Okay. My journey is complete and as promised, it’s time to move on with this “whole new life” nonsense I’ve been promising you. Enough with the light-hearted prognostications regarding the imminent destruction of our Western way of life and the demise of growth-based capitalism as a viable economic model. No more insentient ramblings about how we, in America, have to pay so much more for everything than everybody else, just because we live here. Those subjects are just so last-year and, since the blog crossed the mythic one-year boundary a couple of weeks ago, it’s time for something new. Let’s usher in the new fifty-two with a look at something I’ve never really paid any attention to before: Revisionist History.
My “whole new life”, by necessity, requires a “whole new way” of looking at things. For me, never known for being particularly adaptable or willing to compromise my ardently held views, this is going to take some practice. So, just for grins, I decided to take a look at how those Masters of Spin – the original westward-ho pioneers – handled one aspect of their “whole new life” as they moved into what is now my new home state.
The area known as Washington State was originally “discovered” by Captain Don Bruno de Heceta in 1775. As with most of the New World, the “discovery” was largely disputed by the thousands and thousands of people who were already living here. But, as elsewhere, they were shit out of luck once the Europeans showed up. I digress. Captain Don’s claim for Spain turned the Pacific into a Spanish lake; a situation that remained for a grand total of three years when the English explorer Captain James Cook showed up and said something like “not so fast”.
What was to become Washington state was originally the settled home of numerous Native American Tribes who moved into the area about twelve-thousand years ago after the continental glaciers retreated. When the Brits took over in the late 1700s the area was part of the Oregon Territory an area jointly occupied by England and America until 1848 when the U.S. took over. The area eventually called Washington was, for a brief five months named Clark County until the governor remembered the other guy and Lewis County was created. It was next split off from the Oregon Territory in 1853. Washington Territory was subdivided into several major counties in the early 1850s and the current thirty-nine county map was finished by 1911.
All of which I am sure you find completely boring which is why you have me, your faithful writer, to look into things a bit more deeply. It was the names of the counties which held some interest for me and how they got those names. Lewis and Clark Counties are pretty much a given. The intrepid Captains may not have discovered the place but their expedition in 1804 – 1806 put it on the map, so to speak. In a nod to the natives who were here before the Europeans showed up, seventeen counties are named after tribes or with Indian words, six counties commemorate Presidents – George gets the state but no county, eleven are named after Other Famous People, and the remaining five after miscellaneous stuff.
One county’s name is what got me started onto this line of inquiry. The question seemed simple enough to me: “Why is the county containing Seattle named King County?” Nobody knew. My confusion stemmed from the fact that King County’s logo is an image of the unabridgeably named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he of civil rights fame. Given that King County dates from 1852 and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from nearly a century later I was pretty sure that the county was originally named for somebody else. I figured that Seattle being Seattle, specifically 75+ percent White and wracked with guilt, voters decided to rename the county to honor the slain leader. Nope. It was weirder than that.
But on with the names. Of the seventeen Indian named counties, seven are named after the tribe that lived in the area. Some are named after water features: Cowlitz means “river of shifting sand”, Chelan means “deep water”, Asotintranslates as “eel creek”. Skamania (which would be a really good name for a Caribbean rock band), really references a bowel problem; the name means “obstructed”. One county’s name – Kittitas – is similar to words in almost all of the northwest native languages but doesn’t mean the same thing in any of them. Among the rest is the oddly self-glorifying name of Wahkiakum which translates to “big timber”. And finally there is the geographically inconsistent Pend Oreille County, named after the local tribe and which means “earring” in French. I was puzzled as to why a local Indian Tribe would 1) speak French and 2) name themselves after a piece of jewelry.
The Presidentially named counties include three of the big four: Adams, Jefferson, and Lincoln. The other three honor Presidents U.S. Grant, James A. Garfield, and Franklin Pierce. Garfield was a shoe-in, the county was created the same year the luckless leader was plugged. What else could they do? Franklin Pierce is something of an outlier taken stand-alone but fits right into the bigger picture. The naming of Grant County has some interesting coincidences surrounding it when considered from the historical distance allotted us.
