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6: The Woven Coast
- University of Washington Press
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6 / The Woven Coast A visitor to seattle in the summer of 1900 would have been impressed. Where a town of fewer than four thousand people had existed only twenty years earlier, a city of eighty thousand now crowded the shores of Elliott Bay. A newly commissioned army fort guarded the bluffs above West Point, a massive railroad and shipping terminal was under construction at Smith’s Cove, and electric lights illuminated much of downtown, powered by distant dams. More than forty labor unions represented workers in the city, including the longshoremen who shepherded millions of dollars in international commerce into and out of Elliott Bay. The Duwamish River still curved chaotically toward the Sound, but its meandering days were numbered; plans were already under way to transform it into an organized channel of commerce. Even Ballast Island, where the refugees from Herring’s House had come to protest seven years before, seemed to reflect Seattle’s urban fortunes, growing each year as bricks, rocks, and other detritus were added by ships from Manila, Honolulu, Valparaiso , San Francisco, and Sydney. Metropolis had arrived.1 But in 1900, it was not the people of Herring’s House who now camped on Ballast Island. Instead, it was people from the Strait of Juan de Fuca. These were S’Klallam people, thirteen dozen men, women, and children who had come to the city from their homeland on the northern shore of the Olympic Peninsula. Their canoes, and those of other Native people from even more distant Native places, had inspired some observers to dub Seattle’s waterfront the “Venice of the Pacific.” S’Klallam people camped safely in the territory of the Duwamish: clearly, the city’s Indian terrain had shifted.2 Meanwhile, several blocks away, on the site of Henry Yesler’s old mill, 1 0 5 a second kind of new Indian terrain existed. On a triangle of greensward known as Pioneer Place Park, wedged in among the banks and hotels, a massive Tlingit carving rose over flowerbeds and a neatly clipped lawn. At its base, mythic ancestor Raven-at-the-Head-of-Nass anchored a series of striking figures: a whale with a seal in its mouth, a smaller raven, a mink, a woman holding her frog-child, and yet another raven carrying a crescent moon in its beak. This was the Chief-of-All-Women pole, carved to memorialize a woman who had lived and died a thousand miles from Seattle. It was an unlikely candidate for the city’s first piece of public art, but there it stood. According to one observer, it even made Seattle unique, “the only city in the world which possesses a monument of this character to a fast departing race.”3 The story of how canoes from the Strait of Juan de Fuca and a totem pole from Alaska got to Seattle is the story of the city’s arrival as a regional metropolis, of the linking of distant places to each other and to that metropolis, and of the creation of a new urban story. Just as Ballast Island was a physical manifestation of Seattle’s connections to distant ports, Indian people and images in Seattle reflected the city’s new economic and cultural boundaries, which by the twentieth century reached as far north as Alaska. Indian canoes arriving on Seattle’s waterfront from far- flung places heralded the creation of an urban Indian hinterland of which Seattle was one nexus. Meanwhile, Seattle’s experience of regional empire, spurred in part by the discovery of gold in the Klondike in 1897, led to a new urban vocabulary that used Native imagery such as totem poles to highlight the city’s new position as gateway to the North. Seattle ’s Indian hinterland stretched along a coast woven together by new urban and indigenous connections, and through that new weaving, both Native people and the city would be changed. I n august 1878, the Seattle Daily Intelligencer reported that scores of Native men and women were camped at the foot of Washington Street on their way to the hop fields of rural Puget Sound country. Perhaps they were the people immortalized in Mr. Glover’s bird’seye panorama of the city. If not, they were people like them. Above the tide line, temporary shelters and dozens of canoes filled with personal 1 0 6 Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:00 GMT) belongings turned the waterfront into a sudden and unmistakable...