Native Seattle (10 page)

I
N THE EARLY-MORNING HOURS
of 26 January 1856, the U.S. Navy's sloop of war
Decatur
opened fire on the
illahee
called Seattle. Its targets were not the fifty or so white residents huddling in a tiny blockhouse at the corner of Front and Cherry; rather, the
Decatur
was gunning for the estimated one thousand “hostiles” in the woods behind town. They had come from indigenous communities in southern Puget Sound and the far side of the Cascade Mountains to sack Seattle, traveling down the old trail from Lake Washington to Little Crossing-Over Place and taking up positions beyond the cleared yards at the edge of town. They had already burned many outlying homesteads and now seemed about to raze what little existed of central Puget Sound's urban potential. Throughout the day, settlers and marines exchanged fire with the attackers, and by ten o'clock that evening, the enemy had retreated back to Lake Washington. No bodies were ever found, but some settlers estimated that as many as two hundred Native warriors had died; among the settlers, one man and a teenage boy had been killed. In less than twenty-four hours, the “Battle of Seattle” was over.
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Enshrined in local mythology as the ur-travail of early Seattle—a violent inverse of the Chief Seattle Speech—the Battle of Seattle is like countless other events held to have occurred in what historian Patricia Nelson Limerick has called the “empire of innocence,” in which blameless white pioneers earn honor and success by surviving threats from nature, Indians, or a corrupt government. But what on its surface might seem like a showdown between savagery and urbanity was in reality a much messier affair, illustrated by a map of the conflict drawn by the
Decatur
's Colonel George S. Phelps. It shows a handful of streets and landmarks such as the blockhouse and the hotel belonging to Mary Ann “Mother Damnable” Conklin; above and to the right are the “hills and woods thronged with Indians.” But at the edges of the little town, we also see two clusters of cross-hatchings—almost like Plains tipis—representing Indian encampments. On the slope above Henry Yesler's mill sits “Curley's Camp,” and the other, named “Tecumseh's Camp,” stands across a dirt street from Mother Damnable's. Distinguished from the Native attackers, these were indigenous people who had come to Seattle, but not to destroy it. Many of them had come to build it.
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Let there be no mistake: without the labor of Indians, Seattle would have been stillborn. As lumbermen and laundresses, hunters and haulers, indigenous men and women made the city possible. But at the same time, their presence also brought the needs of an “embryonic town” into conflict with the larger aims of federal policies designed to segregate and manage Native communities. Civic leaders challenged the remote federal government and created a local Indian policy based on the needs of urban communities like Seattle and predicated upon a weak federal presence in the region. Not everyone felt that “Siwashes” belonged in town, though, and a series of legal restrictions placed on indigenous people reflected settlers' deep ambivalence about the place of Indians in urban life. As at Alki Point that first winter, the presence and persistence of Indians simultaneously facilitated and challenged Seattle's urban ambitions.

Seattle's indigenous workers included the men employed at Henry Yesler's sawmill, the primary engine of commercial development for the first two decades of the town's existence. In the early 1850s, nearly every white man in town worked in the mill, but its output of some eight thousand board feet of lumber on a good day required the additional labor of Native men. Edith Redfield, an early settler, described sawmills like Yesler's as “little kingdoms, a law unto themselves . . . here white men, Indians, Chinamen, and Kanakas [indigenous Hawai'ians] worked side by side and boarded at the Company's cook-house.” Indians and settlers may have worked and boarded together, but Natives also had particular contributions to make. John M. Swan recalled how
indigenous men, seasoned by regular bathing in the Sound, were well suited for rafting lumber out to arriving ships. Remembering the loading of the
Orbit
for the San Francisco market, for example, Swan recalled that “several of us that were looking at them were shivering with the cold.” Indian mill workers were especially crucial during the Fraser River gold rush, when, in the words of settler William Ballou, “workmen could not be hired for love nor money on Puget Sound” as settlers hied off to the diggings. And as Indians carted sawdust away from Yesler's mill, they dumped it along the shoreline, filling the lagoon of Little Crossing-Over Place and destroying the flounder fishery for which it had been known. Indigenous labor, then, obliterated an indigenous place.
