Chief Seattle and the Town That Took His Name (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

When Chief Seattle was a boy, he saw the first European, Captain Vancouver, sail into Puget Sound. By the time he died, the burgeoning settlement had honored him by naming itself Seattle. In a half-century of tremendous flux, turmoil, and violence, Seattle, the man, understood the force of the coming change and attempted to construct a hybrid world in which prosperity would be shared by natives and settlers.
 
When the British, Spanish, and then Americans arrived in the Pacific Northwest, it may have appeared to them as an untamed wilderness. In fact, it was a fully settled and populated land. And Chief Seattle was a powerful representative from this very ancient world. David Buerge is a journalist and historian who has been researching and writing this book about the world of Chief Seattle for the past 20 years. Quite amazingly, there is no modern biography or history of Chief Seattle and the native world that was changed forever after contact with Europeans. Buerge has threaded together disparate accounts of the time from the 1840s to 1900--including native oral histories, Hudson Bay Company records, pioneer diaries, French Catholic church records, and historic newspaper reporting--to write what amounts to the first thorough account of Chief Seattle and his times. The geography the author covers is not confined to what we now think of as Seattle; there were events as far east as Idaho, south to the Columbia River, and north to Vancouver Island. Chief Seattle was something of a visionary who understood the inevitability of white settlement and even embraced it, and he encouraged intermarriage of native women (including his daughter and granddaughters) with white settlers in the hope that both peoples would prosper together. Chief Seattle had successfully employed this tactic of joining ostensible enemies to form more effective coalitions in his diplomatic dealings with the various tribes in the Puget Sound region. Included in this account are the treaty signings that would remove the natives from their historic lands, the Battle at Seattle that threatened the existence of the settlement, and the controversial Chief Seattle speech that haunts the city that bears his name to this day.