[As always, click and click again to enlarge the pictures.]

The Turn at Broad Street

From his prospect above Main Street a few yards west of the pioneer Commercial Street (First Avenue South) the Denny Hill greenbelt at its north end seemed to George Robinson, the Victoria photographer visiting in 1869, to conclude with a profile made from trees leaning slightly towards Elliott Bay. [See illustration #51 in Chapter 6] At Broad Street the shoreline turns just far enough to the east (or to the map-north) that from old town there seems to be a formidable peninsula protruding there.  But the waterfront really makes only a slight turn north of Broad.  The “peninsular effect” is heightened by Magnolia, which in the distant haze is a lighter shade. The combined conditions of a slight turn and atmospheric perspective give this modest point near the future foot of Broad Street more prominence than it actually owns.  If Robinson had recorded the parts of his panorama from the deck of the Hunt, that point near Broad would have been missed or not noticed and, of course, with the slapping of the paddles his photograph would have also been out of focus.   For from the Hunt – where we see that Canadian side wheeler in Robinson’s pan – the shoreline beyond the point would have been revealed and joined in one continuous greenbelt with the green western slope of Denny Hill and with no Magnolia haze to confuse it or encourage a mistaken point.  [Using a straight edge and a map of Seattle one can easily warrant this observation about the deceptive point at Broad Street as seen from Piner’s Point, aka the Pioneer Square Historic District.  Near one end place the straight edge half way between First Ave. S. and Alaskan Way on Main Street – Robinson’s prospect.  Keeping this point fixed or stationary, pivot the same side of the straight edge or ruler so that it touches the intersection of Alaskan Way and Broad Street.  You will note that the waterfront north of Broad Street runs nearly parallel with the straight edge.  Consequently from Robinson’s second floor prospect it is only barely lost to view.]

The first U.S. topographical map of Seattle from the mid 1870s (already noted several times in previous chapters) shows this slight turn in the waterfront to be near Eagle and Bay Streets or just north of the foot of Broad Street. In Robinson’s 1869 photograph where the waterfront reaches Broad Street, the bank or bluff has petered out and the darker vegetation that reaches the beach is – to reiterate – marked by the leaning tree at Broad Street or very near it. [Again, see illustration No.51 in Chapter 6.] By the mid-1870s the lean in the tree at Broad managed to bend so close to the water that it was chosen as a defining landmark by the cartographer.  It is noted on a printing of the map.

1870: Census

Before we follow Robinson to near the northern edge of Yesler’s dogleg wharf to study his other view of the Seattle waterfront, we will first admit that for the moment the Robinson attribution is, perhaps, a sober hunch.  (The splendid informality of the blog means I can change or confirm it all later.)

Next we may also speculate on how many locals made it to the wharf on the 21st of July 1869 to survey emissary Seward during his brief visit to Seattle on his way to “proving” Alaska.  Most likely a telegram-ignited grapevine prepped all locals that he was on his way.  And what sort of population did he have to draw from? In the 1870 federal census Washington territory had 23,955 residents, and of these King County counted 2164 persons, or less than half the population of Seattle’s Leschi neighborhood now.   Of the few hundred only 243 were counted as Indians. (Some of them may have been living on or above the beach on Bell’s then inactive Belltown claim.)  In Seattle there were 1142 inhabitants including blacks, whites, Chinese and Indians.  Walla Walla with 1394 inhabitants was the largest town in the Territory and its namesake county was the most populated as well.  (Walla Walla kept this distinction throughout the 1870s and was again slightly more populated in 1880 than Seattle when figured by the Federal census that year.  However, it was a distinction lost to Seattle – by estimates – the following year.) It is left to the reader to approximate how many of Seattle’s 1100-plus citizens made it down to the dock to listen to Seward.  Without a news report or reminiscence of a nose-counter, my hunch is that at least half of those hundreds pulled themselves away from their home entertainments, responsibilities, or brooding introversion to attend.

1869: Robinson’s View of the Central Waterfront from Yesler’s Wharf

George Robinson’s second view of Seattle (if our attribution is correct) was photographed from near the end of Yesler’s dog-legged Wharf and on its north side. [52] It looks across Yesler’s millpond to Front Street (First Avenue) between Columbia Street on the far right and Madison Street on the far left.  Although Front still generally follows the contours of the native land, it has been graded for wagons, and the scrapings from the street can be clearly seen between it and the waterfront.  What is perhaps most startling about this earliest view of the central waterfront is how the bay nearly reaches Front Street.  At a not very high tide it would have flooded the narrow Post Alley that following the city’s 1889 fire was developed a half block west of Front Street on fill and pilings.

The white classical symmetry of the Territorial University sits left of center on the horizon.  To the left and below it is Rev. Daniel Bagley’s “Brown Church” at the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Madison Street.  The paint job on the lower rear wall of the church – the attached one story western section – is darker than it appears in Robinson’s panorama where it seems to be a second and lighter tone than that used for the west façade of the main section of the church.

If these differences hold and are not simply the result of photographic effects, then Robinson would have recorded this scene and the merged panorama on different visits.  A study of the trees on the horizon (like fingerprints their branches don’t lie) shows that the panorama from Commercial and Main was photographed later than the view from Yesler’s Wharf.  One sizeable tree that appears in the view from the wharf is missing in the panorama from Plummer’s Hall.  But is this imagined what with trees overlapping and swaying this way and that?  There is, however, a clincher to dissipate these doubts.  A residence appears in the panorama that is not included in the view from Yesler’s Wharf.

