Introduction

A bulldozer was churning up the ground where Cecile Maxwell’s ancestral village had once stood. Maxwell, the great-great grandniece of “Chief Seattle” and the new chairwoman of the Duwamish Tribe, had been visiting the site upriver of the West Seattle Bridge often. In the months leading up to this day in early July 1976, she had frequently talked with the archaeology students sifting through carefully excavated bores of black dirt specked with shell and bone fragments. She was eager to learn about their finds and how they might affect her tribe’s claims to land and fishing rights in the area.

No students were working: their project had been wrapped up, the grids and tools they’d been using in their research removed. The site had been quiet for several weeks, but today a bulldozer was working the area where the students had meticulously documented fragments of bone, stone tools, and myriad seashell deposits. Alarmed, Maxwell hurried back to her office and dialed the number for the Army Corps of Engineers.

The previous fall, Maxwell had received a letter notifying her that the Army Corps had found evidence of a tribal settlement on land owned by the Port of Seattle. The Corps’s district archaeologist, David Munsell, had been reviewing an application from the port for a permit to fill a river bend that was left behind when the Duwamish Waterway was constructed more than half a century earlier. The remnant branched sharply off the deep, straight shipping channel and looped west before arcing back to rejoin the constructed waterway half a mile downriver—or a mile along the meander formed by the natural river bend.

Since 1899, Section 10 of the federal Rivers and Harbors Act had required a permit for any dredging, filling, or excavation in navigable waters of the United States. The entire Duwamish Waterway had been constructed in the early 1900s under Section 10 permits. In 1975, the port moved to fill this last remaining river bend with an eye to adding more land along the Duwamish Waterway—land that could be used to build a new marine terminal.

The port’s permit application was routine, but a new Washington State law, passed in 1975, declared a state interest in protecting archaeological resources for their historical and scientific value. The Corps of Engineers had never examined any Duwamish River sites for their archaeological value before, but the port’s Terminal 107 property, which sat along the remnant stretch of river, was right across the channel from Munsell’s office: he could see it from the windows of the Army Corps building. So, with the application in hand, he drove across the West Seattle Bridge to take a look.

Munsell passed the Seaboard Lumber Mill before turning into a small lot at Terminal 107. He parked his car and walked to a cluster of houses in the process of being demolished. To prepare for developing the property, the port was evicting the occupants of an entire neighborhood of modest homes that stretched along the river bend. Some of the houses had already been removed, their shallow foundation pits exposed. Peering down at the exposed layers of earth in one of the pits, Munsell immediately knew that he would not be approving the port’s application. A swath of exposed shell and bone fragments more than a foot deep cut across the face of the dirt—a classic midden, or disposal ground, of a type commonly associated with prehistoric village sites in coastal areas. The Port of Seattle’s Terminal 107 had archaeological resources in abundance, lying bare for all to see.¹

By the time the Port of Seattle signed a contract with the University of Washington to investigate the ancient site—a requirement of state law and a condition of the Army Corps’s further consideration of their permit—Cecile Maxwell and the Duwamish Tribe had been alerted to the finding. As original occupants of the Duwamish River Valley and its network of villages, they were included in the chain of notifications issued by the Army Corps and the Port of Seattle. Maxwell had become the tribe’s chairwoman a few years earlier, spurred by indignation over her brother’s arrest for fishing in the Duwamish River at a time when Native fishing rights were routinely ignored.

The day she came upon the bulldozer desecrating the remains of her ancestors’ village, the university archaeologists had just submitted their findings to the Port of Seattle. The shell midden that David Munsell had spotted on his visit had been confirmed as part of a site with great archaeological significance, and the university team called for further study before any development of the area. The report recommended that the site “be actively protected from any further disturbance.” Nevertheless, a few weeks later the port ordered the demolition of several condemned houses on the property, right in the middle of the study area. The incident destroyed much of the documented village site before Maxwell’s frantic call to the Army Corps could stop it.²

According to Tom Lorenz, the university’s lead archaeologist at the site, the remains had been destroyed. “I’m sort of overcome by how much is gone,” he told the Seattle Times. “This area has been so disturbed that there is very, very little left that’s of use.” The port insisted the demolition was accidental, but an irate letter from Washington State’s historic preservation officer, Art Skolnick, accused the port of having “willfully altered this significant archaeological site” and said the bulldozers had “irrevocably destroyed a prime source of scientific data.” The digging and compaction destroyed 80 to 90 percent of the known archaeological remains.³

