(Edited transcript of a conversation moderated by Scott James, Writer)

In this Artist’s Chat, Scott James speaks with historian David Buerge and historical novelist Gar LaSalle about the life of Chief Seattle, the transformation of the Pacific Northwest during the nineteenth century, and the distance between the historical man and the figure created by later generations.

Buerge’s Chief Seattle and the Town That Took His Name draws upon decades of archival research to recover a leader who was at once a warrior, diplomat, strategist, and advocate for his people’s survival. LaSalle’s Widow Walk, the first book in the Widow Walk Saga, explores the same historical world through fiction, placing individual lives within the collisions among Native communities, settlers, soldiers, traders, and entrepreneurs.

Together, their approaches are complementary: Buerge reconstructs what the surviving evidence allows us to know, while LaSalle uses disciplined historical imagination to explore what such events may have felt like to the people who lived through them.

Scott James’s note: This transcript has been condensed and lightly reorganized for clarity. Repetitions, false starts, and conversational fillers have been removed while preserving the speakers’ meaning and individual voices.

Introductions

Scott James: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Solipsis Publishing Artist’s Chat series. Today we are joined by two distinguished interpreters of Pacific Northwest history: historian and biographer David Buerge and novelist Gar LaSalle.

David Buerge (Photo: Madeline Crowley)

David is an eminent historian and author of fourteen books, who has devoted decades to recovering the early history of Seattle and the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. His deeply researched biography, Chief Seattle and the Town That Took His Name, considered the definitive biography of Si’ahl separates the historical man from the many legends later attached to him. [Editorial Note: In English, Seattle’s name is often also spelled Si’ahl, Sealth, Seathl or See-ahth as an attempt to be more accurate to the Lushootseed pronunciation. There is no “th” sound in the Lushootseed language]

Gar LaSalle (Photo: Barbara Bourdeau)

Gar is the award-winning author of the Widow Walk Saga, which brings the nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest to life through meticulously researched historical fiction. His first novel, Widow Walk, explored many of the same encounters among Native peoples, settlers, soldiers, and entrepreneurs that David has examined in the historical record.

David, let’s start with you. Please begin by painting a picture of the Pacific Northwest before American settlement. What kind of world did the newcomers enter?

The Pacific Northwest Before American Settlement

David Buerge: We are certain now that Native peoples inhabited the Pacific Northwest continuously for at least 12,000 years. Their oral traditions preserve memories of major geological events, including changes to Lake Washington, the deluge that washed away a land bridge across the Columbia River (“the Bridge of the Gods) and the collapse of Mount Rainier’s summit thousands of years ago.

This was not an untouched wilderness when white settlers began arriving. The land the first Europeans encountered already bore the profound imprint of human stewardship. Indigenous communities had managed the landscape for generations through regular burning, creating open meadows and a mosaic of forest growth.

It is well documented that European diseases, including smallpox and measles, then killed at least half of the Indigenous population. That produced social, economic, and religious upheaval. Communities responded through spiritual revivals, political reorganization, and, in some areas, intensified slave raiding intended to replace lost populations.

The British generally entered the region as traders. The Americans came chiefly as land claimants. That distinction accelerated Native dispossession and turned an existing crisis into a true catastrophe.

Scott James: What period does that transformation encompass?

David Buerge: It unfolded across Chief Seattle’s lifetime.

He was born in the 1780s, near the time of the first great smallpox epidemics, and died in 1866, after Native peoples had been dispossessed and confined largely to reservations. For them it was a turning over of the world. Yet they retained much of their culture despite sustained pressure to assimilate.

Scott James: Gar, that later period overlaps with the world of Widow Walk.

Gar LaSalle: It does, as well as what I intend to include in a fifth book in the Saga.

David, I’m particularly interested in the relationship between Seattle and ambitious settlers such as Isaac Ebey, the energetic, land-hungry settler who appears in my story. You have said that Seattle probably ferried Ebey through the Elliott Bay area.

David Buerge: He almost certainly did. Ebey was one only a few non-native settlers in region at that time, as you know. He was the first person to survey Lake Washington and other areas and Ebey would have needed the help of someone like Seattle who knew the area quite well.

Chief Seattle: Warrior, Strategist, and Broker

Scott James: David, please expand on this. How directly was Seattle involved in helping the new arrivals. Was he that way from the start?

