Native Seattle (22 page)

Abandoning its backward creators, the Chief-of-All-Women pole now served a higher purpose: advertising Seattle. Where it was “at,” among the city's “surging scenes” and far from the “salmon scented Silences,” seemed not only preferable but natural. Seattle knew where it was “at” as well; at the dawn of the twentieth century, it was the gateway to a new empire that stretched from its railroad stations and wharves, along the rainy northwestern edge of North America, and into the high Arctic.
Just as Native people moved up and down the coast, Native objects and images began to move as well, and both Seattle and its hinterland were changed. Here was a city that highlighted its urban modernity by telling stories about places far from the bustle, about silent places in the distant wilderness over which it held sway.
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As early as 1870 the
Alaska Times
was being published in Seattle, but it was the arrival of the steamer
Portland
in 1897 that truly hitched Seattle's wagon to the North's star. Soon after the
Portland
hove to on the waterfront with half a ton of Yukon gold on board, Seattle established itself as a fulcrum in the economy and ecology of gold, a crucible that turned raw yellow metal into cash, food, clothing, real estate, patronage, and more. While other developments helped spur the eightfold expansion of the Seattle economy between 1895 and 1900 (steamship trade with Asia and South America, as well as increases in commercial rail shipping to markets back East), the gold rush became the dominant explanation for Seattle's new international prominence.
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As the launching point for voyages to Alaska, Seattle became an entrepôt not just for yellow metal but for encounters with the Native peoples of the North. Anthropologists had been working the coast for years, but the massive migration of non-Indian people, diseases, technologies, and goods into Seattle's northern hinterland quickened the “scramble” for Northwest Coast materials and gave rise to a salvage mentality among scholars. Anthropologists came to document cultures that seemed on the verge of extinction; tourists came in search of exotic Others who called the northern wilderness home. Most of them came from Seattle, particularly after its status as the commercial center of the gold rush was clinched, and were encouraged along their way by guidebooks printed by railroads, steamship companies, and Seattle's own Chamber of Commerce. Native people and things, along with the spectacular scenery of the Inside Passage, were the chief attractions of trips from Seattle to Alaska. As early as 1890, naturalist John Muir described mobs of totem-seeking tourists on the waterfront at Wrangell, Alaska. “There was a grand rush on shore to buy curiosities and see totem poles,” he wrote. “The shops were jammed and mobbed, high prices being paid for shabby stuff manufactured expressly for the tourist trade.” And once
Seattle had established itself as the gateway city, tourists need not go as far as Wrangell to purchase a piece of the North. Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, opened in 1899 by J. E. “Daddy” Standless among the steamer wharves of the waterfront and still in business today, became a nexus of the trade in Native material culture and the greatest of dozens of such emporia in Seattle. In addition to outfitting “Indian corners” in private homes, the Curiosity Shop and its competitors helped fill the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum; curio shops were places where popular imagination, ethnographic impulses, and urban ambitions joined. But the movement of Native things—such as the miniature argillite totem poles, ivory shaman's tools, and cedar canoe models at the Curiosity Shop—from Seattle's hinterland was made possible by Native people. Just as Indian men and women met the throngs at Wrangell's wharves, they also worked at the heart of the trade in Seattle. One such man was Sam Williams, a Ditidaht carver from Vancouver Island. First coming to Seattle around the turn of the century, Williams settled on the tideflats like so many other migrants, and in 1901, his skills came to the attention of Daddy Standless. Over the next four decades, Williams carved hundreds of miniature and full-size totem poles for the Curiosity Shop. Several of Williams's children and grandchildren also carved for Standless, and a handful of his poles can still be found at the Curiosity Shop.