Had that been all there was to the story, Terminal 107 might be a bustling marine terminal today. Heavily disturbed archaeological resources, no matter how significant and regardless of the cause of their disturbance, are not generally considered worth saving. But fortunately for the Duwamish Tribe and others with an interest in Seattle’s cultural heritage, the Army Corps demanded a new study to examine the rest of the port property, to determine whether any more artifacts remained outside the disturbed area. The new study, released in March 1977, reported that while the demolition had destroyed the half acre that made up the original research area, an additional two and a half acres of archaeologically important resources were found, dating back 1,400 years. They included shell, bone, and stone tool fragments, along with the remains of an “aboriginal house structure”—possibly one of the Duwamish Tribe’s ancestral longhouses or perhaps a fish-drying shelter used during the winter salmon runs. The new study recommended that the site—bureaucratically referred to as Duwamish No. 1 Site—be nominated for the National Register of Historic Places and that immediate steps be taken to ensure its protection.⁴

Most significantly, the research team concluded that “any future development activities . . . would probably result in significant adverse impacts to its cultural resources.” The researchers recommended additional excavation in order to recover valuable scientific and cultural information still buried beneath the surface.⁵

In a 2017 interview, Munsell recalled that the Port of Seattle was not pleased with the outcome: “They were unaccustomed to complying with antiquities legislation.” Munsell and Art Skolnick became so concerned about the port’s actions and the political pressure it might exert to get its permits approved that they took the highly unusual step of alerting the news media about their findings.⁶

Public support for preserving the site erupted. While Munsell was a federal employee and somewhat shielded from the local political blowback that followed, Seattle’s mayor, Wes Uhlman, reportedly complained about Skolnick’s actions to the state governor, Dixie Lee Ray. Skolnick, a state employee, was soon out of a job.⁷

Despite the drama playing out behind the scenes, the Army Corps pushed forward. By the time Sarah Campbell of the University of Washington took over investigating the history of the site in the 1980s, the port had gone on record as supporting the effort. Campbell describes the port staff as being very cooperative, despite their ongoing interest in developing the site for commercial use. But as more artifacts were found, each consecutive investigation added to the public’s understanding of the significance of the site and led to new recommendations for further excavation and study. By the end of the 1980s, the port had cut its losses and laid a layer of protective soil over the historic village to preserve its contents, opening up the river-bend property to public recreational access. The Duwamish Tribe’s village would not be erased to make way for a new shipping terminal.⁸

Today, public art installations and interpretive history signs dot a pedestrian walking trail along the riverbank where the Duwamish Tribe’s longhouse stood at the center of the village called Yuliqwad—Lushootseed for “basketry hat,” a traditional cedar headpiece. Adjoining the site is a city park, Herring’s House, named after another tribal village once located about a mile away, on the shore of Elliott Bay. Today, everything up- and downriver of the historic village has been altered by the construction of the Duwamish Waterway, but the river bend itself—the last remnant of the original river within the Seattle city limits—remains the same.⁹

Aerial view of the Duwamish Waterway and Kellogg Island, showing the original river bend and straightened canal, with downtown Seattle in the background. Courtesy of Tom Reese.

I first saw the river bend at Yuliqwad from a kayak in the spring of 1994, my center of gravity below the waterline as I cut through the narrow channel. A concave wall of ash-fine sand rose from the water on my left, binding together a layer of ancient clamshells still visible in the eroded bank. Belted kingfishers trilled as they skipped from tree to tree ahead of my boat, and a great blue heron skimmed low, flushed from the reeds on my right. Ahead, a mudflat extended around the bend, alive with speckled shorebirds scurrying along the water’s edge. I felt I had passed into another time, one before barges and smokestacks and sewer grates.

Ten minutes earlier, I had been leading a team of kayakers along Seattle’s concrete-lined Duwamish Waterway in a training session for volunteers with the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance’s Kayak Patrol—a citizen navy of sorts, ferreting out illegal dumping and industrial discharges fouling Seattle’s waters. Airplanes and cranes cast shadows over the water, and the din of engines and machines drowned out our shouted attempts at conversation. Paddling with cameras and notepads tethered to our boats, we were searching for, and finding, unauthorized sources of pollution.

