Controversial Authorship

There is a lot of controversy over who actually wrote Chief Seattle's speech.  Obviously, some people believe that the speech was actually written by Chief Seattle.  On the other hand, there are some people who believe that the speech was written by a man named Dr. Henry A. Smith instead.  There is actually some legitimate arguments behind the issue of who actually wrote the speech.  For one, the article was published in a small journal in 1887 which is 33 years after Chief Seattle supposedly gave the speech in 1854.  Also, if Chief Seattle gave the speech it would have been in his native language which was Salish.  Dr. Smith did not speak Salish.  He spoke English and Chinook which means in order for Dr. Smith to understand the speech, there would have to be someone at the speech translating it from Salish to Chinook.  Furthermore, Dr. Smith was a poet, and the speech sounds very similar to his poetry.  There have been other faked Chief Seattle speeches and this makes people believe that this one could possibly be fake as well. 

http://www.chiefseattle.com/history/chiefseattle/speech/speech.htm