Two conflicting perspectives exist for the early history of Seattle. There is the "establishment" view, which favors the centrality of the Denny Party (generally the Denny, Mercer, Terry, and Boren families), and Henry Yesler. A second, less didactic view, advanced particularly by historian Bill Speidel and others such as Murray Morgan, sees David Swinson "Doc" Maynard as a key figure, perhaps the key figure. In the late nineteenth century, when Seattle had become a thriving town, several members of the Denny Party still survived; they and many of their descendants were in local positions of power and influence. Maynard was about ten years older and died relatively young, so he was not around to make his own case. The Denny Party were generally conservative Methodists, teetotalers, Whigs, and Republicans, while Maynard was a drinker and a Democrat. He felt that well-run prostitution could be a healthy part of a city's economy. He was also on friendly terms with the region's Native Americans, while many of the Denny Party were not. Thus Maynard was not on the best of terms with what became the Seattle Establishment, especially after the Puget Sound War. He was nearly written out of the city's history until Morgan's 1951 book Skid Road and Speidel's research in the 1960s and 1970s.
Founding
What is now Seattle has been inhabited since at least the end of the last glacial period (—10,000 years ago). Archaeological excavations at what is now called West Point in Discovery Park, Magnolia confirm settlement within the current city for at least 4,000 years and probably much longer. The area of ("herring house") and later ("where there are horse clams") at the then-mouth of the Duwamish River in what is now the Industrial District had been inhabited since the 6th century CE.Dailey (map with village 33, referencing his footnotes 2, 9, and 10) The Dkhw'Duw'Absh (People of the Inside), and the Xachua'bsh (People of the Large Lake),For a pronunciation brief, see the footnote in Duwamish tribe. of the (Skagit-Nisqually) Lushootseed Coast Salish Native American Nations occupied at least 17 villages in the mid-1850s (13 within what are now the city limits),(1) After historical epidemiology 62% losses due to introduced diseases. (1.1)Boyd living in some 93 permanent longhouses (khwaac'ál'al) along the lower Duwamish River, Elliott Bay, Salmon Bay, Portage Bay, Lake Washington within what is now Seattle, as well as Lake Sammamish, and the Duwamish, Black, and Cedar Rivers in what is now metropolitan Seattle.Page links to "Village Descriptions Duwamish-Seattle section" . Dailey referenced "Puget Sound Geography" by T. T. Waterman. Washington DC: National Anthropological Archives, mss. [n.d.] [ref. 2]; Duwamish et al. vs. United States of America, F-275. Washington DC: US Court of Claims, 1927. [ref. 5]; "Indian Lake Washington" by David Buerge in the Seattle Weekly, August 1–7, 1984 [ref. 8]; "Seattle Before Seattle" by David Buerge in the Seattle Weekly, December 17–23, 1980. [ref. 9]; The Puyallup-Nisqually by Marian W. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940. [ref. 10]. Recommended start is "Coast Salish Villages of Puget Sound" . The Dkhw'Duw'Absh and Xachua'bsh are today represented by the Duwamish Tribe.
George Vancouver was the first European to visit the Seattle area in May 1792 during his 1791–95 expedition to chart the Pacific Northwest; the first White forays for sites in the area were in the 1830s.Morgan (1951, 1982), pp. 21–22
The founding of Seattle is usually dated from the arrival of the Denny Party on November 13, 1851, at Alki Point. The group had travelled overland from the Midwest to Portland, Oregon, then made a short ocean journey up the Pacific coast into Puget Sound, with the express intent of founding a town. The next April, Arthur A. Denny abandoned the original site at Alki in favor of a better-protected site on Elliott Bay, near the south end of what is now downtown Seattle. Around the same time, Doc Maynard began settling the land immediately south of Denny's. Charles C. Terry and others hung on at Alki for a few more years, but eventually it became clear that Maynard and Denny had chosen the better location.
The first plats for Seattle were filed on May 23, 1853. Nominal legal land settlement was provisionally established in 1855 (with treaty terms for what is now Seattle not implemented). Doc Maynard's land claim lay south of today's Yesler Way, encompassing most of today's Pioneer Square Historical District and the International District. He based his street grid on strict compass bearings. The more northerly plats of Arthur A. Denny and Carson D. Boren encompassed Pioneer Square north of what is now Yesler Way; the heart of the current downtown; and the western slope of First Hill. These had street grids that more or less followed the shoreline. The downtown grid from Yesler Way north to Stewart Street is oriented 32 degrees west of north; from Stewart north to Denny Way the orientation is 49 degrees west of north. The result is a tangle of streets where the grids clash. (See also Street layout of Seattle.)
