Native Seattle (26 page)

As pioneers told stories about Indians and nature to measure what had been lost, they produced a place-story that challenged the one told by the Tilikums, and they knew it. Pioneer poet Francis Henry, for instance, had written in 1874 about the “pleasant condition” of the early settler who was no longer the “slave of ambition” and who found a new life in the Northwest surrounded by “acres of clams.” Some years later, Henry felt compelled to pen a bitter sequel:

Some say this country's improving,
And boast of its commerce and trade,
But measured by social enjoyment
I find it has sadly decayed.
In the pioneer days on the Sound,
When the people had little to wear,
And subsisted on clams the year round,
We'd hearty good fellowship here.

Not only our friendly relations
Are dropped for the worship of gold,
But the solid backbone of the country
Is recklessly bartered and sold.

The poem continues with complaints about logging, the commercial harvest of those sacred clams, and other emblems of industrial Puget Sound. That Henry used gold as a metaphor for the lack of “friendly relations” in the new, metropolitan Seattle was no accident. He and his pioneer compatriots were crafting an urban story that directly challenged
the one promoted by the Tilikums in the Potlatch festivals. Instead of a story in which the city's northern hinterland—and the wealth that had sprung from it—was the driving force, pioneers crafted a story in which Seattle's origins lay in a close-knit community set in a nigh-Edenic landscape.
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The local press also became involved in this clash of urban histories. In 1913, just before the start of the third Potlatch festival, a writer for the
Patriarch
complained that “publicity has developed into a system in the present day. That which is not unworthy of publicity is considered, by the public, to be not worth notice.” The writer then listed all the civic holidays in Seattle—including Tilikums’ Day and Boosters’ Day—before pointing out that the “Hegira” of the pioneers had nothing to do with gold and that “theirs was no feather-bed Pullman car luxury, such as is now enjoyed by those insolent ‘chee charcos’ who presume to treat them with patronizing condescension.” The tension between Potlatch parades and pioneer reunions, then, reflected a much deeper conflict between the
cheechako
and the pioneer generations and the social orders they each represented. Some pioneers had benefited from Seattle's metropolitan status; in fact, many of the founding families had become important members of the civic and commercial elite. But in the new cities of the West, as historian David Wrobel has shown, pioneers’ political and economic power was usually slight—even if their cultural and moral status was not—and their accounts of the past contrasted sharply with the efforts of boosters to imagine places like modern Seattle into existence.
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As more and more of Seattle's first settlers died, it fell to their children and grandchildren to keep the pioneers' place-story alive. Not surprisingly, the Denny clan was at the heart of things. In a series of enormously popular books, Emily Inez Denny (the daughter of David and Louisa Boren Denny) and her second cousins Sophie Frye Bass and Roberta Frye Watt (the granddaughters of Arthur Armstrong Denny himself) equated Indians, nature, and the pioneer way of life more explicitly than their predecessors ever had. Denny's 1909 family memoir
Blazing the Way; or, True Stories, Songs, and Sketches of Puget Sound and Other Pioneers
is filled with passages in which the first white woman
born in Seattle grieves for a time when “our play-grounds were the brown beaches [and] the hillsides covered with plumy young fir trees.” The playground was made all the more wonderful by the “friendly advances” of Native children, who “in their primitive state... seemed perfectly healthy and happy little creatures.” All this would be swept away by the inexorable tide of progress:

To the few of our pioneers who are left and who were once the barefooted boys and girls who played the roads that are now First and Second Avenues the past seems like a beautiful dream, wherein people of another world dwelt; the red man with his picturesque garb of blankets and beads; the pioneer in his buckskin hunting blouse and coon skin cap; the sailors from white winged ships, and the jolly Jack tars from the old man-o-war.

Denny's “beautiful dream” contrasted starkly with the urban landscape she now saw around her.
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Denny's kinswomen Sophie Frye Bass and Roberta Frye Watt were brought up with tales of Seattle's village period and, like Denny, told stories about Indians to talk about Seattle's metropolitan transformation. Bass in particular used changes in the urban landscape to distinguish between the Indian past and the urban present: “Third Street with its neighborly homes, beds of pansies and mignonette, shade trees, picket fences, along with the lum-me-i (old woman) and her micka tickey clams (Do you want to buy some clams) is of yesterday, while Third Avenue with its hurrying throng, its roar of traffic and brilliant lights—is of today!” She described the deaths of indigenous people like Kikisebloo and the city's massive engineering projects in the same sentence; she mourned the time before conservation laws, when local settlers could come home with bags full of game. To talk about urban change, it seemed, required talking about Indians. Watt followed a similar path; in writing of her uncle Rolland, for example, she cast the Indian and urban as antonyms:

His life has spanned the years from the Indian cayuse to the automobile, from the Indian canoe to the airplane. He has seen Seattle grow and change
from one roofless cabin in the wilderness to a city of towering buildings; he has seen the winding Indian trails give way to straight and paved streets; his ears have heard the cry of the cougar, the chanting of the medicine man—and the voice of the radio.

