Native Seattle (16 page)

Pioneer daughter Sophie Frye Bass recalled another mixed-race family enumerated in the 1880 census, that of John and Mary Kelly and their daughter Maria. Living in an immaculately kept little house on Fourth Avenue between Pike and Pine streets, Washington Territory–born Mary did laundry at home for her white neighbors, while Irish immigrant John was a skilled blacksmith. Maria, fourteen in 1880, was a schoolmate and friend of young Sophie Frye and other settler children, once holding a “potlatch” by handing out candy hearts bearing inscriptions such as “Do you love me?” and “Be my girl.” Like Mr. Glover's bird's-eye view of Seattle, in which indigenous people were a part of everyday urban life, memories of families like these attested to
the ways in which everyday relations between Indian and settler called into question those very categories. The mixed-race family of Maria Kelly was just as much a part of settler society as that of Sophie Frye.
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While Indian and non-Indian lives interwove at the fine-grained level of the census schedule, on a larger scale Indian and non-Indian spaces beyond the city limits were also beginning to interweave in 1880. After the slumps of the 1860s and early 1870s, Seattle at last began to grow in accordance with its founders' imaginations, leapfrogging over enclosing hills, marshes, and waterways in the late 1870s. One newspaper editor described Seattle's growth spurt in a call for any doubters to “go out over the hills to the real front of action and progress,” where they would see the signs of urban development: “fires smoking in the distance on every hill, new roofs peeping out through vistas of vanishing foliage, trim garden fences routing out the old logs and debris.” These changes in the landscape told “the story of extending dominion, and the beginning of the new regime of solid growth for Seattle.” Residents living “on the outskirts this year,” noted one observer, “find themselves next year right in town.” This was no less true for Native people living in and immediately around Seattle. As the city spread across the rugged landscape between Puget Sound and Lake Washington, outlying settlements—indigenous and settler alike—were imbricated into the urban fabric.
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Seattle's sudden expansion in the late 1870s took place on many fronts and often uncovered glimpses into the indigenous landscape it would soon obliterate. To the south, a terrible beach road, “broken and demoralized” after each winter's rains, made its sloppy way past the oxbows and marshes of the river valley to the settlement of Duwamish, which had recently celebrated the opening of a lyceum, a sure sign that change was on the way. Not far away, county officials had chosen “one of the finest pieces of land in the county … over one hundred and sixty acres of land of a black alluvial character” as the site of a farm and hospital for the poor and indigent. Previously leased by Illahee entrepreneur John Pinnell to several Chinese truck farmers, the farm stood on deep shell middens created by generations of indigenous harvests, which explained the remarkably fertile soils.
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Meanwhile, to the north, urban outposts seemed to be springing up everywhere. In 1878 Belltown, immediately north of Seattle along Elliott Bay, boasted sixty-eight houses, one school, a grocery, and a boardinghouse for shipbuilders, while more houses were under construction. As the townscape took form, builders often unearthed bodies wrapped in cedar bark, the remains of an indigenous cemetery. At Lake Union, “quite a town” now surrounded David Denny's sawmill, with close to two hundred residents. After a sidewalk was built to the lake from Seattle's northern city limit in 1879—following the route of an indigenous trail—residents expected streetcars, water lines, and “the villas of our wealthy townsmen” to follow in short order. To the northwest, families had begun clearing land around Salmon Bay in 1877, and by 1879 farms could be found along both sides of the bay, with a population “sufficiently numerous to sustain a district school.” And to the northeast, along the no-longer-distant shores of Lake Washington, families began staking claims—and more importantly, moving to them—in the late 1870s, banking on an eventual canal connecting the lake with Puget Sound.
