Native Seattle (18 page)

While she was by far the most celebrated of Seattle's “last” Indians, Kikisebloo was by no means the last of the last. Other Duwamish, Lake, and Shilshole people continued to live in Seattle well into the twentieth century. Some displayed a remarkable commitment to particular places. On Salmon Bay, for example, the small cedar-plank home of Hwelchteed and his wife, Cheethluleetsa, also known as Madeline, was a distinctive landmark on the shore opposite a settlement now known as Ballard. Cheethluleetsa and her husband harvested clams, salmon, and berries to sell in Ballard, using the income to purchase items from area merchants or for ceremonies held with visiting relatives. Like another Salmon Bay Indian, nicknamed Crab John, whose shouts of “salmon, ten cents” were a fond memory of many Ballard residents, Hwelchteed and Cheethluleetsa were living links between the indigenous town of Tucked Away Inside and the modern town of Ballard. Indeed, Hwelchteed portrayed himself as the hereditary headman of the Shilsholes and, as such, garnered much attention from residents and tourists alike, particularly after the death of Kikisebloo.
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Meanwhile, on Portage Bay at the eastern end of Lake Union, Chesheeahud and his wife, Tleebuleetsa (confusingly, also called Madeline), regularly entertained visitors from area reservations at their homestead. When Tleebuleetsa lay dying in the spring of 1906, relatives came from area reservations and elsewhere to keep vigil, and a
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
photographer captured the image of family members as they arrived at the small house on the flats of Portage Bay. In the background of the photo, the new University of Washington campus and streetcar suburbs reach to the horizon. Two supposedly separate worlds—the urban and the indigenous—were in fact the same place. (Nowhere is this clearer than at Chesheeahud and Tleebuleetsa's graves, which lie in the old section of Seattle's Evergreen-Washelli Cemetery immediately next to that of Hiram Gill, a controversial Seattle mayor who made his
career playing off the bad blood between Lava Beds society and the “law and order crowd.”)
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Hwelchteed, Chesheeahud, and their wives were relatively successful at surviving in Seattle, but other indigenous people had a harder time of it. Living among the marshy suburbs on Portage Bay was one thing; trying to eke out a living on the industrial downtown waterfront was another. In 1910, a Duwamish couple named Billy and Ellen Phillips made the headlines after a winter storm destroyed Billy's crabbing boat, their primary source of income. Identified as a nephew of Seeathl, Billy (whose Whulshootseed name was Sbeebayoo) and his wife quickly became a minor cause célèbre. The
Post-Intelligencer
printed graphic descriptions of the couple's living conditions in their cabin at the foot of Stacy Street: both were malnourished, Billy was nearly blind, and Ellen was suffering from chest pains. For some time, they had been surviving on neighbors' stale bread and on fish donated by a nearby cannery. The
Post-Intelligencer
coverage inspired a broader charity campaign aimed at not just keeping them alive but also paying for their relocation. As reporters milked the story for all it was worth, they also chronicled the process by which a skilled fisherman and his wife had been reduced to such dire circumstances. His camping places along the Puget Sound shoreline had become private property, and the new owners resented Indian trespassers. Both game and fish were harder to come by, as habitat loss, pollution, and commercial fishing took their toll. Even Billy's canoe had been lost. These factors, combined with age and ill health, had nearly spelled the end for Ellen and Billy.
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The struggle of the Phillips was not unique to Seattle. Throughout Puget Sound, indigenous people were finding fewer and fewer places to call their own. While the treaties of 1855 had allowed Indians to leave the reservation to hunt and fish and work,
living
off-reservation was another matter, especially as the non-Indian population continued to burgeon. Bureau of Indian Affairs agent S. A. Eliot described the situation in the 1910s:

The most serious situation among the Sound Indians is occasioned by the large number of homeless vagrants.… The reservations on the Sound are
now all allotted and there remains a remnant variously estimated at from one to three thousand Indians who are landless and homeless. These people wander up and down the Sound, living on the beaches and constantly evicted or ordered to move on by their white neighbors. In one or two places they have established considerable villages, but they have nothing there but squatter's rights.

