Ozette Petroglyphs

For years according to the accounts of the white trader, John Hancock, the Makah people believed that the white man put smallpox in bottles and buried it in the sand (see Indians of the Pacific Northwest by Robert Ruby and John Brown). The Makah people were often in conflict with the imposing whites from the arrival through at least the 1860s.

This photograph is of a coastal stone petroglyph seen on the shores of the Ozette Triangle of the Olympic Peninsula also referred to as Wedding Rocks. The white man's ship is directly aimed at a fertility symbol. The photograph seems to suggest the threatening nature of the arrival of the whites on the beautiful coasts of the Northwest. Another site offers this explanation created by Daniel Leen: "According to a nautical historian, this sailing "ship" is actually a "hermaphrodite brig", a sailing vessel with square sails on the main mast, and fore-and-aft gaff rigged sails on the mizzen mast (Ellison 1977). A vessel of this rig was constructed at Nootka Sound by John Meares in 1788 and subsequently used to trade along the west coast, the first of its kind to be built on the Northwest Coast."