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History of Seattle before 1900 |
History of Seattle 1900-1940 |
History of Seattle since 1940 |
This article covers the History of Seattle, Washington before 1900. Seattle is a city in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States of America. This article is part of the History of Seattle series.
Historiographical note
There are basically two accounts of the early history of Seattle. There is what one might call the "establishment" view, which favors the centrality of the Denny Party (generally the Denny, Mercer, Terry, and Boren families) and Henry Yesler). A second "revisionist" view, advanced particularly by historian Bill Speidel, sees David Swinson "Doc" Maynard as a key figure, perhaps the key figure. In the late nineteenth century, when Seattle had become a thriving city, several members of the Denny Party still survived; they and many of their descendants were in local positions of power and influence. Maynard was about ten years older and died relatively young, so he was not around to make his own case. Because the Denny Party were generally conservative Methodists and Maynard was, among other things, a drinker who lived with both his wife and an ex-wife and felt that well-run prostitution could be a healthy part of a city's economy, he was not on the best of terms with what became the Seattle Establishment, and Maynard was nearly written out of the city's history until Speidel's research in the 1970s.
Founding
The founding of Seattle is usually dated from the arrival of the Denny Party on November 13, 1851 at Alki Point. The group had travelled overland from the Midwest to Portland, Oregon, then made a short ocean journey up the coast into Puget Sound, with the express intent of founding a town. The next April, Arthur A. Denny abandoned the original site at Alki in favor of a better protected site on Elliott Bay, near the south end of what is now downtown Seattle. Around the same time, Doc Maynard began settling the land immediately south of Denny's. Charlie Terry and others hung on at Alki for a few more years, but eventually it became clear that Maynard and Denny had chosen the better location.
The first plats for Seattle were filed on May 23, 1853. Doc Maynard's land claim lay south of today's Yesler Way, encompassing most of the area now known as the Pioneer Square Historical District and the International District. He based his street grid on strict compass bearings. The more northerly plats of Arthur A. Denny and Carson D. Boren, however, which encompassed Pioneer Square proper, the heart of the current downtown, and the western slope of First Hill, had street grids that more or less followed the shoreline. (The downtown grid from Yesler Way north to Stewart Street is oriented 32 degrees west of north; from Stewart north to Denny Way the orientation is 49 degrees west of north.) This results in a tangle of streets wherever the grids clash.
Both Alki and the settlement that was to become Seattle relied in their early years on the timber industry, shipping out logs (and, later, milled timber) to build and rebuild San Francisco which, as Bill Speidel points out, kept burning down every year or so. Seattle and Alki both offered plenty of trees to build San Francisco and plenty of hills to slide them down to water.
The early Seattle settlers had a sometimes rocky relationship with the local Native Americans (or, as the usage of the period would have it, "Indians"). There is no question that the settlers were steadily taking away native lands and, in many cases, treating the natives terribly. There were numerous deadly attacks by settlers against natives and by natives against settlers.
Bill Speidel writes in Sons of the Profits, "The general consensus of the community was that killing an Indian was a matter of no graver consequence than shooting a cougar or a bear..." Against this background, Doc Maynard stands out for his excellent relations with the natives. He and Chief Seattle were friends and allies: Maynard certainly profited greatly from this friendship, but that should not diminish the fact that during the outbreak of violent hostilities in 1856 he risked the wrath of his fellow settlers by protecting neutral Indians. However, outside of some old-time trappers and traders, he was almost unique in his attitude.
Denny and Edward Lander (the first local federal judge) also stood out in that they believed that the law should be applied fairly and equally: to them, murder was murder, regardless of the race of the victim. However, it was impossible to get this view upheld by a jury. In Sons of the Profits Speidel recounts a case of two vigilantes who had hanged a native man. After a series of (possibly deliberate) irregularities in their trial, the jury acquitted these obviously guilty men on a technicality.
Territorial Governor Isaac M. Stevens probably did more damage to relations between settlers and natives than any one other person. He put a bounty on scalps of "bad Indians". He declared martial law to prevent Lander from issuing writs of habeas corpus for people who were held in jail for little other reason than sympathizing with the natives. One at least two occasions, he actually had Lander himself jailed.