In the 1920s, Suquamish tribal member Charles Alexis reported seeing other Indians living in impoverished conditions on sandspits and in other marginal locations around Puget Sound in earlier years. The “lighthouse colony” at West Point, to which some of the refugees of the Herring's House arson had briefly removed, was one such place. While Alexis and Eliot had very different perspectives on these landless Native people—one as a tribal witness in a land claims case, the other as a government advocate of Indian “industrial and moral development”—they both saw Indian landlessness in urban Puget Sound as a dilemma.
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For many Native families still living in and around Seattle in the 1910s, allotment at Muckleshoot, Suquamish, and other reservations remained the most realistic solution to this dilemma. In their applications for allotment, Indian men and women both outlined their long connections to Tucked Away Inside and other indigenous communities, as well as to Seattle itself, and exchanged those connections for a new kind of security on the reservations. Even “Lake Union John,” the man named for his place, left the city: soon after his wife's death in 1906, Chesheeahud sold his property on Portage Bay (making him one of the richest Indians in Puget Sound) and removed to the Port Madison Reservation, where he died four years later. The only reminder of his presence on the bay was the name of the plat set up on his former homestead; even today, legal descriptions of lots in the neighborhood designate them as part of “John's Addition.”
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Billy and Ellen Phillips did not initially relocate to a reservation. Instead, with the help of cousins from Suquamish and donations from non-Indian Seattleites, the couple moved into a new cabin on Salmon Bay, next to that of Hwelchteed and Cheethluleetsa, who may have been relatives. The little enclave near old Tucked Away Inside would not exist
much longer, though. Sometime in 1914 or 1915, during construction of locks for a ship canal connecting Puget Sound to Lake Washington, Cheethluleetsa died. Three months later, Indian agents from Port Madison came to take Hwelchteed to the reservation. Soon after that, Billy Phillips burned their home in keeping with Native strictures against moving into a house where someone had died. Neighbor Andrew Jacobsen recalled that the Phillips place caught fire as well: “He let that burn too; he was clearing the land.” When the locks were completed in 1916, none of the old indigenous people remained near the site of old Tucked Away Inside; the only Indian people living on Salmon Bay were the mixed-race inhabitants of Ballard and surrounding neighborhoods.
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Although they offer glimpses into the concrete workings of indigenous marginalization, contemporary accounts of Seattle's “last” Indians also reflect deep-seated assumptions about the racial destiny of Native people in general. Not unlike tales of Indian ghosts, these are place-stories inhabited by the “vanishing Indian” and a cast of characters drawn from the broader national imagination. Princess Angeline was “the Pocahontas of the West,” the Phillips were members of the “fast falling band of Siwashes,” and Lake Union John and Madeline represented a final chapter in the “romantic history of early Seattle.” As elsewhere in the country, indigenous people who survived in Seattle seemed like temporal anomalies, holdouts from an earlier age. Of Native women selling wares on the city's streets, for example, one writer claimed that “nothing has ever happened to any of them in the city, but they remain what Darwin calls a persistent type, and stuck like a porous plaster.” White writers described other Native Seattleites in similar ways. Mandy Seattle lived “in the past… when she herself was young and straight as the shoots of the alder in springtime,” while her kinswoman Mary Sam Seattle, who had once helped clear land for the first settlers, had been “left by the side, jetsam thrown up by the ebb and flow of human activities, as exemplified in the upbuilding of this city.” Simultaneously stuck in the past and vanishing into it, indigenous people in Seattle were characterized by local newspapers as “Our Citizens of Yesterday” and a “wretched remnant.”
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Accounts of people like Salmon Bay Charlie, then, were often clouded
by powerful ideas about the inevitable decline and disappearance of Indians as a race. They also reflected a major shift in the place of Indian people in urban affairs. As combatants and laborers, alleged vectors of contagion and supposed purveyors of vice, Indians had played a central, and material, role in civic politics in the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, however, Indians were no longer a threat. No one was worried about Hwelchteed and his wife bringing smallpox to town or about Tleebuleetsa and her husband burning down the city. And aside from the few who ponied up cash for the Phillips' move, neither did white Seattleites seem all that concerned about their long-term welfare. Instead, the presence of people like Mandy Seattle simply served as an allegory about both the fate of the vanishing race and the city's urban success. Seen as having little material use, indigenous people could still serve a rhetorical purpose. They could still be used to tell place-stories.