Before that day, I had run my training sessions on Seattle’s Lake Union and the Ship Canal that leads from the lake to Puget Sound, passing through the Ballard Locks. I had been on the Duwamish River only once before, with Lee Moyer, a former Boeing engineer who made a postretirement career of designing and building kayaks. We had stuck to the wide shipping channel that day, getting familiar with the many factories and pipes that lined the waterway. The channel had been built straight, dredged deep, and lined with industrial berths. There was nothing natural about it.

On this training excursion, I decided to hang a hard left after leading the volunteers past the last of a line of factories. “This one is Holnam Cement,” I shouted over the churning gears above. A conveyor belt was offloading heaps of sand and gravel from a sixty-foot barge tied to its berth. “If you see this stuff going in the river, take a photo and grab a water sample so we can test it for pH and arsenic. The raw material they use here can be toxic to fish.” Then, with twenty minutes to kill before our session ended, I led the group behind the remnant of a small island just north of the factory.

The serene meander we found ourselves paddling along, and its sudden proliferation of wildlife, was a revelation. It was here that Cecile Maxwell had encountered the bulldozers in 1976. Here early American settlers had built a bustling neighborhood of gridded streets and fishing docks in the 1890s. And here the Duwamish Tribe had lived in a cluster of longhouses and hosted potlatches for over a thousand years, leaving behind a dense detritus of clamshells. Maxwell’s desperate call saved the last remaining bend on the Duwamish River where we now floated at eye level with the shorebirds.

Cecile Hansen, chairwoman of the Duwamish Tribe, wearing a traditional basketry hat in 2010. The Duwamish River is in the background. Courtesy of Steve Shay.

In the years following, I became the director and head “Soundkeeper” at the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, filed and resolved several lawsuits against Duwamish River industries that we caught violating the Clean Water Act, and founded the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition, an organization focused on securing a thorough cleanup of the toxic pollution that had accumulated in the river bottom over the past hundred years. In time, I came to be considered an expert on the Duwamish River—Seattle’s hometown and only river, but one which few people in the city knew much about, if they even knew it existed. Unless you had reason to be on the river itself—and few outside the adjacent industries and shipping did—the river remained almost entirely hidden behind an industrial wall.

Researching this book confirmed what I had always suspected: that despite twenty-five years advocating for the Duwamish and working closely with those who depend on and love it best, I hardly knew this river at all. The history of the Duwamish River is deep, rich, and long—and as complex as the stories of the many generations of Native and immigrant families who have now settled here from every continent and multiple archipelagoes around the world. In the past two centuries, we have dramatically changed the course of this river, but not so dramatically as the transformations we wrought have in turn changed us.

The story of the Duwamish River and the experiences of its people—Native, immigrant, and industrialist—is largely missing from the popular history of Seattle. The river’s original watershed extended from Mount Rainier’s Emmons Glacier to the north King County suburb of Woodinville and included the White, Green, Black, and Cedar Rivers, Lakes Washington and Sammamish, and a spiderweb of interconnected creeks and lakes, from north Seattle’s Green Lake to Roaring Rock Creek in southwest King County and all the ponds, wetlands, and tributaries in between. The entire watershed drained through the Duwamish River to the Puget Sound embayment we call Elliott Bay, on downtown Seattle’s waterfront. It was the land of the Dkhw’Duw’Absh or Doo-Ahbsh (“people of the inside”) and the closely related Hah-chu-Ahbsh (“lake people”), today collectively known as the Duwamish Tribe.

