History of Seattle before 1900

What is now Seattle has been inhabited since at least the end of the last glacial period (c. 8000 BCE—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.[1] The area of [toˈlɑltu] ("herring house") and later [hɑˈʔɑpus] ("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.[2] The Dkh^w'Duw'Absh (People of the Inside), and the Xachua'bsh (People of the Large Lake),[3] 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),[4] 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.[5][6][7][8][9][10][11] The Dkh^w'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;[12] the first White forays for sites in the area were in the 1830s.[13]

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 400 feet (120 m) covered much of what is now Seattle. Today, none of that size remain anywhere in the world.[14][15]

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.

Top: View looking west to Yesler's Mill at the end of the street (see smokestack) and nearby cookhouse; the tall pole in the road on the right is where the Pioneer Square pergola stands today, (1874) Bottom: Yesler's Mill, stores, and taverns on Skid Road (Mill Street, now Yesler Way)

At first, Alki was larger than Seattle. "It was platted into six blocks of eight lots... and most of them had buildings on them that were in use. There weren't eight level, usable blocks in all of Seattle".[19] However, when Henry Yesler brought "financial backing from a Massillon, Ohio capitalist, John E. McLain, to start a steam sawmill once he had isolated the perfect location for such a structure",[20] he chose a Seattle location, on the waterfront where Maynard and Denny's plats met. Thereafter, Seattle would dominate the lumber industry.

Yesler selected this location because of a critical flaw with Alki as a port: "During the winter, the north wind, building up the tides in front of it, comes sweeping down the Sound out of Canada, piling mighty waves on Alki Point. Beginning with Terry... nobody has been able to build anything out in the water at Alki that will withstand those waves".[21]

The road leading down the hill to that mill, later called Mill Street and now known as Yesler Way, was originally known as the Skid Road, the route for skidding logs down to the mill, hence the term "Skid Road" or corrupted as "Skid Row" for a rundown or dilapidated urban area as the mill declined and the area collapsed with the Crash and Great Depression.[22]

Via the bargaining power of his mill, Yesler wrangled about 20,220 square feet (1,878 m²) of prime land from some of the original settlers. Besides his mill, Yesler started a cookhouse that "did more to 'set' the heart of the city in the middle of Yesler's property holdings than anything else Henry did. Henry never did make a lot of money out of his mill. It was the strategic location of his land that made him a millionaire".[23] Like many of Seattle's early entrepreneurs, Yesler was not always the most scrupulous about how he made his money; he borrowed $30,000 at 8% interest to build the mill, and repaid McLain only after McLain took Yesler to court three times.

Seattle, engraving from "Harper's New Monthly Magazine" (September 1870).

The first Seattle fortunes were founded on logs, and later milled timber, shipped south for the construction of buildings in San Francisco. Seattle itself, in the early years, was, of course, also a place of wooden buildings, and remained so until the Great Fire of June 6, 1889. Even the early system of delivering water to the settlement used hollowed-out logs for pipes. Seattle in its early years relied on the timber industry, shipping logs (and, later, milled timber) to San Francisco.

Terry sold out Alki (which, after his departure barely held on as a settlement), moved to Seattle and began acquiring land. He either owned or partially owned the first ships that allowed Seattle's timber industry to exist by providing a means to move the product to market. He eventually gave a land grant to the University of the Territory of Washington that housed its original campus and today makes the University of Washington a downtown landlord collecting rents of more than $1 million a year. He worked in politics to establish street grades, a water system, and a host of other services (which, not coincidentally, benefited him as one of the city's largest landholders).

Meanwhile, Arthur Denny became the second richest man in town, after Yesler, and got himself elected to territorial legislature. From that position, he tried unsuccessfully to get the territorial capital moved to Seattle from its then supposedly temporary location in Olympia. The other potential money prizes were the territorial penitentiary and the territorial university. When the politics all played out, Vancouver wound up as the proposed capital, Port Townsend was supposed to get the penitentiary, and Seattle got the university. Apparently, Seattle was the only real winner in this deal: to this day, Olympia remains the capital of Washington; the main state penitentiary is in Walla Walla.

