Native Seattle (7 page)

Despite wave after wave of disease—at least five separate epidemics by 1850—indigenous people remained the dominant presence around Salt Water, as Samuel Hancock, one of the first American settlers on Puget Sound, learned when he stopped at Prairie Point in 1849. “A great many Indians came from their houses to the beach here, to ascertain where we came from,” he wrote, adding that they seemed “well disposed” toward him. Hancock traded with the people, exchanging tobacco and looking glasses for clams and salmon. Although buffeted by strengthening storms of change during the early nineteenth century, symbolized by new place-names, new diseases, and new things to buy and sell, Prairie Point was still very much an indigenous place when Hancock visited. The place where the
Exact
would drop anchor two years later was still more Salt Water than Puget Sound. Nothing illustrates this more than the word Hancock used to describe the growing number of white settlers in the region: he called them Whulgers, using the indigenous
word for Salt Water to describe those who thought they were coming to Puget's Sound.
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W
HILE ARTHUR DENNY IS UNANIMOUSLY
credited with being the father of Seattle, that title could just as easily go to a forgotten figure named George Brock. A resident of the Willamette Valley at the western end of the Oregon Trail, Brock appears only briefly, not unlike one of Shakespeare's plot-driving apparitions, in the story of the Denny Party's journey west. When the Denny and Boren families arrived at the confluence of the Burnt and Snake rivers, Brock was there, and in the shadow of bunchgrass-covered hills blackened by summer wildfires, he warned Arthur Denny that the best Willamette land was already spoken for but that another region ideal for settlement lay just to the north. In his memoirs, Denny recalled that his attention “was thus turned to the Sound, and I formed the purpose of looking in that direction.” Brock's bit of rumor and speculation—he apparently had never seen Puget Sound—effectively and suddenly diverted the two Illinois families. As they labored up the difficult Burnt River Canyon toward the Columbia, they were now on their way not to the oak-dotted prairies of the Willamette but to the timber-shadowed shores of Salt Water.
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But if Arthur Denny seems to have been easily swayed by the shadowy Brock, his group did not rush headlong into unknown territory. Instead, their tentative, incremental steps toward settlement reflect the cautious, mindful demeanor for which Seattle's founders were renowned. In September 1851, as family members lay bedridden with fever in Portland hotel rooms, Arthur Denny interviewed Thomas Chambers, a Puget Sound settler in town on business. Chambers provided Denny with his first firsthand account of the territory to the north, including the indigenous inhabitants, who he said were “friendly and they were glad to have the Bostons—as they called the Americans—to come.” Chambers's testimony cemented Denny's intentions to lead the group to the Sound. Meanwhile, Arthur's brother David and new compatriot John Low headed to Olympia, a tiny settlement built around tideflats
at the head of the Sound. There, they met two men who would make the landing at Alki Point possible: Leander Terry, who was also looking to settle on the inland sea, and Captain Robert Fay, a retired whaling captain who wanted to hire local Indians to catch salmon, preserve it at Point Roberts, and load it onto ships bound for San Francisco. Fay offered Denny, Low, and Terry seats in his open scow, and on 25 September, the four men came ashore just inside Low Point, around the headland from where Wahalchoo had dived for power years before. There, they found scores of Indians waiting. Among them was the headman who had agreed to procure indigenous workers for the venture: Seeathl.
