Native Seattle (12 page)

Asa Mercer's importation of white women was just one means of rectifying the problem; the law was another. In 1855 the territorial legislature had passed the Color Act, which voided solemnized marriages between whites and Indians in Washington State. Three years later, that law was amended to nullify all
future
interracial marriages as well, and in 1866 the legislature would enact a new Marriage Act denying even
common-law legitimacy to indigenous-white relationships. Meanwhile, Superintendent of Indian Affairs W. W. Miller published an editorial in the
Washington Standard
in 1861 calling for an end to the “degrading” practice of “open prostitution and concubinage” between settlers and Indians, which was “so utterly subversive of good order.” Revealing that there were also economic motives behind such a call for order, the 1866 Legitimacy Act barred mixed-race children from inheriting their father's estate if children existed from a previous marriage to a white woman. Unless white control of land and political power was protected by legislative means, many proponents of miscegenation laws feared that thousands of acres would be handed down to a generation of “mongrels” and that the “half-breed vote” would prove an embarrassment to ambitions toward statehood. (During his tenure in the territorial legislature, for example, Arthur Denny himself would advocate tirelessly against giving mixed-heritage people the vote.) For all their scope and number, though, the laws were often difficult to enforce; historian Charles Prosch complained that during the 1860s and 1870s it was difficult to find jurors and attorneys who did not have Indian family members and who were not therefore “in sympathy with the delinquents.” Just as the presence of Indians thwarted some settlers' urban visions, everyday life in Seattle Illahee resisted the “civilizing” efforts of racist laws.
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As moralizers fretted and lawmakers legislated, life went on in Seattle Illahee, including at the namesake Illahee itself. Opened in 1861 by John Pinnell, who had previously run brothels on San Francisco's Barbary Coast, the Illahee appeared the same year that Superintendent Miller's miscegenation editorial appeared in the local press. It was one of the largest buildings in Seattle, with a dance floor, a long bar, and a series of private rooms. Described in the 1870 census as “Hurdy-Gurdies,” the Indian women employed there (few if any of them from local tribal communities) were also called “sawdust women” after the Illahee's location on the fill that had obliterated Little Crossing-Over Place and its lagoon. One typically pious memoir described “bawdy houses” and “squaw brothels” resounding with the “the frantic cries of those whose sin had brought them to the verge of madness and despair,” suggesting
that such institutions were well known even to those who would never consider darkening their doors.
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On the streets and alleys south of Mill Street, the mad houses (another nickname for establishments like the Illahee), saloons, and gambling parlors of Seattle were known collectively as the Lava Beds, a name with both infernal and libidinal connotations. In Seattle's new place-story, the “sawdust women” were the antitheses to the “Mercer Girls,” and the mad houses stood in opposition to the orderly world north of Mill Street. Even the landscape reflected the difference: prim houses among cleared woods on the hills versus shanties on the sopping tideflats. At the same time, the Lava Beds fueled the urban economy, and despite all their moral outrage, critics of the Illahee lived in a town whose growth was driven by the engines of “moral darkness.” Asa Mercer, John Pinnell, and “their” women represented a kind of urban symbiosis; after all, it was not far from one side of Mill Street to the other.

Never mind symbiosis, though: to the enforcers of moral authority in Seattle, the Lava Beds and the people who frequented them were threats to urban order. For newspaper editors, Christian religious leaders, and others, the presence of Indians in Seattle seemed to threaten not just the town's moral fiber but its very existence. Native people and the settlers who “sided” with them—for this struggle was very definitely perceived as having two sides—were portrayed as having the potential to quite literally destroy Seattle. Two vectors of destruction, almost apocalyptic in their scope, were of particular concern: disease and fire. In the minds of many influential Seattleites, both contagion and conflagration had their origins—and scapegoats—in the town's mad houses and sawdust women. Long after the Battle of Seattle, it seemed that indigenous people could still sack the place.

