Native Seattle (25 page)

Soon after their appearance, the Tilikums became one of the largest civic organizations in Seattle. A competition among their three component “tribes” in 1913, for example, brought in 1,547 new members, bringing the total to 2,588 Tilikums, a significant portion of the city's white, middle- and upper-class men. Their induction ceremony involved the climbing of a totem pole, and tongue-in-cheek gossip of human sacrifice circulated through town, a reminder of the fascination with rumored cannibalistic rites among Northwest Coast peoples. “Playing Indian” was a well-established American pastime and had always expressed a wide range of political and cultural notions, but if the Tilikums tried to look like Indians, they behaved more like their white counterparts in fraternal organizations throughout the country. Concerned—at least on the surface—with more than simply making money, the Tilikums also sought to create a new moral climate in the city. During their inaugural year, for example, they erected a totem pole downtown that literally spelled out the values of the Tilikums. A far cry from the Chief-of-All-Women pole at the other end of the downtown, this one stood atop seven steps, each engraved with a virtue: Energy, Loyalty, Tradition, Truth, Ability, Equality, and Success—all spelling Elttaes. For all its gaiety, the work of the Tilikums was also a moral project, its apparent confidence belying deep-rooted concerns about modern urban life and the reforming impulses of the Progressive Era.
¹²

The work of the Tilikums was also a historical project. The 1912 Potlatch parade, for instance, was a wheeled chronology of Seattle's imperial past, its place-story cast in crepe and cardboard. First came a float belonging to a “shaman,” who used rattles to clear “evil spirits” from the parade route, followed by the Hyas Tyee's own float of walruses, ravens, and golden cornucopias representing the North's abundance. Then came the Tilikums themselves, some wearing papier-mâché bear, eagle, and whale masks and others dressed as totem poles, with horns braying and drums pounding in “the way in which the Indians of the North called together the chieftains.” Next came a Native potlatch scene complete with slaves and giant feast dishes, followed by Russian Alaska: a miniature replica of the Orthodox church at Sitka and
“Russian priests, Cossacks and Indian slaves.” Last, but certainly not least, came the American period, represented by a huge eagle perched on a map of Seward's purchase, a re-creation of Chilkoot Pass with a regiment of sourdoughs, and lastly the Home Government float, “a patriotic conception of what the future holds for Alaska.” Looking north to articulate Seattle's urban future, Potlatch organizers expended little energy on the local past: Chief Seattle, the pioneers at Alki, and other figures and events from Seattle's pre-imperial history rarely appeared at Potlatch. This was a story about place, and the place in question was the salmon-scented silences, gold-strewn Arctic creek beds, and totem-poled villages of Seattle's hinterland—not the lands and waters upon which Seattle had been built.
¹³

The kind of place-story the Tilikums told had everything to do with the kind of men they were, and with the kinds of experiences they had had with both cities and Indians. Most members of the Tilikums of Elttaes were
cheechakos,
people who had arrived during Seattle's period of rapid population growth that began in the 1890s. Few of them had experienced Seattle Illahee. For them, the city had always been a place of banks and steamships and railroads and tall stone buildings, all connected to Alaska and the North Pacific. To be fair, Potlatch—which, after all, began as Alaska Day—was never really about Seattle's history in the first place. A glorified street party and public-relations campaign, Potlatch was an escape from the past, created by men with little interest in reliving a history few of them had known firsthand. At the same time, convincing residents, visitors, and investors of Seattle's current and future greatness required the creation of a historical trajectory—a story for the city. And, in a sense, the Tilikums' version of Seattle's history
was
a local story; in the crowded world of twentieth-century urban competition, Potlatches and totem poles and tribes could provide the city with a unique urban identity among its rivals. But their definition of place was a new one: as the Northwest Coast's greatest metropolis, the hinterland had for the Tilikums become part of Seattle's local terrain.