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His business arrangements complete, Fay left Terry, Denny, and Low to explore the area. Land reconnaissance was largely out of the question thanks to a bewildering landscape of tideflats, salt marshes, and dense forest, so after hiring two indigenous men from the camp to serve as guides, the three Americans headed up the Duwamish River by canoe. Had Low, Terry, or Denny been able to converse with their guides in Whulshootseed instead of a crude combination of hand signs and Chinook Jargon, they might have learned the ancient and practical names of landmarks on the river: shortcuts, trailheads, backwaters. They might have learned the names for the river's abundance: salmon-drying frames, duck nets stretched between tall poles, fine carving wood. Their guides might not, however, have told them of the numinous places along the river and its delta: a boulder carved with shamanic power spirits, the home of a malevolent spirit that took the form of a fingerless hand rising from the water, the ruins of an ancient fish weir dating to the time of the Changer. More than just a resource territory, the valley of the Duwamish was also a place rich with stories and powers, but the guides apparently shared none of this knowledge with their charges, and even if they had, they would likely have been misunderstood. This was not only because of the vast differences between English and Whulshootseed, but because the settlers and their guides also spoke two mutually unintelligible languages of landscape. Where indigenous people saw spirits and nets and carving wood—the wealth of the land as it was and had been—Denny and the others saw the wealth of the land as it could and would be,
expressed in words like “arable,” “improvement,” and “export.” And so after their reconnaissance was complete, David Denny penned a note to his brother, decreeing that the valley of the Duwamish had “room enough for one thousand travelers.” The decision to found a city had been made, and Low caught Captain Fay's next scow back to Olympia, on his way to Portland with the news. If any moment must be named as the birth of Seattle, then surely this was it.
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In fact, though, some of those thousand travelers had already arrived, and they and their indigenous neighbors helped prepare the way for the rest of the Denny Party. A month before Denny, Low, and Terry arrived at Seeathl's fishing camp, Luther Collins, Henry Van Asselt, and Jacob and Samuel Mapel had joined some seven hundred Indians camped at Low Point before setting out to stake claims in the valley of the Duwamish. While Denny and Terry set to building a cabin, with Native workers paid in bread for their assistance, local Indians and whites made their presence known. On one day, for example, Collins and a Native man known as Nisqually John drove a team of oxen past on the beach; on another, “Old Duwampsh Curley” and several other Indians came to visit, offering Denny and Terry a meal of roast duck. Not long after, Terry hitched a ride to Olympia in Collins's scow to gather the rest of the party in Portland. David Denny was left “alone” to continue work on a cabin for his family and their cohort.
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When the thousand-travelers note arrived in Portland, Arthur Denny and the rest of his party, healed from their bouts of ague and joined by the Bell family from Indiana, booked passage on a two-masted schooner called the
Exact
. On 5 November, they left Portland, crossed the Columbia's murderous bar, and headed north along the coast. Along with the families bound for David Denny's cabin at Alki, the
Exact
carried other settlers hoping to establish homes on Puget Sound and miners, many straight from the California goldfields, on their way to the Queen Charlotte Islands far to the north. More than a week later, on 13 November, the twenty-four “Pilgrims” made landfall at Prairie Point and were greeted by a very grateful David Denny, who was suffering mightily from a fresh axe wound on his foot. Then came the famed moment of creation: the crying, the rain, the anxious meeting with Seeathl and his people.
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The date may be the same, but the historical circumstances of this urban founding bear few similarities to the singular, deliberate, and preordained landing described in Seattle's traditional creation story. Instead, the story of the Denny Party's arrival at Alki Point is one of rumors and abrupt changes in plans; of illness and accidents; of Native towns and other settlers who got there first. Most importantly, the story has active Indian players: the labor contractor Seeathl, the guides who took the first members of the Denny Party up the river, even Nisqually John and Old Duwampsh Curley. Their presence and agency set the story, not in an emptied-out wilderness, but in a still densely populated indigenous world. The process of getting to Alki—of founding an American city on Salt Water—had depended in no small part upon indigenous people and places. The process of getting along
at
Alki would as well. This would prove to be the greatest mistake made in apprehending the topography of
terra miscognita
: the idea that founding a city could take place without the presence—indeed, the tolerance—of indigenous people.

