The Famous Speech Chief Seattle Never Made

The Suquamish chief 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). Tune in to learn.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed 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,

(00:24):
and that is Chief Seattle 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 when settlers were moving

(00:48):
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 a little bit of background

(01:10):
about the Sequamish 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. They lived in cedar plank long

(01:31):
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 cat tail. And they also were really
well known for making these hard watertight baskets from coiled
cedar roots, and they could actually use these baskets for cooking.

(01:54):
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. The most notable famous

(02:18):
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 with in that way,

(02:41):
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, although he did himself have
some misgivings about the city being named for him at
various points in his life. Uh. He's sort of worried that,
because of the importance of names in his culture, that

(03:03):
having people repeatedly used 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 years because he doesn't

(03:24):
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. By

(03:45):
his own account, he was born on Blake Island and
central Puget Sound, and his mother was named Shulizza. She
was a Dwamish woman from Green River, and his father
was shwi Abe from the Suquamish village and Agate Pass.
So he had a mother who was Duomish and a
father who was Squamish, and so his his bloodline sort

(04:06):
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

(04:29):
between the Pacific Northwest and settlers when George Vancouver reached
Bainbridge Island in sevent 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

(04:51):
really strong spiritual significance, and thunder power was said to
give a person power as a warrior and a speaker.
There are accounts of addle 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

(05:12):
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,

(05:35):
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 water versus coming at you rapidly
on boat. Right, the incoming raiders were handily dispatched when
they came around this like treacherous curve and crashed into
a tree, which is pretty ingenious. Right. Word spread of
that he was named to be an important chief, and

(05:58):
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, but owning slaves is a pretty

(06:20):
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, idea, Uh,
there's only one culture that enslaved other people, and there

(06:42):
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, and she died shortly after
giving birth to their first child, Kiki so Blue, who
was also known to the settlers as Princess and Jeline.
She's a notable historical figure in that area and the

(07:03):
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 interesting part

(07:25):
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, he focused less

(07:48):
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 a 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.

(08:12):
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 the prominent person. He owned most of

(08:34):
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, Washington was separated out
from the Oregon Territory and in October Governor Isaac Stevens,

(08:57):
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

(09:20):
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

(09:40):
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

(10:01):
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

(10:22):
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

(10:44):
as the address was was delivered Um. He then reconstructed
that speech from his notes and published it in the
Seattle Sunday Star in eight seven, so it was thirty
two or thirty three years after it was reportedly delivered. Um.
Occasionally people say that this speech was made at the
signing of the Point Elliott Treaty. We know for sure

(11:06):
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 elliotts and
he would have not been able to make notes. No. Uh.
The second version is basically an edited, rewritten version of

(11:29):
Smith's that was published in the Seattle Sunday Star, which
was done by a poet named William Arrismith. 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
in voice. And then the third and most famous iteration

(11:50):
of the speech that's attributed to Chief 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. It was written so much later seventies

(12:11):
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 pretty clearly was not. But this speech
has been quoted in numerous anthologies. It was made into
a children's book called Brother Eagle Sister Sky. Joseph Campbell

(12:33):
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 bumper

(12:54):
sticker quotable 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 fifty four. 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

(13:15):
no record of it 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 He says he wrote it. He acknowledges authorship of it. Right.
So I'm going to take a minute and just sort
of read a little snippet of the Seattle Sunday Star

(13:37):
version and the Ted Perry version, and the there's a
twofold purpose here. One is 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 we're gonna talk a little bit more about the
Sunday Star version in a minute. So this is a

(13:58):
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 leaves him by the
hand as a father leads an infant son. But he
has forsaken his red children, if they are really his

(14:20):
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 white man's God cannot love our people, or he
would protect them. They seem to be orphans who can

(14:41):
look nowhere for help. How then 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 whole of it has
been categorized into this idea of a fair el speech.
There are several speeches delivered by Native Americans within that

(15:04):
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's Chief Joseph gave such an address. Um,
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.

(15:26):
And 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. Tell
your children that the earth is rich with the lives
of our kin. Teach your children that what we will
have taught our children, that the earth is our mother.

