Native Seattle (17 page)

Seattleites moved quickly to repair the damage. As soon as the ashes cooled, business owners resumed their affairs in the canvas tents, but they expended little effort on their less seemly neighbors, many of whom had lost everything to the flames. Orange Jacobs recalled that “the fallen angels and the upper class of gamblers could take care of themselves,” while other, less fortunate citizens required “careful and necessary scrutiny” to prevent the handing out of “free lunches.”
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The long-standing
enmity between the people of the Lava Beds and their more straitlaced neighbors shaped responses to the disaster, but as before, the two elements of Seattle society had always existed in a symbiotic relationship. Before long, the Lava Beds had resumed activity. In fact, within months, they were more active than ever, as the Great Fire spurred a riot of urban development in the old commercial district. Wooden structures lost to the fire were replaced by ones of brick and stone, and as capital poured in to rebuild the city, so did new immigrants. For the next year, more than two thousand new immigrants arrived in Seattle every month, nearly doubling the city's population to over forty thousand people by the Great Fire's first anniversary. In terms of the built landscape, population growth, and civic self-identity, the Great Fire was a critical juncture in Seattle's urban story.

But, in fact, the Great Fire had only accelerated growth already under way. It was not the flames of a boiling glue pot but rather those inside a Northern Pacific Railroad engine that had truly sparked Seattle's great lurch toward metropolis. In 1883, the city held its Railroad Jubilee, which included a massive salmon barbecue hosted by local Indians. The Jubilee proved premature, however; the first Northern Pacific train would not arrive until June 1884, over tracks laid by some 1,400 Chinese laborers and heralded by a twenty-one-gun salute using cannon from the 1856 Battle of Seattle. Even then, service was poor, uncomfortable, and inconsistent, leading to complaints from locals and the eventual abandonment of the line by the Northern Pacific. It took yet another year for the “Orphan Road” to become a functioning railway, but when it finally did, in late 1885, it began a new wave of immigration to Seattle that had yet to peak when the city burned.
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Eight years later, the 7 March edition of the
Seattle Times
noted a sharp increase in the number of “red denizens” on Ballast Island on the rebuilt Seattle waterfront. Ballast Island was exactly what its name implied: a massive pile of rock, brick, and other debris dropped by ships near the foot of Washington Street. It was one of the few places in town where large groups of Indians were tolerated. On this day in 1893, ten large dugout canoes and several smaller ones, some loaded down to the waterline with furniture, tools, and trunks of clothing, had, along with their
owners, attracted a “large and curious crowd of spectators.” Dispatched to Ballast Island by his editors, the reporter soon learned that the canoes' occupants had been burned out of their homes on the West Seattle shoreline. According to the Indians, eight houses had been destroyed, their owners and inhabitants “turned out indiscriminately, without reference to the disposition of the Indians, who, however, took the matter without resistance.” Some of the now-homeless Native people were quite elderly and had lived in West Seattle for many years, carrying monikers like West Seattle Jack, West Seattle Jim, and West Seattle Charlie to prove it. Indeed, these were the people of Herring's House, the old indigenous town, which had survived the early phases of urban development. But the Saturday before, a man named Watson, with the help of several other West Seattle residents, had started the fire that brought centuries of Herring's House's history to an end.
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At first glance, the Gilded Age razing of this small Native neighborhood in West Seattle seems an anomaly. The deliberate destruction of Herring's House seems more in keeping with the spasmodic violence of Seattle's early years than with the nascent progressivism of the 1890s. But the events of March 1893 were part of a larger urban process of indigenous dispossession that had begun decades before, although that process accelerated in the late nineteenth century with Seattle's metropolitan ascent.

