Port Townsend, Washington, 1851. Two waters meet here — the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound — and for a few decades, the men who arrived first were certain this would be the greatest city on the Pacific Coast. They platted streets that still exist, built brick buildings that still stand, and filed claims on land they had no right to take. The S'Klallam and Chemakum peoples had lived at this confluence for thousands of years before the treaties — treaties signed under pressure, in languages the signatories did not speak, ceding territories they had no framework for imagining as ownable. Where Two Waters Meet tells the story of Port Townsend's founding years through witnesses on both sides of that transaction: the settlers who believed they were building civilization, and the people who watched their world being renamed. A novel rooted in the place where Ricardo Gómez now lives and writes — and in the history that the town's Victorian facades have always been covering.