The earliest extant text printed in Seattle, dating from 1872, is a handbill warning of an impending visitation by the dread smallpox, which remained a potent reality in Puget Sound a century after its first terrible appearance. This was especially true in the filthy, congested cities Americans and Canadians had built. In the early 1860s, for example, another wave of Comes Out All Over had traveled from town to town, arriving in Seattle from San Francisco via Victoria, British Columbia.
As before, indigenous communities bore the brunt of the microbes, which killed hundreds (if not thousands) of Indians in 1862 alone. Native people were at a loss as to how to stop it. Settler Joseph Crow, for example, recalled the unsuccessful efforts of a Native doctor to heal patients in a house at Front and King Streets on the Lava Beds during an outbreak in 1864—after which the doctor, his skills now seen as useless, disappeared. But if Indians were the primary victims of epidemics, they were also the primary scapegoats. Between the lines of the handbill warning of disease lay powerful ideas about race, sex, and urban destiny.
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In January 1876, for instance, two Native women died of smallpox in Seattle. What to us seems like a small outbreak inspired the
Seattle Daily Intelligencer
to decry a much more pressing issue: the traffic in “miserable prostitutes” by men like the “vile wretch” who had brought the two women from Victoria. And so when a Native woman died of smallpox in a building south of Mill Street and another was found to be infected, the press placed the blame squarely on the residents of the Lava Beds and their supposed moral failings:

It is not generally deemed advisable to mention the presence of this loathsome disease in a city, but we believe that to be…an injustice to the public, who should be seasonably apprised of contagion in any quarter and thus be enabled to guard against it. Aside from this, we have another reason for alluding to the subject, and that is to call immediate attention to the necessity of our city authorities taking prompt steps to provide for the care of other cases, which must occur from exposure to this, and to adopt some stringent regulations relative to allowing any Indians from British Columbia and elsewhere, to be landed at this port, or to visit or reside in this city. As yet nothing has been done in the way of preventing these filthy animals from visiting our city at will, and bringing… what may become a pestilence in our midst.