Not long before the fire of 1893, West Seattle had still been an isolated community, separated from Seattle by Elliott Bay and the wide, muddy Duwamish estuary. By the late 1880s, its residents were clamoring for regular connections with Seattle, while Seattleites became increasingly interested in excursions to (and suburban homes on) the West Seattle peninsula, with its beaches, fresh air, and views of the waterfront and Olympic Mountains. And so on Christmas Eve 1888, the ferry
City of Seattle
, equipped to carry wagons, buggies, and cattle, began regular eight-minute passages between the two cities, subsidized by the West Seattle Land Improvement Company, itself bankrolled by San Francisco capitalists. With the new maritime connection, the company began buying and clearing land, building roads and sidewalks, and establishing a cable car line from the ferry landing to a new business district. As
one observer recalled, “it was quite the thing for newcomers to ride back and forth just for the pleasure of the fresh salt air. Even retired deep-sea captains enjoyed the trip.” Wharves and grain elevators near the ferry terminal soon followed, and by 1893 West Seattle was in the midst of a development boom, in no small part thanks to the population explosion after the Great Fire of 1889. Muckleshoot tribal member Gilbert King George described his mother's stories of what that had meant for the people of Herring's House:

My mother told me of the days when this area was being claimed, and playmates' homes were destroyed for relocation purposes. I always remember because she was so puzzled by what happened to her friends' home. She got up the next day, there was a pile of ashes there. Whole families were removed. Relocated. So you have to wonder, you know, what are the mental impacts on a mother and a father, grandparents, who have to literally pick up their family and have to move.

The Great Fire of 1889 had spurred growth in West Seattle, which in turn encouraged the fiery ouster of indigenous people living in places slated for “improvement.”
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The fire of March 1893 is unusual only in that it merited the attention of the press. Other fires, ignored in newspapers and other historical documents, continued to smolder in the memories of indigenous people who had witnessed them. Occasionally, these memories found their way into the written record. During a landmark 1920s land claims case, for example, older Duwamish Indians recalled what had happened to their villages as Seattle grew around them in the second half of the nineteenth century. Major Hamilton described how, “when the settlers came, they drove us away and then they destroy the house and even set fires to get us away from these villages.” Similarly, Jennie Davis, a Lake Indian (and the daughter of Chesheeahud, the indigenous homesteader on Lake Union's Portage Bay), portrayed the transition from Native to settler residences: “Some of [the Indian houses] was gone and I see where the construction of some of the buildings.” West Seattle itself was the scene of more than one fire; Sam Tecumseh, the son of
one of Arthur Denny's close Indian allies, recalled the large “potlatch house” that had once stood at Herring's House along with the smaller longhouses. The result of two summers' worth of labor by nearly a score of skilled builders, the big house alone was valued in 1920s currency at around $5,000. “When the white settlers came,” he told the courtroom through an interpreter, “then they took possession of [the Indians'] cleared land and also destroyed the house.” These indigenous place-stories link the fire of March 1893 to a longer history in which urban development and Indian dispossession went hand in hand.
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Seattle's growth also caused a major shift in the urban labor pool. Gone were the days when settlers needed the work of Native people to conduct everyday town life, when Henry Yesler needed Indian men for his sawmill or white women needed Indian women to do their laundry. As more and more newcomers arrived, many indigenous people were pushed aside, their services no longer necessary. For the Duwamish man Dzakwoos, who had kept a homestead on Lake Union, the loss of work forced him to abandon his homestead and relocate to the east, where he would become part of a Native community living at Monohan on Lake Sammamish, where mill jobs remained. This community would come to be part of the modern-day Snoqualmie Tribe, and present-day tribal members understand the changing demographics and economy in and around Seattle as a key reason for the development of this new community. Snoqualmie elder Ed Davis recalled, for example, that the people at Monohan, including Dzakwoos and his extended family, “all come together when they run out of jobs.”
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And so the refugees from Herring's House, characterized as indignant but “philosophical” by the reporter, had some decisions to make as they gathered on Ballast Island in 1893. They could move to the “lighthouse colony,” a windblown squatters' encampment at West Point north of town, and some apparently did. Or they could move upriver: the area around the confluence of the Black and Duwamish rivers had been the eponymous Duwamish “inside” for centuries, and in the 1890s several Indian families still lived there, in a narrow stretch of the river valley that settlers simply called Duwamish. (The descendants of many of those people would become the modern-day Duwamish Tribe.) The refugees'
third option was to go further afield and apply for an allotment of land on one of Puget Sound's reservations, such as Port Madison (later known as Suquamish), Muckleshoot, or Tulalip. For many, this last option seemed to be the safest. At a time when Indian people enjoyed few legal rights, faced discrimination and hostility from many of their non-Native neighbors, and were often forced to live at the peripheries of the new economy, land, even when held in trust, could offer security that life in and immediately around Seattle could not.
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Ironically, the rapid urban expansion that had fueled the fire in West Seattle, with its ferries and beach cabins, slowed soon after the community of Herring's House was razed and its members dispersed. Just a few weeks after Watson's arson, the stock market collapsed and banks began to fail across the nation. The Panic of 1893 was on. In West Seattle, the Panic led to what one observer called a “nervous breakdown”: the ferries and cable car stopped running, real-estate ventures crumbled, and growth came to a standstill. The depression that followed dampened Seattle's spirits for four long years, and we might ask whether West Seattle Charlie and his neighbors might have still had homes on the shore there if only the timing had been a little different.
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Meanwhile, other Native people continued to live in Seattle, albeit in diminishing numbers, after the burning of Herring's House. In fact, it was those diminishing numbers that would lead to a change in the way indigenous people were portrayed in Seattle—indeed, the fact that they were portrayed at all. Whereas the workings of indigenous dispossession in the late nineteenth century rarely appear in the historical record, by the dawn of the twentieth century, Indians in Seattle—especially ones that seemed to be vanishing—were front-page news.

