When Euro-American fur traders began appearing on the west coast in the late eighteenth century, smallpox and other diseases they brought killed at least 50% of the Native population. Native societies crashed, and desperate groups began raiding to restore their populations, killing men and enslaving women and children. To find an event as apocalyptic in western history, we would have to go back to the Black Death in the fourteenth century.
It was during this time of brutal social upheaval that a child named Seattle was born. Partly because one his grandmothers had been enslaved by northern raiders—and Puget Sound tribes considered enslavement a permanent stigma both on the enslaved and his or her descendants—he began his life already an outcast. Further, one of his parents may also have come from the White River village called Flea’s House, near modern Kent. The village was regarded as socially low, probably because it had been decimated by disease that left many of its children orphans—making them, in the eyes of other tribes, poor marriage choices. Even though he was raised at a different village downriver called Stuk, Seattle’s supposedly tainted lineage bedeviled him. As late as the 1950s, George Adams, a state legislator and member of the Skokomish tribe near Shelton, derided him as “…an ex-slave who lived at Fleaburg.”
Chief Seattle
How did Seattle become one of the most respected war leaders and visionaries of his time, and two centuries later one of the most well-known Native Americans in the world? It all hinged on a single event—a battle an untested Seattle decided to risk as a young man.