W
HEN THE DENNY PARTY LANDED
at the point, they called it neither Prairie Point nor Seattle. Instead, the tiny American outpost was christened New York. Over time, it would come to be known as New York–Alki, a moniker meaning “New York by-and-by” or “New York eventually” in the local lingua franca of Chinook Jargon. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the metropolis at the mouth of the Hudson River was the
ne plus ultra
of American aspiration, the model to which new cities on the nation's urban frontier aspired. It was the commercial capital of the nation and reached out with steamers, railways, newspapers, and retail houses into the rapidly expanding antebellum nation. More than simply the economic center of the country, though, New York was also its cultural hearth. While some critics had begun to describe New York as a “wicked city,” it was more commonly lauded as the driver of American progress, its success the result of a refined, cultured urban environment that stimulated the nation's intellectual and social development. The founders might have chosen a different name for their
hopeful settlement just three or four decades later, after waves of immigration, exposés of urban violence, and new attitudes about the perils of modern urban life had changed the meaning of New York. But to a tiny clutch of families in a half-finished cabin on a Puget Sound beach in 1851, Gotham must have seemed the apotheosis of urban ambition.
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Leander Terry and his younger brother Charles were from upstate New York and had likely had firsthand experiences with America's premier city. But for the majority of Seattle's founders, the frontier towns of Illinois shaped their vision for Puget Sound's New York in ways a distant Gotham never could have. In 1850, when the Denny and Boren families left home for Oregon, Knox County, Illinois, was in the midst of an urban revolution. Permanent white settlement in the area had begun only in the 1830s, but by midcentury the forests of sugar maple, basswood, and wild cherry were giving way as families headed by men with stolid biblical names like Israel and Azel and Hiram established farms and feedlots. Life on the farms revolved around the young town of Abingdon, whose limestone buildings and prim grid of streets sat on high rolling ground above a tributary of the Spoon River. Town life in Abingdon, a satellite of St. Louis, was orderly: liquor violations, morals charges, and murders were virtually unheard of, and judges handed out one hundred percent conviction rates for such disorderly acts as “wantonly” burning prairies. (We might ask if it was the fire itself or the wantonness with which it was lit that was so criminal.) “Court days” were a primary form of entertainment in this straitlaced town, and the Cherry Grove Seminary, founded by Cumberland Presbyterians, was the dominant cultural institution. It was from this buttoned-up Protestant world that Seattle's “Pilgrims” came.
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But if Knox County seems to us almost stereotypically midwestern, it was in fact part of the “Old Northwest,” and its orderliness and peace stood on foundations of chaos and war. In 1850, Abingdon was on St. Louis's urban periphery, but only twenty years earlier, it had been at the edge of the
pays d'en haut
, a vast region crisscrossed by trade networks. These networks, along which furs and other commodities made their way, reached between the centers of European and Asian society and
indigenous communities like those of the Coiracoentanon, who lived along the banks of what they called the Amaquonsippi and what Americans would call the Spoon. By the eighteenth century, what had been a “middle ground” of accommodation had become what historian Richard White has called a “world of fragments,” as European empires and indigenous nations vied for power. The violence of the period led many Coiracoentanon to leave the valley of the Amaquonsippi for refugee settlements to the south. The last local conflict, known as the Black Hawk War, saw the end of indigenous tenure in what could then become Knox County. With treaties only a quarter century old nullified by war, the surviving Coirancoentanon had by 1832 “disappeared forever from this locality” according to one early writer, with “none of the whites knowing when or where they went.”
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The result was that the Dennys and other settlers of 1840s Knox County had very little contact with Native people, although evidence of the indigenous past lay all around them. Settlers regularly came across earthen mounds, flint arrowheads, and the ruins of wigwams as they plowed and felled. Indians also remained part of local memory in accounts of war. Social power in Knox County typically sprang out of the Black Hawk War, whose veterans and organizers translated their military leadership into civilian political careers, and so the foundations of Abingdon's new urban order actually lay in chaos and violence. The Lows, from nearby Bloomington, Illinois, and the Bells, from more distant Edwardsville, Indiana, had all likely had similar experiences in American towns built in the former
pays d'en haut
; William Bell's father, for example, had been a ranger during the wars of American expansion. The Denny Party brought with them both visions of urban order (and perhaps resigned expectations of war with a “doomed” race) and very little firsthand experience with Native people.
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