Little more than one generation ago, at a date which would extend quite beyond the date birth of very many people in Seattle, there was assembled on the neck of land known as Elliott point, Alki point, Duwamish head and West Seattle, or as the Indians called it Squ-ducks, a large band of Indians and a great pow wow was going on.
One thousand natives of the Duwamish and other tribes with a few stragglers from distant local tribes were assembled and sat about their smouldering fires, lounged lazily in brown-colored canoes or were snoring under rakish tents much as the Indians of today do about Ballast island or the hop fields.
All was excitement.
History records the fact that the day was a beautiful one, a brilliant sun shedding a brilliant light over a most primeval and rural scene.
OLDEST HOUSE IN KING COUNTY—J. W. MAPLE’S, WHITE RIVER
Over all this vast congregation of God’s simple-minded children there ruled a chief—old Chief Sealth—then a patriarch, aged, yet stately and dignified; an Indian simple and untutored, though yet an orator of the highest rank.
Old Chief Sealth, a name honored and revered even at that early day; a name since become historic and wreathed with an enduring, undying fame.
It was at a day when the flames of Indian warfare were beginning to smoulder after a long seige of war, of ambush and bloodshed on Puget Sound, though the old patriarch of the forest, Chief Sealth, had refrained from lending a hand in the bloody work of his tribal relations and neighbors. He, like many of the proud chieftains in the earlier settlement of the Atlantic and middle states, stood by the white men—the invaders we might say—when their brethren wore the war paint and carried the scalp-lock at their girdle.