WRITTEN BY PAUL DORPAT

COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON LIBRARIES

Likely feeling some mix of guilt and gratitude, several pioneers, including the "father of Seattle," Arthur Denny, erected a new headstone for Chief Seattle at the Suquamish Cemetery in 1891. The graveyard was tidied in the late 1930s with a Works Progress Administration grant; a Bicentennial grant helped groom the graveyard again in 1976. These additions included the native sculpture that still surrounds the chief's headstone. The archaeologist Leonard Forsman, a member of the Suquamish tribal council for 15 years, participated in the 1976 project as a 14-year-old summer worker. Forsman provided much of the details for this feature and took the contemporary photo.

	COURTESY OF LEONARD FORSMAN

In 1838 the Revs. Francis Blanchet and Modeste Demers arrived on Puget Sound answering the call of French-Canadians working for the Hudson Bay Co. That many of the trappers had Puget Salish (or Lushootseed) wives made welcoming the "black robes" to native communities easier. And in three years the U.S. Navy expedition of exploration headed by Lt. Charles Wilkes came upon the central sign of this missionary work, a large white crucifix standing on the Suquamish beach beside Ol'-Man-House.

Wilkes' 1841 discovery of praying Indians occurred a decade before Midwesterners — many of them Methodists — first arrived on Elliott Bay to found a city named for Seattle, baptized Noah, who had been attending Mass since the early 1840s.

In 1861 a small mission church was built on the hill above Ol'-Man-House village. With his death in 1866, a procession carried the chief the mile from the church to the Suquamish Cemetery. When the federal government condemned the Ol'-Man-House site in 1904 for uses it never developed, the church was destroyed. Parts of it, though, like the Gothic windows, were salvaged and included in the new St. Peter's, constructed soon after and seen here in both scenes over the shoulder of Chief Seattle's graveside monument.