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Mill work was only part of the contribution Indians made to Seattle's livelihood. With supplies hard to find or outrageously priced, settlers depended on Native subsistence networks to survive. J. Thomas Turner told historian Hubert Howe Bancroft a quarter century later that whites in early Seattle “awaited upon the ebb and flow of the tides for their principal food…we were largely dependent upon the Native inhabitants… for our potatoes and food products of forest and Sound.” Jane Fenton Kelly, the daughter of a Duwamish Valley family, recalled that Native people made domestic life possible among the marshes and dense timber:

Mother would send us out to watch for a canoe and we would hail them and give them a written order to the grocery man. He would fill it, and they would bring it out to us. They charged twenty-five cents or “two-bits” as they called it, for each article they brought, large or small. I can remember after we were on the homestead one-half mile up the hill, an old Indian by the name of Jake carried a five-gallon keg of New Orleans molasses to us and charged us but twenty-five cents.

In this way, the duck nets and salmon-drying frames of Seattle's indigenous geography fed its immigrant population. The arrangement benefited Indians as well; hunters who brought mallards and other waterfowl to white families were typically paid a quarter dollar for each bird. These coins, along with pelts of bears and other animals, often changed
hands on “whiskey boats” that plied the Sound with cargoes of flour, tobacco, beads, and liquor.
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Indigenous work went beyond mill labor and subsistence provision; Indians participated in almost every aspect of the Seattle economy, successful or otherwise. They packed hundreds of barrels of salmon for David “Doc” Maynard in the fall of 1852, a venture abandoned after the fish spoiled before arriving in San Francisco. They used traditional methods to render dogfish oil, the primary lubricant for sawmill equipment in Puget Sound until the 1890s. Native men cleared land and helped build homes on the slopes above Elliott Bay, and Native women did the washing within those homes. Indians paddled the canoe that carried the U.S. mail, and shoreline-hugging “Siwash buggies,” as canoes were sometimes called, were often the only way to travel from one place to another. And of course there were the women celebrated by the ditty “Seattle Illahee.” We can now only imagine the mix of limited opportunities and male coercion that led those women and girls from British Columbia or elsewhere to the Illahee, but their contributions to the economy and reputation of Seattle easily rivaled those of Yesler's mill employees. With the exceptions of banking, American-style medicine, and a handful of other settler-dominated vocations, Indians made Seattle work in the 1850s, and their efforts helped settlers distinguish “good” Indians from “bad.” Walter Graham, whose Lake Washington farm had burned during the Battle of Seattle, nonetheless recalled that the Indians he knew were “good workers” and that one had worked for him for three years.
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But if settlers and Indians forged everyday relationships through work, tensions between indigenous people and the newcomers could also flare into violence. Well before the attack on the town in January 1856, violence between Indians and whites had been a regular, and deeply distressing, occurrence. One such case was that of an Indian called Mesatchie (“Wicked” in Chinook Jargon) Jim, who killed his Native wife near Seattle in 1853. As punishment, Luther Collins and several other settlers lynched Jim on Front Street. That lynching precipitated the slaying of a white man named McCormick near Lake Union; in return, two more Native men were hanged in town. Such
spirals of violence took place when indigenous notions of justice, which often mandated retaliation, coincided with a powerful strain of vigilantism in settler society. That same year, preacher's wife Catherine Blaine recorded a similar cycle of killings that took the lives of two white men and as many as a dozen Indian men, inspiring settlers to organize a militia to take care of the “problem” Natives. Had cooler heads not prevailed, the militia's offensive against indigenous people would have taken place, not out in the woods or on a river somewhere, but right in the heart of town where the Indians in question were staying. “We feel considerably alarmed for ourselves,” the consistently timorous Mrs. Blaine wrote, and her anxiety reflected that of many of her neighbors, Boston and Native alike.
