Native Seattle (42 page)

109   
[Unknown]
   dxWTLusH
Green Lake must have been a fine fishing spot, surrounded by deep woods and close to the town at Little Canoe Channel (108). In addition to the salmon run in the lake's outlet, which we now call Ravenna Creek, the lake was known for suckers (
Catostomus
sp.) and perch (
Perca
sp.), the latter, interestingly enough, an introduced species, suggesting that Native fishermen visited this place well after resettlement by non-Indians.

110   
Red Paint
   lééQtud
Licton Springs bears one of Seattle's few modern place-names derived directly from Whulshootseed. People came here to gather clay, which
was baked and mixed with tallow to create a red paint.
⁴⁰
The area was one of David Denny's properties, then a health spa, and finally a streetcar suburb. The rust-red springs are still visible today in Licton Springs Park.

111   
Dear Me!
   ádeed
This small cove was an important place to gather to play
slahal
, the bone game; its name is an exclamation that must have echoed out over the water during many a session. Waterman's informant said that this place was “set aside” as a camping spot for Indians. This was most likely during the 1870s, when Henry Yesler operated a sawmill on the cove and would have needed all the workers he could get. The bone game sessions surely continued after a hard day's work in the mill.

112   
Drying House
   sHab7altxW
Exposed to the sun and to winds off the lake, this point would have been an ideal place for drying salmon in open frame structures. Waterman noted that his Indian collaborators also referred to this place as Whiskey Point, perhaps a reference to the liquor obtained via the cash and contacts made at Yesler's mill.
⁴¹

113   
Place of Whitened Clay
   dxWTSáxWub
White clay was found here at the base of steep, forested cliffs. Mixed with grease, earth pigments like those from here and Licton Springs (110) are still used in important ceremonies.

114   
Minnows, or Shiners
   TLeels
Lake Washington was home to many kinds of fish, from the huge sturgeon (
Acipenser transmontanus
) and the prolific sockeye salmon (
Oncorhynchus nerka
) to smaller species like those caught at what is now the private Windermere Park.

115   
Small Prairie Point
   babqWábaqs
To indigenous foragers, the similar, but slightly different, prairie names around Seattle likely each signaled a different suite of plant resources.
Some might have had particularly good camas, while others were better for salal or rice-root lily. In other words, the subtle diversity of names for similar kinds of places likely mirrored subtle forms of ecological diversity.

116   
Digging in the Water
   CHa7áhLqoo
Lakes throughout the region were thought to be connected to Puget Sound. In this case, a hunter was dragged into Lake Washington by an elk he had wounded, and the bodies of both were found a month later on the shore of Puget Sound at Richmond Beach, north of Seattle. (Compare entry 34.) The name of this outlet to a small pond at today's Sand Point, however, is almost certainly a reference to the gathering of wapato (
Sagittaria latifolia
), a starch-rich aquatic tuber that once grew prolifically in the 4,000 acres or so of wetlands around the shores of Lake Washington.
⁴²

117   
Sand People
   WeestalbabsH
Before it was filled by the navy, this pond at Sand Point was known for a short time as Mud Lake. Efforts are under way to restore some of the marshes here.

118   
Fog
   sqWsub
This is the name for Sand Point, an extensive, flat promontory. Fog is a feature of the lakefront here during certain times of the year.

119   
Snowberry
   TudáxWdee
Snowberry (
Symphoricarpos albus
) was used to disinfect festering sores, and its inedible fruit was used as an indicator of the size of a given year's run of dog salmon (
Oncorhynchus keta
): the more plentiful the berries, which were referred to as the salmon's eye, the more plentiful the run. Snowberry thickets have been replaced here by the massive buildings of the former naval air station.

120   
Much Inner Cedar Bark
   slágWlagWatS
Pontiac Bay, once a stop on the Seattle, Lakeshore, and Eastern Railway,
was before that a place for gathering the bark used in everything from baskets to diapers.

121   
Hunt by Looking at the Water
   xWeexWééyaqWayas
The fact that this name refers to hunting, rather than fishing, suggests that hunters would seek deer or other animals that came down to the shore here.

122   
Silenced (or Quieted) Place
   dxWXóóbud
There was at least one longhouse here at the mouth of Thornton Creek. Stone tools and an adze have been found in the watershed between here and site 123. Farther up the watershed, on the 7200 block of Twenty-eighth Avenue Northeast, is a huge boulder that according to local lore was an indigenous gathering place located at a junction of the upland trail system.
⁴³

123   
Bald (or Peeled) Head
   hLooQWqeed
Remnants of this upland marsh can still be seen at North Seattle Community College, but a sense of the larger sweep of Bald Head can be gained by driving on Interstate 5 and noticing the “bowl” in which the college and Northgate Mall now sit. One of the sources of Thornton Creek, these wetlands would have been an ideal place for gathering highbush cranberries, marsh tea (
Ledum groenlandicum
), and other resources.

124   
Osprey's House
   TSeeXTSeeX7altxW
Waterman incorrectly identified the large nest here as belonging to an eagle. Ospreys (
Pandion haliaetus
) continue to nest around the shores of Lake Washington.

125   
Thunderbird's House
   XWeeqWádee7altxW
In Puget Sound Salish religion, Thunderbird is one of the most powerful spirits, offering skills of oratory, wealth, bravery, and health to those, including Seeathl, who have held it. Thunderbird's child is Thrush (
Catharus
spp.), who brought languages to the various human
peoples. According to some elders, Thunderbird was a small, pure-white bird, about the size of a gull. But for most, it was a giant bird (probably the condor,
Gymnogyps californianus
). In either case, it threw off pieces of flint, or lightning, from its open mouth as it flew, while the sound of thunder came from the beating of its wings. Thunder-bird was thought to live here on the lakeshore at the edge of this tall bluff. At least some of the Puget Sound Salish believed that the Thunderbird made its home in a rock (note nearby boulders at 122 and 127).
⁴⁴

126   
Deep Point
   sTLúpaqs
According to Waterman's informants, people who swam here on the edge of the lake were often taken away by “something.”

127   
It Has a Rock
   basCHééTLa
This tiny stream, which runs in a deep ravine just north of the Seattle city line, is now officially known as Bsche'tla Creek thanks to a group of neighbors who asked the Lake Forest Park City Council to restore its original name. A large glacial erratic sits near the creek's mouth.

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).