(15:49):
Whatever befall 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 know. All things
are connected, like the blood which unites one family. All
things are connected. Whatever befall the earth befalls the sons

(16:09):
of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life.
He is nearly 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
it's easy to see why. I mean, it is very
moving and you know, really quotable, very quotable, sort of

(16:32):
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
normally associate that sort of awareness of the earth and
the planet as something bigger than just what we're you know,

(16:54):
sort of running on day to day. We associate that
closeness more with a native and Arikans 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 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

(17:16):
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,
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

(17:39):
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
the Ted Perry version, but it did get it got
its share of attention. UM. At various points that text
was reprinted and pam flits and books and histories and

(18:01):
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 are not powerless. And somebody added a sort of
thirteen word word coded 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

(18:25):
added in and then sort of picked up and passed
along as it was reprinted. Um. We're gonna sort of
talk now about how even when we have this text
that came from the Seattle Sunday star. We're still not
really sure how authentic it is or how will it
actually represents the words that were spoken at the time.
And it begins with the guy who wrote it down. Uh.

(18:45):
Dr Henry Smith was a scholar and source has said
that he was bilingual in English and Duwamish. And that
is a little weird because what the Duwamish tribes actually
spoke was a language called the show Seed. I apologize
if I have pronounced that wrongly. Um. Any address that
Chief Seattle gave would have been made in this language

(19:05):
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 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

(19:25):
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,
but that meant that he had to have an interpreter everywhere,
which sort of became a mark of status, Like, if
we are going to entertain this, this diplomat from these tribes,

(19:48):
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
his notes from. And we do know. I mean, he
is a fairly reliable figure in that he was the
superintendent of local schools, he was a member of the legislature.

(20:10):
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,
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,

(20:31):
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,
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

(20:54):
the area and established the city, and New Seattle, which
was the young entrepreneurs who were graduately taking those people's
places in society. So the fact that he was trying
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

(21:15):
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
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,

(21:36):
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 portrait that Smith
paints when he's introducing this speech. Um, it definitely comes
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

(21:59):
off as prophetic is 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 places to push Native Americans out of land and
to break up tribes so that their original culture would

(22:19):
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 what we mentioned a little earlier, which
was chiefs Joe's I sort of farewell speech that happened
in eighteen seventy seven. So it's possible that some of

(22:40):
the fatalism and the tone is influenced by 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, 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.

(23:04):
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 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

(23:28):
from his tribe. But the overwhelming sense of sadness um
seems possibly not characteristic of of his other encounters with
white settlers. And there's also no record of this speech
in the Smithsonium. It's not 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

(23:51):
note form and note starting a note form more than
more than thirty years after the fact. We do though
have as a reference to short speech is that Seattle
made at the Point Elliott Treaty Council, which was from
December eighteen fifty four UM. And these are from the
record of the proceedings and the Bureau of Indian Affairs

(24:11):
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 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

(24:33):
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 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

(24:55):
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 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

(25:16):
paper so vastly different in tone from from this other
address that was supposedly delivered. You know, within a year
or so of this. Um, we could get into things
that are kind of troubled, like the deferential tone that
that people might think is is troubling in this particular

(25:37):
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 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,

(25:59):
he didn't remember it. David S. Maynard's widow, Catherine, was there,
and she had no recollection of a long and passion 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 not report any similar things. There's really no
historical record of speeches of that nature being made by him. Uh.

(26:21):
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
of other jobs, from painting to running minds. He was
a newspaperman, and he became like a really prominent local historian.

(26:42):
He was part of the founding of the Washington State
Historical Society, and he wrote to 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
the Pacific Northwest history. UM. He mentions more than once
in his book that Chief Seattle and Doc Maynard were

(27:04):
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
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.

(27:27):
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
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

(27:49):
Seattle's and the Sunday Star was really a thing that happened, Yes,
especially since there's really no corroborating evidence for it. It's an,
as you said, it's an odd last words scenario. Yes,
that the general consensus, I mean, there's there's a surprising
maybe not surprising, there's a there's a fair amount of

(28:10):
debate about lots of aspects of this speech, and 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

(28:33):
for something to be reconstructed from notes thirty years after
the fact to be a pent 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

(28:53):
very early. It was so the linguistic development between them,
like learning each other's which is 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.