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Compared with the attempts at understanding that had taken place at Alki Point only a few years earlier, these events illustrate just how dry the tinder was as more settlers moved in on indigenous lands near Seattle. And, in fact, many settlers did connect white emigration to violence, if only to blame each other. Recalling the Mesatchie Jim case, for example, mill owner Henry Yesler described the effects of “lower class” emigrants on Indian-white relations, noting that “whenever there was trouble it was the fault of some worthless white man.” In what would become one of the most important patterns of conflict in Seattle in the coming decades, Yesler identified class as a key element of race relations. Tensions between the “law and order crowd,” represented by Yesler, Arthur Denny, and other civic leaders, and the “worthless,” less orderly elements of urban society would shape life in Seattle for years to come. While Yesler blamed interracial violence on the wrong kind of emigrants, many indigenous people knew that low-class settlers were only part of the problem.
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And so within just a few short years of Seattle's founding, both settlers and Natives were calling for a new sort of order. That new order came in the form of treaties designed to mitigate interracial violence by creating new boundaries between white and Indian communities and settling—pun intended—the question of indigenous title to the land. Much of the run-up to the signings took place in urban outposts. Seattle was the site of one such proceeding on 12 January 1854, when Isaac
Ingalls Stevens, the new territorial governor and Indian superintendent, introduced himself and the treaty process to more than a thousand Indians and some ten dozen settlers gathered in front of Doc Maynard's office. One year, ten days, and many speeches later, Seeathl and other headmen signed the Treaty of Point Elliott.
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In towns throughout Puget Sound, settlers celebrated the treaty process; one Native elder, in a particularly eloquent choice of words, described Seattle settlers' reaction to the treaty as “hooraying.” There was some cause for optimism among Indians as well. Among other things, the treaty ensured that indigenous people would have the right to camp, hunt, fish, and harvest berries and roots at the “usual and accustomed stations and grounds.” But despite the promises of the treaty, few Indians were hooraying. In fact, significant factions in Native communities on Salt Water and beyond took offense at the treaty agreements, and some did not hesitate to express their indignation. In late 1855, for example, a shaman named Chaoosh visited David and Louisa Denny at their cabin on Lake Union after a government “potlatch” at Tulalip north of Seattle. Enraged at the agent's offers of cheap needles and strips of blankets, he warned them that whites were few in number and could be easily wiped out. The condescending gifts, paltry compared to what could be found in any town's shops, only added to growing Native outrage at the hubris of the Bostons.
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As tensions grew, urban settlements, beachheads of the American invasion of Puget Sound, were obvious targets for the indigenous uprising that seemed increasingly inevitable. In response, white officials began with what seemed like the most obvious first step: removing Indians from the towns. Indian agent Michael T. Simmons, however, found that doing so was no simple task. A month before the attack on Seattle, after several attacks had already taken place elsewhere in the region, Simmons reported finding among Seattle's indigenous residents “a strong determination… not to cross over to their reservation.…I informed them that they must go over or they should receive nothing. Finally they obeyed my wishes and those of the head chief.” Removal, however, could not only not prevent war but might actually lead to it; Henry Yesler and several other Seattleites, for example, warned that forcing
Indians onto the reservations “was to all appearance tantamount to a declaration of war against them.”
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But many did not leave, and, in fact, when the Battle of Seattle finally came, it was Indians who saved the day and the settlement. On the eve of the conflict, several hundred Native people remained in and immediately around the town, including Curley, who had close connections both with Henry Yesler and with Leschay (Leschi), a Nisqually militant who was allegedly organizing the attack. Curley met with Leschay to call for peace, but the warrior would not be swayed. And so, along with several other Duwamish people and a number of white men who lived with Indian women, Curley brought warning of the attack to the settlers, giving them just enough time to make haste to the tiny blockhouse. Connections between settlers and Native people, forged through everyday life, had saved Seattle. (Leschay would be hanged in 1858 for the murder of an American soldier, a highly controversial punishment that divided settler opinion and ultimately resulted in Leschay's unofficial exoneration in 2004.)
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