In fact, in lamenting the loss of the pioneer way of life, with its romantic scenery and encounters with Indians, the Denny women and other pioneers created a framework in which Indians and cities seemed as though they were mutually exclusive. Just as “pioneerness” seemed impossible in twentieth-century Seattle, so too did “Indianness.” Some even went so far as to equate themselves with the Indians who peopled their stories. In describing the passing of the settler generation, Bass described the factors that had led to the dispossession of many
real
local Indians—in particular, large-scale urban engineering—as if she and her ancestors were a vanishing race as well. And when her family home burned in the 1870s, she recalled feeling as though “I could say with the Indians when they were driven from their homes, ‘chad-quid-del-el’ (‘Where is my home?’),” using a Whulshootseed phrase to express the terror of homelessness. In Bass's urban story, pioneers practically
were
Indians.
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The Denny family writers mourned the effects of urbanization—in particular, the perceived loss of community, freedom, and closeness to nature—and used stories about Indians to do it, but they rarely spoke of the processes by which indigenous land had become Seattle. For example, none of the women mentioned the 1866 petition that had prevented the creation of a Duwamish reservation near Seattle—a petition their fathers, uncles, and grandfathers had all signed. Instead, they emphasized the “incalculable injury, outrages, indignities, and villainies practiced upon the native inhabitants by evil white men.” Like their ancestors, Watt, Bass, and Denny saw Indian-white hostilities as the fault of the “wrong” kind of settlers, whitewashing both their own past and Seattle's urban history. Avoiding the connections between urban founding, Native dispossession, and metropolitan dominance, the creators of pioneer place-stories absolved themselves of responsibility for both the indigenous past and the urban
present.
It wasn't us
, they seem to protest.
It was somebody else, the squaw men or those damned
cheechakos.
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D
ESPITE THE CONTRASTING PLACE-STORIES
they told, and the real differences those stories represented, the Tilikums and the pioneers had many things in common. One of those things was Edmond S. Meany. A University of Washington historian, Meany played a critical role in documenting the local past, often in collaboration with pioneer societies, but also participated actively in the civic boosterism and cultural borrowing of the Tilikums. Meany consulted with Broadway High School students on a historical pageant that stretched from Vancouver's voyage to the creation of the Ship Canal and the Smith Tower, and he was one of the lead organizers of the AYPE, ensuring that the University of Washington would benefit from the development of the fairgrounds. He advised Tilikums on the “proper” meaning and use of the term “potlatch” and regularly answered letters inquiring about “Indian names” for young-businessmen's clubs, high school yearbooks, real-estate developments, and vacation homes. Meany's life and work blurred the distinctions between Potlatcher and pioneer, academic and booster, archivist and appropriator.
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Beyond the tireless Professor Meany, the Tilikums and the pioneers had something else in common. Together, they crafted Seattle's most powerful place-story, in which something called the Seattle Spirit, born in the founding at Alki Point, triumphed over both nature and Native people. This story was transmitted most explicitly on the anniversary of the Alki landing, known as Founders Day. While Founders Days in the nineteenth century had been reserved observances, by the twentieth century they had become urban spectacles, second only to the Potlatches, joining memories of Indian “depredations” to calls for a renewed civic consciousness and grafting local stories onto national narratives. In reenactments and other rituals, Seattle's “Pilgrims” were not just founders of one northwestern city but players in a triumphant drama of civilization-versus-savagery that had begun at Plymouth Rock. Every November, Seattleites made their city's place-story and their nation's place-story one and the same.

One of the first large public observances of Founders Day came in 1905. Hundreds gathered at the corner of First and Cherry, the site of the blockhouse where settlers had cowered during the indigenous attack on the town in 1856, to witness the installation of a plaque commemorating survivors of the “Battle of Seattle.” Pioneer attorney Cornelius Hanford gave the keynote address, describing in vivid detail the “sanguinary struggle.” While noting that only a few settlers had been killed in the uprising, Hanford pointed out that “it was an earnest war, and waged for the purpose of expelling or exterminating all of the white people.” But the pioneers had persevered, eventually allowing landscapes locked in Native possession to achieve their full potential:

Necessity, which is natural law, justifies the exercise of power of dominant races to occupy and use the land for the purposes for which it is adapted.… The Caucasian race acquired North America, partly by purchase and partly by conquest of the native inhabitants, who, as occupiers of the land failed to use it as God intended that it should be used, so as to yield its fruits in abundance for the comfort of millions of inhabitants.

For Hanford, and likely for many in the audience that day, the connection between indigenous resistance and urban development was clear: the former had almost ended but ultimately justified the latter, and it was the land,
this place
, that joined those two stories. In later years, Hanford would hone this logic. In his 1924 subscription history
Seattle and Environs
—along with books by the Denny clan, part of Seattle's historical canon—he wrote that the attack stemmed from Indian resentment of a “stronger and more enlightened people.” In the end, Native envy had faltered before the Seattle Spirit, which had existed “from the time when the founders landed… intangible as the souls of men and yet a real force, giving community identity distinct as the individualities of persons.” The birthplace of Seattle, then, was located both at Alki Point and in race war.
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Some observances of Seattle's birthday were held in public places like the corner of First and Cherry; others were held in private homes where old friends gathered to share their memories. One such gathering
took place in 1914 “in a proud old house on the top of First Hill, where the ceilings are high, and the roof is mossy, and the stairs are square, and the light comes through the windows in rainbow patches.” This was the home of Vivian Carkeek, one of the éminences grises of Seattle society. He was a pioneer; in fact, he had been born in a waterfront house built on the place where, back in 1862, David Kellogg had watched Bunty Charley's initiation into a Duwamish secret society. As founders of the Seattle Historical Society and with links to Seattle's village period, Carkeek and his peers crafted a genteel vision of the past. But there was also a darker side to that history: among the teacakes and crinoline at his party could be found “an Indian costume or two for grim reminder.” For all their gentility—or, rather, because of it—pioneers saw themselves as noble survivors of the violent tensions that had dominated Seattle's first years. One of Carkeek's friends wrote, for example, that “as ever the case from Massachusetts Bay to Puget Sound the white and red man go to war.” Linking Seattle's creation to that of the nation, pioneers saw their city's foundations laid in the inevitability of racial conflict and in the moral fiber that had ensured American victory. From Pawtuxent to the Little Crossing-Over Place, the story seemed the same.
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