Native Seattle (11 page)

Despite the role that “friendlies” had played in mitigating the attack by “hostiles” on Seattle, once the smoke had cleared, settler leaders quickly labeled all Indians potentially dangerous and renewed their efforts to get Indian people out of town. For settlers unfamiliar with the complicated alliances and enmities that linked indigenous communities in Puget Sound, segregation seemed the way to proceed, especially with territorial newspapers warning that “the savage war-whoop, as it were, [is] at the doors of every town and settlement within our borders.” But it was as difficult a task now as before the attack. In July 1856, for example, Henry Yesler, now Indian agent for the Seattle area, reported to Governor Stevens that a number of Native people were fishing, clamming, and harvesting berries at Salmon Bay. Yesler also wrote of two Indian families who were still in the “off-limits” area of Lake Washington because one of their men, mortally wounded by a faulty musket, wanted to die and be buried on his
“illahee.”
Meanwhile, George Paige, another Indian agent, complained that Doc Maynard had been treating Native people like Seeathl's churchgoing sister Sally and filling prescriptions for them without first applying to Paige for authorization.
Their faith in traditional medicine shaken by epidemics, some indigenous people saw visiting American doctors as a way to stay alive. (That is, if they could get past Duwamish Valley settler Luther Collins, who shot at Seattle-bound Indians so often that it merited a letter of complaint from one naval commander to Governor Stevens.)
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Work remained the primary reason Native people stayed in town after the attack, and Paige complained about this issue more than any other. His threats to withhold government rations from Indians living in town fell flat, as they were “mostly in the employ of whites, consequently etc. do not require feeding.” The source of the problem, Paige wrote, was the “intermedling” businessmen who needed workers; Doc Maynard was particularly guilty of having “tampered” with the agent's charges. This was ironic, considering that Maynard had complained about the very same issue only two months earlier when he briefly served as an Indian agent. While overseeing the relocation of Seattle's indigenous residents to remote West Point in the late summer of 1856, Maynard was confronted by Henry Yesler, who “wanted a portion of them to work for him & it would cause him much trouble to go to the said encampment after them.” Enlisting the support of Arthur Denny and other town leaders, Yesler convinced many of the Indians to stay put and encouraged others to come in from the Lake Washington backcountry. Those who did follow Maynard's orders, referred to by Yesler and Arthur Denny as “fools,” struggled through a series of brutal winter storms on the exposed and isolated spit. The reservations were no better. In November 1856, an Army captain at the Muckleshoot Agency in the Cascade foothills wrote to his superiors on behalf of Duwamish headman William that “on the reservation, they were furnished with a little flour daily by the Indian Agent, Page [
sic
], that they could get no clams there, and the consequence was that many died of hunger, and unless a number had gone to their old ground to procure Salmon, they should all have died on the reservation.” The point had been made: life in town was better for Indians, just as Indians in Seattle were often better for the town.
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By the end of 1856, it was clear that agents' efforts to vacate indigenous settlements in and around Seattle had not worked. Four separate
bands of Native people remained in the Seattle vicinity at the end of the year. One small group of thirty or so, under the leadership of a man known to settlers as Cultus (“Worthless”) Charley, was camping just north of town along the beach, and more than a hundred remained directly across the bay at Herring's House. Meanwhile, Curley's band of forty had settled in behind Mother Damnable's in the heart of town. And even Native people who had gone to the reservations would return, if only seasonally; by midsummer of 1857, some three hundred Indians were camped at the mouth of the Duwamish River opposite Seattle, likely at an ancient settlement and stockade called Little-Bit-Straight Point.
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By not moving, Native people continued both to play a central role in Seattle's fledgling economy and to vex many of their non-Indian neighbors, and the tensions between these two facts were expressed in a series of policies enacted in Seattle during the 1860s. The first came in 1865, when Seattle officially incorporated. Among the first ordinances passed was one decreeing that “no Indian or Indians shall be permitted to reside, or locate their residences on any street, highway, lane, or alley or any vacant lot in the town of Seattle.” But it also demanded that “all persons having in their employ any Indian or Indians within the corporate limits of said town shall provide lodgments or suitable residences for the said Indians during the time of said employment, on, or immediately attached to their own places of residence.” Signed by Charles Terry, Ordinance No. 5 tried to codify a middle road between segregation and integration. Set alongside ordinances dealing with taxes, sidewalks, and magistrate fees, the “Removal of Indians” ordinance—which was really only about the removal of certain kinds of Indians and the retention of others—highlighted just how central Indians were to urban life on Puget Sound.