David Buerge: Not early on. Seattle had first been known as a formidable war leader—independent, forceful, and distrusted by the Hudson’s Bay Company. The journals at Fort Nisqually contain more hostile descriptions of him than of almost any other Native leader. Unlike leaders who cooperated closely with the Hudson’s Bay Company, he had initially refused to become pliable and never did with them.

Chief Seattle as a young warrior (a.i. depiction by Gar LaSalle)

But after a failed attack on Fort Nisqually by Native tribes, his strategy changed. He began actively encouraging Americans to settle in his country. Seattle understood that newcomers would continue to arrive. Rather than merely resist them, he decided to incorporate them into an economy of trade, kinship, and mutual dependence. He and his people, Duwamish and Suquamish, guided prospective settlers through Puget Sound, showed them suitable land, and welcomed men such as Isaac Ebey with ceremony.

In Seattle’s earliest recorded speech, he invited the Americans to settle among his people so that each group could provide what the other lacked. He even encouraged intermarriage. This was not submission; it was a calculated effort to secure his people’s future in a rapidly changing world. He offered his own daughter for marriage to a white settler.

Gar LaSalle: How common was intermarriage, and how were Native wives treated by American settlers?

David Buerge: Well, the experiences varied enormously. During the earliest years, American settlers were greatly outnumbered and often depended upon Native communities. Many young American men married Native women, and certainly some of those marriages were durable, because by marrying into a Native family, a white settler could enter councils, establish trading relationships, and become part of the community.

Other relationships, unfortunately, were exploitative. Some military officers and settlers took what were called “country wives” and abandoned them when they left. George Pickett is one familiar example, as you described, Gar, in Widow Walk.

Captain George Pickett, US Army (future Confederate General); Commander at Fort Bellingham, Washington 1857

Gar LaSalle: We will never really know what how Pickett behaved, because his wife, a Bella Coola Native named “Morning Mist” died shortly after childbirth.

David Buerge: You chose to emphasize the romantic nature of Pickett’s relationship with his wife. Certainly native women in many cases were treated as essential partners in one phase of settlement, but then were discarded when an American wife or a more socially acceptable match appeared. As a larger, more self-conscious American middle class arrived, attitudes hardened. Intermarried men were disparaged, laws were passed against interracial marriage, and Native women were increasingly excluded from respectable society. The Mercer Maids were advertised as a remedy for a shortage of marriageable women, although Native women were already present in large numbers. The deeper concern was racial mixing.

Seattle’s own strategy was strikingly different. He encouraged trade and marriage because he envisioned Native people and Americans forming a shared society. His vision was practical, adaptive, and far ahead of the settlers who believed coexistence required Native disappearance.

Scott James: That interpretation restores Seattle’s agency. He was not simply reacting to settlement; he was trying to shape it.

David Buerge: Exactly. He could not control the forces entering the region, but he tried to direct them toward an outcome in which his people could survive and prosper.

The Fraser River Gold Rush and Social Upheaval

Gar LaSalle: You have also described how few non-Native settlers lived here before the Fraser River gold rush. How did that influx alter the region?

David Buerge: Good question. I noticed you included some of that in your chapters on Pickett, Gar. Before the gold rushes, relatively few Americans came to the Pacific Northwest. Most were families traveling overland to claim farms. When Washington Territory was organized in the early 1850s, its non-Native population numbered only a few thousand across an enormous area, while the Indigenous population was many times larger. Yet Native people were excluded from the new civil order, with disastrous consequences for any genuine sense of community.

The Fraser River gold rush of 1857 and 1858 changed the social balance. Thousands of miners, many of them veterans of the California goldfields, moved north. When the easily accessible gold declined, large numbers of young, unattached, and unemployed men drifted into Washington Territory. They sought work in mines, mills, and settlements, and many formed relationships with Native women.

That unsettled the emerging American middle class, which was anxious about disorder and racial mixing. Washington’s early history can be understood as a succession of invasions—settlers, miners, laborers, soldiers, and later migrants—each wave tending to erase, or willfully forget, the people and events that preceded it.

Scott James: So demographic change produced not only conflict, but a repeated loss of historical memory.

David Buerge: Yes—often willful forgetting, because the history was difficult and morally compromising.

How the Historical Man Became a Myth

Scott James: One of the great strengths of your work, David, is that you neither diminish Seattle nor romanticize him. How did this complicated strategist become the environmental prophet we are familiar with today?