[7-Ronbinson-Comerc-det WEB]

The missing house can be found in Chapter 6 in the printing there of the full Robinson pan.  For searching it is best to use the layered rendering of the pan, the one which includes the left half on top and the right half – the one of interest in this matter – on the bottom of the diptych.   Or the house can be seen here [above] in the detail extracted from yet another photograph Robinson recorded during the visit that included the panorama.  This one looks north up the middle of Commercial Street with Robinson’s back to King Street.  The “new” home appears on the right and the university on the left.  Judging from the home’s position in reference to the Territorial University’s main building at the northeast corner of Seneca and 4th Avenue, that freshly appearing home would be near what is now the intersection of 5th and Spring.

Granted that the Robinson detail is not so detailed itself, we can, I think, still find the home in question near the center of a view [above] taken from the Territorial University in 1887.  It looks southeast towards First Hill.  What appears like an attached shed to the rear, or north, in the Robinson view, has been upgraded with an Italianate bay window along the home’s west façade.  And in 1887 King County Treasurer George D. Hill lives there.  Most likely he had a family, although the 1885 directory that lists him residing at the northwest corner of Fifth and Spring does not make note of it.  Hill is not the old home’s first resident for he arrived in Seattle in 1879, or ten years after Robinson made his panorama that showed this home when it was alone and new.

Another view – or stitched views – from an upper floor of the University was recorded in the early 1870s.  George Moore, the city’s principal resident photographer then, may be responsible.  It looks [below] down 4th Avenue on the left (the Baptist church appears in the distance on 4th near Cherry) and over the tower of the first and here new Central School at the northeast corner of 3rd and Madison, and beyond that to Yesler’s Wharf.  Elliott Bay then was still its aboriginal size with tidelands – on the left washing against Beacon Hill – that had not yet been reclaimed and developed.

Returning to Robinson’s 1869 recordings from the end of Yesler’s Wharf we will make note of something that cannot  – yet – be noted in the photograph itself.   A beachside stone-covered tomb, mentioned by historian David Buerge, which was uncovered beneath a burial mound near Front Street and a little ways north of Marion Street was for Robinson and everyone still covered and undetected in the photograph from Yesler’s Wharf.  From Buerge’s description, in this 1869 view the mound is most likely somewhere near the shed on the left that is built in part over the beach.  [52]

Marion Street ends at Front Street on the rise just left of center.  [52] In 1872 the town’s first “pleasure garden”, a landscaped bower with hanging lanterns and beer, was developed on the hillside a little ways north of Madison Street and east of 2nd, which would put it directly to the far side of Bagley’s Brown Church as seen here.  [I have not as yet come upon a photograph of this attraction and may never. Photographs of Seattle in the 1870s are rare.]  Sited then between and in line with the Methodists and the University, the beer garden would thereby fulfill the trinity of basic human needs – understanding, redemption, and refreshments.

If taxes and fees are reliable signs of a community’s priorities and grudges, in 1869, the first year of its new status as a chartered municipality, Seattle considered the requirements of its streets more fundable than its dogs, but the dogs, at least, were dearer than the town’s deceased.  General taxes collected amounted to $494.23.  However more than three times that amount was got from a designated “road tax”: $1601.  Dog licenses yielded $119.50, an impressive sum when it is considered that only $47 was gained from cemetery lots.  The figure contributed from theatricals, only $20, is a dour sign of the part played by the professional performing arts in the still teenage community.

The ALIDA

The scene above is nearly as old as Robinson’s record of Seattle’s waterfront. This view was also made from the end of Henry Yesler’s wharf, and looks across his millpond to the side-wheeler Alida. Above and behind the steamship’s paddle is the dirt intersection we are by now familiar with, that at Marion St. and Front St. (now First Ave). That puts the side-wheeler in the parking lot now bordered by Post and Western avenues and Columbia and Marion streets or just behind the Colman Building. The occasion is either in the summer of 1870 or 1871. The by now familiar steeple-topped Methodist Protestant Church, the “Brown Church,” on the left was built in 1864. In the summer of 1872 its’ builder and pastor, Rev. Daniel Bagley, added a second story with a mansard roof, which can be studied in the Peterson study of the same waterfront also recorded from Yesler’s wharf and included soon below in this chapter.  Bagley was also the main force behind the construction of the University of Washington, which shows off quite well in this view with its dome-shaped cupola at the center horizon. The photograph’s third tower, on the right, tops Seattle’s first public school. Central School, which we just inspected from the campus, was built in 1870 back from the northwest corner of Third and Madison. If the bell in its bell tower were still calling classes, it would be clanging near the main banking lobby of the SeaFirst tower.  [Actually, I no longer know how the “old” 1968 SeaFirst tower is used or if there is still an upscale restaurant on the top floor.  Last I was there may have been in 1982 – before the bank crashed – or was unloaded – because of bad oil-related securities, I believe.  It was in the restaurant that I coincidentally was introduced to the banker who, it was later revealed, was principally responsible for the bank’s failure to stay a locally-owned institution: Seattle’s first bank, started by the honest old pioneer, Dexter Horton and, at first, named after him.  Some readers will remember the bank’s advertisements that purred with Horton heritage.]

