Robert

People settled around his house, and in 1903, a railroad connection made Eatonville a real town, and the Eatonville Lumber Company the biggest business in town.

Prior to that point, settlers in the area had tended to just call the whole area Mashel's Prairie, after a group of Niskali Indians who originally inhabited the region.

These native people had been massacred in 1856 by a militia known as Maxon's Raiders in retaliation for a fight with a Washington militia a few weeks earlier.

I think this is all part of the Puget Sound War.

Per the website historylink.org, official reports claimed only eight of the Mashal hostiles were killed, but virtually all accounts and testimonies agree that the Raiders under Maxon's command killed defenseless elderly women, children, and infants.

So that's where Mark's hometown comes from.

Many such cases in the U.S.

A lot of little genocide villas out in the PNW and elsewhere.

I love that this whole town just started because a bunch of dudes squatted on another dude's front lawn.

Yeah, yeah, after wiping out the people who had previously lived there.

Yeah, that's the classic Pacific Northwest trait.

Very, tale as old as, well, the PNW.

And Mark would have grown up, he wouldn't have been grown up being taught that, like, Maxon's Raiders had killed all of these people's, like, kids, right?

Like, they would have been taught, and there was a battle, you know, and they killed eight of these Braves, right, as opposed to, and then a genocide was done.

They killed a hundred warriors, parentheses, women and children.

The original military-aged males.

Yeah.

So he would have been raised, as I stated, in a community that was nearly all white and in which legends of Indian hunters like Maxon's Raiders would have been celebrated in school and in the popular culture of the day.

Racism would not have been weird for him.

I've never read Mark discuss any of this history, not even in his books.