Antiquated Views 

Editor:

I respond to the Guest Views column by Mark Drake in the Dec. 21, 2017, edition, headlined "The Plaque, The General and 1984." Maybe it was a slow news week but it seemed like a lot of these varied views that your guest touched on had been expressed the previous week. What is the point? He likes the movie, The General. Understandable. He mentions the Jacoby Storehouse plaque and the McKinley statue in the same sentence as if they are the same. They are not. The point, it appears clear, are the words on the plaque that refer to the storehouse: "it served periodically as a refuge in time of Indian trouble." I'm not but an amateur historian, but it seems that the Indian troubles were that the Indians already lived on this land that the settlers had settled on.

I don't know of any massacres of white settlers by Indians (some where killed, yes), but there are numerous massacres of Indians documented all around Humboldt County.

If my Indian ancestors were massacred, my view on that civic plaque and those words, "Indian trouble," would be a passionate one of distaste. (Actually, my ancestors were massacred, and my grandfather left for dead in a 1905 Russia pogrom.) We survive and we all live together now, and we are the same: We all struggle to provide a quality of life for our families, that our descendants may thrive, so our ancestors may be honored. Your guest author votes, at the end, for historical accuracy. Let's do that.

Jeffrey Haloff, Eureka