Native Seattle (9 page)

So would the people of Little Crossing-Over Place and Herring's House and Clear Water and all the other Native towns. Just as Vancouver's Puget
Sound had not erased Salt Water, just as Wilkes's Point Roberts and the Denny Party's New York–Alki had only partially obscured Prairie Point, Seattle would not entirely replace Little Crossing-Over Place. In naming settlements like Seattle, Europeans and Americans sought to claim them and turn the abstract spaces of wilderness into places—into Home. But such efforts were never completely successful. Instead, the day-to-day realities of settlers and Natives meant that the newcomers would have to contend with the people and places they sought to replace. Rather than being emptied of their meanings, places in and around the young town would collect new meanings as settlers accreted their own experiences onto sites with existing indigenous histories. For Seattle, that meant that the coming years would be a time of gathering—of new stories about place, about race, and about the boundaries between cooperation and conflict. Seattle's urban Indian history was just beginning.

I
N 1858, HEARING
that indigenous people had been trading gold at forts on the Fraser River north of Puget Sound, hopeful hundreds ventured into the Fraser's deep canyons, home to the Stó:lŌ and Nlaka'pamux peoples, in search of the yellow metal. Within a year, more than twenty thousand prospectors, many of them American, had overrun the Fraser. Unattached women were few and far between in the diggings, and life there was a heady mix of longing and libido. Folk songs on the Fraser included a randy little ditty about a place on Puget Sound known for its good food and good women. Sung in a mixture of English and Chinook Jargon, it painted a vivid, if vulgar, picture of Seattle's attractions:

There'll be mowitch [venison]
And klootchman [Indian women] by the way
When we 'rive at Seattle Illahee [Seattle country].
There'll be hiyu [many] clams
And klootchman by the way
Hiyu tenas moosum [Many “little sleeps” (sex)]
Till daylight fades away.
Kwonesum kwonesum cooley [Always always run]
Kopa nika illahee [To that place]
Kunamokst kapswalla moosum [To steal sleep together]
As the daylight fades away.
Row, boys, row!
Let's travel to the place they call Seattle
(That's the place to have a spree!)
Seattle Illahee!
¹

While magazines and newspapers enticed overlanders to Puget Sound with stories of arable land and a salubrious climate, “Seattle Illahee” was another kind of public relations altogether, and likely did as much to establish Seattle's reputation throughout the Northwest as any emigrant handbook.

That the miners sang of Seattle Illahee is fitting. On a literal level, it was the name of one of the town's primary economic ventures: the Illahee was a brothel staffed mostly by Native women, many of them most likely from British Columbia. On a more symbolic level, however,
illahee
, a Chinook Jargon term meaning “country” or “place” or “home,” suggested a truth about everyday life in early Seattle: it was as much an indigenous place as a settler one. David Kellogg, who arrived in Seattle in the 1850s, could have told you that. Decades later, he described early Seattle as “a very small village, really more Indian than White!” It was a place where Indians dominated the young urban landscape. “Along the beach stretched the shanties with the inevitable canoes,” wrote Kellogg, “some hauled high onto the beach and covered with mats while the smaller ones lay idly at the water's edge, ready for immediate use. Every polackly [night] the singing and pounding in the shanties was the mighty orison.”
²

During its “village period,” an era stretching from the Denny Party's move to Little Crossing-Over Place in 1852 to the coming of the railroad in 1883, Seattle was indeed a Native place. Indigenous people came to town throughout those decades both to continue long-standing traditions and to make bids for inclusion in urban life. Perhaps most importantly, they came to work, and Indian labor would facilitate much of Seattle's early development. It would also challenge federal Indian policy, as civic leaders enacted Indian policies of their own that often ran counter to the ambitions of a weak national government. Well after the treaties and the “Indian War” that would erupt between some settlers and some Native people in 1855 and 1856, the presence of Native people in town continued to shape civic politics, as Indians became signifiers of urban disorder in the eyes of many of Seattle's leading citizens. Seattle Illahee was a perfect name for a place where indigenous people—both as participants in the town's successes
and as scapegoats for its problems—were at the core of life on the urban frontier.

