Before Seattle Rocked: A City and Its Music

2. Gaslight Serenade

19 Chapter 2 gaslight Serenade t he ageless rhythms of Puget Sound native culture were broken on November 13, 1851, when twenty-four men, women, and children from the Midwest landed on a spit of land at the entrance to Elliott Bay. One of the newcomers, David Denny, gave the new settlement the optimistic name New York (the Duwamish people called the place Smaquamox). Less than a year later, most of the settlers abandoned the exposed spit for a more protected location across the bay to the east. They called their new home Seattle in honor of the Duwamish elder Sealth who had been kind to them, but the idea of New York never died. Possessed by urban visions, the settlers dug in for the long haul to prosperity. Life was rough. Throughout its first decade, Seattle’s white population barely topped one hundred souls. The pioneers were for the most part a sober, orderly lot whose priorities in life were shelter, food, and business. Men dug wells, pulled stumps, built houses, and opened dry goods stores. Women carded wool, planted gardens, picked berries, made clothes, cleaned, and raised children. What the settlers could not produce themselves —vegetables grown in kitchen gardens, soap rendered from animal fat—had to be shipped in. Staples were expensive: flour cost fourteen dollars a barrel, butter seventy-five. Mail service was at the whim of unscheduled sailing ships, sometimes only once a month. Stamps and paper money were practically unknown; people paid in gold coin or bartered. The settlers brought with them a new kind of music, less organic than that of the Duwamish, less spontaneous, less an intrinsic part of daily life. For 20 § gaSlight Serenade white society, making music was a formal thing, to be done on instruments appropriate to specific styles and occasions, in specified places. Whether for religious ritual, amusement, or mental “improvement,” music was generally an event apart from everyday life, to be indulged in after the day’s work was done. Many still considered music frivolous and morally suspect, and Seattle founder Arthur Denny was the archetypal Puritan holdover. By 1851, though, Puritan influence was fading, and among Seattle’s first white music makers were members of Denny’s own family. Arthur’s brother, David, and cousin, Tom Mercer, sang as they cleared land, and Sarah Mercer hummed “Wrestling Jacob” while drawing sap for the family’s sugar. David’s young niece, Emily, and her cousins passed the evenings singing tunes from the latest songbooks. David and Louisa Denny’s children were among the first to play mail-order musical instruments: cornets for the boys, a flute for Anna. In 1852 Henry Yesler fired up his sawmill, setting the economic, demographic , and cultural tone that would define nineteenth-century Seattle: a foundation of extractive industry, performed by a male workforce that demanded abundant entertainment. They found it first in the mill cookhouse , and Emily Denny looked back on many “happy hours, jolly nights, strange encounters, and wild scenes” in the small frame room where mill workers and visiting sailors belted out “Ho! Westward Ho!” and “There’s a Good Time Coming” and played along on fiddles, concertinas, and banjos. In 1853 Seattle first celebrated Independence Day with speeches, picnicking, and, in the words of J. Willis Sayre, “a dance that kept all the pioneers busy until late at night.” That summer, future Puyallup town founder Ezra Meeker walked the dusty streets listening to fiddles, flutes, and reed organs wafting from the parlors of Seattle’s little frame houses. Despite the harshness of everyday life and the lingering residue of Puritanism , Seattle was born a music-loving town.1 The Indian wars of 1855–56 dampened settlement and business activity , but by the end of the decade Seattle was gaining a reputation as the region’s commercial and amusement center. Sometime around 1860, Fraser River gold miners and Hudson’s Bay Company employees were singing “Seattle Illahee”: There’ll be mowitch [venison] And Klootchman [Indian women] by the way When we ’rive at Seattle Illahee [country] Row, boys, row! gaSlight Serenade § 21 Let’s travel to the place they call Seattle That’s the place to have a spree! In the summer of 1861 San Francisco saloon owner John Pennell got wind of the doings up north and built a saloon-brothel-dance hall on the sawdust tailings of Yesler’s Mill that he named Illahee. Illahee...