Native Seattle (15 page)

Thus the Kinnear boys, who would later become two of Seattle's most prominent citizens, encountered the urban indigenous frontier of Seattle Illahee, where fine hotels existed alongside racks of curing salmon roe and where a growing urban skyline contrasted with an old-fashioned bone game on the cobbles in front of it.
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In Whulshootseed there is a word,
yiq
, that describes the process of working designs of bear grass, maidenhair fern, or wild-cherry bark onto the stunning woven baskets for which Duwamish, Lake, and Shilshole women were renowned. Imbrication, as anthropologists have named this process in English, is by nature forceful, with deer-bone awls pressing into watertight cedar bark or spruce root to create images—mountain ranges, men, rain—passed down through generations of weavers. But the word has a second meaning as well;
yiq
can also describe the process of working something into a tight place or, as one elder described it, “worrying” something into place. What an apt metaphor, then, for the process by which the urban and indigenous worlds interacted within the landscape framed by Glover's drawing, with Native and Boston places and peoples woven together in a shared geography,
with a weave that was often disturbingly tight. Seattle was an imbricated place.
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It was also a place on a threshold. Before 1880, many indigenous people with roots in the landscape that was becoming Seattle had remained there, continuing to pursue subsistence activities and traditional cultural practices in and around town. After 1880, the remaining Duwamish, Lake, and Shilshole people would face increasing pressures to leave the city, both because of Seattle's sudden expansion around the turn of the century and because of federal allotment policy that encouraged them to move to area reservations. Meanwhile, a new kind of Native community would take shape in the city. Indigenous people from beyond Puget Sound, having occasionally visited Salt Water in the past, would now make Seattle part of an annual cycle of migration, leading to the formation of a multiethnic urban Indian community outnumbering the local indigenous population. The year 1880 was also a turning point in the rhetorical place of Native people in white Seattle's civic consciousness. Despite their portrayal as markers of urban disorder, real Indians played an important role in daily life during the “village period.” But in the urban revolution that would take place between 1880 and 1930, actual Native people would be overshadowed by symbolic Indians in Seattle's urban imagination. The matter-of-fact canoes on Glover's waterfront would be replaced by imagined savages, noble or otherwise, and Indian images would receive far more attention than Indian people. The moment captured by Mr. Glover holds elements of both the past and the future, weaving together two periods in Seattle's urban Indian story.
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On the ground, the warp and woof of Native and Boston lives created a shared landscape. Not just on Seattle's waterfront but throughout the young city, along the rivers and shorelines around it, and just over the encircling hills, Seattle Illahee was growing, and the shared world that characterized the village period remained part of daily life. Nowhere is this clearer than in that record of all but the most invisible lives: the federal census. As intrepid enumerators moved through Seattle and its environs in the spring and summer of 1880, just two years after Mr. Glover unveiled his drawing, they captured in their forms and
tables some of the details behind those canoes pulling up to the lithographed beach. They gave voices, if only muffled ones, to Native people who called Seattle home, and their records, along with other accounts of this moment in Seattle's history, highlight the diversity of Native experiences within the urban weave and provide a glimpse into the complexities of a developing urban Indian population.
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In the 1880 census, Indians tend to appear in groups, suggesting that attempts to create spatial boundaries between whites and Natives, if not successful in banishing Indians from the city altogether, had at least resulted in a handful of small enclaves within Seattle's urban geography. One such enclave existed along the waterfront near the city's center and was home to several families of local indigenous people. John and his wife, Stosach, lived with the elderly Goleeaspee; the men both fished for a living, while Stosach was a washerwoman. Samson, another fisherman, lived with his wife, Julia, while their neighbor Moses (likely the man whose son had died of smallpox three years before, his body discovered in a tree trunk on the outskirts of town) hunted to support his wife, Quitsalitsa, and their daughters, Julia and Amelia. The best-known resident of this enclave was Kikisebloo, or “Princess Angeline,” the eldest daughter of Seeathl and mother of Betsy, the woman who had committed suicide to escape her husband's abuse back in the 1850s. Together, these families represented the continued presence of local indigenous people in an urbanizing landscape, who combined traditional resource use with opportunities afforded by the new urban economy. One Seattle resident recalled Indian traders and vendors in the 1870s, writing of “many Indian canoes landing at the foot of Seneca Street and Madison Street, and many Indian women [who] brought us ‘oolalies’ [berries] and clams and mallard ducks.” The small settlement where Kikisebloo and the others lived was one site for these activities, allowing local Native people to maintain connections to places and resources that reflected pre-urban patterns of settlement.