David Buerge: When Seattle died in June 1866, it is fascinating that no newspaper in Washington Territory reported his death. Within a few years, even residents of the city that bore his name seemed uncertain who he had been. That obscurity made him a truly malleable symbol, exploited to suit the politics of the day, especially by reformers and folks romanticizing the image of indigenous purity and racial equality.

The first major transformation came in 1887, when Henry Smith published a speech he claimed to have heard Seattle deliver in 1854. Smith was writing during a period of bitter conflict in Seattle over Chinese labor and racial exclusion. In his version of the speech, Chief Seattle warns Americans that their own day of reckoning will come. The speech reflects the crisis of Smith’s time as much as Seattle’s.

Seattle probably did speak about death, memory, and the presence of the dead, but the historical evidence does not support the elaborate prophetic language later attributed to him. The real Seattle wanted his people to participate in the region’s developing economy. He was not announcing or bemoaning their passive disappearance.

Interestingly, a second transformation of Chief Seattle’s image occurred during the environmental movement of the 1970s. Entirely new versions of the speech placed modern ecological language in Seattle’s mouth, including references to buffalo, railroads, and environmental ideas he could not have expressed in that form. And then children’s books such as Brother Eagle, Sister Sky completed the transformation. The historical warrior, diplomat, entrepreneur, and political strategist became an idealized environmental saint.

The irony is that the real man is much more compelling than the myth. His importance lies not in invented sayings, but in his effort to imagine a shared future when nearly every force around him was working toward dispossession.

Scott James: The myth makes him simpler and more comforting; your archival work makes him more human and more consequential.

David Buerge: That is what I hope. He was repeatedly Americanized during his lifetime and even more so after his death. Recovering him means accepting his contradictions.

Photograph of Chief Seattle, 1864 ; E.M. Sammis photographer (U of Washington Archives)

Potlatch, Slavery, and Social Rank

Scott James: Gar, your fiction also confronts aspects of Native social organization that popular accounts often avoid, including potlatch and slavery. How should we understand those institutions?

Gar LaSalle: The potlatch and slave trading were integral to the historical world I was trying to portray, although missionary and government pressure, particularly in Canada, later outlawed the potlatch. David’s research provides a much more precise context than fiction alone can supply.

David Buerge: As you described in Widow Walk, Gar, the potlatch was a means of redistributing wealth, including slaves, and affirming rank. A person accumulated property and then gave it away publicly. The generosity created prestige, obligations, and social influence. Variations of these ceremonial feasts existed from Alaska to northern California.

Slavery served a different function. The peoples of Puget Sound managed productive landscapes and harvested cultivated root crops, but they did not depend upon large slave labor forces. Enslaved people probably made up a relatively small portion of the population, especially in Puget Sound.

The great epidemics intensified raiding for slaves all up and down the coast. Communities that had lost much of their population captured women and children to rebuild households and sustain their economies. Over time, enslavement became a hereditary social status. Seattle’s own family was touched by that stigma, and contemporary observers sometimes used it to belittle his authority.

A Raid by “The Northerners” onto a small village – (a.i. by Gar LaSalle)

Gar LaSalle: The raiding, slaving and headhunting likely had been going on for hundreds of years. Some Indigenous groups, like Haida, Kake and Kwakiutl were particularly adept at it, because of their mastery of the currents in their longboats. Every tribe, long before the arrival of Europeans, told stories about how they had to deal with (by fighting, fleeing or tricking) “the Northerners.” No one really knew who they were…but they were the Pacific Northwest’s version of Vikings. Seattle, as a Duamish, would likely have had to contend with them as well. But he did his own predation and enslavement as a young man.

David Buerge: That’s right. Seattle certainly participated in slave raiding and was known to have held several enslaved people which increased his status amongst the Native communities. That fact should not be erased. At the same time, the institution differed in scale and economic purpose from plantation slavery in the American South. Treaty provisions eventually formally abolished Native slavery, although social memories and relationships persisted for decades. Some formerly enslaved people remained within Seattle’s household or retinue, which shows how complicated those relationships could be. The high status attached to owning slaves persisted in community memory. Some Native critics later used Seattle’s family connection to slavery against him.

War, Treaties, and Imposed Leadership

Chief Seattle – oil portrait by Henry Raschen painted in 1916, Fifty years after the chief’s death

Gar LaSalle: Seattle did not join the attacks on the American settlements during the Indian War, did he?

David Buerge: No. By the early 1850s he had chosen to support the Americans, and he never wavered. He criticized their foolish and provocative behavior, but he refused requests to join those fighting them. But at the same time, he repeatedly reminded American officials that their own conduct had created many of their enemies.