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A second ambivalent document appeared a year later, in 1866, in the form of a petition protesting a proposed reservation for Duwamish Indians along the Black River south of Seattle, the “inside” place that gave the Duwamish their name. Citing that the sixteen Native families living there had been “justly and kindly protected” by the settlers, the 156 signatories—virtually every white man in King County—argued
that a reservation would be an “injury . . . to the quiet and flourishing settlements along the Black and Duwamish rivers.” Moreover, it would be “unnecessary to the aborigines and injurious to your constituents.” Indigenous people working in town or living along the river were one thing; for Arthur and David Denny, Henry Yesler, Doc Maynard, and the other petitioners, the imposition of a reservation close to Seattle was quite another. The settlers preferred their own system of managing Indian-white relations, and so the proposed reservation was never established, an outcome that would have significant consequences for Duwamish legal status decades later.
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The absence of a federal government capable of consistently enforcing its own Indian policies, along with the necessity of Indian labor, meant that the people of Seattle—settler and indigenous alike—had to craft their own strategies for dealing with each other in the first years of the town's existence. Men like George Paige tried to enforce reservation policy, while others like Henry Yesler actively thwarted it, and still others like Doc Maynard seemed to change strategy depending on their circumstances. Meanwhile, some indigenous people like Seeathl went along with the treaties and left Seattle, while others like his sister Sally insisted on continuing to come to town. And still others such as Leschay were driven by the American government's proposals to try to burn the settlers' urban outpost to the ground.

In later years, it would be this last indigenous strategy that would most commonly be used to explain why Seattle seemed to stall in the years after the “Indian War.” Arthur Denny, for example, painted a bleak picture of the Battle of Seattle's long-term effects, noting that “those who remained… were so discouraged, and so much in dread of another outbreak, that they were unwilling to return to their homes in the country…as a consequence it was years before we recovered our lost ground to any great extent.” Certainly, burned homesteads on the outskirts of town had frightened some settlers away, but other forces—the Fraser River gold rush, an economic depression, the Civil War, and the lack of a railroad—did more to retard Seattle's growth during the 1850s and 1860s than the brief indigenous uprising. And in fact, much of the growth that did take place during those lean years was thanks to
Indian labor. In the form of logs shipped, fish caught, laundry washed, and mail delivered, Native people had kept Seattle from becoming yet another failed urban vision. But even as the “woods thronged with Indians” faded into clear-cuts and memories, indigenous people remained a threat to many Bostons' visions of urban destiny—if not from outside Seattle, then from within it.
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S
EATTLE MADE ITS TELEVISION DEBUT
during the Vietnam War, when
Here Come the Brides
first aired on 25 September 1968. With its theme song claiming “the bluest skies you've ever seen are in Seattle,”
Brides
fictionalized one of Seattle's most beloved stories—the importation of dozens of white women to Seattle during and just after the Civil War—for a national audience. It was inspired by the story of Asa Shinn Mercer, twenty-five years old and the newly elected president of the territorial university. Of all his accomplishments, Mercer is most remembered as the entrepreneur who brought eleven unmarried women to the men of Seattle in 1864. Mostly Unitarians from the industrial town of Lowell, Massachusetts, the women, who would come to be known as “Mercer Girls,” either married white bachelors or became schoolteachers. Lauded for his effort, Mercer brought a second installment, of thirty-four “girls,” in 1866. Their story, fraught with just the right mix of adventure and romance, has been part of Seattle's place-story ever since. The 1960s television version was a balm against the growing horror of televised war in Southeast Asia, and in the 1860s, the real Mercer Girls were a balm as well, not against the horrors of that decade's own terrible war, but against something that seemed more immediately threatening to many settlers: the mixed-race world of Seattle Illahee.
