Native Seattle (24 page)

Slowly the smoke from the log cabin curled,
From hearth of white stranger near wilderness shore,
Hearth and a home at the edge of the world,
With bold Saxon faith in a hut's open door.

Raging with anger, demons of hate,
The howling foes fought through the battle's long day.
Chieftain, O, Chieftain, blest was our fate!
Thou stoodst like a rock in our tempest strewn way.
Sweet be the flower, O, child, that you bring,
And pure be the prayer that you Heavenward send,
Soft be the song as wild robins sing,—
A shrine in the grass by the grave of our friend.

Seemingly the noblest of savages, Seeathl was the Indian benefactor to a Saxon city; the place-story of the man and the city that bore his name relied on two premises: a notion of a vanishing race and a belief in inevitable Anglo-American racial supremacy.
³

Other would-be poets made the connection between Seeathl and Seattle even more explicit, often apostrophizing the person and the place in the same stanza as California resident Florence Reynolds did in the 1920s:

Oh! City so marvelously fair of face,
You were born of a noble Indian race,
And to honor their chieftain you were given his name.
Oh! Seattle, great warrior of deathless fame—
You have a monument that ever will stand,
A tribute of Love to your character grand;
A city of beauty that is fast growing great—
A “Wonder Spot” in a wonderful State.

For Reynolds, a grave paled in comparison to a city itself as a marker of Seeathl's life. Similarly, white Suquamish resident T. M. Crepar, a contemporary of Reynolds, suggested an even closer connection between man and metropolis:

There's a people that's proud of the story,
There's a city that's proud of its name,
Like the Chief he was in his glory,
For Sealth and Seattle's the same.

'Neath a whitened cross and mound of sod,
The bones of Chief Seattle lies [
sic
];
While across the bay, where once he trod,
Seattle towers to the skies.

Included in a brochure sold to gravesite visitors by Princess Angeline Souvenirs, the poem's claim that “Sealth and Seattle's the same” reflected popular linkages between the man and the city. Talking about Seeathl and Seattle in the same breath—using an Indian to explain the city—seemed only natural. And, in fact, nature was at the core of this particular place-story, which expressed longing for the lost world of the “first Americans.”
⁴

Stories about Chief Seattle had little to do with the real man named Seeathl. In a pattern that would come to dominate urban discourse over the twentieth century, the city's namesake was often little more than a character from central casting, and the circumstances in which his image appeared rarely had much to do with actual Indians, typically revealing far more about the portrayers than about Seeathl. And, in fact, the symbolic resuscitation of Seeathl in the early twentieth century was but one example of the ways in which white Seattle residents used Indians and Indian imagery to tell urban place-stories. More than appropriations of Indian symbols—a time-honored American tradition—these stories were also ways to work out concerns about a changing city, and as such, they reflected the conflicting ambitions and anxieties of Seattleites. They were stories about place: about what had happened here, about who belonged here. As white Seattle turned to Indians to tell urban place-stories, it was clear that the “Changers” had also been changed by the experience of urban conquest and the transformation of this place called Seattle.

O
N 17 JULY 1912
, a new kind of Indian arrived in Seattle. Like so many who had come before on their way to the hop yards or the tideflats, he came from the north. But there was something different about this Indian. Perhaps it was that he arrived aboard the
Portland
, the same auspicious ship that first brought Alaskan gold to Seattle. Perhaps it was his dress: rather than the plain pants and shirts that most Native men wore, he sported a Chilkat blanket and the tall headpiece of a Tlingit noble, abalone and copper and yellow cedar announcing an ancient lineage. Perhaps it was the presence of the
Fox
and the
Davis
, twin U.S. Navy destroyers that
flanked the
Portland
as it entered Elliott Bay, or the thousands of Seattleites gathered on wharves and rooftops, blowing whistles to greet him and cheering as calliope music filled the air. What made this “Indian” most different from his predecessors, though, was that he was not an Indian at all and no newcomer. Underneath the mountain-goat wool and cedar headdress were the business suit and balding pate of George Allen, Pacific Northwest manager of the National Surety Company of New York. On this day, however, Allen was no run-of-the-mill insurance executive: he was Hyas Tyee Kopa Konoway—“Great Chief of Everything” in Chinook Jargon—and he had come to Seattle to potlatch.
⁵

