Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place

3: Seattle Illahee

3 / Seattle Illahee I n 1858, hearing that indigenous people had been trading gold at forts on the Fraser River north of Puget Sound, hopeful hundreds ventured into the Fraser’s deep canyons, home to the Stó:lO and Nlaka ’pamux peoples, in search of the yellow metal. Within a year, more than twenty thousand prospectors, many of them American, had overrun the Fraser. Unattached women were few and far between in the diggings , and life there was a heady mix of longing and libido. Folk songs on the Fraser included a randy little ditty about a place on Puget Sound known for its good food and good women. Sung in a mixture of English and Chinook Jargon, it painted a vivid, if vulgar, picture of Seattle’s attractions: There’ll be mowitch [venison] And klootchman [Indian women] by the way When we ’rive at Seattle Illahee [Seattle country]. There’ll be hiyu [many] clams And klootchman by the way Hiyu tenas moosum [Many “little sleeps” (sex)] Till daylight fades away. Kwonesum kwonesum cooley [Always always run] Kopa nika illahee [To that place] Kunamokst kapswalla moosum [To steal sleep together] As the daylight fades away. Row, boys, row! Let’s travel to the place they call Seattle (That’s the place to have a spree!) Seattle Illahee!1 4 0 While magazines and newspapers enticed overlanders to Puget Sound with stories of arable land and a salubrious climate, “Seattle Illahee” was another kind of public relations altogether, and likely did as much to establish Seattle’s reputation throughout the Northwest as any emigrant handbook. That the miners sang of Seattle Illahee is fitting. On a literal level, it was the name of one of the town’s primary economic ventures: the Illahee was a brothel staffed mostly by Native women, many of them most likely from British Columbia. On a more symbolic level, however, illahee, a Chinook Jargon term meaning “country” or “place” or “home,” suggested a truth about everyday life in early Seattle: it was as much an indigenous place as a settler one. David Kellogg, who arrived in Seattle in the 1850s, could have told you that. Decades later, he described early Seattle as “a very small village, really more Indian than White!” It was a place where Indians dominated the young urban landscape. “Along the beach stretched the shanties with the inevitable canoes,” wrote Kellogg, “some hauled high onto the beach and covered with mats while the smaller ones lay idly at the water’s edge, ready for immediate use. Every polackly [night] the singing and pounding in the shanties was the mighty orison.”2 During its “village period,” an era stretching from the Denny Party’s move to Little Crossing-Over Place in 1852 to the coming of the railroad in 1883, Seattle was indeed a Native place. Indigenous people came to town throughout those decades both to continue longstanding traditions and to make bids for inclusion in urban life. Perhaps most importantly, they came to work, and Indian labor would facilitate much of Seattle’s early development. It would also challenge federal Indian policy, as civic leaders enacted Indian policies of their own that often ran counter to the ambitions of a weak national government . Well after the treaties and the “Indian War” that would erupt between some settlers and some Native people in 1855 and 1856, the presence of Native people in town continued to shape civic politics, as Indians became signifiers of urban disorder in the eyes of many of Seattle’s leading citizens. Seattle Illahee was a perfect name for a place where indigenous people—both as participants in the town’s successes S E AT T L E I L L A H E E / 4 1 ] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 23:42 GMT) and as scapegoats for its problems—were at the core of life on the urban frontier. W hen new settlers arrived in the little mill town on Elliott Bay, they were often shocked by the large numbers of Duwamish, Lake, and Shilshole people in and around Seattle. Alonzo Russell came in 1853 and recalled years later that “like any boy of fourteen my first impressions of Seattle were of the Thousands of Indians standing by.” Caroline Leighton, the wife of an early customs collector, came in 1866, and in a florid diary entry from April of that year wrote “the frogs have begun to sing in the marsh, and the Indians in their camps. How...