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Patkanim


Patkanim (variously spelled Pat-ka-nam or Pat Kanim) was chief of the Snoqualmoo (Snoqualmie) and Snohomish tribe in what is now modern Washington State.

During the 1850s, he lived at the largest village of his people located at Toultʷ, a fishing village at the confluence of the Tolt and Snoqualmie rivers (today, Carnation, Washington) in a complex containing sixteen longhouses. He was the dominant power from Whidbey Island to Snoqualmie Pass, between what is today British Columbia and King County, Washington According to historian Bill Speidel, his was the major Indian power on Puget Sound, in no small part due to control of Snoqualmie Pass and therefore the profitable trade between the tribes on either side.

Patkanim first gained notoriety among American settlers by arranging a meeting on Whidbey Island in 1848, of 8,000 Puget Sound Indians to discuss the rising threat of white colonists. As Hubert Howe Bancroft recounted:

Patkanim then opened the conference by a speech, in which he urged that if the Americans were allowed to settle among them they would soon become numerous, and would carry off their people in large fire-ships to a distant country on which the sun never shone, where they would be left to perish. He argued that the few now present could easily be exterminated, which would discourage others from coming...

A Steilacoom band leader, Chew-see-a-kit, rejected the considered attack. The white settlers residing in his land were seen as deterrent to raids by Northern Puget Sound tribes, such as the Snoqualmies.


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