Native Seattle (6 page)

But beginnings and endings are rarely clear in history, and the events
that we call history were rarely as deliberate or discrete as we imagine them to be from our vantage point in the present. Like most creation stories, whether of a sport or of a nation, Seattle's origin myth obscures more about actual historical events than it reveals. First, it renders invisible a complex local indigenous landscape of stories reaching back to the ice age, of villages made wealthy by river and prairie and tideflat, and of numinous forces beyond human understanding. Second, by compressing the landing of 1851 into a single moment, it ignores earlier processes of empire and ecology that set the stage for city making on Puget Sound. Third, it obscures the ambitions and imaginations of the Denny Party themselves, ascribing to them motivations and knowledge that are more ours than theirs. Finally, it sets urban founders and indigenous people—and, through them, urban and Indian history—in opposition, as seemingly alien to each other as the two groups that met on the beach that November in 1851.

But if we widen our view beyond that one day of that one year on that one beach, Seattle's creation story takes on a very different form, looking more like Gould's blurry account of baseball's actual evolution. Rather than a single moment of creation, in this version of the story urban founding on Puget Sound becomes a complex, contingent process in which indigenous worlds are misapprehended, empires vie for dominance, and future city fathers change their minds and make mistakes. And most importantly, in this other kind of creation story indigenous people and places are at the center of the telling and have everything to do with getting to the place called Seattle. Well before the city's mythic moment of birth, Seattle's urban and Indian histories were already being bound together in a landscape rich with contested meanings and possibilities.

B
EFORE THE ARRIVAL OF THE
EXACT
and the Denny Party, perhaps in the 1830s, a young man named Wahalchoo was hunting sea ducks off a promontory of open grassy spaces among wind-stunted trees, known to him as Prairie Point. He was looking for more than scoters and scaups; Wahalchoo had been fasting and was also in search of spirit power. He found it there near
Prairie Point, if only briefly. While retrieving spent arrows, he spied a vast longhouse deep in the green waters, surrounded by herds of elk and with schools of salmon swimming over its cedar-plank roof. This, Wahalchoo knew, was the home of a power that brought wealth, generosity, and respect to those who carried it. With its help, Wahalchoo could become a great leader. He went home to find his father, who could help him obtain the power, but the older man was away, and when Wahalchoo returned to Prairie Point, the waters were clear but empty. The longhouse beneath the waves had disappeared, and Wahalchoo was left to seek power elsewhere.
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Indigenous people like Wahalchoo (who would, some twenty-five years later, make his mark on a treaty under the Christian name Jacob) moved through landscapes that were dense with meaning. The proof is in the names. Prairie Point, which would become Alki Point in 1851, was but one named place on a peninsula bordered on the west and north by deep salt water and on the east by a meandering river and its estuary. The headland that brooded to the east of Prairie Point was Low Point, while to the south along the outer shore, a creek called Capsized came pouring out of the forest near a place called Rids the Cold; south of there were headlands called Tight Bluff and Place of Scorched Bluff. Together, these place-names map the indigenous landscape: open places among the forest, cliffs tightly crowded with brush or blackened by mineral deposits. They are also the closest things we have to photographs of the pre-urban world; by the time landscape photographers arrived in Seattle, most of these places had been utterly transformed.

But photographs, like dioramas, are static, and the world around Prairie Point was not. Thrust out into the currents and storm paths of Puget Sound, the point's sand and stone were built up in one season, then swept away in another; before the seawalls and bulkheads of the modern era, the promontory constantly shifted, sometimes subtly and at other times abruptly. Similarly, the indigenous landscapes of what would come to be known as Puget Sound country were changing long before the arrival of the Denny Party in 1851. Some of these changes were slow, others catastrophic, as Prairie Point snagged overlapping nets of power, knowledge, and ecology over the course of centuries. When
Arthur Denny and the rest came to Alki Point, which they called New York, they intruded upon a world already in the midst of profound changes. New networks of trade, imperial reconnaissance, and, most important of all, epidemic disease each served as preludes to the founding of an American city.

