Native Seattle (20 page)

This is not to say that people from reservations and tribal communities stopped coming to the city. As it did for most people living in outlying areas, Indian or otherwise, the city offered services and amenities and jobs that were unavailable elsewhere. Parents brought children from Suquamish to visit doctors in Seattle; Muckleshoot men and women came to the city to shop. A Skagit shaman could get cataract surgery in the city; Tulalip allottees could go to the courthouse to demand land payments. And in a city still fueled by sawmills, canneries, and shipyards, there was always the possibility of paid work. The new urban landscape—the glitter of the department stores, the seediness of Skid Road, the bustle of the waterfront—might have destroyed the indigenous landscape of horned serpents and herring runs, but it still attracted Indian people, who engaged the city on Indian (if not always indigenous) terms.
³⁷

For all their differences, Seattle's indigenous and urban landscapes were often closer together than they seemed. While one had appeared
to give way to the other in a dramatically short period of time, in reality both existed simultaneously in the minds of many Native people. Muckleshoot elder Florence “Dosie” Starr Wynn, for example, told an interviewer about trips made to the city in the 1930s and about the persistence of Seattle's indigenous landscape in her grandmother's memory:

We went to the waterfront, and we went up to the public market, and we used to go up there. And when we'd take her shopping, we'd go through that road through Duwamish, that way. And she named all the rocks. The hills—well, they're gone now, because of blasting and new homes going in, and businesses. But they had names for every one of them rocks down there.… Stories about those hills. All along that valley, there.

The place-stories Dosie's grandmother told her were those of North Wind and South Wind, of the dwarves that helped Spirit Canoe travelers, and of lookouts posted on hills to warn of slavers from the north. The landscape might have been changed almost beyond recognition—the sacred horned snake “gone, not there now”—but the memory of these things remained vital for the descendants of Seattle's indigenous people. In 1931 Suquamish elder Mary Thompson said it best, telling a
Seattle Times
reporter that although she seldom visited the city named after her great-grandfather, she remained connected to the place. “I always feel that I own it somehow,” she said. Meanwhile, a small community of Duwamish people continued to live within the city, blending in as far as outsiders could tell but maintaining their own sense of themselves as a people. Decades later, their story would resurface, and the transition between indigenous and urban ecologies, represented by changes like the Lake Washington Ship Canal, would be central to that story.
³⁸

And then there is the indigenous name for the city itself. When ethnographers like Harrington and Waterman in the 1910s and Marian Wesley Smith in the 1940s interviewed elders throughout Puget Sound, they found that most did not refer to the city by the name chosen by Arthur Denny and his pioneer compatriots. Instead, they used the name of the indigenous settlement buried long ago under the sawdust from Yesler's
mill. On the eve of the Second World War, almost a century after the founding of Seattle, Little Crossing-Over Place continued to exist in the hearts and minds of Indian people.
³⁹

T
HE FLOAT HOUSE
at Tideflats where Seetoowathl lived with his unpleasant wife at the turn of the century did not escape the Changers. The couple had struggled in the first years of the twentieth century, as the dogfish oil industry collapsed with the introduction of petroleum products. Some of their Indian neighbors moved on to the reservations, while others passed away. Meanwhile, the Duwamish River on which their home rose and fell with the tides had changed dramatically. After all the dredging and filling and straightening, they now lived on the last remaining natural bend of the lower river. Relatives came less frequently; Ollie Wilbur and her parents had stopped coming because they “didn't care to go there anymore.” It might have been that isolation, together with infirmity and the industrial landscape that surrounded them, that spelled the end. In the 1910s, Thomas Talbot Waterman described Seetoowathl as “hale-appearing,” but that would change very quickly. In the winter of 1920, Seetoowathl and his wife starved to death. “He died, you know,” recalled his great-grandniece Ollie, “and they just cremated his body, you know.”
⁴⁰