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Meanwhile, on the tidelands just south of Yesler's sawmill and the Lava Beds, another small enclave of Indians reflected a growing pattern in Seattle. At the beginning of the 1880s, the Puget Sound hops industry was reaching international prominence, thanks in part to a
devastating blight in Europe. In a seasonal circuit that would become part of Seattle's urban cadence in the years to come, Native people from British Columbia, Alaska, and elsewhere in Washington Territory traveled to the fields of hops ripening in the valleys around Seattle and typically included a stay in Seattle. Listed mostly as laborers (with the women listed, significantly, as “keeping camp” rather than keeping house), the people the enumerator found on the tideflats were likely partway through this seasonal round. Indian Wallace lived with Indian Jennie, Indian Jack lived with Indian Sallie, and Indian Peter and Indian Annie shared their camp with their son Indian Sam; all were from British Columbia. Nearby, young indigenous Alaskan women named Indian Kitty and Indian Rose camped with Kitty's infant son, Indian Tommy, while a camp close by sheltered Indian Jennie and Indian John. Not unlike the “Chinaman John” system of nomenclature that rendered Asian immigrants anonymous in many historical records, this “Indian” naming practice relegated many Native people—particularly those not connected to local families or communities—to anonymity, lacking even a tribal designation. But their origins far from Seattle suggested that a new kind of urban development, the creation of a far-reaching Indian hinterland, was under way.
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And, of course, there were the Lava Beds. Here, mixed-race households of white men and Indian women existed among the saloons, brothels, and Chinese hostels. Two such households were those of cook William Milton, who lived with British Columbia Native Mary Murphy, and sailor George Hill, whose wife, “Indian Mary,” also hailed from the north. As Milton's and Hill's occupations suggest, many of the white men in such relationships were on the lower rungs of the urban economy. Sometimes, economic circumstances required mixed-race couples to share homes, as unemployed laborer Thomas Scott and “Indian Jennie” did with out-of-work Canadian James Holt and Ellen Dillon, Holt's Indian-Hawai'ian partner. Others, such as Julia Lowar, the daughter of an indigenous woman from Washington Territory and a French father, who lived on the Lava Beds with Joseph Francis, a Hebridean laborer, could afford to keep their own homes. The backgrounds of couples like these also reflect patterns associated with the fur trade of previous
decades; many of the men were from Canada or Scotland, while most of the women were of mixed parentage, their fathers from France, Hawai‘i, Canada, or the Celtic fringe.

While some of the mixed-race households on the Lava Beds in 1880 appear to have been marriages (if only
à la façon du pays
, considering the miscegenation laws of the time), others hint at the reason this district was called the Lava Beds in the first place. Nova Scotian barkeeper Thomas Asgood, for example, rented rooms to Nancy McCarthy, the daughter of a Frenchman and a Washington Indian, and to another “Indian Mary,” this one a full-blood member of an unspecified Native community. Nearby, Louise Woolene, Annie Powers, and Maggie Murphy—all young, mixed-race women, likely from British Columbia—lived above a tavern owned by Welshman Richard Prichard and his partner, William Cheney. Nearby, twenty-five-year-old Indian Katie Hays boarded with barkeep George Behan and his bartender, Thomas Barry; and Native seventeen-year-old Nellie Hilton roomed at the establishment of German immigrants Jacob and Mattie Wirtz. Meanwhile, Cecilia Thomas, a twenty-nine-year-old woman of Hawai'ian and British Columbian Indian descent, was listed as the sole occupant of her household. While specifics about each of these women's lives are lost to history, it is quite possible that some or all of them participated, at least casually, in the sex trade for which the Lava Beds was reviled by Seattle's voices of urban order. Surely, a number of Indian women working in the sex trade were missed by the enumerators, having avoided the census taker or having been hidden by their employers. Pinnell's Illahee may have burned in 1878, but the “sawdust women”—whether prostitutes or not—were still around.