The Alida’s 115-foot keel was laid in Olympia in 1869, but its upper structure was completed in Seattle, in June of the following year, at Hammond’s boat yard near the foot of Columbia Street, and so just to the right of this scene. Perhaps, the occasion for this photograph has to do with her inaugural launching. Ellliott Bay first tested the full Alida on June 29, 1870. Captain E. A. Starr invited Seattle’s establishment on the roundtrip trial run to Port Townsend. The July 4 edition of the Weekly Intelligencer reported that “During the passage down, the beautiful weather, the delightful scenery, the rapid and easy progress made, and last though not least, the excellent instrumental and vocal music which was furnished by the ladies, all contributed to the enjoyment of the occasion.” The steam to Port Townsend took four hours and eight minutes, and a little more on the return.  Then or now, who could complain what with the summer scenery and the music?

The Alida’s 20-year career on Puget Sound began with a few months of glory. She was the first steamship to successfully intrude on the monopoly that another side-wheeler, the Eliza Anderson, had established on the Sound.  [The Eliza Anderson is seen – twice – and described in chapter three.]  The satisfactions (customers) that the Alida’s owners, the Starr brothers, had taken from the older vessel were, however, short-lived. The Alida proved herself too slow and too light for the open waters of the straits. In 1871 the Starr brothers introduced a second and stronger side-wheeler, the North Pacific. For ten years it controlled the Victoria run, while the Alida was restricted to steaming between Olympia and Port Townsend and way points, including Seattle.

The Alida came to her somewhat bizarre end in 1890. While anchored just off shore in Gig Harbor, a brush fire swept down to her mooring and burned her to the water. As we shall note (perhaps too often below in this waterfront history,) a year earlier the Seattle waterfront was also swept by fire. When it was rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1889, all of what is water in this historical scene was planked over and eventually filled in to the sea wall 500 feet out from First Ave.

Another early and therefore rare 1870s view [above] of the central waterfront from Yesler’s wharf includes several new structures, like the three-story “box” built nearly off-shore at the foot of Marion Street.  Many of the structures familiar from Robinson’s recording and the Alida photograph appear here as well, ready for the reader to find.  This view also includes a few of Henry Yesler’s (or whomever was then running his mill) logs floating in the “pond” on the north side of his wharf and mill, here on the right.   And this record also extends north as far as Spring Street and a glimpse at the home built there by another lumberman, Amos Brown.  [We noted Brown in an earlier chapter as the neighbor who was principally responsible for helping rebuild Princess Angeline’s home near the waterfront at the foot of Pike Street in the early 1890s.  We shall visit that site again in a later chapter. ]

1878: Peterson Bros. View from Yesler’s Wharf

In 1878 the north end of Yesler’s Wharf was chosen again as a prospect from which to look back at the central waterfront.  This time it yielded the next grand panorama of Seattle, although it was probably not intended for that role. [53] Rather our rendering of the Peterson Bros panorama was stitched from three roughly overlapping negatives.  In the blow-up included here, [above and below], the seams between them have been partially exposed along the bottom of the photograph by the irregularity of the logs in Denny’s millpond.  Although clearly photographed from the same location – within inches – they may not have been recorded even on the same day.  The middle of the three images fills most of the right half of the photograph, and the tide appears in this section to be about a foot higher than in the image on the left and perhaps two feet higher than in the smallest part on the far right.

Much has changed and some of it implied like the photographer’s perch at the end of Yesler’s Wharf. The dogleg to the north has been lengthened.  From this extended platform the Territorial University is left of the Brown Church, not to the right as in Robinson’s view.  The Methodists have also added a second floor to their sanctuary for a Knights of Pythius meeting hall whose rituals had a southern exposure through the Mansard windows in the new roof.  The photographers for this and many of the best surviving early photographs of Seattle was, as noted, the Peterson Bros, whose studio was at the foot of Cherry Street.  The larger Peterson detail printed here, [54] roughly repeats the section of waterfront between Columbia and Madison streets recorded by Robinson nine or more years earlier.

The 1878 Peterson view can be compared with Robinson’s 1869 record in every part, for instance, the homes that have survived the decade.  Mary and Arthur Denny’s distinguished home at the southeast corner of Front and Union is there, although it may be hard to decipher without an enlargement of its detail.  [55] (It is about 1/5 of the way into the panorama from the left and near the clump of fir trees to the right of the summit of Denny Hill on the horizon.  It is also directly above the larger warehouse on the new wharf that extends into the bay from a shore insertion that is left of the center of Peterson’s panorama.  A 1890s close-up of the Denny home is also attached. [56] Closer by, a study of the intersection of Front Street and Marion Street – near the center of the Robinson view from Yesler’s wharf and to the right of the church in both views – shows structures that are still in place in 1878, although with changes. [57] [58] Some of the homes have been improved and at least the small residence at the southeast corner of Marion and Front has also been lowered to fit the new grade on Front Street.