Perhaps worst of all in its consequences for relations, he dealt dishonestly in treaties, among other things making oral promises that were not matched by what was written down. The local natives had at least a thirty-year history of dealing with the Hudson Bay Company, who had developed a reputation for driving a hard bargain, but sticking honestly to what they agreed to, and for treating Whites and Indians impartially. This continued through the dealings of the local Bureau of Indian Affairs Superindendent General, Joel Palmer, who (along with Maynard's brother-in-law, Indian Agent Mike Simmons) was among the few even-handed men in the BIA.
Consequently when Stevens, in drafting treaties, acted in a manner that Judge James Wickerson would characterize forty years later as "unfair, unjust, ungenerous, and illegal", some natives, quite unprepared for such behavior by the official representatives of the white man's power, were angered to the point of war. The unjust and deliberately confusing Western Washington treaties such as that of Medicine Creek (Dec. 26, 1854) and Point Elliott (now Mukilteo, Jan. 22, 1855) were followed the yet more provocative treaty of Walla Walla (May 21, 1855), as Stevens pointedly ignored federal government instructions to stick to sorting out the areas where natives and settlers found themselves immediately adjacent to one another.
By the time of the treaty of Point Elliott, Maynard had already made an ally of Chief Seattle by arranging to have him compensated for the use of his name for the new town. (Chief Seattle's ancestral religion had beliefs opposed to speaking a person's name after that person's death, so this was not a simple matter, although Chief Seattle soon converted to a somewhat eclectic Roman Catholicism.) At Point Elliott, he cemented this alliance (and greatly benefited his emerging town) by getting Chief Seattle and his Duwamish a separate, more favorable treaty, which, in exchange for a relatively large reservation, abandoned all aboriginal title to 54,790 acres, constituting an area almost identical to the eventual twentieth-century city limits of the City of Seattle.
With Stevens in Eastern Washington sowing discord, Secretary of State Charles Mason was left in charge of the state government. Yakima Chief Kamiakim had effectively declared war and told nations such as the Duwamish that they could either join him or would be treated as enemies. By autumn, there had been an exchange of massacres by whites and settlers, in which both sides seemed ready to kill whichever people of the other race were at hand, with no regard for whether these particular individuals had in any way previously wronged them. (This cycle of retaliatory violence would reach its logical conclusion two years after the war, when the brilliant and generally respected Chief Leschi was tried and condemned to death for a murder he almost certainly did not commit, and hanged before his appeal could be properly heard.)
Maynard got Mike Simmons to deputize him as a Special Indian Agent, then - in a complex, multi-way transaction - cemented a relationship with acting governor Mason and some other key figures by selling them some prime Seattle real estate at a good price. He then used the money from the transaction to buy supplies and a boat to ferry Chief Seattle and his Duwamish to what was effectively a privately funded reservation at Port Madison, west of Puget Sound. He also, at enormous personal risk, spent the first several weeks of November 1855 traveling around eastern King County, which was already penetrated by some of Kamiakim's men, informing several hundred other neutral natives that there was a safe place they could go. Most of them took him up on it.
(In Doc Maynard, Bill Speidel reports that not all of the Seattle businessmen were pleased with his getting the local Indians out of the way. Henry Yesler and others found themselves deprived of much of their labor force and wrote letters of protest to the the territorial government.)
Shortly before Stevens returned to Olympia January 16, 1856, Captain E.D. Keyes had managed an uneasy informal truce by communicating with, among others, Chief Leschi. Stevens promptly undercut the truce, saying of the natives, "Nothing but death is mete punishment for their perfidy."
On January 25, 1856, Stevens announced, "The town of Seattle is in as much danger of an Indian attack as are the cities of San Francisco or New York."
On January 26, 1856, natives attacked the Seattle settlement. The settlement was defended at the time by the 121-strong crew of the sloop-of-war Decatur, seven out-of-town civilian volunteers, and fifty local volunteers. The defenses were based on a large wooden blockhouse, a five-foot-high wood-and-earth breastworks, and various ravines. The number of attackers is impossible to establish: estimates range from a mere thirty to 2000. A few things do seem clear: most of the local volunteers hardly left the blockhouse, the navy took two combat fatalities in this land battle, and Kamiakim's forces were successfully driven off, but also took few (if any) fatalities. Still, they seem to have drawn the conclusion that attacking a major settlement wasn't worth the trouble. The only remaining major battle of the war was to occur March 10 at Connell's Prairie near Puyallup.