Urban Indian enclaves along the waterfront and on the Lava Beds reflected civic leaders' desires to segregate indigenous people from “respectable” settler society, but the distinction between them broke down as Native men and women went uptown to work in the homes of middle-class and elite white families. In particular, Indian women played an important role as domestic servants and live-in laborers in 1880. Throughout Seattle, enumerators found young Indian women living and working in the homes of white families. Fourteen-year-old,
mixed-race Hannah Benson helped minister's wife Mary Whitworth keep house for her husband, their civil-engineer son Fred, and their daughter Etta. Meanwhile, nineteen-year-old Lois Hilderbidle, also the daughter of a white father and Indian mother, worked as a servant in the home of physicians Alvin and Herman Bagley and Herman's wife, Kitty. However, Indian servants could also be found in more modest homes: Irish laborer John Christopher and his wife, Bridget, employed fifteen-year-old boarder Lizzie Whitney, a full-blood Washington Territory Indian; and single-mother Henrietta Minks, a resident of the Lava Beds, received much-needed assistance from a British Columbian woman known as “Indian Kate.” Nothing remains to illuminate why Elizabeth Fitz Patrick, a young mixed-race woman, chose to live with and work for mill owner George W. Stetson's family, but we might guess: money, a bit of prestige, and a ticket off the reservation. Even a handful of young Native men took advantage of such arrangements: Willie Henry, the fourteen-year-old son of a Nova Scotian father and a local Indian mother, was living with James Carpenter and family when the enumerator came to visit in 1880.

Writing in the 1920s, Mrs. E. E. Heg, a member of the Trinity Church congregation, emphasized the importance of these Indian domestic laborers to the white women of Seattle during this time. Noting that the only kind of domestic help available in Seattle came from Native women, she pointed out that such workers freed her and other Episcopalian women to help organize Seattle's first parish. High-status Indian women, meanwhile, were sometime employed by high-status white families, as in the case of Kikisebloo, who did laundry at the parsonage of the First Presbyterian Church throughout the 1870s and whose impatience with the minister's young children became something of a running joke in town. Her regular journeys between the indigenous enclave on the waterfront and the parsonage up the hill illustrate just how permeable boundaries were between white and Native Seattle. It also suggests a certain kind of congruency between two status-conscious societies: high-class Duwamish working for high-class Boston.
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Indigenous fishermen, hop pickers from Alaska and British Columbia, the saloon crowd, and domestic servants—these were the roles into
which Seattle's urban Indians were expected by their Boston neighbors to fit. Each category came with its own respective space on the margins of society: waterfront, tideflat, Lava Bed, laundry room. However, few spatial expressions of power are pure or complete, and elsewhere in Seattle, other Indians, and Indian women in particular, had become part of settler society, not as washerwomen or camp-keepers or Lava Bed wives, but as members of mixed-race families scattered throughout Seattle. There was Jacob Harding's wife, Lucy, the daughter of Washington Territory and British Columbia Indians, and Jennie, the British Columbian wife of German immigrant John Drummerhouse. An eight-year-old mixed-race Indian child named Hattie, perhaps adopted (or perhaps a disturbingly young house servant), lived with the logger Francis Guye and his wife, Eliza, both of them white; and Andrew Castro, sixty years old, shared a home with his twenty-two-year-old Native sister-in-law Annie and her son John, age five. The occasional marriage between a white man and a Native woman appears in King County's official records as well. The 1876 wedding between Peter Brown and an anonymous “Indian woman,” Robert M. Stewart's 1878 marriage to “Helen, an Indian,” and the 1881 nuptials of Louie Henry and Ellen Hatlepoh suggest that the antimiscegenation laws of the 1850s and 1860s were only haphazardly implemented. Even though enumerators' schedules and marriage records tell us little about these people, these brief glimpses of lives, and perhaps even loves, nonetheless speak to the ways that Native and settler histories had become intimately interwoven.
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