The legislature had tacked on the requirement that a grant of 10 acres (40,000 m²) of land would be required for the university to be built, which they presumably thought would be sufficient to prevent its construction. However, Denny wanted his town to grow and donated the land, creating what would be "one of the biggest and most effective central core properties in the United States".[24] The University of the Territory of Washington (later the University of Washington) opened on November 4, 1861. There were barely enough students to run it as a high school, let alone as a university, but over time it grew into its originally grandiose name.

The logging town developed rapidly into a small city. Despite being officially founded by the Methodists of the Denny Party, Seattle quickly developed a reputation as a wide-open town, a haven for prostitution, liquor, and gambling. Some attribute this, at least in part, to Maynard, who arrived separately from the Denny Party, and who had a rather different view of what it would take to build a city, based on his experience in growing Cleveland, Ohio. By selling some of his land cheaply on condition that businesses be soon built upon them, he recruited professionals, such as blacksmiths and purveyors of vice, who enhanced the value of his remaining land. The city's first brothel dated from 1861 and was founded by one John Pinnell (or Pennell), who was already involved in similar business in San Francisco. Real estate records show that nearly all of the city's first 60 businesses were on, or immediately adjacent to, Maynard's plat.

Second Ave. and Marion St., Seattle, Wash., July 1889

Seattle was incorporated as a town January 14, 1865. The incorporators were Charles C. Terry, Henry L. Yesler, David T. Denny, Charles Plummer and Hiram Burnett, an officer of the largest Puget Sound lumber company Pope & Talbot. That charter was voided January 18, 1867, in response to unrest. Seattle was re-incorporated as a city on December 2, 1869. At the times of incorporation, the population was approximately 350 and 1,000, respectively.[25]

Seattle, looking south from Pine Street, 1880.

On July 14, 1873, the Northern Pacific Railway announced that they had chosen the then-small town of Tacoma over Seattle as the Western terminus of their transcontinental railroad. The railroad barons appear to have been gambling on the advantage they could gain from being able to buy up the land around their terminus cheaply instead of bringing the railroad into a more established Pacific port town.

Unwilling to be bypassed, the citizens of Seattle chartered their own railroad, the Seattle & Walla Walla, to link with the Union Pacific Railroad in eastern Washington. The S&WW never got beyond Renton, but that was far enough to connect with new coal mines, fueling industry in Seattle. The later Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Railway was only moderately more successful, although it did provide a route for logs to come to the city from as far away as Arlington, Washington, boost development of towns, and help Seattle hit the jackpot with the Northern Pacific. The Great Northern Railway chose Seattle as the terminus for its transcontinental road in 1893, winning Seattle a place in competition for freight traffic to California and across the Pacific. The Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern was, over the years, incorporated into the Northern Pacific and then the Burlington Northern railways.[26][27] The line was abandoned as a railroad in 1971 with the general decline in rail, and became in 1978 a foot and bicycle route renamed the Burke-Gilman Trail, then gradually greatly extended.

Seattle's first streetcar, 1884, at the corner of Occidental and Yesler.

Second Av. & Yesler Way, Seattle, 1904

As has been remarked, Seattle in this era was an "open" and often relatively lawless town. Although it boasted two English-language newspapers (and, for a while, a third in Norwegian), and telephones had arrived in town, lynch law sometimes prevailed (there were at least four lynchings in 1882), schools barely operated, and indoor plumbing was a rare novelty. In the low mud flats where much of the city was built, sewage was almost as likely to come in on the tide as to flow away. Potholes in the street were so bad that legend has it there was at least one fatal drowning.

A lynching in 1882 drawn by A. W. Piper.[28]

The 1882 lynchings are well described in Murray Morgan's book Skid Road. The events involved a mob defying an armed sheriff, successfully disarming the sheriff's deputies, and assaulting Judge Roger Sherman Greene, who attempted to slash the ropes by which the lynching victims were to be hanged. Judge Greene, while not doubting the actual guilt of the lynched men, was later to write that "the lynchers were co-criminal with the lynched".

Some Seattle schools in 1900.