1876: Front Street Regrade

Peterson photographs are the best evidence of what a marked effect the 1876 regrade of Front Street (between Yesler and Pike) had on the waterfront.  [There will be more on this regrade in the next chapter.]The smoothing of the street behind the timber bulkhead introduced some inhibitions.  One could no longer scramble onto the waterfront from Front Street.  The few exceptions were at street ends.  One of these “holes” was at the foot of Marion. [57 again] As the detail reveals, the cribbing of the timber retaining wall has there been turned out like a gate. Perhaps this exception is meant to allow the dumping of fill for an eventual extension of the street into the bay.  Whether intended or not, in effect, this is what happened.  It is repeated one block north at Madison Street where a similar break is evident to the left of the four story structure on the water side of Front Street and at its southwest corner with Madison. [53, just left of center.] (It was at this corner that the city’s Great Fire of 1889 was ignited.)  It also appears that the bulkhead is open at the foot of Columbia Street, far right, [53] although the roofs of the sheds that have been built on the beach block an inspection of most of the street end.  (It may be remembered from the introduction to this history that it was at the wet foot of Columbia that pioneers described the smell of the waterfront as turning sulfuric to the south.  If the Petersons had continued their panorama with another frame to the right in the direction of the wharf on which they were standing, we might have seen the discoloration that was described of beachside constructions south of Columbia.)

Seneca to Union Streets Revisited

The Peterson pan includes a hint of another of the waterfront’s natural remnants, one noted earlier: the ravine at Seneca street, or more correctly here the bridge over it and the bulkhead hiding it.   The large deciduous tree that breaks the horizon about one fourth of the way from the left border of the pan [53] is its marker – nearly.  Below the tree and a short distance to the right the bulkhead reveals a darkened section. [59] This is Seneca Street – today where the off ramp from the viaduct to the central business district meets First Avenue.  In this view the bulkhead is two years old, time enough apparently for the springs that irrigated the ravine and continue to seep through the fill to nourish whatever growth has attached itself to the bulkhead between the street and the waterfront.  There is a possibility that the wall itself is constructed differently here.  Seen in detail it seems (the effect is perhaps too subtle) to take a corner and turn towards the ravine (to the east) on the left side of the darkened section.  A railing for the bridge is evident a short ways to the right of the darkened area on the bulkhead.  This railing is on the east side of Front and is easily detected because it contrasts with the dark north bank of the ravine that appears behind it.  (A white arrow is also pointing at it.)  A railing on the west or bay side of Front is more difficult to decipher, and yet when seen in detail is at least suggested by other but softer lines.  Or may not be.  The east side of Front was developed for pedestrians, and not the west.  Along the west side all that would be needed was a low “fence” of logs running end-to-end between the openings at the end of the streets noted above.

Both University and Union Streets are also distinguished in the Peterson pan in ways noted earlier.  One short block north of Seneca the bulkhead is broken by what appears to be a negotiable incline of dumped earth. [60] It may also be, in part, the natural contour of the native bluff.  The trees directly to the north of this break are much older than the bulkhead and spring from ground that is not very far below Front Street.  This is also where the shoreline below begins its turn to the northwest.  Consequently, University Street between Front Street and the waterfront has at least since the 1880s been outfitted either with steps (as now) or ramps to the waterfront.  As noted above, and will be shown in a later chapter, soon after the city’s “Great Fire” of 1889 the stairway that had been built there earlier was replaced by a bridge for wagons that passed over both Post Alley and Western Avenue and reached Railroad Avenue directly.  This bridge allowed the movement of freight between this north section of the waterfront and the growing north section of the Central Business District.

One long block further north on Front (between University and Union the blocks get longer), Union Street continues only a little ways west of Front Street before it runs out of the picture.  In a panorama of the waterfront taken from the King Street Coal wharf about nine years later, Union Street seems to continue to the beach. [61] After the fire of 1889, the newspapers made considerable note of the wagon road on Union Street and what a hard but necessary haul it was for moving building materials up from Schwabacher’s Dock at the foot of Union Street (the only wharf of size on the central waterfront to escape the ’89 fire) to the many building sites in the city.  As we shall repeat below this was a temporary hardship.  Following the fire Western Avenue between Union and Belltown was soon improved, and the waterfront itself was speedily rebuilt into a wider Railroad Avenue with several accesses to the business district on Madison, Marion, Columbia and Yesler.

We insert here (above) what might be a “sidebar” in any coffee-table book for visiting guests.  Still the comparison below does include a revelation.  The etching is from a 1870 Harper’s Monthly article on Puget Sound, titled “The Mediterranian of the Pacific.”  Before comparing them to earlier Robinson view from Yesler Wharf, the structures in the oft-reproduced etching puzzled me.   Now when compared to Robinson there places, at least, become obvious.  When time allows we intend on reprinting the entire Harper’s article with commentary and added illustrations as another of our – and Ron Edge’s –  “Edge Clippings.”

