1 / The Haunted City
1. Only a handful of North American places use Native imagery to market themselves as explicitly as Seattle does. The American Southwest, and especially Santa Fe, have a long history of using local (and other) Indian motifs. Vancouver, Victoria, and many other British Columbian places have used Northwest Coast imagery for a long time. For studies of these two regions and their employment of Native iconography, see Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1996); and Michael Dawson, Selling British Columbia: Tourism and Consumer Culture, 1890–1970 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004).
2. William Kittredge, The Nature of Generosity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 8. While the term “place-stories” is mine, the concept is inspired by the work of others. E.g., see Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); Crisca Bierwert, Brushed by Cedar, Living by the River: Coast Salish Figures of Power (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), esp. 36–71; and Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
3. Carol Lind, Western Gothic (Seattle: Lind, 1983), 2; Babs Babylon, “In the Dark: Casper Central,” Seattle Weekly, 26 October 1994, 59; Jessica Amanda Salmonson, The Mysterious Doom and Other Ghostly Tales of the Pacific Northwest (Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 1992), 3–12, 91–102, 137–42; and personal communications with Jay Miller and with Dana Cox, Seattle Underground Tours.
4. For the original printing of the speech attributed to Seeathl, see the 29 October 1887 edition of the Seattle Star. For reprintings and embellishments of the speech in local histories, see Frederick James Grant, History of Seattle, Washington (New York: American, 1891); Clarence B. Bagley, History of King County, Washington (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1929); and Roberta Frye Watt, Four Wagons West: The Story of Seattle (Portland, OR: Metropolitan Press, 1931). See also Eric Scigliano, “Shaping the City: A New Book Looks Over a Changing Urban Space,” Seattle Times Pacific Northwest Magazine, 10 November 2002.
5. For discussion of the Chief Seattle Speech and its various interpretations and uses, see Rudolf Kaiser, “Chief Seattle’s Speech(es): American Origins and European Reception,” in Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature, ed. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 497–536; Vi Hilbert, “When Chief Seattle Spoke,” in A Time of Gathering: Native Heritage in Washington State, ed. Robin K. Wright (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 259–66; Denise Low, “Contemporary Reinventions of Chief Seattle: Variant Texts of Chief Seattle’s 1854 Speech,” American Indian Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1995): 407–22; Albert Furtwangler, Answering Chief Seattle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997); and Crisca Bierwert, “Remembering Chief Seattle: Reversing Cultural Studies of a Vanishing American,” American Indian Quarterly 22, no. 3 (1998): 280–307.
6. Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1; Judith Richardson, Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 3–6; Renée Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), 3; and Marian W. Smith, The Puyallup-Nisqually (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 97.
7. Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 90.
8. Jack Cady, Street: A Novel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 13, 25; Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), 69, 132; Jonathan Raban, Hunting Mr. Heartbreak: A Discovery of America (New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991), 261–62.
9. Cady, Street, 34–36; Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996), 195, 409.
10. Grant Cogswell and Rick Levin, “Screw the Space Needle: Seattle’s True Landmarks,” Seattle Stranger, 21 September 2000, 38–39; Emily Baillargeon, “Seattle Now: A Letter,” New England Review 20, no. 2 (1999): 148; and Brian Goedde, “Visions of the Ave: Despite Fears of Failure, the U-District’s Heart Is Still Beating,” Seattle Real Change, 20 September 2001, 8–9.
11. For examples of urban pictorials, see John W. Reps, Panoramas of Promise: Pacific Northwest Towns and Cities in Nineteenth-Century Lithographs (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1984). For images of Indians in the American imagination, the classic work remains Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Knopf, 1978). Images of Gast’s American Progress can be found easily on the Internet; one example is the Central Pacific Railroad Museum website, at cprr .org/Museum/Ephemera/American_Progress.html. For the 1906 real-estate brochure, see C. B. Bussell, Tide Lands: Their Story (Seattle: n.p., 1906).