W
HEN NEW SETTLERS ARRIVED
in the little mill town on Elliott Bay, they were often shocked by the large numbers of Duwamish, Lake, and Shilshole people in and around Seattle. Alonzo Russell came in 1853 and recalled years later that “like any boy of fourteen my first impressions of Seattle were of the Thousands of Indians standing by.” Caroline Leighton, the wife of an early customs collector, came in 1866, and in a florid diary entry from April of that year wrote “the frogs have begun to sing in the marsh, and the Indians in their camps. How well their voices chime together.” She also described a small stream of freshwater that cascaded down a gully into the lagoon at Seattle. Once, that stream had been a water source for the longhouses of Little Crossing-Over Place. Fifteen years later, the stream still served Native people, as they came to town and replaced Little Crossing-Over Place with a bustling new community that existed alongside, and enmeshed with, the Bostons. Only a “small and insignificant village” in the eyes of 1859 arrival Dillis Ward, Seattle was dominated by indigenous people, who made it their own, using the new proto-urban venue, with its connections to new trade networks, new forms of political and spiritual power, and new audiences, to enact and even enhance economic, political, religious, and social traditions. Continuous streams of both water and history flowed here.
³

All around the fledgling town, Indian people insisted on inclusion in settler society. When a wedding united the Mapel and Van Asselt families in 1862, Seeathl and several hundred of his people arrived to observe the festivities along the Duwamish River. After dinner, the newlyweds stood on display while Native men and women filed by to look at them. Afterward, Seeathl and others began a celebration of their own on a sandspit at the mouth of the Duwamish, and Mapel recalled that “all that was good in the power of the spirits was called upon and invoked as a blessing for Henry Van Asselt.” More than simply the marriage of two settlers, the wedding was a meeting of two cultures, with both making a performance out of it. In allowing the Indians to gaze “in awe”
at the “white Klootchman,” the settlers defined themselves as superior newcomers in a land of primitives. Meanwhile, in their finery and solemnity, Seeathl and his retinue similarly defined themselves as high-class people. And the Mapel–Van Asselt wedding was not unusual; indigenous ceremony was a key element of Seattle's urban scene during its first decades, linking Native tradition with new circumstances. Caroline Leighton described a gathering to sing and dance spirit powers on the Seattle shoreline in 1866:

A little, gray old woman appeared yesterday morning at our door, with her cheeks all aglow, as if her young blood had returned. Besides the vermilion lavishly displayed on her face, the crease at the parting of her hair was painted the same color. Every article of clothing she had on was bright and new. I looked out, and saw that no Indian had on any thing but red. Even old blind Charley, whom we had never seen in any thing but a black blanket, appeared in a new one of scarlet.

This example of Native people maintaining traditional cultural practices in the new setting of a mill town is a powerful challenge to the notion that Seattle's Indian history was coming to a close. When half the town showed up dressed in red, it was clear that Seattle was still a good deal indigenous.
⁴

But if some indigenous people pursued traditional ceremonies in town, others came to Seattle to access the new spirit power that lived there: Jesus Christ. One Native woman named Sally, said to be a sister of Seeathl, was well known around town for her church attendance and in fact strove to build friendships only with churchgoing white women. Meanwhile, Ben Solomon, born at Little Crossing-Over Place before the longhouses were abandoned and the wild roses took over, became a figure in the local Roman Catholic congregation and after his first communion built a chapel near the large Native towns on the Black River south of Seattle.
⁵