Between 1911 and 1914 and again in the 1930s, Seattle's premier urban festival was the Potlatch. Like the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (AYPE), the Potlatch drew on symbols of the city's northern hinterland and trumpeted the unique virtues that assured a great future for Seattle, its residents, and its investors. More than just another example of public relations, though, Seattle's Potlatch festival was also a way for a certain class of Seattleites—specifically, the city's new commercial elite—to tell stories about the city and its history. Called a “triumph of symbolism” by one observer, the Potlatch appropriated Native imagery to create a regional vision of civic development. In telling stories about the places that had been linked to Seattle through its imperial networks, Seattle's Potlatchers crafted a new narrative about what it meant to be not just in this place but in this place that dominated other places: in the premier city of the Northwest Coast.
⁶

Seattle's Potlatches, like the AYPE before them, were indicative of the heated competition among Western cities in the early twentieth century. While Seattle's regional dominance was largely a fait accompli by the first Potlatch in 1911, the urban West remained a volatile place, where the fortunes of cities could still be won or lost. Potlatch organizers sought to cement Seattle's position by creating a signature event, “all that the Mardi Gras is to New Orleans; all that La Fiesta is to Los Angeles; all that the Rose Festival is to Portland.” But why call it Potlatch? To highlight the city's modernity, why did festival promoters choose a Native tradition as their leitmotif ? The answer centers on the question of wealth and on the idea of a civic generosity that offered the promise of prosperity
to all those who lived in Seattle and its hinterland. That an Indian ritual could best articulate this vision made perfect sense to Potlatch promoters:

To the Indian of the Northwestern water reaches [Potlatch] means a feast to which all of the tribe are bidden and whence they return to their tepees laden with gifts.

Seattle has adopted the Indian name and applies literally the Indian definition. It spends $200,000 or more upon its annual festival, and offers it, as free as its Northwestern air, to whomsoever may fare this way.

No feature of the whole delightful celebration is offered at a price, for The Potlatch is not established for profit. Rather it is an annual thank-offering for a prosperity that seems perennial; for such beauties of climate and nature as have nowhere on earth their parallel.

Potlatch promoters, then, cast themselves as humble “chiefs” generously bestowing the fruit of civic and ecological wealth upon the people of Seattle and their guests.
⁷

Their choice not only served the message of the festivals but also expressed a long-standing fascination with the potlatch among non-Indians. Identified by outsiders as a trademark cultural element of the Northwest Coast, “potlatch” was in fact a constellation of diverse practices used by indigenous people all along the northwestern edge of the continent as a way to manage social, economic, and spiritual relationships. In Puget Sound, for example, the practice of
sgweegwee,
from the Whulshootseed word for “invite,” linked elite families, their resources, and their spirit powers over great distances through the public performance of a spiritually sanctioned sharing ethic, often on occasions such as funerals. As one elder said in the 1910s,
sgweegwee
both made a wealthy person's name “high” and made it “go all over the place.” This notoriety brought responsibility; Tulalip elder Gram Ruth Sehome Shelton (Seeastenoo) pointed out that the primary purpose of the practice was to “keep up the poor,” to maintain social cohesion through sharing.
⁸

