Mark Parsons

The Last Book of Chimacum Mark Parsons

Our perception of the original North American Indians, natives or indigenous people of North America, is usually based on the first pictures of them taken between 1850 and the First World War. Our first description of these people was written by those who were exploring for future country's developments into these wilds and not by the fur trappers, hunters and adventures who came first. Lewis and Clarke described what and who they saw and drew pictures of both flora and fauna, but they did not take pictures. It was the later black and white pictures that we would remember the most. It is from these first pictures that has formed our sense of curiosity and knowledge of how they dressed, their weapons and their customs. But they had already been touched by those first fur trappers and explores who changed the Indians way of life from their first day of contact. Some already had rifles, gun powder, flint and balls, English knives, Boston shirts, European beads when the first documentarians arrived to describe them. In The LAST BOOK OF CHIMACUM the author had drawn from the writing of the first explorers to put together a written account of those people, and, especially the natives of the Olympic Peninsula, the last of the untouched tribes of America, and what happened to one of those tribes that disappeared. All of the Native North American Indians have now been identified and documented. Then I discovered the Chimacum Indians of the Olympic Peninsula on Washington State's northwest coast no longer exist, either in a reservation setting or linage. With this book I decided to do something about that and learn why they no longer exist.