The "letter"

A similar controversy surrounds a purported 1855 letter from Seattle to President Franklin Pierce, which has never been located and, based on internal evidence, is described by historian Jerry L. Clark as "an unhistorical artifact of someone's fertile literary imagination".^[7] It seems that the "letter" surfaced within environmentalist literature in the 1970s, as a slightly altered form of the Perry/Stevens version. The first environmental version was published in the November 11, 1972 issue of Environmental Action magazine. By this time it was no longer billed as a speech, but as a letter from Chief Seattle to President Pierce. The editor of Environmental Action had picked it up from Dale Jones, who was the Northwest Representative of the group Friends of the Earth. Jones himself has since said that he "first saw the letter in September 1972 in a now out of business Native American tabloid newspaper." Here all leads end, but it is safe to assume the original source was the movie poster.^[5]
There is no record of a letter from Chief Seattle in either the private papers of President Pierce in the New Hampshire Historical Society, or in the Presidential Papers of Pierce in the Library of Congress.^[17]
The staff at the National Archives has been unable to locate any such letter among the records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the National Archives and "concluded that the letter ... is probably spurious."^[18]
It would be quite improbable if not impossible for a letter from the Chief of an Indian tribe to the President of the United States not to have been recorded in at least one of the governmental offices through which it passed. For the letter to have made it to the desk of the President it would have passed through at least six departments: the local Indian agent, Colonel Simmons; to the superintendent of Indian Affairs, Gov. Stevens; to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs; to the office of the Secretary of the Interior and finally to the President's desk—quite a paper trail for the letter to have left not a trace. It can be concluded that no letter was written by or for Seattle and sent to President Pierce or to any other President. (Seattle was illiterate and moreover did not speak English, so he obviously could not write English.)^[5]