Gar LaSalle: Governor Isaac Stevens also imposed a hierarchy of chiefs and sub-chiefs, holding selected leaders responsible for the conduct of entire communities. How different was that from traditional leadership?

David Buerge: It was fundamentally different. Native communities generally operated through consensus. Wealthy families and respected lineages exercised influence, but leadership was persuasive rather than coercive. A good leader advised, negotiated, demonstrated generosity, and led by example. Authority could not simply be imposed from above. That’s where Seattle excelled.

Seattle’s prominence among the Duwamish grew partly from his success as a war leader. The Suquamish selected him as a chief only a few years before the treaties, so the title “chief of the Duwamish and Suquamish” describes a relatively late development.

Stevens and other officials wanted a structure they could administer, so they designated Seattle as a principal chief and required him to help select subordinate leaders who would be held responsible for their people. The theory was simple: control the chiefs and you control the population.

That bureaucratic hierarchy was alien to traditional political life. It restricted local autonomy and placed Native leaders between their own communities and a federal government backed by soldiers, courts, and the power to recognize or remove them. Native peoples then had to adapt to a system created largely for their control.

Scott James: Your reconstruction is especially valuable here because it shows how a familiar English word—“chief”—can conceal an entirely different political system.

David Buerge: Yes. The word gives the impression of centralized authority when the actual relationships were much more fluid and consensual.

History and Historical Fiction

Scott James: David, your work tests inherited stories against chronology, motive, and often obscure archival evidence. Gar, your novels work within those historical boundaries while imagining the private experience the records cannot preserve. What can each form contribute?

David Buerge: I believe the historian weighs the surviving fragments and tries to make the most coherent sense of them. It is always an interpretation, but it must remain answerable to evidence.

Gar LaSalle: And, historical fiction also requires a firm factual foundation. The novelist has considerable license, but that license should operate within a credible historical world. My aim is to supply the human element—to imagine fear, ambition, loyalty, grief, and moral choice against an accurate backdrop.

That is why David’s work is so valuable to me. The documented history is often more surprising than fiction. Historians, anthropologists, and biologists continually recover material that changes what a novelist thought he knew. Responsible historical fiction has to remain open to that discovery.

David Buerge: Fiction and history are both forms of commentary, but they make different promises to the reader. History changes as new sources appear and as each generation asks different questions. Historians have biases, and fortunately new historians eventually challenge them.

When I was first asked to write a biography of Seattle, I thought it was impossible. The primary sources seemed too sparse. The early chapters felt quiet because I did not yet know enough to explain what was happening. That frustration became a twenty-year search.

The evidence was scattered through government records, newspapers, private journals, and missionary letters, some of them written in French. Those letters helped establish details such as the date of Seattle’s baptism and clarified events that had been misdated for generations. My task was not simply to collect facts, but to ask why celebrated accounts—especially the famous speech—did not fit the chronology or Seattle’s known behavior.

I cannot claim to have recovered everything. This is the most coherent account I can construct from the available evidence. But the more evidence we find, the more significant Seattle becomes. The real achievement is not that he predicted modern environmentalism; it is that he tried to preserve his people’s place in a world being remade around them.

Gar LaSalle: David, your research has materially strengthened my own work. The notes you shared about Isaac Ebey’s expedition during the Indian War gave me information I could not have located independently. More important, your scholarship has repeatedly shown me that the documented history is often stranger, more complicated, and more compelling than anything a novelist might invent.

David Buerge: And Gar’s fiction gives that history a human scale. Documents preserve fragments—names, journeys, transactions, conflicts—but fiction can help readers imagine what those events felt like to the people living through them. Gar’s care with the historical setting allows the imagination to illuminate the record rather than distort it.

Gar LaSalle: That is the standard I hope to meet. History establishes the responsibilities of the story; fiction gives the people within it breath.

Scott James: David, your work restores Chief Seattle as a complicated and remarkably adaptive leader rather than the symbol later generations made of him. Gar, your fiction shows how that same historical world might have been experienced by the people caught within it. Thank you both for demonstrating how archival history and disciplined historical imagination can illuminate one another.

David Buerge: Thank you, Gar. I have enjoyed seeing the history take on another kind of life in your work.

Gar LaSalle: And thank you, David. Your scholarship has made both the history and my own understanding of it richer.

Scott James is a writer, poet and publicist, working from his home in Austin, Texas.