author
J. A. (Joseph Allen) Costello
1854–1943
A late-19th-century writer of the Pacific Northwest, he is best known for The Siwash, a vivid collection of Indigenous life, legends, and regional history centered on Puget Sound. His surviving work has endured as a curious window into how people of his era tried to record the cultures and stories around them.
1 Audiobook
The Siwash, Their Life, Legends, and Tales: Puget Sound and Pacfic Northwest
by J. A. (Joseph Allen) Costello
About the author
Born in 1854 and living until 1943, J. A. Costello—Joseph Allen Costello—has a small but lasting place in regional writing about the Pacific Northwest. Library and archival records identify him as the author of The Siwash: Their Life, Legends and Tales: Puget Sound and Pacific Northwest, first published in Seattle in 1895.
That book brings together descriptions of Native life, local tradition, and storytelling from the Puget Sound region. It reflects a 19th-century settler perspective, so modern readers may want to approach it as both a historical source and a record of the attitudes of its time.
Very little biographical detail about Costello is easy to confirm today, but archival records also preserve handwritten papers connected to his notes on the St. James Mission in Vancouver, Washington Territory. Even with such a faint paper trail, his work remains of interest to readers drawn to early Pacific Northwest history, folklore, and the way older books tried to capture a fast-changing region.