Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

For the past few weeks, I’ve been doing research for The Wolf Tree. It’s been an education, in several ways.

Seattle isn’t like New York or San Francisco or London. I don’t have dozens of books to choose from, rows of scholarly tomes filled with history, details, and anecdotes.

Most books about Seattle’s history are pictorial, thanks in large part to Paul Dorpat’s “Now and Then” newspaper columns. Dorpat’s oeuvre is built on the photographic record, comparing views from Seattle’s past to photos of its present, but taken as a whole, his work isn’t comprehensive. If it’s not in the picture, it’s not discussed, and thus there’s little by way of historical analysis and “big picture” views. In addition, there is very little surviving photography of Seattle pre-1880 (the period I’m researching), and thus there is very little wheat amidst the chaff.

In other words, Dorpat (and others who’ve followed his lead) are helpful, but only in an ancillary fashion.

The remaining titles I’ve found were written in the early part of the 20th century; they are mostly biographical, some lamely humorous, and almost all of them rife with bad writing and overt racism. One book was so bad I had to put it down. Every sentence of the author’s description of the Puget Sound natives was filled with words like “buck,” “brave,” “squaw,” “lazy,” “cowardly,” and “Happy Hunting Grounds.” The imagined dialogue he put into the mouths of the white settlers was just as unreadable, built of such abominations as:

“Ef’n yer goods’r all aboard, Mr. Terry, and if the ladies’ll be good enough t’remove that flotilla of young’uns from my mainmast, I’ll set about gettin’ under way.”

and

“‘Pears t’me we’ve settled in the wrong spot, boys.”

Shoot me. Just…shoot me.

These books are also very sketchy on early Seattle history. We hear a lot about the years 1851-1856 (i.e., from the founding of the town site through the much ballyhooed “Battle of Seattle”) and then they go dark until 1880.

Sometimes I wonder if I purposefully make things hard on myself…

I was just about to give up when I happened upon an obscure reference to A Chronological History of Seattle from 1850 to 1897, by Thomas W Prosch. That name–Prosch–stood out; I knew that there was a Thomas Prosch who was the first editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I followed the trail and found a gold mine.

Instead of the miserable, puffed-up, condescending, yuck-it-up anecdotes of a curmudgeonly, beer-drinking good-old-boys, I found the facsimile of a hand-typed, year-by-year chronology, culled from old newspapers, compiled by a seasoned journalist. Admittedly, this was a 19th century journalist, but trust me, he’s more dispassionate and even-handed than most of the so-called journalism you and I see every day.

It’s hard to read–it’s basically screenshots the pages Prosch hand-typed back in 1900–but it spends four to ten pages on the happenings of each and every year, right through the “dark” years of my research period.

Thank you, Thomas Prosch (1850-1915), and thank you, Seattle Public Library (established 1869).

k