In 1855, Sealth spoke again, briefly, at the formal signing of the Port Madison Treaty, which settled the Suquamish on their reservation across the sound from Seattle. His brief remarks have none of the elaborate pretensions of most speeches recorded during that era. As historian Bernard DeVoto noted, Indian speeches tended to reflect the literary aspirations of the recorder more than the orator.

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Three years later, an old and impoverished Sealth spoke one last time for the record, wondering why the treaty had not been signed by the Congress of the United States, leaving the Indians to languish in poverty: I have been very poor and hungry all winter and am very sick now. In a little while I will die. When I do, my people will be very poor; they will have no property, no chief and no one to talk for them. This entire text, as well as Sealth’s 1855 comments, are preserved in the National Archives.

Until the 1970s, the story of Chief Seattle belonged to the city that bears his name. Then, with the environmental movement in full swing, the speech Sealth made to Governor Stevens in 1854 was resurrected into the consciousness of Americans. It is not difficult to find people who consider the speech to be on almost the same level as the Gospel. The modern versions of the speech, which has been called the embodiment of all environmental ideas, have references to things Sealth would have never seen or known about, such as trains, whippoorwills, and the slaughter of the buffalo (which occurred long after the tyee’s death) are included. Comparisons between known versions of the text have turned up four main variants, each with its own phrasing, wording and sometimes contradictory content.

The first version of the speech has been traced to a transcription made by Dr. Henry Smith more than 30 years after the actual event. Smith’s is the original on which all others are based; it appeared in the October 29, 1887, issue of the Seattle Sunday Star under the title Scraps From A Diary. The article begins with a favorable description of Old Chief Seattle and segues into what is more than likely Dr. Smith’s poetic impression of what the tyee said, based upon notes Smith had made at the time. Smith concludes with the comment, The above is but a fragment of his speech, and lacks all the charm lent by the grace and earnestness of the sable old orator, and the occasion. Dr. Smith’s diary cannot be found, so it is impossible to know just how closely his notes followed what Sealth had to say. Moreover, Sealth was a prideful man, and though he embraced the white man’s commercial products, he refused to learn his ways or speak his language. Hence, it is safe to say that what Smith heard was a translation. It was probably made from Sealth’s Lushotseed language into the Chinook jargon and then into English, with each transliteration losing or embellishing something of the original.

In 1931, Clarence B. Bagley published an article and reproduced the Chief Seattle speech with his own additions. In 1932, John M. Rich published a booklet called Chief Seattle’s Unanswered Challenge, which follows the Smith text but with some minor changes. A 1971 version by W.C. Vanderworth in Indian Oratory: Famous Speeches by Noted Indian Chieftains is essentially the same as these two.

The third major revision of the speech was done in 1969 by poet William Arrowsmith, who translated from the Victorian English of Dr. Henry Smith an interpretation that retains the tyee’s meaning, if not the wording and phrasing. A fourth version displayed at the 1974 Spokane Expo, a shorter Letter to President Franklin Pierce, and many other variations at about that time have a familial resemblance to the Smith text but begin to adopt an ecological view. In Smith’s 1887 version, the natural world is the canvas upon which Chief Seattle’s words are drawn. In the 1970s, the environment is the entire painting.

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