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When he went to the cities of the East seeking young women, Asa Mercer went with a blessing in the form of a letter of recommendation from William Pickering, Washington territorial governor. Both Mercer and Pickering saw this as a missionary enterprise; in a circular distributed ahead of his visits, Mercer cautioned that “we only wish a class of emigrants who will improve the religion, morals, and tone of society in the T[erritory].” Mercer, and by proxy certain elements of Seattle
society, were not interested in recruiting the East's urban rabble; rather, they wanted upstanding young women who could serve as social housekeepers, transferring the civilizing institutions of marriage and education to the savage West. As women signed on, the travails ahead worried many of their families; some wrote letters describing the “ignorance, coarseness, and immorality” of Seattle and claiming that Washington Territory was “the last place in the world for women.” In a sense, they were right: Seattle was a far cry from Lowell or New York. When those first eleven women disembarked from the sloop
Kidder
on 16 May 1864, they joined an ongoing struggle to establish urban order, and not surprisingly in Seattle Illahee, indigenous people were at the center of the debate. What was at stake, at least in the minds of some Seattleites, was the town's very survival.
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As he traveled through New England and New York, Mercer described the challenges American civilization faced in the Northwest. He was particularly concerned about relations between white men and Indian women, which purportedly threatened the moral tone of a place where, according to one settler, “it required a combination of all the towns… to muster enough white women to make up three of four sets at a dance.” With those demographics, the companionship of Native women, like the labor of Native people more generally, was part of everyday life in Seattle and had been since the town's beginning. The story of early Seattle is the story of intimate encounters. “Indian Jennie,” a niece of Seeathl, married African American settler John Garrison “according to the Indian custom” in the 1850s, around the time that Matthew Bridges married his Native wife, Mary, who had been born at Little Crossing-Over Place. Rebecca Fitz Henry was born in town to a white father and Duwamish mother in 1862. Six years later, the Duwamish woman Kalaeetsa gave birth to her son Charles, whose father was settler Michael Kelly. Mill owner Henry Yesler recalled how many unmarried white men working in local sawmills had Native women as companions, and Yesler himself had fathered a child named Julia with the fifteen-year-old daughter of Curley, despite the fact that his wife, Sarah, was still alive and well and living in Ohio. Through these new relations, a whole generation of mixed-race children called Seattle their
illahee
by the 1860s.
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For Asa Mercer and others, this was a dire problem in need of fixing. Minister's wife Catherine Blaine wrote home in 1853, for example, about the doomed marriage of a settler named Joe Foster to Betsy, the granddaughter of Seeathl. Infamous for being “unkind” to his wife, Foster's behavior eventually led Betsy to hang herself in their small house in town. Her Indian relatives demanded the body for burial, while Foster pleaded with settlers to allow her to be interred in the town cemetery. They acquiesced, but Blaine's husband refused to officiate at the funeral, which was attended only by a few “squaw men” and their Native companions. “Now, what a situation he is in,” Catherine Blaine penned to her kin back East, “with his little half-breed child and despised by whites and hated by the Indians.…He is, I believe, the son of a minister and well brought up.” Blaine's portrayal of the Foster family's tragedy is telling. While clearly identifying Foster's abuse as the proximal cause of Betsy's suicide, it also hinted at a deeper problem in the minds of many Seattleites. On an urban frontier with few white women, settler men could be “tempted” into liaisons with indigenous women, and even a minister's son could be dragged down into the chaos that miscegenation brought. In another letter, Blaine bemoaned “the degradation men bring on themselves” in Seattle through their relationships with Native women, who were “but little better than hogs in human shape.” The children of such unions were a problem as well in the eyes of some Bostons; settler and historian Charles Prosch condemned mixed-race couples for “giving birth to a class of vagabonds who promised to become the most vicious and troublesome element in the population.” The situation seemed to threaten the whole region; according to missionary Charles Huntington, race mixing cast a pall of “moral darkness” over Puget Sound, against which the Mercer Girls shone as beacons of light.
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