiple angles thinking
about the relationships between these two people, which from this
point was definitely not as positive as it had been
in the very earliest days of the founding of Seattle.
Well and the Native Americans did accuse Seattle of uh duplicity,
(32:31):
and it really led to a lot of ongoing problems,
especially because of how the treaty actually played out once
it was in effect. There were wars between the native
tribes and the settlers in the mid eighteen fifties all
through those lots of things, lots of areas of the
Pacific Northwest where they were wars between the Native Americans
(32:52):
and the settlers, and Seattle continued to remain an ally
and tried to keep his tribes out of the battle
um at. In some points he would warn the American
settlers of incoming attacks by other tribes. So he continued
to stand by the white settlers, even as a lot
(33:12):
of the other Native tribes nearby, and the ones that
were maybe not part of his his particular collection of tribes,
really fled back against the settlers. And after the town
of Seattle was incorporated in eighteen sixty five, ordinance actually
forbade permanent Indian houses within the city limits, so he
(33:33):
had to give up his home, yeah, which he had not.
They had already, you know, already figuratively there had been
of giving up of the homeland. And then he literally
had to move out of the city. He moved to
the Port Madison Sequamash Reservation, and he died there after
a brief illness in June of eighteen sixty six, at
about the age of eighty. Since we're not completely sure
(33:56):
exactly when he was born, that's an estimate. We know
that his funeral involved both Catholic and Native rights, but
there wasn't a record of it in the newspapers at
the time, not really involved in any of the records
of the local white settlers. Uh to our knowledge. No
leaders who had known him and who had helped found
(34:17):
the city with his assistants attended his funeral, so by
that point, by the point of his death, he was
not well known in the area anymore, at least among
the settlers. The Seattle Weekly Intelligent Intelligencer printed an article
about his funeral in eighteen seventy, so it was some
years after it happened, and then the Seattle Sunday Star
(34:37):
with his speech, came out in eighteen eighty seven. He
started to become a folk hero at that point, and
the Ted Perry speech from the seventies made him into
more of a household name, and some history minded people
put up a marker in eighteen ninety that read Seattle,
Chief of the Suquamps and Allied tribes died June seventh,
eighteen sixty six, from friend of the Whites, and for him,
(35:00):
the city of Seattle was named by its founders. The
reverse side Read's baptismal name. Noah's self age probably eighty years,
so there is a marker, but it didn't go up
for I didn't go up until some people decided that
there should be one. It was sort of marked with
a rough year twenty four years later. Yes, it was
(35:21):
roughly marked before that point. The Suquanas tribe opened a
museum in Seattle in September, which is about the tribe's
history and culture. Chief Seattle does play a small part
in the overall museum, but he's not the center focus
of it. The Seattle Times quotes the museum director as saying,
I think the tribe is consciously trying to move away
(35:44):
from Chief Seattle being the beginning, middle, and end of
the tribe. It's in no way a reflection of less
esteem or less respect. It was not there yet the
last time I was in Seattle. Nope, now I want
to go either. It's quite recent. Uh so, yeah, I
want to go to Yeah. It's it's so interesting to
(36:06):
see how history treats him, right, you know, in terms
of him having it once been. I mean, I know,
for me growing up in the seventies in just outside
of Seattle, there was lots of Chief Seattle talk. So
it's very interesting now to know that in the museum,
at least, his role is played down a little bit
(36:28):
right well, and I can imagine it being since the
city was named after him, growing up in the area,
growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I think that people's
exposure to Chief Seattle and who he was and what
his legacy was, and what the Native Americans in the
area are like is probably vastly different from much of
the rest of the United States. I would imagine, yes,
(36:51):
having not grown up in the rest of the United
States to compare, I guess I love Seattle. I think
it's an awesome, beautiful part of the world, and I
am glad that we have the records that we do
have of what the settlement there was like. It is
as many parts of American history are. When it comes
(37:12):
to the relationship between settlers and Native Americans, is very distressing,
especially when you consider that after the time period that
we've talked about, there were some pretty orchestrated efforts by
the government to try to basically breed out in quotes,
Native Americans. That was like sending Native American children to
boarding schools so that they wouldn't be exposed to their
(37:33):
native culture, uh, that type of thing. So the fact
that the Squamish tribe has been able to survive in
the face of all that is is noted as an achievement.
Uh that there are still nine fifty members after all
of that. Indeed, I feel like we're ending on a
sad note. I know, I'm trying to think of a
way to make it happy. But there's a new museum.
(37:57):
There is a new museum, and the pictures of it
look beautiful, gorgeous. They look really beautiful and like a
really wonderful place to go and learn more about cultural
history of that part. Anytime you travel in the Pacific
Northwest and the Native American influence is so visible in
a lot of places, and so being able to see
where that all comes from instead of it just being
(38:17):
sort of the facade stuck on the building, I think
is a wonderful thing to be able to do. Yes,
maybe we should have a pilgrimage. Let's do let's have
a history field trip. We can visit my brother. I
also have a brother and a sister. There were covered.
(38:38):
Thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday.
If you have heard an email address or a Facebook
you are l or something similar over the course of
today's episode. Since it is from the archive that might
be out of date. Now. You can email us at
history podcast at how stuff works dot com, and you
can find us all over social media at missed in History.
And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
(39:01):
Google podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else
you listen to podcasts. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com m
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