Talk:Puget Sound War

Relationship with Yakima War?

If the Battle of Seattle (1856) involved Yakima troops (as Bill Speidel wrote), then it would be more accurate to assign it to the Yakima War ... or perhaps to merge the two into a series of related conflicts. rewinn 05:33, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Well, are you a lumper or a spliter? The two books I have with info on these wars both suggest that while they were similar in some ways, with some "coordination" between the Yakama and Puget Sound tribes, there are a number of significant differences. The Yakama War continued for several years and spread througout much of eastern Washington, and required a major effort by the US Army (relative to the time and place). The Puget Sound War was shorter and did not involve the large scale military campaigns that took place east of the Cascades. The Puget Sound War began after, and ended before the Yakama War.

After the Puget Sound hostile Indians were essentially defeated, Chief Leschi led a group of followers over Naches Pass, finding sanctuary with the Yakamas. So there was at least sympathy if not some degree of mutual assistance. A few Yakamas did cross the mountains to join the Puget Sound tribal resistance, but they seem to have been very few in number. John Swan, whom the Indians trusted, met with them in Leschi's "secret camp" to talk peace. Swan's account describes about 150-200 Indian fighters, of which perhaps 20 were from "east of the Cascades" -- Yakamas and Klickitats mainly.

On the Battle of Seattle, it apparently came five days after Gov. Stevens delcared "a war of extermination" against all the "hostiles" in Washington Territory, Puget Sound tribes and Yakamas alike. But according to Murray Morgan, it was less a battle than "a desultory duel at long range". The page on the Battle of Seattle is full of accounts by Phelps, but Murray Morgan dismisses some of the accounts of Phelps and others -- saying that "..the reports seem to have multipled by ten the actual numbers [of Indians]. There could not have been more than one hundred and fifty." The Battle of Seattle page also says that "Phelps put the number of enemy at 2,000", and that Leschi was ("presumably") involved. But Morgan finds this quite unlikely -- perhaps Phelps still felt the lingering animosity and presumed guilt of Leschi that led to his illegal execution. Anyway my main point here is that the wikipedia page on the Battle of Seattle strikes me as exaggerated almost to the point of 19th century anti-Indian propoganda -- I wouldn't trust it.

Meanwhile, the Yakama War ranged over a much larger region, with the Puget Sound War as a fairly minor related conflict. Wikipedia's Yakima War page seems to be in need of work too. For example, the claim that "...these [Yakama] raids culminated in the Battle of Seattle in which an unknown number of raiders briefly crossed the Cascade Range to engage settlers, Marines and the U.S. Navy before retiring" seems speculative and unsourced (wrt "raiders crossing the Cascades"). My understanding is that no one knows much about which Indians participated in the Battle of Seattle.