In an era during which the Washington Territory was one of the first parts of the U.S. to (briefly) allow women's suffrage, Seattle women attempted to counter these trends and to be a civilizing influence. On April 4, 1884, 15 Seattle women founded The Ladies Relief Society to address "the number of needy and suffering cases within the limits of the city". This eventually resulted in the founding of the Seattle Children's Home, still in operation today.

Other signs of encroaching civilization were the city's first bathtub with plumbing in 1870,[29] and first streetcar in 1884, followed by a cable car from downtown over First Hill to Leschi Park in 1887. In 1885, the city passed an ordinance requiring attached sewer lines for all new residences. In 1886, the city got its first YMCA gymnasium, and in 1888 the exclusive Rainier Club was founded. On December 24, 1888, ferry service was inaugurated, connecting Seattle to West Seattle, near the location of the Denny Party's first attempt at settling at Alki and reviving that settlement. A year later, a bridge was built across Salmon Bay, providing a land route to the nearby town of Ballard, which after 17 years would be annexed to Seattle.

The relative fortunes of Seattle and Tacoma clearly show the nature of Seattle's growth. Though both Seattle and Tacoma grew at a rapid rate from 1880 to 1890, based on the strength of their timber industries, Seattle's growth as an exporter of services and manufactured goods continued for another two decades, while Tacoma's growth dropped almost to zero. The reason for this lies in Tacoma's nature as a company town and Seattle's successful avoidance of that condition.

Both Seattle and Tacoma in the 1880s were essentially lumber towns, built on the resulting export income. All over the Puget Sound there are communities that started with the same assets, timber and a port. However, Seattle's early lead with Yesler's mill and other enterprises meant that its economy was based on manufacturing as well as lumber, and was thus far more diversified than Tacoma's. The Northern Pacific Railway terminus only increased Tacoma's lumber trade instead of diversifying the economy. Meanwhile, Seattle became the hub for the region and the railroad had to come.

Chinese first arrived in Seattle around 1860. The Northern Pacific Railway completed the project of laying tracks from Lake Superior to Tacoma, Washington, in 1883, leaving many Chinese laborers without employment. In 1883, Chinese laborers played a key role in the first effort at digging the Montlake Cut to connect Lake Union's Portage Bay to Lake Washington's Union Bay.

Seattle's Chinese district, located near the present day Occidental Park, was a mixed neighborhood of residences over stores, laundries, and other retail storefronts.[30] In fall 1885, with a shortage of jobs in the West, many workers turned violently anti-Chinese, complaining of overly cheap labor competition. In the Pacific Northwest, this had the unusual character that the anti-Chinese mobs included significant numbers of the native Indians as well as European-Americans.

The first massacre of Chinese occurred at Rock Springs, Wyoming, September 2, 1885. On September 7, Chinese hop-pickers were massacred in the Squak valley near present-day Issaquah. Similar incidents occurred in the nearby mining camps at Coal Creek and Black Diamond. Many Chinese headed from these isolated rural areas into the cities, but it did them little good: on October 24, a mob burned a large portion of Seattle's Chinatown; on November 3, a mob of 300 expelled the Chinese in Tacoma (loading them into boxcars with surprisingly little actual violence) before moving on to force similar expulsions in smaller towns.[31][32][33]

Violent opposition to the Chinese at this time was inseparable from labor union organizing. The pro-labor Seattle Call routinely described the Chinese in brutally racist terms; leading figures in the anti-Chinese movement included Knights of Labor organizer Dan Cronin and Seattle socialist agitator Mary Kenworthy; the utopian socialist George Venable Smith was also of this party. Nor did the Chinese have many strong defenders among the wealthier classes, who, however, mostly favored a more orderly departure of the Chinese to massacre and riot (the policy of Henry Yesler, who was serving as mayor at this time).[34]

A contemporary depiction of events related to the anti-Chinese riot of 1886.