Adding “beastly squaws” and “filthy animals” to a racist lexicon already inhabited by “sawdust women” and “squaw men,” the editorial also posed a central question about urban progress: were Seattle's legal and medical establishments mature enough to deal with this crisis? Law enforcement were still in its infancy and Bostons still regularly died during
epidemics; those facts, combined with still-fresh memories of vast mortality among the Indians, put very real fear in the hearts of settlers. If ecological imperialism—the introduction of new species like smallpox to new worlds like Salt Water—had made Seattle's founding possible, the fear now was that it could unmake it as well.
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In response to this new outbreak, the city council ordered the mayor to pass laws preventing the spread of contagion to other Seattleites. If the official urban powers could not deal with the problem, the
Daily Intelligencer
warned, other forces might be brought to bear. Concerned citizens, the paper suggested, might, “regardless of our authorities so-called, take the matter in their own hands and adopt that vigorous course in the premises which is needed.” The heated rhetoric of the
Daily Intelligencer
reflected the near hysteria that swept Seattle during smallpox visitations. In March 1877, for example, some “evil disposed person” raised the standard of contagion, a yellow flag, in the window of a tenement on Mill Street. The paper described what happened next: “several timid persons . . . plunged off the sidewalk into the mud, and shied away like young fillies in their first hurdle.” Even a false alarm, as this turned out to be, could disrupt town life.
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Meanwhile, real outbreaks continued. In May 1877, Mayor Gideon Weed, a physician by training, received a report of smallpox at Salmon Bay. He went to investigate and discovered that one Native woman had already died. Her relatives had buried her, burned her clothing and bedding, and then “quit the locality,” but Weed located them the next day along the Duwamish and had them placed under armed guard in a “pest house” on the ridge between Seattle and Lake Washington. Their fate is lost to history, but the incident was a great boost to the reputation of Mayor Weed, who was lauded in the press as having done “much more than could even have been asked or expected of him in that official capacity.” It also inspired a new policy: during smallpox outbreaks, the police would prevent all Indians from entering Seattle “so far as is practicable.” But quarantines and exclusion did not prevent Native communities from carrying more than their share of smallpox's burden. In the twelve months leading up to July 1877, for example, there were eighteen cases of the disease in Seattle, twelve white and six Indian; nine of
the whites recovered while only one Indian did. More indigenous people living in and around Seattle died in the next twelve months; the encampment at Smith's Cove was hit particularly badly. Settlers discovered a number of Indian bodies there, buried in shallow graves with their broken guns. Not long after, the remains of a man identified as “the son of Old Moses” were found jammed in a trunk north of town, spurring another round of vaccinations among settlers who “may have fooled around the tainted spot.” Although smallpox was heading into decline as a major cause of mortality among both Indians and settlers, it remained on many Bostons' minds in the late 1870s as one of the gravest dangers presented by indigenous people in the urban landscape.
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Smallpox was one danger; fire was another. In the nineteenth century, fire was perhaps the ultimate urban fear: again and again, cities throughout the industrializing world had experienced devastating fires that often changed the course of their history in profound ways. In Seattle Illahee, fears of fire combined with anxieties about Indians to spawn a second apocalyptic discourse. In short, many settlers—and in particular, those in charge of the newspapers—were convinced that Native people were going to burn the town down. One 1878 editorial, for example, described the Lava Beds as a “tinder box, all primed and charged as it were, and ready to explode without a moment's warning in a wholesale conflagration.” After a “narrow escape” in September, the
Daily Intelligencer
posited that “in time of peace it is best to prepare for war” and called for the building of water tanks and the hiring of night watchmen to patrol the Lava Beds and Indian camps. But for some, the best way to deal with the fire danger was simply to get rid of the Native encampments on the flats near Main Street. Not only were their inhabitants “an element too indecent to be tolerated within the city limits,” said one editorial, but their bonfires threatened the “whole business portion of town.” “There is also an old ‘siwash’ shanty situated further down the reef, and near the old Pinnell house,” the article continued, “which should be razed to the ground and occupants driven off to the reservation where they belong.” The author then demanded that the chief of police take responsibility for keeping Indians out of the city; if he did not, the result was sure to be catastrophic. Once again, the
danger was not just material; it was also moral. Never mind that other Native people lived in town as family members and employees; it was these “threats” who warranted the most public attention and who became an integral part of the young city's new place-story.
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In the end, neither of the fires that swept Seattle—one in 1879 and the “Great Fire” of 1889—had anything to do with Indians. The first started in a middle-class hotel, and the second, which destroyed most of the business district, began in a cabinetmaker's shop. Other fires, meanwhile, targeted Indian people. On the night of 7 May 1878, for example, someone burned down the Illahee. The
Daily Intelligencer
celebrated the blaze, which “swept off a fusty obstruction to progressive improvements in that quarter.” “Citizens and firemen stood about watching the fire,” one settler recalled, noting that “not a pint of water was thrown upon the fire, nor an effort made to save any part or article.” Throughout Puget Sound, laws and torches became weapons in the battle between two urban orders, one symbolized by the Mercer Girls and the other by the Lava Beds. In the decades to come, two competing urban visions—an “open town” that actively encouraged its red-light district and a “closed town” with zero tolerance for vice—remained at the core of Seattle politics. What would be forgotten in the future, though, was that such debates had their roots in earlier conflicts over the role of Native people in town life and over who belonged in this new place called Seattle.
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S
OMETIME IN THE 1870S
, a Chinese man named Ling Fu was brought before Judge Cornelius Hanford in Seattle's courthouse, accused of not having the proper citizenship papers. Facing deportation, Ling Fu argued that he did not need to carry papers: he had been born on Puget Sound. To test him, Judge Hanford quickly shifted his inquiry into Chinook Jargon, which had become nearly as common as Whulshootseed or English in Puget Sound country. “Ikta mika nem? Consee cole mika?” (What is your name? How old are you?), he demanded of Ling, who in turn replied, “Nika nem Ling Fu, pe nika mox tahtlum pee quinum cole” (My name is Ling Fu, and I am twenty-five years old). Clearly surprised, the judge responded,
“You are an American, sure, and you can stay here.” He then turned to the bailiff and decreed, “Ling Fu is dismissed.”
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