Anyway, perhaps more of a response than needed! The two books I'm referencing are Murray Morgan's "Puget's Sound", and D.W. Meinig's "The Great Columbia Plain". Pfly 05:29, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Would it help if I trotted out a passage about the various wars in this period all being generally referred to as the Yakima War? Seriously, I just saw one in Ned McGowan's War (ref on McGowan's War article) in a discussion of Vancouver Island Governor Douglas' policy/situation vis a vis the wars that erupted in the Americanized sector of his old Columbia District; it's a summary and doesn't mention the Battle of Seattle by name but as I recall indicates conflict in Puget Sound; I'll dig it out later as I just go in the door. Other than that, these articles were a revelation for me as I'd never heard of a massed attack of this size on the Coast, even less so such a multi-tribal alliance, including peoples from over the mountains; to me that the Yakima (I'd say the branch of the Kamialk are a branch of the Yakima; the name doesn't look familiar in any other sense) and Klickitat and others point to the extraordinary nature of the muster; this was an all-nations attempt to stage battlefield war on the main stronghold of the whites in the region (south of the border). I hadn't heard of it before and it was interesting to read; took me a while to find out who the "raiders" were ("freedom fighters" or whatever we daren't call them in the present context...oh yes, "insurgents") but once I realized it was the alliance as composed it made sense to me as part of this other comment about these other wars being part of the Yakima War; it's a whole period, and other alliances were also at play, even spilling across the border (in the case of the Okanagan, who if they'd been drawn into the Fraser Canyon War that would have marked the spillage of the Yakima War fully over into the newly-incorporated (just barely) British colony; this is also in the book in question, but it's also commonly observed by other writers in Canada these days (that sounds so weird; we usually think of ourselves up here as BC); if you like I'll copy out the passage into one of my sandboxes and provide the page refs and cite info; the reaction in the British colonies, and the governor's support of Stevens with arms and money, are all in there. I've found other stuff in our histories on things like a Tongass attack on the Twana in the '40s, and other dated events which maybe are of overall interest to territorial-era history for Washington/Oregon Territory or contemporaneous within "white man history" events in the emergent American presence at that time in the Oregon Country, i.e. quite a bit went on with native peoples that's documentable, mostly in pre-US sources - of course (Helmcken, Tolmie, Douglas, the usual suspects plus Teit and Hill-Tout.....Skookum1 06:57, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Sure, any help you could give would be, uh, helpful! My source has mostly been Bill Speidel who is of course only as good as his sources. rewinn 04:24, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Well, it's a bit dicey to start Wars between indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest partly because of the scope of the potential article and also the danger of synthesis in the writing of it; individual wars are harder to write articles on as so little is available out there - partly because of a blanket of semi-secrecy on these wars in post-modern histories but partly because so little reached the written record. Wars involving the indigenous peoples of North America I don't think is an article title, but close to it - what Indian Wars redirects to now I think; or that title is for "white"-"Indian" wars, not "Indian-Indian" wars. Basically the article could be a collection fo cites of various battles, attackes and known massacres/raids ,without too much editorializing (where the danger of synthesis lies - adding/imposing interpretations of events, all too fashionable in modern historiography). One of these, or rather a series of these, were the Haida-Tongass raids on Puget Sound, which were a regular affair until they coincided with the Puget Sound War and the presence of the US navy; it's noteworthy that the first sailor of the US Navy in the Pacific to die from an attack of warriors from outside what had become American territory (the boundary settlement meant little to the Haida and Tlingit obviously). Also there's events like the Heiltsuk (or Haisla?) raid that destroyed the main village (and most of the population) of the Osekeeno, and so on. My main reason fro commenting tonight has to do with this; it's why I added the new bit to the intro, as accounts of these battles describe them as being "during the Indian Wars in Puget Sound" and in contexts where it's clear that hte US historian, or US source, does not distinguish between the hostilities of the war with local native peoples, but also with those at war with THEM. The raids were not part of the war war as the article describes it; but to those in the historical context, it's hard to say whether "the Indian Wars in Puget Sound" is equivalent to "the Puget Sound War". I submit that the officers of the US Navy and the territorial government didn't really distinguish between the two, except to (perhaps( fear the Haida and Tongass more than the more (or formerly more) pacific Puget Sounders and their Interior allies. BTW 6000 attackers seems like a phenomenal number to have been repelled; as far as the canoes from the north goes there's actual figures cited somewhere about their capacity and how many canoes there were; it was in the hundreds of men (and, at least in the case of the Haida and one would imagine also the Tlingit, also the women). I'll make a note of the passages in BEgg and Howay/Scholefield that are relevant here when I come across them again, and will try and get a sandbox started where stuff on the inter-indigenous warfare can be organized/cited before article creation; I'm more focussing on Alaska boundary dispute writing in the next while, or intend to, but using the same sources, though different chapters....a lot of the ethnographers have sections on instruments of warfare and related methods; I'll see if I can find my digitized copy of part of Teit....Skookum1 (talk) 02:05, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

One of the ostensible reasons on the American side as I recall was to end native slaving of other natives, which certainly was the upshot of the defence of the local peoples from slaving/raiding by the nothern tribes; but also wasn't there some abolition of chiefs' control of their slave populations (Salishan chiefs were more of a csste than a single-leadership like we assume is the meaning of chief, and slave is likewise a caste - see explanation I think on Skwxwu7mesh. It seems odd for US authorities to maintain abolition of native slavery when it hadn't been abolished in the US for other peopels, i.e. by themselves, yet.02:10, 27 August 2008 (UTC)Skookum1 (talk)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Puget Sound War/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

Work needed detailed on its talk page, Talk:Puget Sound War. Pfly 03:41, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Last edited at 03:41, 23 June 2007 (UTC). Substituted at 03:32, 30 April 2016 (UTC)