Native Seattle (8 page)

On Puget Sound, those visions and expectations collided with the realities of settling in Puget Sound. They collided, first, with the fact that Indian people were not about to disappear with the arrival of the urban frontier and, second, with the dawning reality that, while war was always a possibility, for the most part indigenous people were planning to participate in the creation of that frontier. Founding a city in
the Pacific Northwest meant living alongside Native men, women, and children. Almost immediately after the
Exact
put the settlers ashore, for example, Indians came to live with them. Arthur Denny recalled the scene:

Soon after we landed and began clearing the ground for our buildings they commenced to congregate, and continued coming until we had over a thousand in our midst, and most of them remained all winter. Some of them built their houses very near to ours, even on the ground we had cleared, and although they seemed very friendly toward us we did not feel safe in objecting to their building thus near to us for fear of offending them, and it was very noticeable that they regarded their proximity to us as a protection against other Indians.

Denny's account paints a radically different picture from Lillian Smart's creation story diorama. Instead of twenty-four settlers on an empty beach, with perhaps a handful of Indians on hand, we see those same twenty-four whites as pale faces among hundreds of darker ones. Denny's account also speaks to the reasons Native people came to New York–Alki—out of curiosity, to trade, or in fear of increasingly common raids from northern Indians. Regardless of the reasons, by a few weeks after the founding, New York–Alki was no longer just an American settlement. It was also an indigenous one.
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Arthur Denny and the others should not have been surprised. Although they had had only one direct interaction with Indians on the overland journey, a furtive skirmish with some Shoshoni men on the Snake River, other experiences farther west made it clear that city founding in the Northwest would include Indians. The early growth of Portland, for example (“quite a thriving town… even at that early period” in Arthur Denny's own words), was fueled largely by its new sawmill. When the mill opened in 1850 on the bank of the Willamette, local indigenous people established a new settlement adjacent to it within weeks, where they made up a significant portion of Portland's population and the mill's labor force. Similarly, the “embryo city” of Olympia at the head of Puget Sound consisted of “about a dozen one-story frame cabins,
covered with split cedar siding, well-ventilated and healthy, and perhaps twice as many Indian huts near the custom house” when David Denny and John Low met Lee Terry there.
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Within a few weeks of its founding, New York–Alki looked much the same. It was a biracial place. To use the language of the day, it was a place of Bostons and Siwashes, the former a reference to the city of origin of many of the first Americans on Puget Sound and the latter a derogatory term derived from the French word
sauvage
. With little experience other than tales of war, the settlers were forced to amend their ambitions in light of their new, and seemingly precarious, circumstances. Likewise, indigenous people who had left for Prairie Point but who had arrived in New York–Alki had to come to terms with the new rules of engagement represented by white settlement. Facing each other across linguistic and cultural chasms, the indigenous and white residents of Prairie Point/New York–Alki mystified each other. Native practices were often inexplicable to the settlers: despite complaints from one of the settler wives, for example, one elderly indigenous woman insisted on throwing her used tea leaves at table legs whenever she visited the cabins. Meanwhile, settler children caught herding garter snakes into a brush fire were sharply admonished by Indian neighbors, who said it would bring a flood. (Soon after, according to a Denny descendant's own account, there was in fact a downpour.) Indigenous men and women found the newcomers, and in particular the Boston women, equally strange. They crowded into the crude cabins to watch the women cook and clean; several memoirs tell of Mary Denny and Lydia Low enlisting harsh words or a hot skillet to maintain some semblance of privacy. During those first few weeks, Americans and Indians each made attempts to reach across divides of language, belief, and etiquette.
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Sometimes, it worked. When some laundry disappeared soon after the setters arrived, Arthur Denny spoke to Seeathl, who admonished the other Indians present and oversaw the swift return of the missing garments. On another occasion, one of the white women fed a sick indigenous child, whose father, a “hard case” dubbed Old Alki John, gave her a tin pail in return. Although she refused his gift—more likely an actual payment, and her refusal thus a minor affront to Native ideals
of reciprocity—the two families had nonetheless established a bond. Also during that first winter, a woman named Ooyathl, one of the wives of Seeathl, died suddenly. David and Arthur Denny built a cedar coffin for her body, which was “wrapped…in so many blankets that it would not go in.” Helping give Ooyathl the high-class burial her status demanded helps explain the close connections between the Denny families and the families of Seeathl in decades to come, with David Denny a particular favorite of many Native people in and around Seattle.
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But attempts at accommodation did not mean there were no tensions. The male members of Denny Party in particular saw themselves as the intellectual and moral leaders of New York–Alki, no matter the number of their indigenous neighbors. During that first winter, they made it clear that a new political order, with them at the top, was emerging at Prairie Point. When a “very white” Indian woman named Seeayay came to the settlement to escape an abusive husband on the Puyallup River to the south, David Denny advocated on her behalf. She later married the son of Old Alki John (just plain Alki John), and as a result, David Denny became known as the “Law-Man” among local indigenous communities. Meanwhile, when an altercation between Indians visiting from the Green River and the Cascade foothills threatened to turn violent, Arthur Denny stepped in and kept them apart until tempers died down. (While the indigenous disputants likely saw him as an impartial outside moderator, in keeping with local legal tradition, Denny surely interpreted their acquiescence as a sign that the Indians sought order—in particular,
his
order.) Other performances of white authority were less subtle. When the
Vincennes
, the same ship that had been part of Wilkes's expedition, arrived at New York–Alki during that first winter, it repeatedly fired cannon that had once been used in a massacre in the South Pacific. The booming reports made “a strong and respectful impression upon the hundreds of Indians… while to the settlers, noticing the effect upon the Indians, it was music of a delightful character.” During the same months that an American minority learned to live among an indigenous majority, that minority made it clear who planned to be in charge in the years ahead.
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At the same time, indigenous people exerted their own influences
over the urban beginnings of New York–Alki. When the brig
Leonesa
arrived, exchanging staples like flour and sugar for wooden piles to help build San Francisco, it was Native men who cut most of the trees and floated the lumber out to the ship. Indians also brought bushel after bushel of potatoes to the settlement as supplies ran low during the winter, gathering them from gardens in their own towns. And just as the name New York was followed by a Chinook Jargon suffix, the first commercial venture in the settlement, set up by John Low and Charles Terry in November, had a name drawn from the hybrid trade language. The New York Markook House (
markook
or
makook
meaning “trade”) kept “constantly on hand and for sale at the lowest prices all kinds of merchandise usually required in a new country.” Indeed, New York–Alki was a new country, for Native and settler alike.
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D
ESPITE THE SYMBOLISM
of events like Ooyathl's burial and the firing of the ship's cannon, both intended to make lasting (if conflicting) impressions upon local Indians, the founding of New York–Alki does not register prominently in the oral tradition of local Native peoples. In fact, it does not register at all. Among the many indigenous accounts of nineteenth-century history in central Puget Sound, there are virtually no stories about the Denny Party and the little settlement on the point. Clearly, what is so important to Seattle's civic place-story is much less so in Indian country. Perhaps the landing at Alki was just one more arrival of settlers during a period when similar foundings were taking place on the shores of Salt Water; perhaps it is overshadowed by other events of the 1850s: the treaties and the resulting conflict that settlers would name an “Indian War.” And of course, not all stories survive. Nor do their keepers.