The crazy woman and the old man who refused to speak English had chosen to stay on the river, and that choice had cost them their lives. The fact that two old people, Indian or otherwise, could starve to death in Seattle in 1920 is an indictment of the failings of the Progressive Era. The city now had over 300,000 residents and had achieved remarkable successes. Most notably, the tallest building west of the Mississippi—the Smith Tower, completed in 1914—stood within sight of the Duwamish, a testament to wealth, competence, and confidence. From its upper floors, one might have been able to see the curve of the river at Tideflats, but the Progressive ethos of reform, charity, and order, for all its successes, could not make the cognitive leap from skyscraper to float house. Then again, the Progressive Era, which saw great leaps forward in medicine, social work, conservation, and suffrage, was also the era of Jim Crow, the Alien Land Law, the
first Red Scare, and the disaster of Indian allotment. Why should Seattle have been any different?

During construction of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, engineer Hiram Chittenden had once written that critics of the canal disliked such projects “simply because they destroy old associations… those who have been familiar all their lives with certain conditions are naturally loth [
sic
] to see them changed.” For many Indian people, the “old associations” had been destroyed almost completely. In the decades between the coming of the railroad and the Great Depression, Indian agency in Seattle is hard to find. It is there, though: in the applications for allotment, in the death vigil held near the university grounds, in the “sneak fishing” on the Duwamish. These small acts would provide tenuous links between the indigenous past and future reclaimings of urban space by Indian people. Meanwhile, during the same decades that indigenous Seattle was reaching its nadir, another kind of Indian history was on the rise. In describing her kinsman's house on the river, Ollie Wilbur recalled that a number of the Indians living at Tideflats were not kin of hers or of anyone she knew. They were what those who still spoke Whulshootseed called by a name that meant something like “from the surf 's mouth.” They were from far, far away, and they had come to make Seattle theirs.
⁴¹

A
VISITOR TO SEATTLE
in the summer of 1900 would have been impressed. Where a town of fewer than four thousand people had existed only twenty years earlier, a city of eighty thousand now crowded the shores of Elliott Bay. A newly commissioned army fort guarded the bluffs above West Point, a massive railroad and shipping terminal was under construction at Smith's Cove, and electric lights illuminated much of downtown, powered by distant dams. More than forty labor unions represented workers in the city, including the longshoremen who shepherded millions of dollars in international commerce into and out of Elliott Bay. The Duwamish River still curved chaotically toward the Sound, but its meandering days were numbered; plans were already under way to transform it into an organized channel of commerce. Even Ballast Island, where the refugees from Herring's House had come to protest seven years before, seemed to reflect Seattle's urban fortunes, growing each year as bricks, rocks, and other detritus were added by ships from Manila, Honolulu, Valparaiso, San Francisco, and Sydney. Metropolis had arrived.
¹

But in 1900, it was not the people of Herring's House who now camped on Ballast Island. Instead, it was people from the Strait of Juan de Fuca. These were S'Klallam people, thirteen dozen men, women, and children who had come to the city from their homeland on the northern shore of the Olympic Peninsula. Their canoes, and those of other Native people from even more distant Native places, had inspired some observers to dub Seattle's waterfront the “Venice of the Pacific.” S'Klallam people camped safely in the territory of the Duwamish: clearly, the city's Indian terrain had shifted.
²

Meanwhile, several blocks away, on the site of Henry Yesler's old mill,
a second kind of new Indian terrain existed. On a triangle of greensward known as Pioneer Place Park, wedged in among the banks and hotels, a massive Tlingit carving rose over flowerbeds and a neatly clipped lawn. At its base, mythic ancestor Raven-at-the-Head-of-Nass anchored a series of striking figures: a whale with a seal in its mouth, a smaller raven, a mink, a woman holding her frog-child, and yet another raven carrying a crescent moon in its beak. This was the Chief-of-All-Women pole, carved to memorialize a woman who had lived and died a thousand miles from Seattle. It was an unlikely candidate for the city's first piece of public art, but there it stood. According to one observer, it even made Seattle unique, “the only city in the world which possesses a monument of this character to a fast departing race.”
³