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The Chief-of-All-Women pole, erected in Pioneer Place Park at the height of the gold rush, was the most famous example of this migration of Native objects and imagery. It instantly became an icon of Seattle's promise and one of the “must-see” attractions of excursions to the Northwest. In the April 1905
Journal of American Folklore
, anthropologist John Swanton wrote, “Every visitor to Seattle, Washington, has been attracted and more or less interested by the great totem pole that adorns its main square.” As its image circulated around the globe on
cartes des visites,
“Seattle's Totem Pole” provided a frontierish frisson that set the city apart from its competitors. Indeed, the Chief-of-All-Women pole was all the more exceptional because of its urban backdrop. “This totem pole is such a curious object!” wrote one observer to her Massachusetts kin in 1901, “especially when seen right in the business part of the city
as ours is.” In 1907, temperance writer Agnes Lockhart Hughes cast the pole as a zero-datum marker for the city's growth:

For less than a decade of years this heraldic monument has gazed upon the many changes in its vicinity, and shortly, on all sides it will be overshadowed by the immense business structures now in [the] course of construction. Relentlessly the hands of a nearby clock mark the speed of fleeting time… seemingly unmindful of the grotesque Totem Pole. … Its lips tell nothing of its past, its ears are deaf to the roar of traffic around it, but its eyes gaze down on the rapid progress of Seattle, the wonderful Queen City of the West.

For observers like Hughes, the pole in Pioneer Place linked the banks, law firms, and other businesses of the city's commercial district—many of which fronted the park where the pole stood—with the goldfields and other resources of the new Alaskan frontier. The fact that the pole faced northwest was deliberate: a trophy of the gold rush boom, the Chief-of-All-Women pole became a symbol of Seattle's metropolitan reach, and thus its modernity. Other imperial cities had created visual languages to reflect their ambitions and the nature of their holdings; Seattle had looked North and found a totem pole.
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Like Indian migration to and from Seattle, represented by canoes on the waterfront, the hinterland represented by the Chief-of-All-Women pole was manifested in comings and goings. A canoe capsized in the Nass River, inspiring the carving of a pole. A chartered ship dropped anchor at Tongass Island, its passengers hungry for a trophy, while steamboats spilled tourists onto wharves in search of Alaskan souvenirs. Railcars emptied at Seattle stations, to be filled again with masks and rattles on their way to eastern museums. Lines on tourist brochures linked Seattle with Alaskan places like Wrangell and Sitka. Urbanites took the trolley downtown to see a pole erected, and postcards traveled the world, naming Seattle Gateway to the North and City of Totems. Through routes of travel and commerce that linked places like On the Cottonwood to places like Pioneer Place Park, Indian images came unmoored and could serve new masters.

This was a powerful new place-story, literally: the creation of Seattle's new urban vocabulary carried with it new power relations. Within months after the Chief-of-All-Women pole was taken in 1899, for example, the Tlingit people of On the Cottonwood accused eight of the
Post-Intelligencer
expedition members of theft. Seeing little cause for concern, the “Committee of Eight” filed a mock suit against themselves, bringing Lake Indian Chesheeahud from his home on Lake Union to play the role of plaintiff. That ploy was dropped when a federal grand jury indicted the committee, but the presiding judge soon dismissed the indictment after a dinner held in his honor by committee members. Drafting a retroactive bill of sale, the committee paid $500 to the people of Tongass Island and then sat back to bask in their newfound notoriety. The Ganaxádi Ravens and the Seattleites had been connected to each other in new and unexpected ways, in an urban warp and indigenous weft that bound up a continent's vast edge.
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T
HE KLONDIKE GOLD RUSH
symbolized Seattle's imperial education; the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition was its coming-out party. Held in 1909 on the shores of Lake Washington, the AYPE trumpeted Seattle's status as “Queen City of the Pacific,” and its massive Beaux Arts–style buildings, made mostly of plaster, stood as symbols of “the awakening of the Pacific, and transforming of the backyard of the world into the front.” The neoclassical White City confections impressed visitors, but so did the presence of “Jap-Alaskan” architecture and other Indian-inspired spectacles, especially on the amusement strip known as the Pay Streak. “The red man of the Pacific Coast is present everywhere,” announced the
Seattle Times:
“His crude art, always symbolical and sometimes hideous, glares and grins at the visitor from the red and dun-colored totem poles marking the way to the Pay Streak; the carved tribal history of Alaskan tribes upholds the beautiful ‘Tori’ arch of the South Gate, and figures in many of the postcards sold by dealers in such wares.” Beyond the Pay Streak, Indian things filled the displays of the fair: Seattle photographer Edward S. Curtis's photogravures, S'Klallam ceremonial objects, even human scalps recalling the “red man of J. Fenimore Cooper” in the Government
Building's Dead Letter Department. Virtually every exhibit included some sort of ethnographic display, and the message was clear: these Indians were our people—not in the sense of being
us
, of course, but in the sense of being
ours
. Like other world's fairs, the AYPE was intensely didactic, brazenly ambitious, and thoroughly racist.