(29:18):
I think it's importance. Some of it has to do
with this whole back story 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 welcoming attitude toward settlers for his

(29:39):
entire life really 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 acts us to hunting and

(30:01):
fishing grounds, healthcare, education, and 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

(30:23):
of unrest among the 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

(30:44):
military conflict that he 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 accused
Seattle of uh duplicity, and it really led to a

(31:09):
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 and the settlers, and Seattle continued

(31:30):
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 of the other native tribes nearby, and

(31:51):
the ones that were maybe not part of his his
particular collection of tribes, really fought back against the settlers.
Years and after the town of Seattle was incorporated in
eighteen sixty five, ordnance actually forbade permanent Indian houses within
the city limits, right, so he had to give up
his home, yeah, which he had not. They had already,

(32:14):
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 exactly when he
was born, that's an estimate. We know that his funeral

(32:36):
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 the city with
his assistants attended his funeral, so by that point, by

(32:57):
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 with his speech came
out in eighteen eighty seven. He started to become a

(33:17):
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 sus Quamps
and Allied tribes died June seventh, eighteen sixty six, from
friend of the Whites, and for him, the city of
Seattle was named by its founders. The reverse side reads

(33:41):
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. It was roughly marked before that point.
The Squamas tribe opened a museum in Seattle in September,

(34:04):
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 from Chief Seattle being
the beginning, middle, and end of the tribe. It's in

(34:25):
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
Uh it's it's so interesting to see how history treats him, right,

(34:46):
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 talks. So it's very interesting now to know
that in the museum at least his role is played
down a little bit right well, and I can imagine
it being since the city was named after him growing

(35:09):
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, having not grown up in the
rest of the United States to compare. I love Seattle.

(35:34):
I think it's an awesome, beautiful part of the world,
and I'm 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 to the relationship between settlers and Native Americans, is
very distressing, especially when you consider that after the time

(35:56):
period that we've talked about, there were some pretty orchestrated
efforts by the Romant 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 native culture, uh, that type of thing. So
the fact that the Squamis tribe has been able to
survive in the face of all that is is noted

(36:17):
as an achievement. Uh that there are still nine and
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. There is a new museum, and
the pictures of it look beautiful, Yeah, gorgeous. They look
really beautiful and like a really wonderful place to go

(36:39):
and learn more about cultural history of that part. Any
time you travel in the Pacific Northwest, 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 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.

(37:00):
Let's do that history field trip. We can visit my brother.
I also have a brother and a sister there, and
I believe you also have a listener, Mail, I certainly do.
And this one amuses me a little bit because it
is a correction to a correction that we previously read
and listener mail. We had previously read a correction about

(37:20):
whether you could describe the pope as having resigned, and
so this one comes from Jacqueline and she says, high ladies,
just listen to your last podcast. And I wanted to
clarify a piece of mail that said the word resigned
should not be used in regard to Pope Benedict. As
a former reporter for a Catholic newspaper, I pulled out
my Catholic a p style guide. Yes, we had to

(37:42):
use two style guides when writing stories. And the word
retirement can be used for a pope, priest, cardinal, or bishop.
Here's what it says retirement. When referring to a priest, bishop, cardinal, etcetera.
It can be said that he retired from active ministry or,
in the case of a priest, attained see near priest's status.
This is to clarify the point that the priest does

(38:03):
not retire from the priesthood. He remains a priest, though
has retired from full time assignments. So the word retirement
or resigned can be used as it's how it's used
that matters to the Catholic Church. Hope this clears things
up for everyone. So while that entry does not specifically
say pope, we did go look this up ourselves after
we recorded our previous one where we talked about that correction, Yeah,

(38:25):
because we realized in talking about it that we had
seen it on many other news sites listed as resigned.
Sort of said what is the rest? Looking up and
the ap did specifically use the word retired, um, as
did it. Turns out the Vatican official things from the
Vatican website used the word retired when Pope Benedict delivered

(38:47):
his address. It was translated to the word renounced, so
that word can be used. Um. But then also there
were official things from the Vatican that used the word resigned.
So it appears that resigned is okay as a word
to use about talking about a pope stepping down. It
happens so infrequently and certainly in the modern era, that

(39:08):
we don't really have a clear established rule. You don't
really have at the topic that used to Yeah, we
don't what to call a pope's no longer being in
the pope. So yes, if you would like to comment
further about when we can and can't use the word
resign or this podcast or anything else, you may write
to us a history podcast at Discovery dot com. We're

(39:30):
also on Twitter at mist in History and on Facebook
at facebook dot com slash history Class stuff. If you
would like to learn more about what we talked about
today and what the city of Seattle has turned into,
you can go to our website and put the word
Seattle in the search bar and you will find the
Ultimate City of Seattle quiz. You can do that and
a whole lot more at our website, which is how

(39:50):
Stuff Works dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, does it how stuff works dot com.

(40:20):
This episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class is
brought to you by Jack Threads.