O
N THE LAST EVENING
of May 1896, Kikisebloo, the daughter of Seeathl, died of tuberculosis in her home on the Seattle waterfront. Her passing was big news in the city, where shops sold postcards of her image and where a chance encounter with the “Indian princess” was one of the highlights of the urban experience. Children sneaked into the city morgue to see
her body, while undertakers argued over who had the right to bury it. When the funeral finally took place on 6 June, thousands of Seattleites lined downtown streets to watch the procession make its way to a full requiem mass at Our Lady of Good Hope. Afterward, Kikisebloo was laid to rest in Lakeview Cemetery in a canoe-shaped coffin, next to her old friend and ally Henry Yesler. Her grandson Joe Foster, whose terrorized mother had committed suicide so many years before during Seattle's “village period,” was the sole Indian present.
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Kikisebloo's life had been like Seattle's Indian history writ small. Present with her father at the Denny Party's settlement at Alki, she was closely allied with Seattle's founding families, many of whom employed her as a washerwoman. Simultaneously noblewoman and drudge, Kikisebloo elicited a wide range of reactions from her white neighbors: some revered her as a touchstone to the indigenous past (case in point her much-ballyhooed introduction to visiting U.S. president Benjamin Harrison in 1891), while others, especially young people, were more likely to throw rocks at her as she passed in the street. For her part, Kikisebloo was famous both for her loyalty to pioneer families and for throwing stones of her own (or clams or potatoes, depending on what was handy) at her tormentors. In the last years of her life, she lived in poverty on the Seattle waterfront, simultaneously watched over by solicitous society women and lampooned in the press. By the time of her death, Kikisebloo had come to represent both the “noble savage” (expressed best by the urban legend that she had brought warning of the 1856 Indian uprising to Seattle residents) and the stubborn, backward “Siwash” doomed to extinction.
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In the nineteenth century, Kikisebloo's life had reflected many of the contradictions inherent in Seattle's Indian story. On the eve of the twentieth century, however, her death heralded a new pattern. The presence of indigenous people in Seattle was used by white observers to craft a powerful new narrative about the inevitable disappearance of Indians from Seattle and the modern world. Native people had always been symbols in Seattle—witness the debates about vice, fire, and disease in the village period—but in earlier decades, they had also been a force to be
reckoned with. As their numbers dwindled in the early twentieth century, local Indians were recast as stock characters in melodramatic stories about urban progress, representing both the inevitability of indigenous decline and the inexorable ascent of metropolitan Seattle. Here was a new place-story.