But perhaps the most obvious reason that the Alki landing is not part of local indigenous oral tradition is because the settlement of New York–Alki was a temporary arrangement. And so in the late winter of 1852, Arthur Denny, Carson Boren, and William Bell set out to circumnavigate Elliott Bay in search of a permanent location for their homesteads. Since selling piles and timbers to passing ships was “the only dependence for support in the beginning” as far as Denny could see,
“it was important to look well to the facilities for the business.” The new site had to meet four requirements: a deep harbor, a supply of freshwater, fine stands of timber close to the shore, and feed for stock. As the three men explored the shores of Elliott Bay, they circulated through another arc of the landscape, but the indigenous places around Elliott Bay were largely invisible—save one. One Denny descendant described their arrival at the spot, using modern landmarks to orient her readers:

In the afternoon as they paddled south, the explorers discovered that the high bluff gradually dropped from a height of forty feet to the level of a little tide stream with meadow grass on its banks, which we know as Yesler Way. North of this was a knoll at the foot of Cherry Street. South of the stream was a low wooded section, and half hidden therein were the ruins of an Indian hut. The distinct shore line ended rather abruptly and merged into tide flats at what is now the foot of King Street, making a point at low tide and an island at high tide.

The three men decided that this place, known as Little Crossing-Over Place to Seeathl and his people because of a trail leading into the back-country, was to be their new home.
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Soon, it would become Seattle. On 23 May 1853, plats for the town of Seattle were officially filed. By then, the settlement had grown into a small hamlet, including figures like Henry Yesler and David “Doc” Maynard who would become key players in Seattle's urban drama. Although the Whulshootseed name for the site was now familiar to many of the settlers, the “awkward and meaningless” word meaning Little Crossing-Over Place was never considered as a name for the town, while Duwamps and Duwamish River, two other options used briefly during 1852, were considered ugly and unflattering.
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Instead, the community leaders chose to name their town after Seeathl, who had played such a vital role in life at New York–Alki. Historians have debated Seeathl's reaction to this; some say that he was indifferent, others that he was horrified by the decision and even went to Olympia to protest it, and still more suggest that he may have given the name willingly as he approached
the end of his life. Regardless of what he thought, the naming of Seattle is typically portrayed in civic historiography as a critical turning point: a handing over from the indigenous to the urban.
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Indeed, well before the day when Bell, Boren, and Denny decided that Little Crossing-Over Place would be their new home, the indigenous world of the Duwamish, Lakes, and Shilsholes had been irrevocably transformed. The ruined longhouse at Little Crossing-Over Place, overgrown with wild roses (and, according to oral tradition, only one of several that had once stood there), spoke to the abandonment of towns in the wake of epidemics and slave raids. In Whulshootseed, similar words described both houses and human bodies: house posts were limbs, roof beams were spines, walls were skin. Just as sweeping a house and healing a body could be expressed with the same verb, related words spoke of illness and the falling down of a home, and so the ruins were testaments to loss. Meanwhile, on a nearby bluff above Elliott Bay at what is now Spring Street, a cemetery adorned with tin and trade beads spoke of the epidemics and the traders who had brought them. Read like a text, the landscape seemed to tell of the passing of Indians from Puget Sound, and so the naming of Seattle seems the end of an era.
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But, of course, the story is much more complicated than that. When the plat for Seattle was filed in May 1853, it showed a grid of straight lines not unlike the layout of Abingdon or one of the other towns from which the Bostons had come. On the ground, however, the landscape would not be easily transformed into a model of Cartesian harmony. Arthur Denny could attest to that. “The front of our territory was so rough and broken as to render it almost uninhabitable at that early time,” he recalled. “I dug a well forty feet deep in the bottom of the gulch and only got quick sand with a very limited amount of water. Direct communication with the bay, by which we received all our supplies at that time, was next to impossible, owing to the height of the bluff.”
Terra miscognita
, in the form of gullies and springs, sand and slopes, would exert its own agency over Seattle's growth, forcing urban visions to accommodate local realities.
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