On the West Coast the 1870s were generally years of growth most of it fed by the new transcontinental to California.  Seattle grew too, and this was in spite of the community’s dashed hopes for Puget Sound’s transcontinental terminus.  Instead, the Northern Pacific publicly chose Tacoma, or rather its own New Tacoma, in 1873.  By fits and starts the NPRR reached Tacoma in 1883, and with ironic effects for Seattle.  In spite of at first no rail service and then poor service from Tacoma, Seattle grew right beside Tacoma – even a neck again – with such vigor that its extended boom years really begin with the ’83 completion to Tacoma of the Northern Pacific.   But unlike Tacoma, Seattle’s growth would continue to quicken until the First World War.  At a little more than 3000, Seattle’s population in 1880 was deceptively small because the city was also the cultural, transportation, and financial center for what went on all around the Sound and in the woods.  This depth to its culture and economy is what gave Seattle the substance to survive periodic nation-wide hard times like those ten-year panics of 1873, 1883 and 1893.   This last, the Panic of 1893 and years following, was especially hard on Tacoma.

We close this chapter with a panorama of the Seattle skyline taken from Colman Dock – the northwest corner of it where the pedestrians walk directly from the ferries to a level one floor above the exiting vehicles.  This pan was taken for Jean’s and my book Washington Then and Now but not used.  So we revive it.  The date is 2004.  The position is not really a repeat of the outer end of the Yesler’s wharf.  That would be on the other side, the south side, of Colman Dock and a few feet closer to the seawall.

Migrant Fill and Bones -2

Now picking up those bones left hanging at the end of Part 5, historian-educator David Buerge suggests that with the 1865 expulsion and restricted access to their traditional cemetery at Seneca Street, the native people “are likely to have attempted to establish another cemetery further north.  Traditionally, native funeral grounds were situated north or west of house sites.”  Since Elliott Bay is west of Baq’baqwab, Buerge’s burial ground may have been somewhere north of Bell Street.  As noted earlier, in public works like the walling off of the Belltown Ravine for the Elliott Avenue extension in 1912-14 the fill that comes from nearby is obviously favored over dirt got from more remote locations.  Consequently the bones found in the 1912-14 fill may have come from a native gravesite associated with the Baq’baqwab camp but not directly at it.  This explanation would make the earlier placing of the bones with the fill an ironic instance of the “return of the native” – this native – to his or her home.  By about the late 1880s, Buerge notes, “burials would have been carried out in reservation cemeteries or in more isolate, outlying spots.”

[Remember: CLICK – often twice – to Enlarge.]

Trail to Lake Union

The Belltown Ravine was apparently spring fed in season and allowed an easier access to the hill above the waterfront.  Or did it? The bluff was not so high at the south entrance to the Ravine.  In the detail attached above a path can be seen, top-center, ascending the bank at that point in the ca.1902 photograph recorded from the off-shore RR trestle.  The whole scene from which this detail was pulled will be included as scene number 211 in a latter and as yet unnumbered part of this history.  Yes it did. A trail that followed the easier grade up the verdant ravine would have had its own appeal even when not especially needed, except by the old or infirm.  Buerge notes that a feature of the north camp was “a trail that left the beach and connected with the southwestern end of Lake Union.”  Such a trail has been marked on the federal topographical map surveyed in the mid-1870s – the map described above in chapter four.   Perhaps even more than the spring of fresh water the path would seem to center the Baq’baqwab site.  Buerge points out that “informants in this century remembered when parties left their canoes on Lake Union’s shore and walked the trail over to the bay.”  In this line (or path) the pioneer William N. Bell, Belltown namesake, concluded his 1878 interview with a H.H. Bancroft researcher from California with a suggestive recollection about the trail to Lake Union.  “Boren and I, I suppose, were the two first white men that were ever at Lake Union.  Shortly after we had agreed to take our claims here (early in 1852) Boren and I came here and happened to land at the end of the trail that went to the lake, and we just went over.  The Indians told us there was a little lake there, and also a big lake.”  The “big lake,” you may have figured, the locals would name Lake Washington.

1880s Belltown Beach Community

After the Battle of Seattle in 1856 the Bell family fled to California and left their land in the stewardship of those who stayed in spite of the fearful uncertainties and regional loathing that followed.  When William Bell returned for good to his claim in the mid-1870s, he was soon acting the landlord as he promoted his “North Seattle” or “Belltown.”  The proprietor back on his hill may have hastened another native diaspora, this one at the north camp, Baq’baqwab.  Buerge again: “One group appears to have resettled at the south eastern shore of Lake Union until burned out in 1875, while another moved north to the lighthouse at West Point. The houses of Baq’baqwab appear to have been moved off the bluff and down onto the beach.”   For that period of the late 1870s and early 1880s there is little photographic evidence of Baq’baqwab beach, aside from panoramas recorded from the King Street Coal Wharf.

One from the early 1880s shows two beach huts to the north of the entrance to the Belltown Ravine. [42-43] Another detail from the late 1880s includes the “cubist” or architectural shapes of beach shacks (mostly their roofs) above the interrupting Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Trestle that in 1887 was built just off shore along the waterfront. [44] As already observed, the trestle generally obscures the beach.  A few photographs of a beach community there survive from the late 1880s and after.  They show mostly tents and draped lean-tos. [45]

Another scene with beach, bluff and assembled natives is included directly below for some scholarly reader to research the “fingerprint” of the bluff.  Since the names of those posing are most likely lost to us by now, it is only the clinging landscape on the cliff that might identify this as a Seattle waterfront scene, and if so then most likely below Belltown.  This record was included in a small collection of photographs depicting only Seattle scenes.

