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Research Files: Katie Gale's Tombstone: The Work of Researching a Life

2005; Oregon Historical Society; Volume: 106; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ohq.2005.0018

2329-3780

LLyn De Danaan,

Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis

ResearchFiles LIau De Danaan Katie Gale's Tombstone TheWorkof Researching a Life Sometimes a story just must be told. But how does a researcher proceed when there are no letters, journals, or even secondary sources to consult? On a late summer morning in 2004,1 set off with two local history buffs, Stan Graham and Jan Parker, in search of a smallburial groundnear theOlympia OysterCompany justhalf amile frommy home on Oyster Bay at the head of Totten Inlet near Olympia, Washington. A local man had visited theMason County Historical So ciety to report that he had seen a small burial plot when he logged the area in around i960. We drove down the road with our clippers, leather gloves, and a small-scale map on which an oversize x marked the several acres of land we would need to search. We decided first to explore the flat land high on the bank overlooking the bay. There would be a grand view ofMt. Rainier across thewater to the east from that bench of land. The hike up the steep hill from where we parked the truck was through a jumbleofvines and stumps.The climbwas thebeginningof amuch longer journey. Remarkably, given the heavy vegetation and the vague directions, we found the site. The first inscribed stone we saw was leaning against a blocky, moss covered base. The children ofMr. and Mrs. Johnson, it read, Hattie and Henry. Henry died in 1895, age seventeen. Hattie died in 1897, age eighteen.1 We stood silent for a fewmoments on this sacred ground, thinking about the children and wondering about the cause of their deaths. We imagined the grief of losing two youngsters, so close together in time. 642 OHQ vol. 106, no. 4 ? 2005 Oregon Historical Society Then, lying on the ground beside itsbase, we saw a column of stone ? a pinkish stone, probably marble, engraved with a pair of low-relief doves: KATIE, WIFE OF J.A.GALE, DIED Aug. 6, 1899, AGED 43 yrS. Gone but notforgotten The grave itselfwas not evident, the grave site ungroomed; ithad been unvisited perhaps for years. Nonetheless, the name on the headstone was familiar tome. We had found the tombstone of Katie Gale, an Indian woman I had read a snippet about years before in twomemoirs written bywhite late-nineteenth-century residents of the area. On thatwarm rise encumbered by the exuberant foliage of big leafmaple, the pricking canes of invasive Himalaya blackberry, low-lying holly, and young Douglas firs, De Danaan, Katie Gale's Tombstone an ordinary late summer day in 2004 became special. Iwondered what I could hope to discover about her lifemore than the anecdote or two, specifically stories of fights between Katie and her husband Joseph over ownership of land, that circulated among the few Iknew ofwho had heard her name. So far as I knew from the one or two notes I had read about her in thememoirs, she had not kept journals or written letters.2 She did not, I decided later, read or write at all. She signed her mark with a firm cross. Iwould have to imagine the very texture of Katie Gale's daily life. Although the task seemed daunting, Iknew in those initialmoments that Iwanted to tell her story. Where to begin? If there were any truth in the stories of Katie's dis putes with her husband, common-law or otherwise, might there not be some record of the land or tidelands in question and the disputes themselves? We turned to archived records, specifically legal documents, and found much more than a simple glimpse of the life of the woman called Katie Gale. Documents do not speak for themselves. They must be deciphered. One must learn to read difficult handwriting, decode references to geographic places whose names have long since changed, and consult dictionaries and other reference material to sort out usage and terms in the context of the year inwhich the document was produced. To render the docu ments useful, historians proceed through a variety of intellectual exercises ? analysis, authentication, verification, contextualization, and interpreta tion ? without which the document is ameaningless scrap. Those who labor in the service of otherwise obscure subjects learn how...