Both Alki and the settlement that was to become Seattle relied in their early decades on the timber industry, shipping out logs (and, later, milled timber) to build and rebuild San Francisco which, as Bill Speidel points out, kept burning down. Seattle and Alki offered plenty of trees to build San Francisco and plenty of hills to slide them down to water. A climax forest of trees up to 1,000–2,000 years old and towering as high as nearly covered much of what is now Seattle. Today, none of that size remain anywhere in the world.Dolan & True (2003), pp. 142, 144Van Pelt (2001) pp. xxii, 181–185, 187–191
Relations with Native Americans
This section draws heavily on Bill Speidel, Sons of the Profits (1967) and Doc Maynard (1978). Doc Maynard and Murray Morgan, Skid Road (1951, 1960, 1982) are especially useful on the events regarding resistance nominally led by Kamiakim in the January 1856 attack on the town.
Before the Treaty of Point Elliott (1855)
Early European-American settlers in Seattle had a sometimes rocky relationship with local Native Americans since they were steadily taking away Native lands and, in many cases, mistreating Native people. There were numerous deadly attacks by white settlers against Native Americans and by Native Americans against white settlers.
Bill Speidel writes of white settlers in Sons of the Profits, "The general consensus of the community was that killing an Indian was a matter of no graver consequence than shooting a cougar or a bear..." Against this background, Doc Maynard stands out for his excellent relations with Native people. He and Chief Seattle (Suquamish/Duwamish, c. 1786–1866) were friends and allies. Maynard profited greatly from this friendship. During an 1856 violent outbreak of hostilities, Maynard risked the wrath of his fellow white settlers by protecting neutral American Indians. However, outside of some old-time trappers and traders, he held a minority perspective.
Denny Lander and Edward Lander, the first local federal judge, also stood out in that they believed that the law should be applied fairly and equally: to them, murder was murder, regardless of the race of the victim. However, they found it was impossible to get this view upheld by white juries of the time. In Sons of the Profits, Speidel recounts a case of two vigilantes who had hanged a Native American man. After a series of (possibly deliberate) irregularities in their trial, the jury acquitted these obviously guilty men on a technicality.
Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens probably did more damage to relations between settlers and Native Americans than any one other person. He put a bounty on scalps of "bad Indians". He declared martial law to prevent Lander from issuing writs of habeas corpus for people who were held in jail for little other reason than sympathizing with Native people. On at least two occasions, he actually had Lander himself jailed.
Perhaps worst of all in its consequences for relations, he dealt dishonestly in treaties, among other things making verbal promises that were not matched by what was written down. Local tribes had at least a three-decade history of dealing with the Hudson's Bay Company, who had developed a reputation for driving a hard bargain, but sticking honestly to what they agreed to, and for treating Whites and Indians impartially. This continued through the dealings of the local Bureau of Indian Affairs Superintendent General, Joel Palmer, who (along with Maynard's brother-in-law, Indian Agent Mike Simmons) was among the few even-handed men in the BIA.
Consequently, when Stevens, in drafting treaties, acted in a manner that Judge James Wickerson would characterize 40 years later as "unfair, unjust, ungenerous, and illegal", some Native people, quite unprepared for such behavior by the official representatives of the white man's power, were angered to the point of war. The unjust and deliberately confusing Western Washington treaties, including the Treaty of Medicine Creek (1854) and Treaty of Point Elliott (1855) were followed by the yet more provocative Treaty of Walla Walla (1855). Stevens ignored federal instructions to focus on sorting out the areas where Native peoples and European-American settlers found themselves immediately adjacent to one another, or, from the other perspective, where settlers moved onto Native land.
After the Treaty of Point Elliott (1855) By the time of the Treaty of Point Elliott, Maynard had already made an ally of Chief Seattle by arranging to have him somewhat compensated for the use of his name for the new town. Chief Seattle's ancestral religion and Coast Salish culture have beliefs opposed to speaking or using a person's name after that person's death and prior to protocols, so this was not a simple matter, although Chief Seattle soon converted to a somewhat eclectic Roman Catholicism. At Point Elliott, Maynard cemented this alliance (and greatly benefited his emerging town) by negotiating for Chief Seattle and the Duwamish a separate, more favorable treaty, which, in exchange for a relatively large reservation (promised, not yet ever fulfilled), Natives abandoned all aboriginal title to , constituting an area almost identical to the eventual twentieth-century city limits of the City of Seattle, for nearly nothing at the time.
With Stevens in Eastern Washington sowing discord, Secretary of State Charles Mason was left in charge of the state government. Yakama Chief Kamiakim had effectively declared war and told nations such as the Duwamish that they could either join him or would be treated as enemies. By autumn, there had been an exchange of massacres by Whites and settlers, in which both sides seemed ready to kill whichever people of the other race were at hand, with no regard for whether these particular individuals had in any way previously wronged them. (This cycle of retaliatory violence would reach its logical conclusion two years after the war, when si'ab Lescay (Chief Leschi) was tried and condemned to death for murder, and hanged before his appeal could be properly heard.)