By the time that seasonal migrations of native workers to the hop fields of the White River (Green River) Valley began in the 1880s, as Buerge notes, the beachside “remnant of Baq’baqwab became the focus of large seasonal encampments when native agricultural workers congregated there and to the south at Ballast Island.”  (As will be described and illustrated below in yet another unnumbered chapter, this was the island made from ships ballast, which during its few years of supplying a campground for the migrant Indians was also a parody of their former winter camp on what, as noted in chapter four, U.S. Navy Lieu. Charles Wilkes named Piners Point.  In the late 1880s, when Ballast Island was formed and first used by the itinerates, their former winter camp of Jijila’lec with its long houses and ceremonies would have still been easily remembered and vividly recalled for those too young or too new to remember it.)  With the failure of hop agriculture in the White and Snoqualmie River valleys in the early 1890s, the native encampments at and near Baq’baqwab also dispersed.  In their place, especially after the economic panic of 1893 extended into a depression, the new community of squatter’s shacks described earlier was built along the beach below Denny Hill. This community was a polyglot of natives and down-and-out immigrants – mostly the latter.

Above are two views of hop harvest time in the Snoqualmie Valley with Mt. Si on the horizon recorded by pioneer Seattle photographer Theodore Peiser. He arrived in Seattle in the early 1880s and stayed for more than twenty years.  Much of his early work was destroyed in the city’s “Great Fire” of 1889.

Baqbaqwab Suburbs & the Seattle Center Swale

We may note that the Baq’baqwab community, the north camp, developed (or was followed by) what may be considered its own northern suburbs.  The 1899 view recorded by Anders Wilse looks at a summer camp in the small bay north of Broad Street. [46]

But the north camp once extended at least as far as Harrison Street, where nets were set up to catch fowl that flying between the Bay and Lake Union, passed low over the swale that once dipped between Queen Anne and Denny Hills.  (This future site of Seattle Center is also described in tribal memory as a potlatch grounds.)  As late as 1961, on the eve of the 1962 Century 21 Worlds Fair, Seattle Times reporter Charlotte Widrig interviewed William Criddle, a relatively late settler, about life on the beach below Seattle Center.  “William was two in 1889 when his father Frederick J. Criddle, a shipwright, brought his wife and six children here from Cornwall, England and settled on the bay at the foot of Mercer Street (below Kinnear Park) One of the early day sights Criddle recalled was a row of Indian tents stretched for a mile along the beach near his home, where Indians from Bellingham and other northerly regions camped while en route to harvest the hop crops in the White River Valley.  ‘My brother and I liked to visit the camp and sometimes did a little trading.  One of the items we acquired was a dugout canoe.  Elliott Bay was alive with salmon in the fall.  When I was about 9 years old, my brother frequently took me fishing in the dugout.’ ”

1869: The Robinson Panorama

The earliest photographic record of the beach and bluff of the Baq’baqwab site is included in the 1869 panorama (often alluded to above and now considered in some detail) of the community and its central waterfront.  The beach below Bell Street is some distance from Robinson’s prospect and so not the sharpest of subjects in the panorama.  We will return to a consideration of this part after first examining the photograph for other revelations – especially those involving the waterfront.

The photographer George Robinson, a 44 year-old “Victorian” from British Columbia, was a multi-talented (photography, dentistry, and the managing of mines) enthusiast who purchased his photographic equipment in an auction five years before his Seattle visit (it turned out that his gear had previously been stolen by the consignor) and opened a photographic gallery in Victoria.  In the spring of 1869 Robinson announced that he was leaving his gallery to concentrate on dentistry (the man knew how to use his hands) but several photographs of his date from 1869 or later, including his four Seattle views that when knit together become the single most revealing photograph of pioneer Seattle extant. [47]

[The two-floor presentation of Robinson’s pan printed just below, is the best doorway to its details.  Remember to CLICK TWICE.]

William H. Seward’s Visit on the Wilson G. Hunt, July 21, 1869

Robinson dated his Seattle panorama 1869.  We may want to narrow it to July 21st or 22nd.  “Big Night on the Waterfront” is how the local Gazette described the visit of U.S. Secretary of the Interior William H. Seward to Seattle on July 21, 1869.  It was the Seward whose grandest “folly”, some of his contemporaries claimed, was to acquire Alaska from the Russians.  While en route to inspect this chilled and sprawling purchase Seward stopped off at Seattle and made a speech for the citizenry that assembled at Yesler’s Wharf to get a good look at Lincoln’s appointee and savor his compliments.  And Seward did boom for and about them, advising the community that Washington Territory’s was a “glorious future.”  Seward came and went on the sturdy steamer Wilson G. Hunt.  It had been freshly delivered to Victoria from the Columbia River in part as an attempt to break the transportation and freight monopoly on Puget Sound of the Eliza Anderson, and its runners were probably pleased to get the Seward assignment because their Hunt was not doing so well against the Anderson.  Almost certainly that is the Hunt pulling away from Yesler Dock.  Although her name cannot be read, that is the shape of her.  Clearly if Robinson arrived in Seattle from Victoria with Seward he did not leave with him.

