Native Seattle (14 page)

I
N THE SPRING OF
1878, the
Seattle Daily Intelligencer
announced that a certain Mr. Glover, after making sketches the previous winter, had completed a drawing of Seattle “supposed to be taken from a considerable elevation.” According to the newspaper, the resulting bird's-eye view of the town was “at once a map and a picture,” portraying “every street, public building and private residence … with extraordinary accuracy.” Nearly three feet wide, the drawing included not just the city but its surroundings, “Lakes Washington and Union basking in the summer sunlight, and the Cascade range towering over all.” The
Daily Intelligencer
also reported that Glover and his business partner planned to embark on a campaign to print and distribute lithographs of the panorama, to specific ends:

To those who subscribe liberally a very liberal allotment of pictures will be made, and as they convey a truthful and accurate portrait of our city and harbor, they will prove invaluable to friends afar off anxious to know what Seattle is like. To property owners the picture will also prove of the greatest value for circulation amongst investors. There are hundreds of capitalists who would be only too glad to know of so genial a clime and so many natural advantages for a commercial city, and where they could invest their money in good paying railroads and real estate. The promoters of the view should be encouraged to perfect their arrangements immediately, as the city never needed the picture more than at the present time.

In an era of intense competition among young northwestern cities, Glover's portrait and its counterparts representing Port Townsend, Tacoma,
Portland, and other towns played critical roles in urban image making and in the pursuit of immigration and investment.
¹

But panoramic city views from the nineteenth century usually bore little resemblance to the actual places they marketed. Instead, in the words of one urban historian, they “depart from reality so as to emphasize and exaggerate order, progress, prospects for future unlimited growth, and other themes dear to the hearts of urban boosters.” Thus, one might expect Seattle's 1878 portrait to be a vision of the city as it wished itself to be: a pastoral landscape surrounding an orderly grid of streets and a bustling harbor, with little evidence of streets filled with thigh-deep mud, stump-cursed lots, noxious effluents from mills and canneries, or undesirable populations. True to the genre, the 1878 panorama did offer a pleasant, idealized image of Seattle that gave little indication of muck, clear-cuts, fish guts, or Chinese boarding houses. But look closely: there, along the waterfront, among the steamers and the tall ships, a small flotilla of dugout canoes approaches a Native encampment on the shoreline at the heart of the city. Glover's bird's-eye-view Indians were matter-of-fact parts of the urban landscape, neither elided nor elevated. And in fact, as their inclusion in Glover's urban imagination suggests, real Indian people still had a place in Seattle's social and economic life in 1878. Despite the Bostons' efforts to craft boundaries between Indians and settlers through laws, lynch mobs, and torches, Seattle remained a landscape where Indians and settlers lived alongside each other, their lives still woven tightly together.
²

When Charles Kinnear and his parents and siblings arrived a few months after Glover unveiled his panorama, they saw this shared landscape firsthand. After buying a salmon from a Native vendor for five cents through the window of their room in the Occidental Hotel, Kin-near and his brother went out to explore their new home. They soon came across an Indian encampment with canoes pulled ashore and racks of salmon eggs curing over small fires, stretching for more than three blocks along the waterfront. As the boys watched, more canoes arrived “in a constant stream,” filled with freshly caught coho salmon, and the
indigenous men commenced to play
slahal,
the “bone game” of strategy and sleight of hand known throughout the Northwest.

Just beneath our station on the high bank were sixty-three long-haired, nude Indians (all their clothes in one pile) sitting in two lines facing each other, boards on their laps, stones in their hands beating the boards as they sang.…In the middle of each line was an Indian Chief with nothing on but a big red handkerchief around his neck. In one hand was a pair of carved bones which—placed under the handkerchief—were changed from one hand to the other, the closed fists then swinging outward, again under the handkerchief, back and forth, and the opposing chief designated the hand supposed to be holding the bones. Both hands were then thrown upward, the bones going from the hand not guessed, and the score keep deposited a stone indicating the loss. The bones then went to the opposite chief who made his trial. Bye and bye all arose, the losing side sneaking along the beach to their wigwams … the stack of clothes divided into as many piles as there were victorious Indians.