Native Seattle by Coll-Peter Thrush Read Free Book Online Page B

attack to the settlers, giving them just enough time to make haste to the tiny blockhouse. Connections between settlers and Native people, forged through everyday life, had saved Seattle. (Leschay would be hanged in 1858 for the murder of an American soldier, a highly controversial punishment that divided settler opinion and ultimately resulted in Leschay's unofficial exoneration in 2004.) 19
     
    Despite the role that “friendlies” had played in mitigating the attack by “hostiles” on Seattle, once the smoke had cleared, settler leaders quickly labeled all Indians potentially dangerous and renewed their efforts to get Indian people out of town. For settlers unfamiliar with the complicated alliances and enmities that linked indigenous communities in Puget Sound, segregation seemed the way to proceed, especially with territorial newspapers warning that “the savage war-whoop, as it were, [is] at the doors of every town and settlement within our borders.” But it was as difficult a task now as before the attack. In July 1856, for example, Henry Yesler, now Indian agent for the Seattle area, reported to Governor Stevens that a number of Native people were fishing, clamming, and harvesting berries at Salmon Bay. Yesler also wrote of two Indian families who were still in the “off-limits” area of Lake Washington because one of their men, mortally wounded by a faulty musket, wanted to die and be buried on his “illahee.” Meanwhile, George Paige, another Indian agent, complained that Doc Maynard had been treating Native people like Seeathl's churchgoing sister Sally and filling prescriptions for them without first applying to Paige for authorization.Their faith in traditional medicine shaken by epidemics, some indigenous people saw visiting American doctors as a way to stay alive. (That is, if they could get past Duwamish Valley settler Luther Collins, who shot at Seattle-bound Indians so often that it merited a letter of complaint from one naval commander to Governor Stevens.) 20
     
    Work remained the primary reason Native people stayed in town after the attack, and Paige complained about this issue more than any other. His threats to withhold government rations from Indians living in town fell flat, as they were “mostly in the employ of whites, consequently etc. do not require feeding.” The source of the problem, Paige wrote, was the “intermedling” businessmen who needed workers; Doc Maynard was particularly guilty of having “tampered” with the agent's charges. This was ironic, considering that Maynard had complained about the very same issue only two months earlier when he briefly served as an Indian agent. While overseeing the relocation of Seattle's indigenous residents to remote West Point in the late summer of 1856, Maynard was confronted by Henry Yesler, who “wanted a portion of them to work for him & it would cause him much trouble to go to the said encampment after them.” Enlisting the support of Arthur Denny and other town leaders, Yesler convinced many of the Indians to stay put and encouraged others to come in from the Lake Washington backcountry. Those who did follow Maynard's orders, referred to by Yesler and Arthur Denny as “fools,” struggled through a series of brutal winter storms on the exposed and isolated spit. The reservations were no better. In November 1856, an Army captain at the Muckleshoot Agency in the Cascade foothills wrote to his superiors on behalf of Duwamish headman William that “on the reservation, they were furnished with a little flour daily by the Indian Agent, Page [ sic ], that they could get no clams there, and the consequence was that many died of hunger, and unless a number had gone to their old ground to procure Salmon, they should all have died on the reservation.” The point had been made: life in town was better for Indians, just as Indians in Seattle were often better for the town. 21
     
    By the end of 1856, it was clear that agents' efforts to