Where Two Waters Meet: A Historical novel of the early days of Port Townsend, WA (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798312425963)

Port Townsend, 1851. Where the Strait of Juan de Fuca meets Puget Sound, a schooner drops anchor in waters the S'Klallam have fished for millennia. The settlers aboard see an empty harbor waiting for civilization. Chief Chetzemoka sees something else entirely: a future he can glimpse but cannot prevent.

Elizabeth Morrison arrives with the first wave, a Boston widow seeking reinvention in the territories. She builds a customs brokerage, accumulates property, raises two daughters-and keeps a cipher journal recording everything the official histories will erase. The treaties broken before the ink dries. The village burned to make room for mansions. The systematic dispossession dressed up as progress.

Chetzemoka chooses accommodation over resistance, signing away his people's land in exchange for promises of fishing rights and reserved territory. It's a gamble on the long game-that words on paper might matter to someone, someday, when circumstances change. His son Joseph inherits that burden, waiting decades for the moment when the settlers' certainties finally crack.

That moment comes in 1890, when the railroad boom that was supposed to make Port Townsend a great city collapses into economic ruin. The speculators flee. Property values crash. And in the wreckage, possibilities emerge that didn't exist before.

Spanning forty-four years of territorial history, Where Two Waters Meet tells the story of American expansion through the eyes of those who built it and those who survived it. Based on documented events and featuring the real S'Klallam leader Chetzemoka-known to settlers as "the Duke of York"-this novel explores what happens when one community's prosperity requires another's destruction, and what it costs to remember what everyone else prefers to forget.

The S'Klallam people-the "Strong People"-never disappeared. Their nations persist on their traditional territories today.

For readers of Barkskins and Cloud Cuckoo Land, this is a story of those who fight to hold onto their place in a changing world.