The story of how canoes from the Strait of Juan de Fuca and a totem pole from Alaska got to Seattle is the story of the city's arrival as a regional metropolis, of the linking of distant places to each other and to that metropolis, and of the creation of a new urban story. Just as Ballast Island was a physical manifestation of Seattle's connections to distant ports, Indian people and images in Seattle reflected the city's new economic and cultural boundaries, which by the twentieth century reached as far north as Alaska. Indian canoes arriving on Seattle's waterfront from far-flung places heralded the creation of an urban Indian hinterland of which Seattle was one nexus. Meanwhile, Seattle's experience of regional empire, spurred in part by the discovery of gold in the Klondike in 1897, led to a new urban vocabulary that used Native imagery such as totem poles to highlight the city's new position as gateway to the North. Seattle's Indian hinterland stretched along a coast woven together by new urban and indigenous connections, and through that new weaving, both Native people and the city would be changed.

I
N AUGUST
1878, the
Seattle Daily Intelligencer
reported that scores of Native men and women were camped at the foot of Washington Street on their way to the hop fields of rural Puget Sound country. Perhaps they were the people immortalized in Mr. Glover's bird'seye panorama of the city. If not, they were people like them. Above the tide line, temporary shelters and dozens of canoes filled with personal
belongings turned the waterfront into a sudden and unmistakable Indian neighborhood. The paper predicted that after three or four weeks earning “considerable money” from labor in the fields, the Indians “will then return, on their way stopping at Seattle to spend the larger part of their earnings.” The movement of working Indian people—and, not insignificantly, their money—in and out of Seattle was becoming part of the city's urban calendar and a central facet of life in Native communities far beyond Puget Sound. Canoes from Washington's Pacific coast, the islands and inlets of British Columbia, and as far north as Alaska were more than just modes of conveyance toward economic opportunity: they were vehicles in which Indian people traveled toward a new identity crafted through their encounters with the urban.
⁴

Long before hops and cities reoriented Native lives on the Northwest Coast, indigenous people had come from great distances to visit Puget Sound. In the 1990s, archaeologists working on the site of a new sewage treatment plant at West Point in Seattle found two remarkable pieces of carved stone, one worked from dark green nephrite and the other hollowed out of light gray stone. These were labrets, ornaments that had once pierced the lower lips of elite Native people; the green one even bore scratches where it had rubbed against the teeth of its wearer. They were at least three thousand years old, and their origins lay far to the north; no societies south of the central British Columbian coast had ever worn them. While the labrets are a mystery (were they worn by men or women, slaves or invaders, spouses or traders?), they attest to ancient voyages along the vast edge of a continent.
⁵

Stories of such journeys come from shallower time as well. During the same decades that Vancouver and Wilkes explored the Northwest Coast for their empires, indigenous people with their own ambitions were making thousand-mile journeys in forty-foot canoes to the places that would become Seattle. Shilshole elders, for example, told one local historian of raids by Stikine Tlingit from southeast Alaska; those unable to escape into the backcountry around Tucked Away Inside were either taken as slaves or killed, their heads thrown into Salmon Bay. The Lekwiltok Kwakwaka'wakw of the northern Strait of Georgia had earned a similar a reputation in Puget Sound by the 1820s, their raids
appearing in the oral traditions of both peoples. Even after non-Indian settlement in Puget Sound, these northern Indians (described by settlers as “northern British Indians” or even “British-Russia red-skins” to distinguish them from local indigenous people) continued to make forays into the inland waterways near Seattle, sometimes turning their attentions to white schooners and farms.
⁶

But in the late nineteenth century, the nature and frequency of Native visits to Puget Sound and Seattle changed. Drawn by seasonal work in the region's burgeoning economy, Indian men, women, and children began traveling huge distances, often every year, to Seattle and its outlying areas. As Puget Sound's first large-scale agricultural commodity, hops played the largest role in these migrations, but over time other kinds of crops—berries, vegetables, herbs, flowers—demanded Native labor. For tribal communities all along the coast, occasional forays into Puget Sound became regular peregrinations. By the early twentieth century, the city was a well-established stopover for Indian laborers whose home communities ranged up and down the Northwest Coast.
⁷