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Here was Seattle's first urban sprawl, and it caught both Native people and Native places in its weave. The Duwamish River offered evidence of an indigenous past in the middens at the County Farm, but it also offered evidence of an indigenous present in the form of several large indigenous settlements along its banks. In Belltown, where growth disturbed graves, living Native people camped along the beach near where longhouses had once stood amid gardens of salal. At Salmon Bay, where a dozen Shilshole families had been living in the 1850s, some still remained. Doctor Jim, “manly, fine-looking, and intelligent,” according to one observer, lived at the mouth of the bay near where Hwelchteed, known to most settlers as Salmon Bay Charlie, owned ten acres. Meanwhile, in the Salmon Bay settlement itself, Alonzo Hamblet managed the West Coast Improvement Company while his Tsimshian daughter-in-law Mary concerned herself with the local church; and the Scheurmann family's ten children—along with those of other mixed-race families like the Ryersons and Tollens—helped fill the seats at the small schoolhouse. To the east on Lake Washington, Native people camped on Union Bay with the permission of settler Joe Somers, while close
by, Chesheeahud, called Lake Union John, and Dzakwoos, also known as Indian Jim Zackuse, worked their respective five and ten acres at the eastern end of Lake Union. And south of there, “Indian Jack” and his wife, Eliza, owned an acre in Columbia City, a new suburb at the head of a slough along the lake.
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Some of these Native men and women, like Mary Hamblet or those camping in West Seattle on their way to the hop fields, were new to Seattle, themselves emigrants in search of urban opportunity. Others, like Chesheeahud and Dzakwoos, were local people with attachments to local places. These were the Indians that an 1879
Daily Intelligencer
reported “had severed their tribal relations, taken homesteads, quit their nomadic life and gone to farming, and who didn't care to lose their places on account of unpaid taxes.” Far from vanishing, these were indigenous people who had chosen to stay near traditional territories and make a go of it in an urbanizing landscape. And although they had “severed tribal relations” according to American law, they and their homes would remain important landmarks for indigenous people traveling to and from the city.
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However, staying in the old places was getting more and more difficult in 1880. The urban imbrication was getting tighter, as indigenous towns turned into poor farms, burial grounds became basements, and fishing sites became waterfront real estate. For some Native people, the pressures were simply too much. Doctor Jim, the healer living at the mouth of Salmon Bay, was one of these. Like many other indigenous doctors in Puget Sound, much of his social standing had been swept away by epidemics and American medical practices; unlike some, though, Doctor Jim had become fluent in English and had chosen to live close to the settlers. But things reached a breaking point for Doctor Jim one morning in 1880, when he hanged himself in his house, within sight of the old Shilshole town of Tucked Away Inside.
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As bad as things had gotten for Doctor Jim, the challenges facing indigenous people in and around Seattle were small in comparison to what was to come. In many ways, 1880 was a brief interlude between two dark periods in Seattle's Indian history. The chaotic violence of earlier decades had largely quieted, the epidemics had waned, and the legality
of Native homesteading allowed for some semblance of independence and economic stability. But the urban ambition reflected in Mr. Glover's bird's-eye drawing of Seattle, and the changes attendant to it, were about to reach new heights, and indigenous people who had worried themselves into the tight weave of the city's rapidly urbanizing landscape would face challenges on a completely new scale. Fire, water, and iron would soon change everything.

W
HEN OLLIE WILBUR WAS A LITTLE GIRL
living on the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the horse and buggy ride from the Muckleshoot Reservation to Seattle was a long one and, in her words, “awful, you know—have to go uphill, downhill, we'd all get off and walk.” Even so, her family went every year to visit her grandmother's brother, who lived in a ramshackle floating house near the mouth of the Duwamish. Seetoowathl—or Old Indian George, as his neighbors called him—still lived where he had been born, in a place known in his language simply as Tideflats. He shared the house with his wife, who was either “quite insane” or “the meanest old …” depending on whom you talked to, and he made a living by catching dogfish and rendering their oil for local sawmills. (“That's all he does, is fish, the old man,” Ollie recalled.) The monotony of fishing was broken every September when Ollie and her parents came with canned berries from the foothills. Their journey linked Seetoowathl, who refused to speak English with visiting ethnographers, and his prickly wife to a reservation some thirty miles distant. Long past the treaty and the Battle of Seattle, indigenous people whose ancestors once lived in Duwamish, Shilshole, and Lake communities like Little Crossing-Over Place and Herring's House still lived in Seattle, even as many of their kin found homes far from the city.