Like indigenous people, indigenous places also served important symbolic roles in twentieth-century Seattle. There was a growing interest in Seattle, and around the country, in “Indian” place-names. Both University of Washington anthropologist T. T. Waterman and his history department colleague Edmond S. Meany, for example, received regular requests for “picturesque” and “quaint” Indian names for estates, beach cabins, boats, and parks. Elsewhere, such names could be used to market urban development itself. In the spring of 1909, for example, the real-estate firm of Calhoun, Denny, and Ewing held a promotional event for their new residential plat, just in time for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. Called Licton Springs, the neighborhood-to-be just beyond Seattle's northern city limit drew its name from the red pigment that Native people had collected there for use in ceremonies. In fact, it was this connection to the indigenous past that made Licton Springs desirable. “The opening of a plat with these natural features in the East would create a riot,” crowed one advertisement. “They have learned to appreciate such treasures. Apparently Seattle is arriving at such a stage.” Using “legends of our Indian tribes now extinct” to sell suburban homesites made perfect sense in Seattle, where actual indigenous people seemed to be on their way out, save for “here or there a relic.”
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As “great throngs” rode new trolleys to Licton Springs, they took the waters, visited the nearby shake cabin that had once belonged to David Denny, and entered contests to win free lots. However, should one of those Indian “relics” deign to “worship the God of Health” at the springs—or, more tellingly, should one of their ghosts choose to haunt the place—one writer warned what would happen:

And it may come to pass that if the spirit of Chief Seattle or Leschi, or what-soever Hyas Tyee was wont to come to mix his war paint at Licton Springs in the centuries that are passed, should chance again this way on a similar mission bent, he would come plum against a blue-coated, brass-buttoned caretaker, who would take him by the lapel of his war bonnet and, leading him down the cement walk, among the electric lights to the confines of Licton Park should tell him to move on. For this is the 20th Century, and to “move on” is the edict for all of us.

Taken alongside the experiences of Sbeebayoo and other Native men and women, this Licton Springs place-story suggested that there was very little room for indigenous people—alive or undead—in modern Seattle. Their legends and place-names, on the other hand, made great copy. Even the symbolic landscape now seemed to belong to the new Changers.
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S
EATTLE IS A BAD PLACE
to build a city. Steep hills of crumbly sand atop slippery clay, a winding river with a wide estuary and expansive tidal flats, ice age kettle lakes and bogs, and plunging ravines and creeks are all sandwiched between Puget Sound and vast, deep Lake Washington. But it was built anyway, despite all this, and today Seattle's watersheds in particular are among its most transformed landscapes: where four rivers once joined to become the Duwamish, now only one flows; Lake Washington empties to the west instead of the south and is shallower; other lakes, creeks, and beaches have been filled, dredged, culverted, and bulkheaded. In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth—roughly the same years that the “last” Indians populated Seattle headlines—the
city undertook a series of massive engineering projects that turned hills into islands, straightened one river and obliterated another, and reshaped entire watersheds, driven by what one urban scholar has called the “leveling impulse.”
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Seattle civic leaders had long held ambitious visions for improving what they called the “natural advantages” of their city. The deepwater port backed by two significant bodies of freshwater had spelled opportunity since the Fourth of July, 1854, when Thomas Mercer gave the name Lake Union to a body of water he hoped would someday link Lake Washington with Puget Sound. Despite various attempts at linking the lakes with flumes and ditches, large-scale efforts were beyond the reach of the young city. Other problems—most notably the steep hills that ringed downtown and the untidy margin between land and sea—remained unsolved throughout much of Seattle's early history. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the technology and capital were available to begin serious attempts at terraforming. In 1895, former governor Eugene Semple proposed cutting a canal through Beacon Hill to connect Lake Washington with the Duwamish River, which until that point had only connected via the shallow, sluggish, and snag-filled Black River. Authorized by the state legislature, construction began in 1901, with soil and clay from Beacon Hill being used to fill the tidelands at the mouth of the Duwamish. While the South Canal project never reached completion—cave-ins and spiraling costs proved its death knell—Semple's passion for reshaping the Seattle landscape continued in the works of other men. The managers of the Seattle General Construction Company, for example, carried on with the filling of the tidelands, using sediments dredged from the Duwamish. Eight years and 24 million cubic yards of silt later, the company had replaced the river delta with the world's largest man-made island, flat, dry, and ready for industrial tenants. That same year, the flood-prone, meandering Duwamish, long a source of frustration, became the focus of engineers' efforts with the creation of the Duwamish Waterway Commission. Dredging began in the fall of 1913, and by 1920, only one original bend of the river remained within the city limits; the rest was a more-or-less straight, fifty-foot-deep channel ideal for large seagoing vessels.