Free Native Seattle by Coll-Peter Thrush

Pinnell house,” the article continued, “which should be razed to the ground and occupants driven off to the reservation where they belong.” The author then demanded that the chief of police take responsibility for keeping Indians out of the city; if he did not, the result was sure to be catastrophic. Once again, thedanger was not just material; it was also moral. Never mind that other Native people lived in town as family members and employees; it was these “threats” who warranted the most public attention and who became an integral part of the young city's new place-story. 36
     
    In the end, neither of the fires that swept Seattle—one in 1879 and the “Great Fire” of 1889—had anything to do with Indians. The first started in a middle-class hotel, and the second, which destroyed most of the business district, began in a cabinetmaker's shop. Other fires, meanwhile, targeted Indian people. On the night of 7 May 1878, for example, someone burned down the Illahee. The Daily Intelligencer celebrated the blaze, which “swept off a fusty obstruction to progressive improvements in that quarter.” “Citizens and firemen stood about watching the fire,” one settler recalled, noting that “not a pint of water was thrown upon the fire, nor an effort made to save any part or article.” Throughout Puget Sound, laws and torches became weapons in the battle between two urban orders, one symbolized by the Mercer Girls and the other by the Lava Beds. In the decades to come, two competing urban visions—an “open town” that actively encouraged its red-light district and a “closed town” with zero tolerance for vice—remained at the core of Seattle politics. What would be forgotten in the future, though, was that such debates had their roots in earlier conflicts over the role of Native people in town life and over who belonged in this new place called Seattle. 37
     
     
    S OMETIME IN THE 1870S , a Chinese man named Ling Fu was brought before Judge Cornelius Hanford in Seattle's courthouse, accused of not having the proper citizenship papers. Facing deportation, Ling Fu argued that he did not need to carry papers: he had been born on Puget Sound. To test him, Judge Hanford quickly shifted his inquiry into Chinook Jargon, which had become nearly as common as Whulshootseed or English in Puget Sound country. “Ikta mika nem? Consee cole mika?” (What is your name? How old are you?), he demanded of Ling, who in turn replied, “Nika nem Ling Fu, pe nika mox tahtlum pee quinum cole” (My name is Ling Fu, and I am twenty-five years old). Clearly surprised, the judge responded,“You are an American, sure, and you can stay here.” He then turned to the bailiff and decreed, “Ling Fu is dismissed.” 38
    Ling Fu's brief trial symbolizes the ways in which settlers—Boston, Chinese, and others—had been transformed by their life in Seattle Illahee. Accounts of Seattle's “village period” are full of settlers speaking Chinook Jargon and sometimes even Whulshootseed; of white men and women learning indigenous subsistence practices from their Native neighbors and employees; and of people from places like Illinois and Ireland, Gloucester and Guangzhou, learning to accommodate Indians' insistence on participation in urban life. Nearly thirty years after Seattle's founding, Native people were still in town, and their participation in urban life had changed the Bostons as well. The mad house known as the Illahee might have been destroyed, but the larger Seattle Illahee, in which indigenous lives were woven into the urban fabric, remained, even as Seattle stood perched on the brink of an urban revolution.
     

















































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