In – or about – 1858 Charles Plummer built a second story hall above the store he opened in 1853 at the southwest corner of Commercial Street (First Ave. S.) and Main Street.  It was a needed venue for performances, dances, and early meetings for groups like the Masonic Lodge and the Good Templars.  It was also the chosen prospect for both Sammis’ ca 1865 panorama of Seattle and Robinson’s 1869 recording.  Sammis view was taken from the crest of the roof, which could be reached by a ladder permanently attached to the roof on its south side and directly over the sidewalk.  Robinson went only to the second floor hall, where from a window some distance from the street he recorded the four parts for his panorama.  The flume-delivered fresh water wharf that extends into the bay off of Main Street never made much on an impression, largely because of the growing success of its neighbor to the north, Henry Yesler’s wharf, which through the pioneer years was all that the community needed.  Charles Plummer’s time in Seattle was too often tragic.  Ellender, his wife, died in 1859 giving birth to twin sons, and Charles lived on only until 1866.

As just noted in the caption above, Robinson took his photograph from a second floor window of the Snoqualmie Hall (AKA Plummer’s Hall) at the southwest corner of Commercial (First Avenue S.) and Main streets.  We may imagine – or expect? – that he waited until the moment his hometown steamer left Seattle without him.  (If Robinson timed the opening of his shutter with the Hunt’s departure, then of the four negatives the one on the far left – or west – with the ship underway may well have been struck first.)  Two additional Seattle subjects survive from Robinson’s visit.  One, printed directly below, is of Commercial Street from the street and shows the ladder that Sammis climbed four or five years earlier to record his panorama.   The other a view to the central waterfront from the end of Yesler’s dock.  We will consider both again below in a later chapter.

Yesler’s Wharf

Because of Robinson’s timing we know that this – or nearly this – is what Seward saw on his Seattle whistle stop.   Excepting the wharf on which he delivered his pep talk, the structures in the village and the few cleared acres that were still crowded by the virgin forest, most of what he examined — the waterfront especially – had not been tampered with much since the visits of Wilkes in 1841, the settlers in 1852, the Coast Surveyors in 1854, and in 1856 that self-style heroic defender of Seattle, Lieu. Phelps, U.S. Navy.   However, Seattle would change considerably in 1869, after Seward was gone.  The biggest changes were Yesler’s.  He replaced his old steam sawmill of ’53 with a new and improved one, and this time much of it was built on the wharf.  This second of Yesler’s mills burned down in 1879 but was replaced with a mill that lasted until another fire took it in 1887. (We will include views of these mills in other contexts and chapters below.)

Although Yesler’s was the first steam sawmill on Puget Sound in 1853, by 1855 there were twenty of them operating on the “Mediterranean of the Pacific”, and some were many times bigger than Yesler’s.  Also as noted above, especially after he extended its length in 1859 to 200 feet, Yesler’s wharf became the hub of much Puget Sound commerce.  A year later he opened a gristmill to produce flour and by 1867 was getting 24 barrels of it a day.  Yesler’s wharf helped Seattle get its jump on the “old wealth” that would sustain the city during the economic crashes that were arranged down the years with depressing rhythm in 1873, 1883, and 1893 – especially 1893.   Then, as noted earlier, the singular and so more vulnerable wealth of the company town Tacoma was not so resilient.  (That the next big recession came in 1907 – not 1903 – added some syncopation to this blues calendar.)  According to Seattle’s principal pioneer historian Clarence Bagley, for many of the earliest years of settlement “Yesler’s wharf was all that was needed.  Plummer’s at Main fell into disuse and decay.”  As is revealed in the surviving photograph of Plummer’s Snoqualmie Hall (above) the flume, like the one showing in the 1859 photograph of the Yesler Home noted above in chapter three, carried water to supply ships at a wharf that resembles more a dock than a pier. [48]

Sammis Panorama ca. 1865

Besides its extraordinary sharpness – one can count the trees on Denny Hill – as noted Robinson’s is the first photographic record of Yesler’s wharf.  His panorama also includes the first picture of any vessel on Elliott Bay (again, the Hunt), and most of the central waterfront as far north as Broad Street.  The closest features on the waterfront are the Indian dugouts at the foot of Washington, far left, beside the then still future site of Ballast Island.  The businesses, far right, on Commercial Street appear in the other and earlier panorama of pioneer Seattle by E. M. Sammis (note above) that is conventionally dated 1865 but may be from 1864. [12] Sammis also exposed his smaller view from Snoqualmie Hall, although he climbed the ladder on its south roof to the crest of the building. (During Robinsons 1869 visit he also made a street level record of Commercial Street that was photographed looking north with his back to Jackson Street. [49] It shows the ladder that Sammis climbed up the south side of the roof of Plummer’s Hall.) When Commercial Street is compared between the two panoramic views – Sammis most likely from 1865 and Robinson from 1869 — it is clear that little has changed in the generally dull first years following the Civil War.  But, as noted, the last months of 1869 made it Seattle’s first boom year.