The Tilikums might have escaped the local past, but they could not escape the global present. The 1913 and 1914 Potlatches resembled that of 1912 in all the important ways—totem poles lining the streets,
Tilikums in their war canoes, and the Big Bug leering at the throngs—but Seattle's biggest festival became increasingly entangled in events in the broader world. The 1913 Potlatch was marred by running battles between enlisted men and the Industrial Workers of the World, and as the world embarked upon the Great War in 1914, Potlatch was scaled back to only four days and received only subdued press coverage. In fact, the 1914 Potlatch would be the last for two decades. The festival was revived again in 1934 to bolster the spirits of a suffering city, thanks to a new generation of Tilikums with their own Hyas Tyee Kopa Konoway, tribal chieftains, and shamans. By the Aviation Potlatch of 1941—the last Seattle Potlatch, as celebration gave way once again to war—images borrowed from Seattle's experience with empire, and versions of history that emphasized the regional over the local, had come to seem like natural expressions of Seattle's past. Although the Tilikums had been responsible for creating this new sense of the local, based in their own lived experiences in a regional metropolis, they did occasionally venerate local history. Even in the years when Potlatch was not held, the Tilikums participated in other urban ceremonies, throwing their weight behind both Chief Seattle Day and commemorations of the landing of the Denny Party at Alki Point. And when the men who dressed as totem poles, who shook Tlingit rattles and spread cannibal rumors about themselves, came together to remember these turning points in the local past, they came into contact with another group of Seattleites who told a very different place-story but who also used Indians to do it.
¹⁴

T
HE TILIKUMS OF ELTTAES
told one kind of urban story in the early twentieth century; pioneers told another. As the “live wires” that powered the dynamo of urban growth, the Tilikums used Indian imagery to sell the city, but pioneers and their descendants used Indian imagery to express ambivalence about the losses attendant to that growth. Potlatches were optimistic festivals of promotion, while pioneer stories were sentimental markings of the passage of time. The two had different purposes: one to drum up attention in the noisy marketplace of civic public relations, the other to preserve
local heritage and revisit fading memories. The Tilikums looked to the future, while the pioneers gazed longingly into the past. What they had in common, though, was that both told stories about Indians to give shape to the history of the city. To craft their place-story, pioneers used accounts of local indigenous people to commemorate their own lives in the city's lost landscapes and, in doing so, cast themselves as a “vanishing race” in their own right. The Tilikums were not the only white people playing Indian in Seattle.

In 1938, the same year that the Tilikums dragged the Big Bug through the city for a “Potlatch of Progress,” Seattle pioneers and their families gathered at the Stockade Hotel at Alki Point. While Potlatches were about extravagance, hyperbole, and celebration, the gathering at Alki was something quite different. “The blazing logs crackling in the fireplace,” noted a
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
observer, “imparted an air of authenticity and quiet corroboration to the ceremonies which were simple but heartfelt.” The guest of honor that day was Rolland Denny—an infant when his parents and their cohort landed on 13 November 1851, the last living member of the Denny Party, and, as such, the only surviving link to those hallowed events. Denny's presence also made Seattle unique; in his address to the group, Mayor Arthur Langlie pointed out that Seattle was one of the few cities where one of the original founders still lived—a backward-looking kind of boosterism. (Seattle's uniqueness in this regard was to last only a few more months: Rolland Denny was dead by the following year's gathering.)
¹⁵

This was not the first such gathering. For nearly half a century, early Seattle settlers, like their counterparts in other Western places, had been coming together to commemorate and commiserate. The Society of Washington Territory Pioneers—“pioneer” defined as someone who had arrived prior to the indigenous uprising of 1856—was incorporated in Seattle in 1872, with Arthur Denny, Henry Yesler, William Bell, and Henry Van Asselt among the founding members. It merged with the larger Washington Pioneer Association in 1886. From the outside, the group's annual meetings, usually held in Seattle, seemed almost funereal. Except for quaint anecdotes of settler life—a litany of hapless Indians, runaway horses, and jokes about mud—the reunions seemed like
a deathwatch. A Seattle newspaper described one such proceeding in the 1890s:

Charles Prosch… read his annual report as secretary, which was interesting and of pathetic interest, especially when we have the names of those recently dead. The pathos of this was heighted [
sic
] when, in response to the reading of the roll call, the answer several times given from those present was, “He is dead,” these being the names of those who had gone, but of whose death Mr. Prosch was not aware.

