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

sides—were portrayed as having the potential to quite literally destroy Seattle. Two vectors of destruction, almost apocalyptic in their scope, were of particular concern: disease and fire. In the minds of many influential Seattleites, both contagion and conflagration had their origins—and scapegoats—in the town's mad houses and sawdust women. Long after the Battle of Seattle, it seemed that indigenous people could still sack the place.
     
    The earliest extant text printed in Seattle, dating from 1872, is a handbill warning of an impending visitation by the dread smallpox, which remained a potent reality in Puget Sound a century after its first terrible appearance. This was especially true in the filthy, congested cities Americans and Canadians had built. In the early 1860s, for example, another wave of Comes Out All Over had traveled from town to town, arriving in Seattle from San Francisco via Victoria, British Columbia.As before, indigenous communities bore the brunt of the microbes, which killed hundreds (if not thousands) of Indians in 1862 alone. Native people were at a loss as to how to stop it. Settler Joseph Crow, for example, recalled the unsuccessful efforts of a Native doctor to heal patients in a house at Front and King Streets on the Lava Beds during an outbreak in 1864—after which the doctor, his skills now seen as useless, disappeared. But if Indians were the primary victims of epidemics, they were also the primary scapegoats. Between the lines of the handbill warning of disease lay powerful ideas about race, sex, and urban destiny. 32
     
    In January 1876, for instance, two Native women died of smallpox in Seattle. What to us seems like a small outbreak inspired the Seattle Daily Intelligencer to decry a much more pressing issue: the traffic in “miserable prostitutes” by men like the “vile wretch” who had brought the two women from Victoria. And so when a Native woman died of smallpox in a building south of Mill Street and another was found to be infected, the press placed the blame squarely on the residents of the Lava Beds and their supposed moral failings:
     
It is not generally deemed advisable to mention the presence of this loathsome disease in a city, but we believe that to be…an injustice to the public, who should be seasonably apprised of contagion in any quarter and thus be enabled to guard against it. Aside from this, we have another reason for alluding to the subject, and that is to call immediate attention to the necessity of our city authorities taking prompt steps to provide for the care of other cases, which must occur from exposure to this, and to adopt some stringent regulations relative to allowing any Indians from British Columbia and elsewhere, to be landed at this port, or to visit or reside in this city. As yet nothing has been done in the way of preventing these filthy animals from visiting our city at will, and bringing… what may become a pestilence in our midst.
     
    Adding “beastly squaws” and “filthy animals” to a racist lexicon already inhabited by “sawdust women” and “squaw men,” the editorial also posed a central question about urban progress: were Seattle's legal and medical establishments mature enough to deal with this crisis? Law enforcement were still in its infancy and Bostons still regularly died duringepidemics; those facts, combined with still-fresh memories of vast mortality among the Indians, put very real fear in the hearts of settlers. If ecological imperialism—the introduction of new species like smallpox to new worlds like Salt Water—had made Seattle's founding possible, the fear now was that it could unmake it as well. 33
    In response to this new outbreak, the city council ordered the mayor to pass laws preventing the spread of contagion to other Seattleites. If the official urban powers could not deal with the problem, the Daily Intelligencer warned, other forces might be brought to bear. Concerned citizens, the paper