About this eBook
A gravestone, a mention in local archives, stories still handed down around Oyster Bay: the outline of a woman begins to emerge and with her the world she inhabited, so rich in tradition, so shaken by violent change. Katie Kettle Gale was born into a Salish community in Puget Sound in the 1850s, just as settlers were migrating into what would become Washington State. With her people forced out of their accustomed hunting and fishing grounds into ill-provisioned island camps and reservations, Katie Gale sought her fortune in Oyster Bay. In that early outpost of multiculturalismãwhere Native Americans and immigrants from the eastern United States, Europe, and Asia vied for economic, social, political, and legal powerãa woman like Gale could make her way.
As LLyn De Danaan mines the historical record, we begin to see Gale, a strong-willed Native woman who¾cofounded a successful oyster business, then wrested it away from her Euro-American husband, a man with whom she raised children and who ultimately made her life unbearable. Steeped in sadnessãwith a lost home and a broken marriage, children dying in their teens, and tuberculosis claiming her at forty-threeãKatie Galeês story is also one of remarkable pluck, a tale of hard work and ingenuity, gritty initiative and bad luck that is, ultimately, essentially American.
About the author
LLyn De Danaan is a writer and an anthropologist. She contributed to the book Vashon Island Archaeology: A View from Burton Acres Shell Midden, and her articles have appeared in Womenês Studies Quarterly, Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History, and Oregon Historical Quarterly.
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