Among the few defenders of the rule of law were the Methodist Episcopal Ministers' Association and Judge Thomas Burke. Burke, an Irish immigrant and generally a friend of labor, was nonetheless a stronger defender of the Constitution; he also spoke out that his fellow Irish should identify with the Chinese as fellow immigrants, a view which fell almost entirely on deaf ears.[35]

On February 7, 1886, well-organized anti-Chinese "order committees" descended on Seattle's Chinatown, claiming to be health inspectors, declaring Chinese-occupied buildings to be unfit for habitation, rousting out the residents and herding them down to the harbor, where the Queen of the Pacific was docked. The police were willing to intervene only to the point of preventing the Chinese from being physically harmed, not to challenging the mob. It is quite probable that if ship's captain Jack Alexander had been willing simply to board the Chinese and take them away, the mob would entirely have ruled the day; however, he was not in the business of hauling non-paying passengers. The mob raised several hundred dollars, 86 Chinese were boarded, but this delay gave the mayor, Judge Burke, the U.S. Attorney, and others time both to rally the Home Guard and to serve Alexander with a writ of habeas corpus. A plot to deport the Chinese by rail was foiled when Sheriff McGraw threatened to prosecute the railroad superintendent for kidnapping.[36]

The following day, Judge Greene made it clear that those Chinese who wished to remain would be protected, but by now, after what they had been through, all but sixteen preferred to leave. Alexander, by now, "was anxious to keep his operations strictly legal",[37] and would board only the 196 passengers for which his ship was rated, slightly more than half of the Chinese who were ready to leave. Possibly due to poor communication, the anti-Chinese faction were unsatisfied; a resulting scuffle resulted in one dead and four others wounded among the anti-Chinese faction, and martial law was imposed. Ultimately, the bulk of the Chinese remained in Seattle, and the U.S. government "out of humane consideration and without reference to liability" paid out $276,619.15 to the Chinese government, but nothing to the victims themselves.[38]

The early Seattle era came to a stunning halt with the Great Seattle Fire of June 6, 1889. It burned 29 city blocks, destroying most of the central business district; no one, however, perished in the flames, and the city quickly rebounded from the destruction. Thanks in part to credit arranged by Jacob Furth (as well as, according to Speidel, brothel-owner Lou Graham), Seattle rebuilt from the ashes with astounding rapidity. A new zoning code resulted in a downtown of brick and stone buildings, rather than wood. In the single year after the fire, the city grew from 25,000 to 40,000 inhabitants, largely because of the enormous number of construction jobs suddenly created.[39]

Tinfoiling Rainier Beer bottles, 1900.

The Pacific Northwest economy during the nineteenth century was heavily rooted in extractive industries, mainly logging. Still, Seattle was becoming a city, and union organizing arrived first in the form of a skilled craft union. In 1882, Seattle printers formed the Seattle Typographical Union Local 202. Dockworkers followed in 1886, cigarmakers in 1887, tailors in 1889, and both brewers and musicians in 1890. Even the newsboys unionized in 1892, followed by more organizing, mostly of craft unions.

According to various analyses and as evident through general readings in news coverage of the time, the history of labor in this period is inseparable from the issue of anti-Chinese vigilantism, as discussed above. A rough-and-ready approach to labor organizing was typical of the period, and there is no question that white Seattle-area laborers at this time saw cheap Chinese labor as their prime competition and strove to eliminate it by eliminating the Chinese immigrants.

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The Central Waterfront during the Gold Rush (1897)

Railroad Avenue (now Alaskan Way) along the Seattle waterfront, 1900

Seattle, as well as the rest of the nation, was hard hit by the Panic of 1893 and, to a lesser extent, the Panic of 1896. Unlike many other cities, it soon found salvation in the form of becoming the main transportation and supply center for stampeders heading for the Klondike gold rush. When the steamer SS Portland arrived at Schwabacher's Wharf in Seattle July 17, 1897, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer scooped all other U.S. newspapers with the story that a "ton of gold" had arrived from Alaska. A publicity campaign engineered largely by Erastus Brainerd successfully convinced the world that Seattle was the place to be outfitted for the journey to Alaska, and Seattle became a household name, literally overnight. The miners mined the gold. Seattle mined the miners.[40]

Seattle's relationship with Alaska during this period was generally one of rapacity. Besides the mining, on October 18, 1899 in Pioneer Square, a Chamber of Commerce "Committee of Fifteen", just back from a goodwill visit to Alaska, proudly unveiled a 60-foot (18 m) totem pole from Fort Tongass. The problem was, the pole had been stolen from the Tlingit village of Gaash on Cape Fox. A federal grand jury in Alaska indicted eight of Seattle's most prominent citizens for theft of government property. A nominal fine was assessed.[41] The village was repaid when the original burned and the Chamber of Commerce commissioned a replacement—and paid twice. "Thank you for the check", wrote the Gaash village leaders. "That was payment for the first one. Send another check for the replacement".