12. For discussion of Western cities and their hinterlands, see Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790–1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); and Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). For three of the handful of works linking indigenous history to urbanization in the American West, see Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769–1936 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Kate Brown, “Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana Are Nearly the Same Place,” American Historical Review 106, no. 1 (2001): 17–48; and Eugene P. Moehring, Urbanism and Empire in the Far West, 1840–1890 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004). For the frontier’s place in American thinking about the West, see John Mack Faragher, ed., Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: The Significance of the Frontier in American History and Other Essays (New York: H. Holt, 1994); Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage Books, 1957); and Kerwin Lee Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890–1990 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
13. A complete list of works on Native history in the West would be too long to include here. For a beginning overview of the literature, see Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha Sandweiss, eds., The Oxford History of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
14. General studies of urban Indians include W. T. Stanbury, Success and Failure: Indians in Urban Society (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1975); Alan L. Sorkin, The Urban American Indian (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1978); Russell Thornton, Gary D. Sandefur, and Harold G. Grasmick, The Urbanization of American Indians: A Critical Bibliography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); and Donald L. Fixico, The Urban Indian Experience in America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000). For published studies of postwar urban Indian institutions and identities, see S. A. Krouse, “Kinship and Identity: Mixed Bloods in Urban Indian Communities,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 23, no. 2 (1999): 73–89; Edmund Danziger, Survival and Regeneration: Detroit’s American Indian Community (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1991); Joan Weibel-Orlando, Indian Country, L.A.: Maintaining Ethnic Community in Complex Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Deborah Davis Jackson, Our Elders Lived It: American Indian Identity in the City (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002); Nicholas Rosenthal, “Repositioning Indianness: Native American Organizations in Portland, Oregon, 1959–1975,” Pacific Historical Review 71, no. 3 (2002): 415–38; Nancy Shoemaker, “Urban Indians and Ethnic Choices: American Indian Organizations in Minneapolis, 1920–1950,” Western Historical Quarterly 19, no. 4 (1988): 431–47; and especially American Indian Culture and Research Journal 22, no. 4 (1998), a special issue devoted to urban Indian identity and literature. For Seattle-based studies, see Howard M. Bahr, Bruce A. Chadwick, and Joseph H. Stauss, “Discrimination against Urban Indians in Seattle,” Indian Historian 5, no. 4 (1972): 4–11; Bruce A. Chadwick and Joseph H. Stauss, “The Assimilation of American Indians into Urban Society: The Seattle Case,” Human Organization 34, no. 4 (1975): 359–69; Bruce A. Chadwick, Joseph Stauss, Howard M. Bahr, and Lowell K. Halverson, “Confrontation with the Law: The Case of the American Indians in Seattle,” Phylon 37, no. 2 (1976): 163–71; Larry E. Williams, Bruce A. Chadwick, and Howard M. Bahr, “Antecedents of Self-Reported Arrest for Indian Americans in Seattle,” Phylon 40, no. 3 (1979): 243–52; Jonathan R. Sugarman and David C. Grossman, “Trauma among American Indians in an Urban Community,” Public Health Reports 111, no. 4 (1996): 321–28; Maria Aurora Holloway, “Illness Perception and Knowledge among Seattle Urban Indians” (M. Nur. thesis, University of Washington, 1974); and John Zoltan Bolyai, “The Seattle Diphtheria Epidemic of 1972–1973 and Its Relationship to Diphtheria among North American Native Americans” (M.P.H. thesis, University of Washington, 1974).
15. James P. Ronda, “Coboway’s Tale: A Story of Power and Places along the Columbia,” in Power and Place in the North American West, ed. John M. Findlay and Richard White (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 3.
16. R. Cole Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94, no. 1 (2004): 165–82.
17. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), xiv–xvi.
18. Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas, 1774–1880 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980), 3; Colleen J. McElroy, “To the Crow Perched on Chief Sealth’s Fingertips,” in Traveling Music: Poems (Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 1998), 56.
An Atlas of Indigenous Seattle
1. Waterman, “Geographical Names,” 186.
2. Ibid., 178, 186.
3. Puget Sound Geography, eds. Vi Hilbert, Jay Miller, and Zalmai Zahir (Seattle: Lushootseed Press, 2001).
4. For coverage of Harrington’s life and work, see the special issue of Anthropological Linguistics (33, no. 4, Winter 1991) devoted to his legacy. Discussion of Harrington’s time in Seattle and an index to the field notes used in this atlas can found in Miles, Papers.
5. Cadastral Survey Field Notes and Plats for Oregon and Washington (Denver: U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, 1982); Duwamish et al. vs. United States, exhibit W-2; Erna Gunther, Ethnobotany of Western Washington: The Knowledge and Use of Indigenous Plants by Native Americans (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1945).
