The Trial of Ferdinand Falkenbarg
A shooting incident involving the 'Duke of York' and his family sparks outrage in Port Townsend, revealing the complex, fading status of local Indigenous leaders in the frontier era.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The Port Townsend Argus informs us: The case of Ferdinand Falkenbarg, charged with shooting Jenny Lind, one of the wives of the Duke of York, came on for a hearing before J. J. H. Van Bokkelen, Justice of the Peace, in the courthouse, on Saturday, April 29th. The evidence being conclusive, the prisoner was fully committed to await the action of the Grand Jury at the September term of the District Court. The Duke of York, head chief of the Clallam tribe, and his two wives, Queen Victoria and Jenny Lind, are historical personages intimately connected with the history of Port Townsend, and rendered famous by the fertile pens of J. G. Swan, James Gilchrist Swan, Theodore Winthrop, Geo. Gibbs, Dr. Geo. Suckley and other writers. The cowardly act of Falkenbarg caused a greater feeling of excitement among our citizens than would probably have been evinced had the same outrage been perpetrated on any other Indian outside of the Duke's family. The injured woman was taken to the hospital where, under the skillful treatment of Dr. Minor, it is thought she will recover. The old Duke is very proud of the attention, and struts and prances round, and brags to every Indian he meets that his wife is the first Indian woman who has received such attentions at the hands of the whites. 'Hia klose nika tumtum,' says the Duke, but he adds in an undertone that if he was as skookum as he was thirty years ago he would not ask the authorities to espouse his quarrels. In early days, when the Duke was a powerful chief, he was ever the friend of the whites, and rendered great assistance to the first settlers here, and they have not forgot his kindness. As long as the old man lives he will be cared for by our citizens, and we hope we shall have no cause to chronicle any further outrage on him or his.
“The old Duke is very proud of the attention, and struts and prances round, and brags to every Indian he meets that his wife is the first Indian woman who has received such attentions at the hands of the whites.”
This incident captures the uneasy transition of power in Washington Territory, where the 'Duke of York'—a figure once central to the survival of early white settlers—found his social standing reduced to a mix of paternalistic sympathy and diminishing authority. The story underscores the deep, often transactional, and ultimately fragile nature of early relations between settlers and the Indigenous leaders who enabled their arrival.
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