The cessation of general hostilities did not diminish Stevens' crusading zeal against the natives. He incouraged fratricidal war by offering the "good Indians" a bounty for scalps of the "bad Indians". The largest collector of such rewards was Chief Seattle's sworn rival, Chief Patkanim, a leader among the Snoqualmie and Snohomish. According to Speidel, Patkanim was not above killing and scalping his own slaves as a means of generating income. Speidel also narrates (in Sons of the Profits) that on one occasion this led to a native being killed and scalped in Stevens' own office.
Stevens continually attempted to recruit Chief Seattle and his Duwamish to this cause. Maynard and Chief Seattle, who had already gone to great lengths to help keep the Duwamish at a safe distance from Patkanim, never actually refused the Governor's request, but instead mantained a successful pattern of stalling and passive resistance to avoid ever providing any Duwamish fighters to further Stevens' scheme.
A smallpox epidemic broke out among the Northwest tribes 1862, killing roughly half of the native population. Governmental policies almost certainly furthered the progress of the epidemic among the natives. [1]
Yelser selected this location because of a critical flaw with Alki as a port: "During the winter, the north wind, building up the tides in front of it, comes sweeping down the Sound out of Canada, piling might waves on Alki Point. Beginning with Terry...nobody has been able to build anything out in the water at Alki that will withstand those waves." [William C. Speidel, Sons of the Profits, p.33]
The road leading down the hill to that mill, later called Mill Street and now known as Yesler Way, was originally known as the Skid Road (the route for skidding logs down to the mill), hence the term "Skid Road" or "Skid Row" for a seamy red-light district.
Via the bargaining power of his mill, Yesler wrangled about 20,220 square feet of prime land from some of the original settlers. Besides his mill, Yesler started a cookhouse that "did more to 'set' the heart of the city in the middle of Yesler's property holdings than anything else Henry did. Henry never did make a lot of money out of his mill. It was the strategic location of his land that made him a millionaire." [William C. Speidel, Sons of the Profits, p.63] Like many of Seattle's early entreprenuers, Yesler was not always the most scrupulous about how he made his money; he borrowed $30,000 at 8% interest to build the mill, and only repaid McLain after McLain took Yesler to court three times.
Terry sold out Alki (which, after his departure barely held on as a settlement), moved to Seattle and began acquiring land. He either owned or partially owned the first ships that allowed Seattle's timber industry to exist by providing a means to move the product to market. He eventually gave a land grant to the University of the Territory of Washington that housed its original campus and today makes the University of Washington a downtown landlord collecting rents of more than $1 million a year. He worked in politics to establish street grades, a water system, and a host of other services (which, not coincidentally, benefited him as one of the city's largest landholders).
Meanwhile, Arthur Denny became the second richest man in town, after Yesler, and got himself elected to territorial legislature. From that position, he tried unsuccessfully to get the territorial capital moved to Seattle from its then supposedly temporary location in Olympia. The other potential money prizes were the territorial penitentiary and the territorial university. When the politics all played out, Vancouver wound up as the proposed capital, Port Townsend was supposed to get the penitentiary, and Seattle got the university. Apparently, Seattle was the only real winner in this deal: to this day, Olympia remains the capital of Washington; the main state penitentiary is in Walla Walla.
The legislature had tacked on the requirement that a grant of 10 acres of land would be required for the university to be built, which they presumably thought would be sufficient to prevent its construction. However, Terry wanted his town to grow and donated the land, creating what would be "one of the biggest and most effective central core properties in the United States." [William C. Speidel, Sons of the Profits, p.89] The University of the Territory of Washington (later the University of Washington) opened on November 4, 1861. There were barely enough students to run it as a high school, let alone as a university, but over time it grew into its originally grandiose name.
The logging town developed rapidly into a small city. Despite being officially founded by the Methodists of the Denny Party, Seattle quickly developed a reputation as a wide-open town, a haven for prostitution, liquor, and gambling. Some attribute this, at least in part, to Maynard, who arrived separately from the Denny Party, and who had a rather different view of what it would take to build a city. The city's first brothel dated from 1861 and was founded by one John Pinnell (or Pennell), who was already involved in similar business in San Francisco.