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For all the power of Curtis's photos and the titillation of scalps and “grotesques,” it was the display of actual Native
people
that most captivated the attention of Seattle fairgoers. The most popular attraction of the entire exposition was the Eskimo Village on the Pay Streak, where “expert reindeer men, skin-boat builders, ivory carvers and the best looking women,” most of them from Siberia, served as living examples of primitivism as they undertook everyday activities in their plaster “frozen north.” Meanwhile, Indian schoolchildren from Tulalip were put on display to show “what the bureau of Indian affairs has accomplished for the Indian people during the last few years.” And just outside the fairgrounds at the White City Amusement Park, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota men attacked stagecoaches day after day as part of a Wild West Show, only to be rebuffed every time by white gunslingers. Whether as harmless primitives, emblems of assimilation, or violent barbarians, Native people, like Native things, were used by fair organizers to articulate a clear message: witness our realm, see our burdens.
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It is all too easy to see Native people at the AYPE as mere captives to Seattle's imperial fantasies. To some extent, they were. But at the same time, Native people had their own reasons to go to the fair. Two days after arriving in Seattle to tend reindeer at the Eskimo Village, for example, Iñupiat Oliver Angolook decided to return to his community near Nome. When the agent who had procured his services confronted him at the wharf, Angolook was reported to respond, “Got money. Pay my own fare.” Indeed, Angolook's salary was reportedly enough to “keep an entire family in affluence through several seasons”—and ironically, it provided the means for him to leave Seattle altogether. Similarly, many Indian Wild West Show participants saw such performances as a way to visit faraway places while earning money for displays of traditional skills like horsemanship. Still another performer, the “Eskimo belle” known as Columbia, reaped a more unique reward; after winning the
AYPE beauty contest (trouncing several white competitors), the young Labrador Inuit woman received a lot in one of Seattle's new suburbs. Like hop fields or curio shops, the AYPE was an opportunity. Meanwhile, Skhandoo, a Chilkoot Tlingit shaman, wowed audiences with dances and ceremonies at the Eskimo Village alongside other Tlingits of the Chilkat, Hoonah, and Taku bands. He had once earned great wealth thanks to the Otter spirit that gave him power to heal, harm, and see far-off events, but after two prison terms for deaths caused by his ministrations, he found himself destitute until landing the job at the world's fair. For Skhandoo, the AYPE served two purposes: it allowed him to continue performing the work for which he had received prestige from both Tlingit and white observers, and it provided him with a living. For a man in Skhandoo's tenuous position, participation in the AYPE may have been the best of few options. For all these Native people, coming to the fair, like coming to the city more generally, often simply made good economic sense.
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Seattle's fair was also a place to play out long-standing rivalries between indigenous communities. In early 1909, for instance, fair organizers received a telegram from Harry Hobucket, a Quileute from Washington's outer coast, noting that the rival Makah were having trouble acquiring a gray whale to bring to the fair and offering to bring one on behalf of the Quileute. While exposition organizers appear to have declined the offer, the proposal suggests that some Native people saw the fair as an opportunity to shame old enemies in a new setting with a huge audience. Several weeks later, a challenge came from Chief Taholah of the Quinault and his sub-chief Pe-ka-nim of the Hoh to Indians everywhere, “and especially to their old enemies,” to join in a canoe race at the fair. But such competitions, like the canoe races on 6 September, “Seattle Day,” could also facilitate new alliances among tribal communities. As teams from Washington's Skokomish and Tulalip reservations and British Columbia's Lyacksun and Penelekuts reserves attracted thousands of spectators to the shores of Lake Union, they both drew white approval and helped craft a shared Native identity.
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