1869: First Boom Year for Seattle

A review of the “local joy” of 1869 includes Seattle’s second but first successful incorporation and the considerable rise in real estate values attendant with the Northern Pacific’s survey of Snoqualmie Pass.  At the time this work strongly hinted that at last Washington Territory’s first governor Isaac Stevens’ 1855 recommendation would be heeded — that Seattle be selected for the western terminus of any transcontinental railroad that took the northern route on the basis of its relatively low Snoqualmie Pass to the east and its harbor.  (Of course that railroad would also get much of the territory along the way with huge land grants on the promise to reach the shores of Puget Sound.)  Stevens called Elliott Bay Puget Sound’s “unequalled harbor.”  (However, Tacoma might make a good defense of Commencement Bay as “more unequalled.”)  The most immediately influential change region-wide in 1869 was the completion of the Union & Central Pacific railroads to California.  The rush of immigrants – including many traumatized Civil War vets carrying land privileges with them – inevitably pushed in all directions, including north, along the coast.  Also, we know, the California railroad would became a great consumer of Seattle coal beginning in 1872 as we will describe in another chapter below.

Denny Home at First & Union & Beach Below

Robinson’s view also includes one landmark in the middle distance – Arthur and Mary Denny’s Carpenter Gothic home. It sat at the southeast corner of First and Union and is a handy reference to the waterfront. [50]  Below the Denny home, the 1869 panorama shows a rare structure on the beach at the approximate waterfront foot of Union Street.  As yet, I have not identified its owner or use.

The glass-faced skyscraper shared by the Seattle Art Museum is the fourth structure to hold the southeast corner of First Avenue and Union Steet.  The 1926 Rhodes Department store building was razed for it.  Rhodes had replaced the Arcade Annex, which took over the corner only after the Denny’s landmark residence was destroyed in 1907.   Theodore Peiser probably recorded this view of the Denny home soon after he arrived in Seattle about 1883.  Six years later Peiser lost nearly everything – including, most likely, the negative for this print – to Seattle’s “Great Fire” of 1889.  When it was built in 1866 this then showy home crafted for the “father and mother of Seattle” was a fancy farmhouse quite detached from its neighbors and remote from Seattle’s business district.

Seattle architectural historian Dennis Andersen uncovered the following quote in the Puget Sound Semi-Weekly.  It appears in the July 9 1866 edition, and so three years before Robinson took his panorama.  “Yesterday we were shown through the new residence of Hon. A.A. Denny, our delegate in Congress.  It is an irregular, Gothic cottage, the plan of which was executed by Mr. S. B. Abbott, who has superintended the work throughout.”   Anderson notes that Abbot, the architect, “likely used any one of a number of pattern book resources for his design . . . He may be the same Abbott who was accused of absconding with railroad construction payroll receipts a few years later.  All must have been forgiven or at least forgotten, because he visited the city in 1901 and was interviewed in the PI as a ‘wealthy banker and oil man’.”  The Peiser view is used courtesy of Sue Champness.

Looking further up the waterfront in Robinson’s 1869 panorama, the beach does not seem to be sited with the structures of any settlement or shore.  Still, small tents and lean-tos on that distant beach may be too small to record with definition.  What appears to be driftwood may in some instances be shelters.  Although relatively detailed for its size and age, as noted the panorama is still constructed from small negatives.

North End Mystery

The Robinson pan includes a north end mystery: two light-colored architectural forms on the bank above the beach. [51] If I have figured it correctly they are near Battery Street and so also very near the site of the Bell family’s first cabin.  (The Bell cabin was destroyed by Indians in the 1856 “Battle of Seattle.”) During the fighting it was visible from the Decatur and the sailors regretfully watched its destruction.  When they were ready to shell the house the captain of the ship gave an order to stop all firing.  As Bell later recalled, “The men were awfully displeased about the order, because they would have bursted (sic) some of them if they had put a shell in.”)  While the forms are too simple and distant to identify they look more artificial than natural. Whatever they are, they are unique – the only light and horizontal forms north of the beach structures just noted near the foot of Union Street.  (If the reader has trouble detecting them in the full pan, the forms begin in the foreground with the little steamer that is moored to the south side of Yesler Wharf. From its wheelhouse, lift the eye directly up to the distant beach.  There the forms are set in darker vegetation just above the exposed bank that rises from the beach.  A little ways to the right of the mysterious forms the darkened landscape dips to the beach.  Again, if I have done my figuring correctly, this is the entrance to the Belltown Ravine discussed above – and sometime soon again below.

The mid-1870s topographical map (noted above) also shows what appear to be two structures on the lip of the bluff near the future foot of Battery Street – although about one city block separates the rectangular marks in the map, which is more than the photograph suggests.  Again David Buerge offers an interpretation for the photograph and perhaps for the map as well.  “I would suggest that the double structure in the Robinson panorama may be the two standing long walls of a longhouse, minus its roof planks and side walls, part of whose length may be hidden by vegetation.  The evidence is that the picture was taken during the summer, which was when the people were off at various camps.  It was not uncommon for them to remove planks from their house to use in constructing a deck joining two canoes to help haul gear and for temporary lodging at these camps.”  So by Buerge’s figuring it is then at least a possibility that these gray-white forms that contrast so strikingly with their dark setting, are the reflective sides of aging and silvered cedar slabs and/or posts associated with the construction of long houses.   (Another less distinguished form in this neighborhood at least hints at the angles of construction.  It appears north of the stepping forms and is also a lighter color than the surrounding bank, although not lighter than the beach.)

This hand-tinted lantern slide shows the use of mats as a ready material for draping a residence.