Native Seattle (19 page)

The most dramatic project, however, took Semple's idea of a canal and moved it north. Under the leadership of Hiram M. Chittenden, of the Army Corps of Engineers, and Seattle City Engineer Reginald H. Thomson, the Lake Washington Ship Canal linked Puget Sound, Lake Union, and Lake Washington through state-of-the-art locks at Salmon Bay, opening the lakes to maritime traffic beginning in 1917. Denny Hill was mostly gone by then, too, its earth used to fill tidelands that now fronted a wide, straight, and deep Duwamish Waterway. The Lake Washington watershed had been reoriented entirely; instead of flowing south out of the Black River, it now moved north and west through the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in Ballard, and the lake itself was ten to twenty feet lower. Together, all of these changes would have profound impacts on indigenous people and places.
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For the men who envisioned and then enacted these changes, Indians were irrelevant. Except as emblems of a vanishing past, Native people virtually never appear in the writings and plans of Thomson, Chittenden, and the other modern Changers. Instead, the creators of Seattle's new urban ecology thought they were improving nature. Thomson, for example, called the Duwamish's natural curves “ugly” and “unsightly,” preferring a channelized and useful river to one that was messy and unpredictable. Meanwhile, ship canal visionary Chittenden argued that the transformation of Lake Washington and Lake Union was “distinctly a case where utilitarian ends can be accomplished without any sacrifice of sentimental interests.” Each of these men downplayed the social costs of reengineering Seattle's landscape; relocating undesirable people, when mentioned at all, was simply one of the benefits of efficient urban planning.
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That none of them mentioned Indians should not come as a surprise. For one thing, adherents to the modern urban-planning tradition paid little attention to local knowledge or history; instead, they looked to abstract, positivist models in which attachments to place and past bore little relevance. In other words, indigeneity and modernity were mutually exclusive in the minds of urban planners. At the same time, urban Indians were disappearing into a diverse category of people and communities known as Seattle's underclass, a grouping that would serve
as the bogeyman in planning schemes for decades to come. The presence of Indian people, when noticed at all, could in fact mark areas in “need” of urban renewal. In 1892, for example, one observer described the “Shantytown” neighborhood around Kikisebloo's house on the waterfront in language similar to that used to malign the Duwamish and the places where a canal needed to be built:

What a blemish on this fair and growing city is that particular locality, where scores of shanties, lean-tos, and sheds, holding a heterogeneous mass of humanity, are huddled together—little children with old faces, unkempt men and women, dirty dogs, stray cats, the sewage from unclean sewers pouring down contagion and filth, moral and physical ill-being—all down that hillside, where the tumble-down dwellings are piled in many cases one over the other.

In a pattern that had begun with the old Lava Beds and that would continue into the late twentieth century, Indianness became a marker of urban disorder. In the case of Thomson, Chittenden, and their fellow Changers, though, those in charge of landscape change were more likely to ignore indigenous people altogether.
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Not that there wasn't evidence of Native people all around Thomson and the others; beyond the front-page stories of Billy Phillips and other beleaguered “last” Indians, large-scale civic-engineering projects could themselves reveal evidence of the indigenous inhabitants of Seattle. This was particularly true in the case of the Lake Washington Ship Canal. In 1913, workers exposed a deep shell midden that had once been part of Tucked Away Inside. And when Lake Washington dropped several feet in 1916 as the last barrier between it and Lake Union was dynamited, even older relics were revealed. At a marshy cove on Union Bay, rows of wooden posts—the remains of the fishing weir at the indigenous town of Little Canoe Channel—stood exposed, and ancient stone hearths resurfaced along the new, lower shoreline. But even these discoveries could serve as arguments for the “improvements” to Lake Washington. In the
Seattle Town Crier
, M. J. Carter wrote that the hearths, created by a “dusky race of primitive men,” proved that the canal was
a “natural” improvement. “Nature moves slowly and on many feet,” he wrote, “but man, harnessing the pent forces of the earth to his needs, strikes with irreverent hand, and the entombed secrets of the past stand revealed.” Rather than evoke the importance of such places to indigenous people, these unearthings only confirmed the naturalness of the engineering marvels that revealed and then obliterated them. These men thought they were restoring nature.
