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

legislature would enact a new Marriage Act denying evencommon-law legitimacy to indigenous-white relationships. Meanwhile, Superintendent of Indian Affairs W. W. Miller published an editorial in the Washington Standard in 1861 calling for an end to the “degrading” practice of “open prostitution and concubinage” between settlers and Indians, which was “so utterly subversive of good order.” Revealing that there were also economic motives behind such a call for order, the 1866 Legitimacy Act barred mixed-race children from inheriting their father's estate if children existed from a previous marriage to a white woman. Unless white control of land and political power was protected by legislative means, many proponents of miscegenation laws feared that thousands of acres would be handed down to a generation of “mongrels” and that the “half-breed vote” would prove an embarrassment to ambitions toward statehood. (During his tenure in the territorial legislature, for example, Arthur Denny himself would advocate tirelessly against giving mixed-heritage people the vote.) For all their scope and number, though, the laws were often difficult to enforce; historian Charles Prosch complained that during the 1860s and 1870s it was difficult to find jurors and attorneys who did not have Indian family members and who were not therefore “in sympathy with the delinquents.” Just as the presence of Indians thwarted some settlers' urban visions, everyday life in Seattle Illahee resisted the “civilizing” efforts of racist laws. 30
     
    As moralizers fretted and lawmakers legislated, life went on in Seattle Illahee, including at the namesake Illahee itself. Opened in 1861 by John Pinnell, who had previously run brothels on San Francisco's Barbary Coast, the Illahee appeared the same year that Superintendent Miller's miscegenation editorial appeared in the local press. It was one of the largest buildings in Seattle, with a dance floor, a long bar, and a series of private rooms. Described in the 1870 census as “Hurdy-Gurdies,” the Indian women employed there (few if any of them from local tribal communities) were also called “sawdust women” after the Illahee's location on the fill that had obliterated Little Crossing-Over Place and its lagoon. One typically pious memoir described “bawdy houses” and “squaw brothels” resounding with the “the frantic cries of those whose sin had brought them to the verge of madness and despair,” suggestingthat such institutions were well known even to those who would never consider darkening their doors. 31
     
    On the streets and alleys south of Mill Street, the mad houses (another nickname for establishments like the Illahee), saloons, and gambling parlors of Seattle were known collectively as the Lava Beds, a name with both infernal and libidinal connotations. In Seattle's new place-story, the “sawdust women” were the antitheses to the “Mercer Girls,” and the mad houses stood in opposition to the orderly world north of Mill Street. Even the landscape reflected the difference: prim houses among cleared woods on the hills versus shanties on the sopping tideflats. At the same time, the Lava Beds fueled the urban economy, and despite all their moral outrage, critics of the Illahee lived in a town whose growth was driven by the engines of “moral darkness.” Asa Mercer, John Pinnell, and “their” women represented a kind of urban symbiosis; after all, it was not far from one side of Mill Street to the other.
     
    Never mind symbiosis, though: to the enforcers of moral authority in Seattle, the Lava Beds and the people who frequented them were threats to urban order. For newspaper editors, Christian religious leaders, and others, the presence of Indians in Seattle seemed to threaten not just the town's moral fiber but its very existence. Native people and the settlers who “sided” with them—for this struggle was very definitely perceived as having two