The paper then enumerated the dead by name: thirty-seven for that year, including Henry Yesler. Press accounts of pioneer reunions, which typically included page after verbatim page of members' reminiscences, highlighted the fact that the generation that had settled Seattle, along with the way of life they represented, was fast disappearing before the onslaught of modern urban life. Pioneer stories were a way to talk about urban change and offered a counterpoint to the enthusiastic promotion of boosters like the Tilikums of Elttaes.
¹⁶

Arthur Armstrong Denny set the precedent; if he is the “father of Seattle,” then he should also be known as the father of Seattle pioneer malaise. In the first published history of the city—
Pioneer Days on Puget Sound
, printed in 1888—Denny was the first to express anxiety about the urban transformations taking place around him:

It is now thirty-six years since I came to Puget Sound, and I am more and more impressed with the fact as each succeeding year rolls by that the early settlers of the country will very shortly all have crossed over the river and be soon forgotten, for we may all concede the fact that we shall be missed but little when we are gone, and that little but a short time; but when we have met the last trial and our last camp fire has died out some may desire a knowledge of such facts as we alone can give.

Here was another kind of crossing in the crossing-over place of Seattle: between two kinds of Bostons, to use the old Chinook Jargon term for the Americans. In one particularly petulant passage, Denny penned that

it is a common occurrence for parties who have reached here by the easy method of steamer or railway in a palace car, to be most blindly unreasonable in their fault finding, and they are often not content with abusing the country and climate, but they heap curses and abuse on those who came before them by the good old method of ninety or a hundred days crossing the plains.

Denny made a clear distinction between his generation and the burgeoning tide of
cheechakos,
many of whom would go on to become members of the Tilikums of Elttaes. He became increasingly dejected in his public musings about the passing of his generation and the ascendancy of Seattle's new civic society; in an 1890 interview with historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, for example, Denny lamented his own obsolescence and seemed to look forward to what he called “crossing over.” Even the physical evidence of his role as founder of the city had disappeared; in 1892, the remains of that first log cabin at Alki were razed, despite Denny's efforts to save it. Denny might have been the father of Seattle, but he seemed surprisingly lost in the city's modern incarnation.
¹⁷

Denny may have been the first—and the most pessimistic—Seattle pioneer to articulate this anxiety over modern urban life, but he was by no means the last. Major J. Thomas Turner, who had first come to Seattle in the 1850s, noted in his 1914 reminiscences that “times have changed,” not unlike the North American landscape. “There are no more Rocky Mountains,” he wrote, “no more Indians, no more buffalo, and the Great Plains have disappeared. Come to think of it, were there ever any, or were [
sic
] their existence only an iridescent dream?” Meanwhile, Charles Kinnear, after describing scenes of 1870s Seattle in his own memoirs, ended with the acknowledgment that “this was in those long haired Siwash Indian days on what is now the city's main waterfront, and the like of it cannot be seen here any more.” Similarly, Edith Sanderson Redfield mourned the passing of Seattle's “wilderness,” its “virgin shore,” and the race of “Redmen” who lived there in a 1930 poem:

All, all are gone, the men, tepees
E'en gone the trickling streams, the trees.
Seattle now in pride surveys
Its ports—its buildings—railroads—ways,
Where money comes and money goes;
Whose right supreme? Who cares? Who knows?

Turner, Kinnear, and Redfield each linked their history to specific places lost to urban development, and filled those places with remembered Indians.
¹⁸