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But for Native people trying to maintain connections to traditional places within Seattle, the changes to the landscape in the first two decades of the twentieth century were far from irrelevant—they were devastating. Simply finding traditional foods, for example, had become close to impossible. The Duwamish estuary's eelgrass beds, which had sheltered young salmon and armies of herring, were gone, buried under the fill of Harbor Island and bisected by the new Duwamish Waterway. The great middens around Smith's Cove—proof of the spot's wealth of clams and other shellfish—were now covered by a landfill. The oxbows and bends of the Duwamish, once home to clouds of waterfowl, had become avenues for global shipping. And when Lake Washington dropped with the opening of the ship canal, its outlet, the Black River, ceased to exist. Duwamish descendant Joseph Moses recalled that it “was quite a day for the white people at least. The waters just went down, down,” he told a local historian, “until our landing and canoes stood dry and there was no Black River at all. There were pools, of course, and the struggling fish trapped in them. People came from miles around, laughing and hollering and stuffing fish into gunny sacks.” And on Lake Union, business and residential development wiped out the trout population. “Too much house now—all gone,” Chesheeahud told one observer, not long before he finally just sold up and left for the reservation. In reordering the landscape for urban utility, Seattle's Changers had dramatically reduced the utility—and habitability—of that landscape for indigenous people.
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There was an element of truth, then, in the “lastness” of Indians in Seattle. In the 1910s, anthropologist Thomas Talbot Waterman noted that Seetoowathl, Ollie Wilbur's relative with the crazy wife, was one of the only indigenous people left in Seattle. In many ways, men and
women like Seetoowathl and Mandy Seattle
were
the last indigenous generation. Certainly, there were people of indigenous ancestry who continued to live in the city. Across Salmon Bay from Hwelchteed and Cheethluleetsa, for example, several families of Shilshole heritage lived in Ballard, and people with roots in communities such as Herring's House and Place of the Fish Spear could be found in other parts of the city. In them, the so-called vanishing race carried on. But in terms of indigeneity—which we might define by subsistence patterns, use of traditional places, ceremonial practices, firsthand experience with the pre-urban landscape, and, not insignificantly, the perceptions of observers—the deaths and departures of Tleebuleetsa, Chesheeahud, and the others did in fact mark a discontinuity in Seattle's Native history. The first decades of the twentieth century did not spell the end of Indian Seattle by any means, but they were the end of
indigenous
Seattle.
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During those same decades, indigenous knowledge of Seattle often came to be located outside the city, on reservations like Muckleshoot and Suquamish or in small enclaves like the Duwamish community at Black River. When academics and amateur ethnographers went in search of Native knowledge of the places that had become Seattle, they rarely went to the city. Their lists of collaborators, in fact, read like shorthand for the slow erosion of indigenous presence in Seattle. Waterman's informants Anne Seattle and Lucy Eells, living at Muckleshoot, both had fathers who were born at Little Crossing-Over Place, the settlement now buried under downtown's King Street railway station. Julie Jacob, born African American and abandoned as an infant on Ballast Island before being adopted by Jacob Wahalchoo and his wife, shared her cultural knowledge in her home on the reservation at Suquamish. So did Jennie John Davis, the daughter of Chesheeahud. Local knowledge was no longer local; understanding of indigenous Seattle could best be obtained by getting out of the city.
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Meanwhile, for people whose indigenous ancestors had left Seattle decades earlier, places in Seattle remained important: clam beds, fishing sites, campgrounds. But just as urban landscape change brought Billy Phillips and his wife to the brink of starvation, it would also erode connections between outlying Native communities and indigenous
places within the urban fabric. In a 1994 interview, for example, Muckleshoot community member (but enrolled Puyallup) Art Williams, born in 1913, described traveling to Alki Point during the summers of his childhood. There, his parents would build a small timber and buckskin shelter, and for two or three weeks, they and other families would harvest clams, mussels, geoduck, octopus, and salmon from Elliott Bay and the Duwamish estuary. “All along, you'd see bonfires,” he told the interviewer, “all along the beaches, where they cooked clams and do everything.” Accompanied by drumming, songs, and stories, the annual trip to Alki was a continuation of older seasonal rounds. Fishing and clamming were only part of the action; the main event took place across Elliott Bay, at the foot of James Street on the Seattle waterfront. There, Native people would trade “whatever you got,” in Williams's words: woolen blankets and dried clams, camas bulbs and buckskins. For two or three weeks, they would “have a big potlatch… everybody come there and say goodbye to one another… 'til next year comes, and then have it over again.”