The first written records of the lands and waters around the future Seattle come from 1792, when British explorer George Vancouver and his crew sailed into the inland sea aboard the
Discovery
. Like most European explorers, Vancouver spent little time trying to ascertain indigenous peoples' own knowledge of their world. His journals contain few Native words and say little of the region's indigenous geography; instead, they are filled with names like Whidbey and Rainier. They are examples of what geographer Daniel W. Clayton has called “imperial fashioning,” in which indigenous places were reinscribed with European nomenclature and incorporated into the colonial geographies of European nation-states. Even the name for the sea itself—given in honor of Vancouver's subordinate Peter Puget, who had diligently surveyed so much of it—transformed the inland sea, whose indigenous name simply meant “salt water,” into a British waterway with an Anglo-Norman pedigree. It transformed the undifferentiated space of
terra incognita
into place, or “space with a history,” emptying it of its indigenous history—at least on official maps—and making it part of a North America littered with historical references to European people and places. This was also one of Seattle's first kinds of urban history, in its linking of indigenous places like “Puget Sound” to imperial centers such as London. But underneath this refashioned landscape lay another geography; for virtually every imperial Puget there was an indigenous counterpart, even if Vancouver and his men simply could not, or would not, see it. It was less
terra incognita
than it was
terra miscognita
.
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For the
terra
here already included an urban history of its own. When Wahalchoo returned home for help in obtaining wealth and power, he went, not to some hovel in the wilderness, but to a proud village called Place of Clear Water, with a great cedar longhouse that was one of the largest indigenous structures in North America. Not far away, just around Low Point from the place where Wahalchoo had gone diving for power,
was another settlement: Herring's House, made up of several longhouses and a larger house used for winter ceremonies. Neither settlement was just a “village,” a term that may connote primitiveness and transience. Instead, these were places where elite families coordinated social alliances, religious observances, and resource distribution. Although not large in terms of population—both Herring's House and Place of Clear Water likely had only several scores of residents each—they and other indigenous winter settlements functioned as towns in relationship to their territories. Natural resources, political power, and spiritual force circulated through these settlements in ways reminiscent of the networks enmeshing larger urban places in other parts of the world—Captain Vancouver's London included.
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Each of these winter towns, along with nearby seasonal camps, resource sites, and sacred places, was linked into a broader geographic community through webs of kinship, trade, and diplomacy. Throughout Puget Sound, these larger communities (many of which would become known as tribes through relations with the American federal government in the nineteenth century) were typically organized around watersheds, and there were three such groups in the territories that would someday become Seattle. Herring's House, for example, was part of a larger constellation of communities whose members called themselves the People of the Inside Place, after the location of their main settlements inland from the Sound. Their name for themselves would be anglicized as “Duwamish.” A second group, known as the Hachooabsh, or Lake People, and usually described as a band of the Duwamish, lived in towns ringing a vast, deep lake behind the hills fronting Puget Sound. A third group, with connections to the first two as well as to the people of Place of Clear Water (who are now known as the Suquamish), was the Shilshoolabsh, the People of Tucked Away Inside, who took their name from their main settlement on the tidal inlet that the Americans would call Salmon Bay. These three indigenous communities—the Duwamish, the Lakes, and the Shilsholes—each had their own towns, with names like Place of the Fish Spear and Little Canoe Channel, and each town in turn had its own hinterland of prairies and cemeteries, fish camps and hunting grounds. These local geographies were
themselves connected through trade and kinship to communities as far away as the arid interior plateau of the Columbia River and the coast of Vancouver Island, knitting the entire region together in a complicated indigenous weave of towns and territories.
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When
Discovery
came into Salt Water in June of 1792, that weave was already fraying. With few exceptions, Puget Sound country seemed “nearly destitute of human beings” to the Englishmen. Vancouver wrote that “animated nature seemed nearly exhausted; and her awful silence was only now and then interrupted by the croaking of a raven, the breathing of a seal, or the scream of an eagle.” After several encounters with Native people, one reason for the silence became clear: smallpox. “This deplorable disease,” Vancouver wrote, “is not only common, but it is greatly to be apprehended is very fatal among them, as its indelible marks were seen on many.” Blind eyes, pockmarked skin, and other ravages familiar to any urban European were clear evidence that the scourge of
Variola
had visited the local people, and indeed, at least one major epidemic had already swept through the region. Likely extrapolating from his own experiences in the great cities of Europe, Vancouver imagined what had been lost as his expedition came upon the remains of Native communities where “since their abdication, or extermination, nothing but the smaller shrubs and plants had yet been able to rear their heads.” Vancouver and other Europeans tended to see indigenous North Americans as “people without history,” but the evidence of that history, in the form of fallen-in roofs and prairies unburned by their cultivators and reverting to forest, was everywhere.
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Dramatic changes like those caused by Comes Out All Over, as smallpox was known in the local language, were nothing new to the indigenous people of “Puget's Sound.” Their ancestors had arrived some ten millennia earlier, just as vast glaciers were retreating from the region, and their creation stories describe a chaotic post–ice age world where rivers flowed in both directions, the earth shifted, and brutal cold harassed the people until Dookweebathl, the Changer, brought order to things. It would take millennia for the climate to stabilize and for salmon and cedar, the two most important benefactors of later indigenous life, to colonize the region, while volcanic eruptions, massive earthquakes,
and catastrophic mudflows routinely punctuated Native history with episodes of devastation. For the hierarchical societies living on the shores of Salt Water, change produced anxiety: the word
dookw
, “to change” or “transform,” is the root for a host of concepts including worry, dissatisfaction, anger, infirmity, and ferocity. At the same time, it is also the root of the words for “yesterday” and “tomorrow”—an indication that change was a constant in indigenous life before the arrival of Europeans and that the “people without history” were people with a past.
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Few of these changes, however, had consequences as dramatic, widespread, and permanent as the introduction of smallpox and other diseases into the local ecology. The microbial intrusion, followed not long after by that of Vancouver and his crew, presaged—indeed, facilitated—the coming of an even greater change: the settlement of the country by people of European descent. The voyage of the
Discovery
had little direct impact on the people of Salt Water, but in places like London and Boston and Washington, Vancouver's accounts inspired ambitious Britons and Americans to establish a permanent presence in the region, encouraged by accounts of a dwindling indigenous population. The first Americans came in 1841, when the United States Exploring Expedition, led by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, sailed up the Sound. The “Ex. Ex.,” as the expedition was known, was among other things tasked with strengthening American claims to lands north of the Columbia River, still held jointly by Britain and the United States. Not surprisingly, the mission included naming. As the crews of Wilkes's sloop of war
Vincennes
and its attendant brig
Porpoise
carefully mapped the bays and inlets, they added a new set of names to Puget Sound's growing imperial geography. That summer, Prairie Point obtained its first English-language name when it was christened Point Roberts after the Ex. Ex.'s physician.
¹¹