Weddings and other ceremonies offered venues for cultural encounter in Seattle, but all too often the collision of indigenous religious observance with the norms of settler society highlighted the differences
between Seattle's two peoples. For many pioneers, Native ceremonies in town created lasting and deeply unsettling memories. David Kellogg recalled vividly the year 1862, for example, when he heard that a “Klale Tomaniwous”—a Chinook Jargon term that Bostons typically translated as “black magic”—was going to take place along the waterfront. Arriving at a small house made of cedar-bark mats and lumber from Henry Yesler's sawmill, Kellogg witnessed the initiation of a man known as Bunty Charley; “the pounding against the roof with poles and on the circle of stones around the fire was deafening,” Kellogg recalled. The proceedings soon moved outside, with participants tossing Charley's rigid body into the air and spraying it with mouthfuls of what appeared to be blood. Soon after, Charley began behaving like the Bear power that had possessed him, walking on all fours among the driftwood before shambling off toward the river. The next morning, he was seen in town wearing the badge of his new status: a dusting of white duck down on his head and shoulders. This was a traditional initiation into a secret society, and its staging on the Seattle waterfront was in keeping with the ritual's logic. Such practices were not just religious rituals but social performances, designed specifically to shock and impress observers and to cement the status of the secret society's members. It certainly worked in Kellogg's case. “Holy smoke but it was a sight,” he wrote years later, his shock still resonating decades later.
⁶

The ducks that provided Bunty Charley's dusting of down likely came from the Duwamish River's estuary, which had been the source of other such emblems of status for centuries. But like new kinds of spiritual power, novel objects that could express social standing—old blind Charley's scarlet blanket, for example—could now also be procured in Seattle. Indian people visited Louisa Boren Denny to buy strips of silk cut from old dresses, and she reminisced that the men in particular “looked very fine with them around their waists, knotted at the side.” Meanwhile, Native women made use of that most cherished of pioneer symbols, the patchwork quilt, to highlight the status of their menfolk. Another Denny kinswoman described how the Indians' quilts of blue and pink on white groundwork were made into shirts, and how “when dressed in a pair of blue trousers and with a bright red scarf tied around
his waist and a gaudy red bandanna handkerchief… around his head, his feet encased in bead-embroidered moccasins, a siwash was a ‘hyas tyee’ (very fine chief).” Indigenous women were also regular patrons at C. C. Terry's store, where they bought tin cups to beat into ornaments, and it was not uncommon to see them dressed in hoopskirts and carrying parasols. As commerce with places like San Francisco grew in the 1850s and 1860s, such consumer goods provided yet another reason for indigenous people to visit. Along with dentalium-shell chokers and blankets woven from mountain-goat wool, now hoopskirts and parasols purchased in town could reflect their owners' prestige.
⁷

Prestige and power could also be found in meetings of the mind between settler and Native leaders. In the 1850s, for example, Saneewa, a Snoqualmie headman from an important indigenous town at the foot of the Cascades, came every autumn with his family, his ponies, and his dogs to camp in Arthur Denny's pasture. Like Seeathl, Saneewa saw Denny, arguably the most powerful man in town, as a strategic ally, but the relationship was mutually beneficial. As the leader of a community located at the western entrance to the lowest pass across the central Cascades, which Denny coveted for a wagon road, Saneewa provided crucial information about the route through the mountains. A few years later, Denny would be among the surveyors to map what they called Snoqualmie Pass. And as for Saneewa, many of his people and their descendants were able to remain in the valley where they had always lived, rather than removing to reservations, in part because of the relationships they built with settler “headmen” like Denny. Here, urban and indigenous ambitions coincided, with trips to town reinforcing one Native leader's territorial prerogatives while also facilitating the opening of new routes for American settlement of the region.
⁸

Hoopskirts and duck down, ponies in pastures and wedding parties near sandspits—each of these things highlighted the ways in which settlers and Indians encountered each other as indigenous men and women participated in town life during Seattle's first decades. Social status, religious observance, and political alliance were all part of the urban indigenous frontier on Puget Sound and offered means for Native men and women to participate in urban society. But throughout Seattle's
village period, each of these reasons for coming to town was overshadowed by another: Indians came to Seattle (or, in some cases, never left the place that became Seattle) for jobs. As they contributed to the town's economy, they would prove all too well that Seattle's Indian history was nowhere close to ending. Indeed, indigenous people saw Seattle as more than a settler community: it was
their
community, since they had been partners in its creation. The question was what, if anything, the Bostons, their civic leaders, and their federal government were going to do about it.