The changes to the watershed did not begin with the arrival of the Denny Party, commonly believed to be the city’s first settlers, but with the very first white immigrants to the area now known as Seattle: Jacob and Samuel Maple, Henry van Asselt, and the Collins family. Nearly two weeks before the 1851 visit by the Denny Party’s scouts and two months before the rest of the Denny Party landed at Alki Point, these settlers completed their journey from the goldfields of California, through present-day Olympia, to the shores of the Duwamish River. After a foray into California gold mining, Luther Collins abandoned his farm on the Nisqually River, near the British-owned Hudson Bay Company’s trading post. He joined a trio of other travelers to scout out a new destination a full day’s paddle north of the company post. Collins, who had visited this “unsettled” river before, stoked his new companions’ ambitions with descriptions of the fertile Duwamish Valley as an ideal homeland with friendly natives. The settlers of the 1850s named their new city Seattle, for the tribal leader who welcomed and supported them when they arrived.¹⁰

Since this pioneering party first settled on the Duwamish River, alliances and conflicts between and among Native peoples, immigrant residents, and local and global industrialists have transformed the watershed’s natural resources, its economy, and all of its communities. The City of Seattle grew from the rich resources of the river’s tide flats, from the monumental feats of its early industrial barons, and from the persistence of generations of Native and immigrant residents. But this growth came at a high cost.

Only seventy years after the first colonists settled on the Duwamish River, its watershed had been reduced to less than one-quarter of its original size of more than two thousand square miles, and only the waters of the Green River still flowed freely to the Duwamish. The White, Black, and Cedar Rivers had been diverted to bypass the Duwamish or had dried up entirely. The waters of the freshwater lakes that these rivers fed and drained were forced through newly engineered routes. The Native people who lived by the changed rivers had been similarly “diverted” to reservations, relegated to shantytowns, integrated into settler society through marriage, or eliminated through disease and warfare.

As an engineering feat, the transformation was remarkable. The dramatic alterations to the Duwamish watershed, and to the river itself, allowed for the birth of a thriving industrial city. Business boomed. Immigrants flocked to the growing metropolis from all corners of the world. From the banks of the Duwamish, a city was born.

And there the story we tell ourselves about the making of Seattle typically ends. But we’ve neglected to pursue important questions about who, and what, we became. What happened to the people who were in the path of this progress? Where are the surviving families of the Duwamish Tribe today? Who are the descendants of those first immigrants to settle on the river? Who has taken their place? And what became of the riverfront businesses founded by Seattle’s industrial pioneers?

Today the Duwamish River is polluted, its neighborhoods in poor health, and its industrial base struggling. At the start of the twentieth century, the city’s boosters filled the mudflats at the mouth of the river to create one of the world’s largest artificial islands. In 1913, dredgers began to straighten the river’s bends and deepen its draft for easy access by ships. The land bordering this new channel was leveled and filled as a site for factories in an effort to create a modern industrial city. By the time the valley filled with the noisy bustle of commerce and industry, less than 2 percent of the river’s original habitat remained, pushing local salmon runs and wildlife close to extinction. For the rest of the century, the river was used as a waste repository, until the federal government declared the river a Superfund site—one of the nation’s most hazardous waste sites—and ordered a cleanup. News of this directive was published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on September 14, 2001—150 years to the day after the first settlers arrived.

The studies that followed the cleanup order revealed a legacy of water, land, and air pollution with tragic health consequences for local residents and fishermen. Land and business values stagnated as more contamination was discovered, and the full cost of cleanup—and liability—skyrocketed. Today, we stand at the precipice of the decisions that may, or may not, restore the health of the Duwamish River and its diverse communities.

This book traces the environmental and social history of Seattle’s hometown river. It tells the stories of the lost rivers and lakes of the Duwamish watershed, the people who helped destroy them, and those who suffered from their loss. It traces the families of the region’s first immigrants and the history of the more recent arrivals—immigrants from Italy, Japan, Eastern Europe, Mexico, Central and South America, Southeast Asia, East Africa, and other places who have become a lasting part of a city long regarded as overwhelmingly white. It also follows the Native people who fled, fought or married the new immigrants, and the industrialists who fueled the growth of the city. And it shows that friends, neighbors, and colleagues in twenty-first-century Seattle are often the descendants of all three.

The book also describes those who are still here—notably, the families of Se’alth and his allied chiefs, as well as the Maples, Collinses, Van Asselts, and their early neighbors. They continue to shape our city, and their descendants are an integral part of its still-unfolding history.

A century and a half after Chief Se’alth escorted the first pioneer families upriver, many of these people have come together in a bid to reclaim Seattle’s river. Whether they will succeed depends on many factors, one of which is whether Seattle can agree on an answer to the question that has been debated for decades: Whose river is it? Plans for cleanup and revitalization are under way, led by this new generation of pioneers who reimagine the Duwamish as “a river for all.”