Real estate records show that nearly all of the city's first 60 businesses were on, or immediately adjacent to, Maynard's plat.
Seattle was incorporated as a town January 14, 1865. That charter was voided two years later January 18, 1867. Seattle was re-incorporated as a city on December 2, 1869. At this time, the population was approximately 1,000.
Unwilling to be bypassed, the citizens of Seattle chartered their own railroad, the Seattle & Walla Walla. This project did not get very far. The later Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Railroad was only moderately more successful, although it did provide a route for logs to come to the city from as far away as Arlington, Washington. The Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern was, over the years, incorporated into the Northern Pacific and then the Burlington Northern railways, but was abandoned as a railroad in 1971, and became in 1978 a foot and bicycle route known as the Burke-Gilman Trail. The Great Northern Railway did finally come to Seattle in 1884, but it would be 1906 before Seattle finally acquired a major rail passenger terminal.
As has been remarked, Seattle in this era was an "open" and often relatively lawless town. Although it boasted two English-language newspapers (and, for a while, a third in Norwegian), and telephones had arrived in town, lynch law often prevailed (there were at least four lynchings in 1882), schools barely operated, and indoor plumbing was a rare novelty. In the low mud flats where much of the city was built, sewage was almost as likely to come in on the tide as to flow away. Potholes in the street were so bad as to cause at least one fatal drowning.
In an era during which the Washington Territory was one of the first parts of the U.S. to (briefly) allow women's suffrage, Seattle women attempted to counter these trends and to be a civilizing influence. On April 4, 1884, 15 Seattle women founded The Ladies Relief Society to address "the number of needy and suffering cases within the limits of the city." This eventually resulted in the founding of the Seattle Children's Home, still in operation today.
Another sign of encroaching civilization was the city's first streetcar, in 1884, followed by a cable car from downtown over First Hill to Leschi Park in 1887. In 1885, the city passed an ordinance requiring attached sewer lines for all new residences. In 1886, the city got its first YMCA gymnasium, and in 1888 the exclusive Rainier Club was founded. On December 24, 1888, ferry service was inaugurated, connecting Seattle to West Seattle, near the location of the Denny Party's first attempt at settling at Alki and reviving that settlement. A year later, a bridge was built across Salmon Bay, providing a land route to the nearby town of Ballard, which eventually would be annexed to Seattle.
The relative fortunes of Seattle and Tacoma clearly show the nature of Seattle's growth. Though both Seattle and Tacoma grew at a rapid rate from 1880 to 1890, based on the strength of their timber industries, Seattle's growth as an exporter of services and manufactured goods continued for another two decades, while Tacoma's growth dropped almost to zero. The reason for this lies in Tacoma's nature as a company town and Seattle's successful avoidance of that condition.
Both Seattle and Tacoma in the 1880s were essentially lumber towns, built on the resulting export income. All over the Puget Sound there are communities that started with the same assets, timber and a port. However, Seattle's early lead with Yesler's mill and other entreprises meant that its economy was based on manufacturing as well as lumber, and was thus far more diversified than Tacoma's. The Northern Pacific Railroad terminus only increased Tacoma's lumber trade instead of diversifying the economy. Meanwhile, Seattle became the hub for the region and the railroad had to come.
In 1885-1886, whites and Indians, complaining of overly cheap labor competition, drove the Chinese settlers from Seattle, Tacoma, and other Northwest cities.
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As with so many of the fires that destroyed cities during this period, the origin of the Great Seattle Fire (June 6, 1889) is clouded in legend. An early newspaper report claimed that the fire began with a glue pot spilled by one James McGough. Although the Seattle Post-Intelligencer corrected the story within weeks, to this day James McGough's glue pot remains as much a legend as Mrs. O'Leary's cow. (Apparently, the fire was indeed started by a tipped glue pot, but in a different part of the building than the unfortunate McGough's paint store.)
The fire burned 29 city blocks (almost entirely wooden buildings; about 10 brick buildings also burned). It destroyed nearly the entire business district, all of the railroad terminals, and all but four of the wharves.