One of the original eastern Washington counties, Stevens County, was named for Isaac Stevens, the first governor of Washington Territory. It was a very large county. As the state grew Stevens County had Lincoln County subdivided out. Further growth required further subdivision and Douglas County was cut out of Lincoln. Douglas County was named after Steven A. Douglas who was most famous for losing the 1860 presidential election to Abe Lincoln. Finally Grant County was chiseled out of Douglas in 1809 to honor the famous Alcoholic-in-Chief. Isaac Stevens, he of the original county, died at the tender age of forty-four at the Battle of Chantilly in the American Civil War, a war which gave Grant the fame he needed to become President and have a county in Washington named after him. The circle is complete.
Isaac Stevens was a nasty character and it could be argued that forty-four was much longer than he deserved to live. Stevens was appointed Governor in 1853 at the age of thirty-five. He traveled west and immediately started pounding the native populations to near extinction in a series of minor wars. Actively pursuing a policy of what would now be known as “War Crimes”, including hanging Chief Leschi because his warriors killed American soldiers in open combat, he succeeded in making the place safer for the white folk who would come to dominate the region’s demographics. So, other than the fact that Indian elimination was a national policy, how did Stevens earn his governorship? Then, as now, political patronage was a powerful force and Stevens worked tirelessly to secure the election of Franklin Pierce, America’s fourteenth president and the man who appointed Stevens governor.
Pierce, who was no great shakes as a memorable president, seems to be the key to the whole story. It was during his Presidency that Washington first came onto the scene as one of the western destinations for the Gay population of the budding nation.
Huh?
Seattle is home to the second highest, after San Francisco, percentage of gays in its local population – a full 12.9%. It turns out that the French-speaking, earring-wearing, big-timber-riding natives that were already here were merely the first. Once Whitey came onto the scene not much changed except the demographics. To commemorate its status as an open and friendly place, King County was named, in 1852, for Franklin Pierce’s almost-openly gay Vice President and former Senator from Alabama, William Rufus DeVane King.
King was a long-time cohabitator with the future almost-openly gay President James Buchanan. They shared a house for some fifteen years, neither ever married and they were referred to during their Senate years as “Miss Nancy” and “Aunt Fancy” by no less a person than President Andrew Jackson. Rep. Aaron Brown of Tennessee called the duo “Buchanan and his wife”. Take a look at King’s Wikipedia page and your gay-dar will go off faster than walking into a Battle of the Bands featuring Village People tribute acts.
King was, sadly for the late-night talk show comedians of the day, the shortest serving Vice President. He spent a mere three weeks in office, including being inaugurated in Cuba, before succumbing to an unidentified illness. But those three weeks were enough to get a county in Washington Territory named after him and set light to a shining beacon of acceptance and tolerance in a county nestled into the green, green hills of the Pacific Northwest.
Fast-forward now to 1986 and the rapid rise of Political Correctness in the United States. King County and Seattle, now whiter than the rice aisle at Safeway, remain a destination for the alternative lifestyle set. But there’s a problem: how can such a liberal, tolerant, and accepting bunch of crackers go on living in a county named for one of the largest slave-holding, cotton-farming, plantation-owning honkeys from Alabama on record, never mind that he was gay?
Their answer: Let’s change history. So on February 24, 1986 the King County Council voted five-to-four to change the “historical basis” for naming King County “King”. The change was made official in 2005 when the State passed the adopting legislation. In 2006 King County dropped its crown logo in favor of the smiling face of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The unfortunate assassination of a black man from Georgia who coincidentally had the same last name as the white man from Alabama originally honored, gave the Seattle politicians the excuse they needed to dump the connection with real history and rewrite it in their new image. Now, King County really is named after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and that other guy will fade further into revisionist obscurity.
All of which is the answer to my original question: What’s in a name? This is a question which currently almost nobody asks and which, I think, everybody should. I think asking questions like this are more than just an exercise to help win at Trivial Pursuit. Finding the real answers gives us a chance not only to get a feel for the forces that acted to bring us all to the times in which we live but also to give us a lens through which to view the things that we are doing now. Things which future generations will label “History”.