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Between 1880 and 1920, however, forces were at work that would make indigenous survival in Seattle virtually impossible. During those years, the city saw its most explosive period of urban growth, which spelled disaster for Native people trying to live in traditional ways and places. By the 1920s, in fact, indigenous Seattle—the geographies and communities that predated the founding of the city—would come to
an end, even if Indian Seattle would not. The wholesale transformation of the urban landscape dramatically altered indigenous subsistence practices and created a new place-story in which the “vanishing race” and the ghostly Indian haunting the city were self-fulfilling prophecies. The Indian people who remained in Seattle, meanwhile, became almost invisible as they adapted to life in a new metropolis.

According to oral tradition, Seeathl had seen this change coming. During treaty negotiations in 1855, he had warned his people to pay special attention to the Americans and their government. “You folks observe the changers who have come to this land,” he told those gathered. “You folks observe them well.” In calling the Americans “changers,” Seeathl invoked the figure of Dookweebathl, the Changer, who had organized the chaotic landscape of deep time and made the world habitable for the human people. It was a particularly apt choice of terms. As powerful forces reshaped Seattle in the decades around the turn of the century, indigenous people found themselves caught up in a transformation of their world nearly as dramatic as those described in the ancient stories. By 1920, Seattle had become the city of a new kind of Changers.
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A
T FIRST GLANCE, SEATTLE'S
two most important fires seem unrelated. The first, in 1889, utterly destroyed the city's commercial district; the second, four years later, obliterated several Native longhouses along the West Seattle shoreline. In Seattle's urban mythology, the earlier conflagration is one of the city's great turning points, the phoenix like moment from which the city rose up to become the Northwest's premier metropolis. The other is a mere historical footnote, forgotten by nearly all of Seattle's chroniclers even though it made headlines at the time. But the two stories they represent—Seattle's urban triumph and the dispossession of local indigenous people—are in fact one story. The path between a boiling pot of glue in 1889 and an arsonist's torch in 1893 represents not just the trajectory of those four years but a broader pattern: in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, indigenous people in Seattle found themselves on the losing side of urban development. Although many of the specifics of this “dispossession by
degrees” are lost to the historical record, the shared context of these two fires offers insights into the seemingly inexorable, yet often invisible, marginalization of the Duwamish, Shilshole, and Lake peoples.
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Rudyard Kipling, imperial apologist and rhetorical bearer of the white man's burden, is an unlikely figure to appear in a history of Seattle, but he offers a graphic (if typically acerbic) description of the city just after the Great Fire of 1889. Arriving in late July as part of a transcontinental tour, he described the near-apocalyptic aftermath. “The wharves had all burned down, and we tied up where we could, crashing into the rotten foundations of a boathouse as a pig roots in high grass,” he wrote. “In the heart of the business quarters there was a horrible black smudge, as though a Hand had come down and rubbed the place smooth. I know now what being wiped out means.” Kipling also noted the scores of canvas tents set up among the ruins, full of men carrying on with “the lath and string arrangements out of which a western town is made.”
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Seattle had nearly been
un
made by the terrible events of a few weeks earlier, when early in the afternoon of 6 June, a pot of glue boiled over and started a fire at Victor Clairmont's basement cabinet shop at the corner of Front and Madison. The flames rapidly spread upward and outward to surrounding wooden buildings. Thanks to brisk late-spring winds and a laughably insufficient water system, by nightfall sixty acres (thirty-three blocks), including virtually the entire business district, had burned to the ground and to the waterline. Yesler's wharf, the Lava Beds, and other Seattle institutions all disappeared into Kipling's black smudge. The fire could be seen miles away; one Snohomish Indian woman recalled seeing her older relatives cover their faces with their hands, rocking and wailing as the southern horizon glowed redly throughout the night.
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