Still, south of Yesler Way, the open city atmosphere remained. The most famous figure in this wide open district would be the flamboyant madame Lou Graham, who arrived in Seattle in 1888 and made herself a force to be reckoned with in the city's politics until her premature death in 1903.
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The Pacific Northwest economy during the nineteenth century was heavily rooted in extractive industries, mainly logging. Still, Seattle was becoming a city, and union organizing arrived first in the form of a skilled craft union. In 1882, Seattle printers formed the Seattle Typographical Union Local 202. Dockworkers followed in 1886, cigarmakers in 1887, tailors in 1889, and both brewers and musicians in 1890. Even the newsboys unionized in 1892, followed by more organizing, mostly of craft unions.
The history of labor in this period is inseparable from the issue of anti-Chinese vigilantism, as discussed above. A rough-and-ready approach to labor organizing was typical of the period, and there is no question that white
Seattle-area laborers at this time saw cheap Chinese labor as their prime competition and strove to eliminate it by eliminating the Chinese immigrants.
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Seattle's relationship with Alaska during this period was generally one of rapacity. Besides the mining, on October 18, 1899, a Chamber of Commerce "Committee of Fifteen," just back from a goodwill visit to Alaska, proudly unveiled a 60-foot totem pole from Fort Tongass, Alaska in Pioneer Square. The problem was, the pole had been stolen from a Tlingit village. A federal grand jury in Alaska indicted eight of Seattle's most prominent citizens for theft of government property.
Relations with the natives
This section draws heavily on Bill Speidel's books Sons of the Profits and Doc Maynard. The latter is especially useful on the events leading to Kamiakim's January 1856 attack on the town.Yesler's Mill
At first, Alki was larger than Seattle. "It was platted into six blocks of eight lots...and most of them had buildings on them that were in use. There weren't eight level, usable blocks in all of Seattle." [William C. Speidel, Sons of the Profits, p.31] However, when Henry Yesler brought
"financial backing from a Massillon, Ohio capitalist, John E. McLain, to start a steam sawmill once he had isolated the perfect location for such a structure," [William C. Speidel, Sons of the Profits, p.60], he chose a Seattle location, on the waterfront where Maynard and Denny's plats met. Thereafter Seattle would dominate the lumber industry. A city grows
The first Seattle fortunes were founded on logs, and later milled timber, shipped south for the construction of buildings in San Francisco. Seattle itself, in the early years, was, of course, also a place of wooden buildings, and remained so until the Great Fire of June 6, 1889. Even the early system of delivering water to the settlement used hollowed-out logs for pipes.Railroad Rivalry with Tacoma
On July 14, 1873 the Northern Pacific Railroad announced that they had chosen the then-hamlet of Tacoma over Seattle as the Western terminus of their trans-continental railroad. The railroad barons appear to have been gambling on the advantage they could gain from being able to buy up the land around their terminus cheaply instead of bringing the railroad into a more established Pacific port town.Relations between whites and Chinese
In 1883 Chinese laborers played a key role in the first effort at digging the Montlake Cut to connect Lake Union's Portage Bay to Lake Washington's Union Bay.The fire
The early Seattle era came to a stunning halt with the Great Seattle Fire of June 6, 1889.Rebuilding from the ashes
The city rebuilt from the ashes with astounding rapidity. The fire had done a fine job of cleansing the town of rats and other vermin; a new zoning code resulted in a downtown of brick and stone buildings, rather than wood. In the single year after the fire, the city grew from 25,000 to 40,000 inhabitants, largely because of the enormous number of construction jobs suddenly created. Labor history in 19th century Seattle
The Klondike Gold Rush
Seattle was especially hard hit by the 1896 economic crash. Unlike many other cities, it soon found salvation in the form of becoming the jumping-off point for the Klondike gold rush. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer scooped all other U.S. newspapers with the story that a "ton of gold" had arrived on a boat from Alaska. Seattle promoters successfully convinced the world that Seattle was the place to outfit yourself for the journey to Alaska. The miners mined the gold. Seattle mined the miners.References
Much of the content of this page is from "Seattle: Booms and Busts", by Emmett Shear, who has granted blanket permission for material from that paper to be reused in Wikipedia.External Links
http://www.historylink.org provides an unparallelled collection of articles on Seattle and Washington State history.