Late one evening in 1867, Aaron Stemple is on his way home in the newly founded town of Seattle when he sees a bright flash and hears a noise from the woods next to his path. Although his horse is afraid, Stemple decides to investigate. He doesn’t have to travel far before he finds an unconscious man, injured and bleeding. Only this man has pointy ears and green blood. Despite the anomalies, Stemple takes the “man” – obviously aware that he is not human – back to his lodgings and proceeds to nurse him back to health.
When he finally awakens, the man has no memories of his past or present. He likewise notices that he is not human, which adds to his confusion. Stemple is confused as well, never expecting the stranger to speak English. Stemple agrees to allow the alien to reside with him, posing as his nephew Ishmael, until his memory comes back and he can return to wherever it is he came from. That would be the twenty-third century, as Ishmael is actually Spock, the science officer of the USS Enterprise from the original Star Trek of the 1960s.
Aaron Stemple was also a character from a sixties television show – the western comedy Here Come the Brides – which was loosely based on actual events from the early days of Seattle. Few unmarried women ventured into the Pacific Northwest during the nineteenth century and a recent transplant named Asa Mercer hoped to rectify that fact. After acquiring funds from other bachelors in the area, Mercer caught a ship to Boston. In nearby Lowell, Massachusetts, he found eleven unmarried women willing to relocate to Seattle, and all but one of them immediately married upon their arrival.
Within the world of Here Come the Brides, the head of a logging company named Jason Bolt fears he is about to lose his operation because of a similar lack of unmarried females. He thus places a bet with Aaron Stemple – owner of the local sawmill – that he can convince 100 women from Massachusetts to move to Seattle. Stemple puts up the money for the trip, but if all 100 women are not still living in Seattle at the end of one year, Bolt forfeits his mountain to Stemple. Bolt succeeds in the first part of the agreement after traveling to New Bedford, Massachusetts, while the second part provides the basis for the first season of Here Come the Brides.
In 1985, writer Barbara Hambly combined the Star Trek of the 1960s with the plot threads from Here Come the Brides to craft a novel that transports Spock to fictional Seattle. The resulting Star Trek: Ishmael is a hybrid of the two shows, with the Spock of the twenty-third century being captured and tortured by a group of Klingons intent on traveling to the year 1867 and altering Earth history. In order to survive the Klingons’ Mind-Sifter, Spock was able to self-induce a catatonic state that also erased his memory.
Back on the USS Enterprise, Captain James T. Kirk searches for a way to duplicate the Klingon’s time travel and figure out how they intend to alter history. He is assisted by a starbase commander with access to the records of the long-gone Khlaru Empire. The Khlaru conquered planets by posing as natives with advanced technology and the knowledge to create stronger economies. Once the planet had grown dependent on them, the Khlaru revealed their true identity and forced the planet to capitulate to their rule.
Captain Kirk discovers that the Khlaru made a similar attempt to conquer Earth during the 1870s but failed when a solitary congressman from Seattle recognized them for what they were and convinced President Ulysses S. Grant to not accept their overtures. That congressman was Aaron Stemple, and the Klingons are intent on killing him before he ever gets elected to Congress. An amnesiac Spock is unaware of this fact but by staying at Stemple’s cabin and posing as his nephew Ishmael, he unwittingly places himself in the perfect position to thwart the Klingons’ plans.
Barbara Hambly does an admirable job of recreating the Seattle of 1867 within Star Trek: Ishmael. “The rain barely ruffled at the puddles that sheeted the muddy thoroughfare,” she writes as Spock and Stemple return home one evening. “Behind them, Seattle spread itself in a brave display of clapboard, canvas and mud over its hills – a handful of stores, a land office, two liveries, a laundry operated by a stout and smiling relative of Lottie’s barboy Wu Sin and the half-erected plank walls of some larger building with delusions of grandeur. Like a wall behind the town, the mountains rose, a looming blue-green bulk of mist-shawled trees, diminishing down into lesser mountains as they approached the town and finally to the hills on which Seattle itself was built. The street sloped down to the harbor, where the masts of the San Francisco lumber boats and the coast-running sloops bobbed at anchor, a second forest. The wind made tracks of white on Elliott Bay, and blew the salt smell of the sound over the shabby town.”
While Aaron Stemple operated the first sawmill in the Seattle of Here Come the Brides, it was Henry Yesler who did so in real-world Seattle. The early inhabitants of the city – including Arthur Denny and David “Doc” Maynard – were always cognizant of what their newfound town needed to survive and expand, and a sawmill was obviously at the top of their list. Thus when Yesler arrived in Puget Sound looking for land, Maynard quickly bequeathed part of his stake near the waterfront to him.
Seattle may have had a sawmill in Here Come the Brides, but it lacked a doctor, something the factual city already had in Doc Maynard. During a visit to San Francisco, Spock and Jason Bolt – along with his brother Joshua – meet a woman named Sarah Gray after a failed attempt by the Klingons to kill Aaron Stemple. Although she professes to be a nurse, in actuality Gray is a female doctor having difficulty practicing her profession in a male-dominated world.
“I was naïve enough to hang out my shingle in Philadelphia,” she tells Joshua Bolt. “Weeks I’d sit, day after day in my consulting room, and no one would come.” After being rejected by local hospitals as well, Sarah Gray decided to move to San Francisco. “I thought there were few enough doctors in this town that perhaps I might stand a chance of doing what I wished to do, of healing others and learning about the arts of healing. I was wrong.” When she agrees to move to Seattle and marry Joshua Bolt at the end of Star Trek: Ishmael, however, she is welcomed by a city in desperate need of a doctor, no matter their gender.
Barbara Hambly slightly tweaked the plot of Here Come the Brides for Star Trek: Ishmael. Instead of the bet between Aaron Stemple and Jason Bolt involving all the New Bedford women still living in Seattle after one year, it was changed to all the women being married by the end of that year.
While one of the eleven women brought back by Asa Mercer in real-world Seattle was deathly ill and thus never wed, Biddie Cloom is considered too homely and talkative to find a husband in the fictional Seattle. Bolt is intent on marrying her himself if necessary, but between Spock convincing Stemple that his bet is unfair to the women and Biddie nursing him back to health after his run-in with the Klingons in San Francisco, Aaron Stemple falls in love and marries Biddie despite losing the bet as a result.
Biddie Cloom owns a pendant, given to her by her grandmother, that she hopes to someday give to her own child. When Spock sees the pendant, he recognizes it despite his memory loss and has faint recollections of once holding it in his hands. The mystery is left unresolved until the very end of Star Trek: Ishmael, when it is revealed that Aaron Stemple and Biddie Cloom are ancestors of Spock’s human mother.
“Had I not lived in Seattle, had I not been there when I was, I doubt she would have married, or borne sons,” he tells Captain Kirk of Biddie upon his return to the twenty-third century. “Because of my influence, she did.”
It was also Spock’s appearance in Seattle that enabled Aaron Stemple to recognize the Khlaru as alien invaders years later as a congressman, which leads to the question of what else Spock influenced during his brief visit to the year 1867. “Influence is an incalculable quality,” he says. “Events of major significance can last for a few seconds only. That is why I say that I was an integral part of the history of the town.”
Making Spock a twenty-third century founding father of Seattle.
Anthony Letizia