6. Waterman, “Geographical Names,” 178.
7. See, e.g., Harvey Manning and Penny Manning, Walks and Hikes on the Beaches around Puget Sound (Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1995).
8. Thompson, “Original Residents of Shilshole Bay,” 10.
9. Jay Wells, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, personal communication.
10. Marian Smith, Puyallup-Nisqually, 69; Miller and Onat, Winds, Waterways, and Weirs, 75–82.
11. Warren Snyder, Southern Puget Sound Salish, 131.
12. Emily Denny, Blazing the Way, 137–39; Gordon R. Newell, Westward to Alki: The Story of David and Louisa Denny (Seattle: Superior Publishing Co., 1977), 83–84, 89–90.
13. For the full report of the excavation, see Larson and Lewarch, Archaeology of West Point.
14. George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific ocean, and round the world; in which the coast of north-west America has been carefully examined and accurately surveyed (London: J. Stockdale, 1801), 512–13.
15. For this genre of stories, see Ballard, Mythology of Southern Puget Sound.
16. Arthur Denny, Pioneer Days on Puget Sound, 17; Mary McWilliams, Seattle Water Department History, 1854–1954 (Seattle: Dogwood Press, 1955), 4–6.
17. Bass, Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle, 37; Emily Denny, Blazing the Way, 9.
18. Waterman, “Geographical Names,” 188.
19. Bass, Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle, 152.
20. Marian Smith, Puyallup-Nisqually, 135.
21. Ibid., 59; Jay Miller, Lushootseed Culture, 11–12.
22. Marian Smith, “Petroglyph Complexes,” 315.
23. Duwamish et al. vs. United States, 697.
24. See Sarah K. Campbell, The Duwamish No. 1 Site: A Lower Puget Sound Shell Midden (Seattle: University of Washington Institute for Environmental Studies, Office of Public Archaeology, 1981); and The Duwamish No. 1 Site: 1986 Data Recovery (Seattle: BOAS, 1987).
25. Marian Smith, Puyallup-Nisqually, 127; William W. Elmendorf, The Structure of Twana Culture (Pullman: Washington State University, 1960), 51.
26. “Duwamish Duck Marsh of Century Ago Has Developed into Seattle’s ‘Golden Shore,’” Seattle Business 33 (1949): 2.
27. Warren Snyder, Southern Puget Sound Salish, 131.
28. Nile Robert Thompson and C. Dale Sproat, “The Use of Oral Literature to Provide Community Health Education on the Southern Northwest Coast,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 28, no. 3 (2004): 15–16.
29. Interview with Florence “Dosie” Starr Wynn, Alki/Transfer CSO Facilities Project Traditional Cultural Properties, MIT.
30. Ballard, Mythology of Southern Puget Sound, 55–64. Detailed discussion of the many versions of this epic can be found in Miller and Onat, Winds, Waterways, and Weirs.
31. Ballard, Mythology of Southern Puget Sound, 64.
32. Ibid., 60.
33. Ibid., 121–22; interview with Ellen Bena Williams, Alki/Transfer CSO Facilities Project Traditional Cultural Properties, MIT.
34. Marian Smith, Puyallup-Nisqually, 68.
35. Ibid., 57, 62.
36. Waterman, Puget Sound Geography, 19.
37. In his Notes on the Ethnology of the Indians of Puget Sound, Waterman describes the process: “‘Indian red’ (ochre) … is dug from the ground, kneaded by the women into lumps, and baked. The lumps are then broken open and the reddest portions picked out. These are pounded up as fine as flour, and mixed with salmon eggs.… This combination gives a beautiful dull red, which seems to adhere to a surface almost as well as our commercial paints, though it has no gloss” (47).
38. There was a Suquamish site with a similar name west of Gorst: šábdup ‘drying place’.
39. Bass, Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle, 152.
40. For discussion of the boulder, see Maria Dolan and Kathryn True, Nature in the City: Seattle (Seattle: The Mountaineers Books, 2003), 243–44.
41. Marian Smith, Puyallup-Nisqually, 70; Hermann Haeberlin and Erna Gunther, The Indians of Puget Sound (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1930), 75.