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That was about to end. As Art Williams got older, the trips to Alki Point and the Seattle waterfront became more difficult. As white Seattleites began to build beach houses with names like Dewdrop Inn and Bide-a-wee facing the beach at Alki, Indian encampments were less welcome. “No, no, no camping no more,” Williams recalled. “They said no, no more camps. They wouldn't let us.” Incorporated into Seattle in 1907, West Seattle had changed from an outlying community to an urban neighborhood, leaving less and less room for Native encampments. Urban growth and its attendant environmental impacts, meanwhile, led to new conservation law. Indigenous people would bear the brunt of these changes as well. State records pertaining to the arrest of Native people for fishing in the Duwamish and on Elliott Bay no longer exist, but Jennie Davis testified some years later that the Duwamish and other local Indians had to stop fishing “or they will be arrested.” Indian agent Charles M. Buchanan was particularly strident in his opinions about the criminalization of indigenous fisheries on Puget Sound, especially in urban places. “The Indians of this agency have donated to the white man all of the great townsites of Puget Sound,” he argued in 1916. “No
Indian has given more—no Indian has received less!” He placed the blame on “the stringent and harsh application to Indians of the State game and fish laws… done under color of law.” Enforcement of these unjust laws, moreover, led to real criminality, reducing Indians to “beggary and theft.” By 1922, when Art Williams returned from the Chemawa boarding school in Oregon, he and his family had to “sneak around different places” to harvest fish and clams. They found, however, that shellfish harvests at Alki Point had dwindled, and Williams attributed this not just to urban development and scapegoating laws but to the fact that Indian people were no longer allowed to go there simply to pray for the clams' continued abundance. Indigenous stewardship of the environment, with all its religious components, had been sundered.
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And much more than clams had disappeared; urban growth had also destroyed the numinous forces that had given many local places their meaning. The story of Ballard's early political history, for example, is the story of residents struggling to keep each other's cattle from fouling the creek that was the town's main water supply. To the Shilsholes, that creek had once been known as Spirit Canoe after the power that resided there, but by the early twentieth century the power was said to have fled, likely offended by the feces and urine of the Bostons' beasts. By the early twentieth century, there were fewer out-of-the-way places for spirit powers and the practices that accessed them to carry on unmolested. Meanwhile, a Duwamish elder described to ethnographer John Peabody Harrington the effects of urban development on a supernatural horned serpent known to inhabit the Lake Washington shoreline and once employed by some of the most powerful and feared shamans. Harrington's notes simply say that by the 1910s it was “gone, not there now.” Around that same time, a boulder inscribed with shamanic power figures on the West Seattle shoreline was buried under fill and concrete foundations. In the late twentieth century, some Indian people would return to sacred sites in Seattle, but during the years of the city's most rapid growth, at least some local indigenous people felt that urban change had destroyed, dispersed, or submerged many of the landscape's spiritual, and thus most fundamental, qualities.
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In fact, the primary place-story local indigenous people told about Seattle in the early twentieth century was one of alienation and erasure. Other informants recounted for Harrington what had happened elsewhere in the city, contrasting indigenous places with their current conditions. Of the firs at Little-Bit-Straight Point, where a settlement and stockade had once guarded the mouth of the Duwamish River, settlers had “cut them long ago,” and in their place stood the Rainier Brewery. The nearby town of Place of the Fish Spear, meanwhile, now lay beneath the Seattle Electric Company machine shops. And new calamities always seemed possible; when construction of the Alki Playground in West Seattle uncovered the remains of several smallpox victims in 1911, some local Indians were concerned that a new epidemic would be visited upon the area. Together, these stories made up an indigenous accounting of urban transformation, in which a new kind of changer, men like R. H. Thomson and Watson the arsonist, had reworked the creations of the original Changer. For people like Hwelchteed, who resisted leaving Salmon Bay until the very end of his life, and for Art Williams, who had never called Seattle home but who came there every year, connections to Seattle's indigenous landscape had been almost severed.
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