Throughout 2021 the Sunday Olympian’s Looking Back feature portrayed events and people from the Sylvester’s Window cityscape project. The 1856 cityscape includes George Bush, early American settler. He and the Simmons party arrived first in Oregon Territory; but as a mixed race man, Bush was not welcome there. The party proceeded north to what is now Tumwater, where Bush and his wife Isabella helped countless fellow settlers to establish their homesteads.
Jacob Lawrence goache, Thank God All Mighty, home at last – the settlers erect shelter at Bush Prairie near what is now Olympia, Washington, November 1845 (detail), Courtesy State Capital Museum Collection, Washington State Historical Society
Note: the image of George Bush more often reproduced, and originally included in the Sunday Olympian, is a fanciful sketch of a “typical” African-American, created for the Los Angeles Times by artist Sam Patrick in 1969 to portray how George Bush might have looked. We have substituted Black artist Jacob Lawrence’s image which is equally based on the artist’s concept of the man.
Text © Deborah Ross and The Olympian 2021 and 2026