• Duwamish tribe
• Mother Damnable
• Rock Springs massacre
• Timeline of Seattle, 19th century

Much of the content of this page is from "Seattle: Booms and Busts", by Emmett Shear; Shear has granted blanket permission for material from that paper to be reused in Wikipedia.

• Anderson, Ross; Green, Sara Jean (2001-05-27). "A culture slips away". Seattle History: 150 Years: Seattle By and By. The Seattle Times. p. 1. Archived from the original on 2006-05-07. Retrieved 2006-04-21.
  and Anderson, Ross; Green, Sara Jean (2001-05-27). "The settlers saw trees, endless trees. The natives saw the spaces between the trees". Seattle History: 150 Years: Seattle By and By. The Seattle Times. p. 2. Archived from the original on 2006-05-18. Retrieved 2006-04-21.
• Boyd, Robert (1999). The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline Among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874. Seattle and Vancouver: University of Washington Press and University of British Columbia Press. ISBN 0-295-97837-6. (alk. paper).
• Cline, Scott, City Archivist (n.d., ~2006; second edition). "Annexed Cities (9100)". "Seattle Municipal Archives Record Descriptions", A Guide To The Archives Of The City Of Seattle. Retrieved 2006-04-21. Check date values in: |date= (help); External link in |work= (help)
• Dailey, Tom. "Duwamish-Seattle". "Coast Salish Villages of Puget Sound". Retrieved 2006-04-21. External link in |work= (help)
  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, 1–7 August 1984 [ref. 8];
  "Seattle Before Seattle" by David Buerge in the Seattle Weekly, 17–23 December 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"
• "Decatur". Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. Department of the Navy, Navy Historical Center. Archived from the original on 2006-08-20. Retrieved 2006-07-21.
• Dorpat, Paul (1984, 2nd ed. 1994). "42". Seattle, now & then. Seattle: Tartu Publications. ISBN 0-9614357-0-4. (pbk.). Check date values in: |year= (help)
  2d edition of vol. I of III
• Lange, Greg (2000-10-15). "Seattle and King County's First White Settlers". HistoryLink.org Essay 1660. Retrieved 2006-04-21.
• Lange, Greg (4 February 2003 [rewritten since 8 December 2000]). "Smallpox Epidemic of 1862 among Northwest Coast and Puget Sound Indians". HistoryLink.org Essay 5171. Retrieved 2006-07-21. Check date values in: |date= (help)
  Lange referenced a very extensive list.
  Summary article
  • Lange, Greg (2000-12-08). "Smallpox kills 14,000 Northwest Coast Indians from April to December 1862". HistoryLink.org Essay 3176. Retrieved . Check date values in: |access-date= (help)
    Lange referenced Lange, "Smallpox Epidemic of 1862 among Northwest Coast and Puget Sound Indians" , HistoryLink.org Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History. Accessed 8 December 2000.
• Morgan, Murray (1960 (originally published 1951, revised 1960)). Skid Road: Seattle -- Her first hundred years. New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-295-95846-4. Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Morgan, Murray (1982 (originally published 1951, 1982 revised and updated, first illustrated edition)). Skid Road: an Informal Portrait of Seattle. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. ISBN 0-295-95846-4. Check date values in: |date= (help)
• "The people and their land". Puget Sound Native Art and Culture. Seattle Art Museum. c. 2003-07-04 per "Native Art of the Northwest Coast: Collection Insight". Retrieved 2006-04-21. Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Phelps, Myra L. (1978). Public works in Seattle. Seattle: Seattle Engineering Department. ISBN 0-9601928-1-6.
• Sale, Roger (1976). Seattle: Past To Present. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. ISBN 029595521X.
• Speidel, William C. ("Bill") (1978). Doc Maynard: the man who invented Seattle. Seattle: Nettle Creek Publishing Company. pp. 196–197, 200. ISBN 0-914890-02-6.
  Speidel provides a substantial bibliography with extensive primary sources.
• Speidel, William C. ("Bill") (1967). Sons of the profits; or, There's no business like grow business: the Seattle story, 1851-1901. Seattle: Nettle Creek Publishing Company. pp. 196–197, 200. ISBN 0-914890-00-X.
  Speidel provides a substantial bibliography with extensive primary sources.
• Speidel, William C. ("Bill") (1989). Through the Eye of the Needle. Seattle: Nettle Creek Publishing Company. ISBN 0-914890-04-2..
• Talbert, Paul. "SkEba'kst: The Lake People and Seward Park". The History of Seward Park. SewardPark.org. Archived from the original on 2005-12-14. Retrieved 2006-06-06.
• Wilma, David (24 January 2001). "Seattle pioneers petition against a reservation on the Black River for the Duwamish tribe in 1866". HistoryLink.org Essay 2955. Retrieved 2006-04-21.
  Wilma referenced "Petition: To the Honorable Arthur A. Denny, Delegate to Congress from Washington Territory," n.d., National Archives Roll 909, "Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824-81";
  Pioneer Association of the State of Washington, "A Petition to Support Recognition of The Duwamish Indians as a 'Tribe', June 18, 1988, in possession of Ken Tollefson, Seattle, Washington.
• Wilma, David (2000-01-01). "Stolen totem pole unveiled in Seattle's Pioneer Square on October 18, 1899". HistoryLink.org Essay 2076. Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, Seattle Unit. Retrieved 2006-07-16.
  Wilam referenced Paul Dorpat, Seattle Now and Then Vol. 2 (Seattle: Tartu Publications, 1984), 32-35;
  Joseph H. Wherry, The Totem Pole Indians, (New York: Wilfred Funk, Inc., 1964), 64, 89;
  William C. Speidel, Sons of the Profits (Seattle: Nettle Creek Publishing Co., 1967), 329-331;
  Viola Garfield, Seattle's Totem Poles (Bellevue, WA: Thistle Press, 1996), 9;
  Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation, Data on the History of Seattle Park System Vol. 4 (Seattle: Seattle Parks Department, 1978);
  James William Clise, "Personal Memoirs 1855-1935" Mimeograph, Altadena, California, 1935, Seattle Public Library.