Like Vancouver, Wilkes found that the landscapes of Puget Sound “savoured of civilization.” As for the indigenous residents, their apparently small numbers suggested that the “Indians of Puget Sound,” as they had been named, were unlikely to stand in the way of white settlement, and even if they did, new waves of disease were “rapidly thinning them off.” The real threat for Wilkes and for the Congress that
sent him came not from indigenous people but from the British, who were establishing a year-round presence at Fort Nisqually on the southern Sound. As facilitators of the highly dynamic fur trade, Fort Nisqually's Hudson's Bay Company factors were always looking for new places to build, and for a short time Prairie Point was a candidate for one of these outlying bastions of mercantile capitalism. An 1833 survey by Fort Nisqually physician William Tolmie provided the first written description of the point (“flat and dotted with small pines, and the soil…mostly sand”) and the first mentions of its surrounding environs and the “Tuomish” Indians, who he noted were “miserably poor and destitute of firearms.” But despite the apparent friendliness of the local people—some surely led by Seeathl—it was a bad place for an outpost, with poor soil and no freshwater. With the signing of a treaty between Britain and the United States in 1846, the issue became moot; British influence at Fort Nisqually faded, although the fort's presence continued to have far-reaching consequences. During an outbreak of dysentery and measles in the winter of 1847–48, Native people from all over Puget Sound, including the territories in and around the future Seattle, traded there and took the microbes home with them.
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