Puget Sound potlatches, however, were overshadowed in the public eye by those held further north. Marked by more lavish ritual performances,
the public destruction of wealth, and the pageantry of dancing societies, the potlatches of the Kwakwaka'wakw and other northern Northwest Coast peoples fascinated academics and the public alike and inspired a vast scholarly and popular literature. Fascination, however, was tempered by colonial revulsion at the seeming profligacy of Indian society, expressed in the de jure repression north of the U.S.-Canada border and in de facto repression south of it. In Seattle, though, potlatch became the inspiration for appropriation. To borrow Gram Shelton's words, Seattle's urban Potlatchers would use Native symbolism to make the city's name high and to make it go all over the place. Here, then, was an event that represented yet another weft of the woven coast, showing how completely Seattle's urban identity had been transformed by encounters with its indigenous hinterland.
⁹

It did not start out this way. The first Potlatch, in 1911, used Klondike imagery: the presiding figure was King D'Oro, the avatar of golden wealth, who arrived on the
Portland
—always the
Portland
—with a retinue of hoary prospectors and rambunctious dancing girls. The following year, though, D'Oro was succeeded by Hyas Tyee Kopa Konoway. The brochure for the 1912 festivities described this new incarnation:

Seattle's Potlatch is unique, for it is based upon and is true to the rich tradition and history of Puget Sound and the Alaskan coast. Every pageant, every spectacle, is colored with the original pigments. Its principal pageant is a line of a thousand totem poles; its emblem is an Alaskan grotesque; its “patron saints” the Whale, the Crow, the Seal, the Bear and other quaint and startling crests of the native of the Northland.

This was, in effect, the AYPE's appropriation of “Indian” images metastasized citywide. The “Alaskan grotesque,” inspired by the totem poles of both Seattle and Alaska, was the Potlatch's mascot, known as the Big Bug. Simultaneously an emblem of the festival and an object of racist derision, the Big Bug was a regional cousin to Sambo, drawn not from the imagined plantations of the South but from the Northwest Coast of popular imagination. The Big Bug's nearer kin were everywhere in Seattle during Potlatch: the Chanty Tyees quartet (“the singing chiefs
of the Seattle Press Club”) sang “Chinook choruses” for Hyas Tyee Kopa Konoway Allen during his official tour of the city, which including making “good medicine” over the new liner
Potlatch
at the Seattle Construction and Dry Dock. Across town, three dozen young men performing the “Totem Pole Dance” as part of the play
The Alaskan
, written by Joe Blethen, son of the owner of the
Seattle Times
, proved a far greater success than the sourdoughs and sad old King D'Oro. Upon Hyas Tyee Allen's ritual departure, the
Times
observed that “ever after Seattle will look to the Potlatch for an Indian chief and not for a king or queen as high ruler.”
¹⁰

The
Times
's rejection of royalty suggests that the Potlatches were democratic, or even populist, in their conception. Indeed, they were—designed as participatory spectacles, the events brought Brahmin and lowbrow together in a unified civic identity. But for all the nods to generosity and philanthropy, it was Potlatch organizers who gained the most from civic potlatching, and they did so through an organization that stood at the core of urban power: the Tilikums of Elttaes. Making their official debut at the unveiling of a newly painted Chief-of-All-Women pole in the fall of 1911, the Tilikums (“friends” in Chinook Jargon; Elttaes is Seattle spelled backward) included the most powerful men in Seattle. During the 1912 Potlatch parade, for example, one of the highlights was “Chief Skowl's War Canoe,” crewed by some thirty Tilikums. Among them were Hyas Tyee Allen's insurance industry colleagues, as well as bankers, attorneys, a Presbyterian pastor, the Seattle postmaster, and staff from both the
Times
and the
Post-Intelligencer
. The canoe also carried J. C. Marmaduke, general manager of the New Washington Hotel and the Alaska Building; Colonel William T. Perkins, an executive with the Northern Exploration and Development Company, the Alaska Midland Railroad, and the Northern Securities Company; Clyde Morris, president of Nome-based General Contractors and the Arctic Club; and Joshua Green, president of the International Steamship Company. Called “the livest of the live wires” in Seattle, these Tilikums had made fortunes from the city's hinterland, whose images their friends at the papers now used to sell the city. So perhaps civic potlatching was not about generosity after all.
¹¹