• HistoryLink.org Encyclopedia of Washington State History provides a collection of articles on Seattle and Washington State history, unparalleled in its niche.
• Seattle Museum of History and Industry. With the Seattle Room at the Seattle Public Library, these host the most extensive archives about Seattle.
• Washington State History Museum, Washington State Historical Society
• University of Washington Libraries: Digital Collections:
  • Boyd and Braas Photographs 88 photographs, c. 1888–1893, of early Seattle, including the waterfront and street scenes, Madrona and Leschi parks, Native American hop pickers, scenes of the aftermath of the Great Seattle Fire of June 6, 1889, and portraits of Seattle pioneers.
  • Frank La Roche Photographs. 312 photographs c. 1888-1910 depicting scenes of the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush, A small photograph album (ca. 1891) used as a sales tool. Photographed by Frank La Roche, it contains an historical photographic record of early Seattle and its expansion northwards along the shores of Lake Union, Seattle, Washington state, Alaska, western United States, and Canada.
  • Theodore E. Peiser Photographs. 140 images from the later part of the 19th century to about 1907. Among his subjects were images of troops preparing to embark from Fort Lawton to China in 1900, the Territorial University (later University of Washington), and early Seattle scenes.
  • Prosch Seattle Views Album. 169 images by Thomas Prosch, one of Seattle's earliest pioneers, documenting the early history of Seattle and vicinity, c. 1851–1906.
  • Seattle Photographs Ongoing database of over 1,700 historical photographs of Seattle with special emphasis on images depicting neighborhoods, recreational activities including baseball, the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, "The Great Snow of 1916", theaters and transportation.
  • Arthur Churchill Warner Photographs. Images by the pioneer photographer A.C. Warner, from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, of Seattle conventional street scenes, waterfront activity, city parks, and regrading of downtown.