Skid Road

An Informal Portrait of Seattle

Murray Morgan

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780295743493
• eBook ISBN: 9780295743509
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Skid Road tells the story of Seattle "from the bottom up, " offering an informal and engaging portrait of the Emerald City's first century, as seen through the lives of some of its most colorful citizens. With his trademark combination of deep local knowledge, precision, and wit, Murray Morgan traces the city's history from its earliest days as a hacked-from-the-wilderness timber town, touching on local tribes, settlers, the lumber and railroad industries, the great fire of 1889, the Alaska gold rush, flourishing dens of vice, the 1919 general strike, the 1962 World's Fair, and the stuttering growth of the 1970s and '80s. Through it all, Morgan shows us that Seattle's one constant is change and that its penchant for reinvention has always been fueled by creative, if sometimes unorthodox, residents. With a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Mary Ann Gwinn, this redesigned edition of Murray Morgan's classic work is a must for those interested in how Seattle got to where it is today.

1

DOC MAYNARD AND THE INDIANS, 1852–1873

1.

In 1850 Dr. David Swinson Maynard was living in Lorain County, Ohio; he was forty-two years old and in debt. On the morning of April 9 he shook hands with his wife Lydia, whom in twenty years of marriage he had come to dislike, kissed his two children, mounted his gray mule, and rode off toward California, where he hoped to recoup his fortunes. Maynard intended to join another Ohioan, Colonel John B. Weller, in the gold fields, but kindness and cholera sidetracked him. Instead of panning for nuggets he became one of the founding fathers of Seattle and in some ways the most influential figure of the early days on Elliott Bay.

Maynard was a man of parts, a warm human being whose worst faults grew out of his greatest virtue, his desire to be helpful; and few people ever got into more trouble trying to help others. He went broke being helpful in Ohio, where during the 1830s he ran a medical school. There is no record that the Vermont-born doctor ever dunned a patient, and he not only extended unlimited credit but signed his patients’ promissory notes. His school went under during the panic of 1837, and so did the projects of a number of friends he had sponsored; he found himself saddled with more than thirty thousand dollars of other people’s debts. For twelve years he labored to pay off his creditors and feed his family; but when his children were old enough to look after themselves, Maynard found irresistible the appeal of California, where a man might unearth a fortune. The fact that the new El Dorado lay half a continent away from his wife made it no less attractive. The first entry in his travel diary expressed the intention of many another man who eventually settled in Seattle: “Left here for California.”

Maynard was still intent on California when he reached St. Joseph on the Missouri. He was traveling light. He had a mule, a buffalo robe, a few books, a box of surgical instruments and some medicines; he had almost no cash and he relied on his profession to pay his way. At St. Joseph he attached himself to a caravan of wagons bound for the West. They crossed the river on May 16. Four days later the doctor scribbled in his journal: “Passed some new graves.”

Death was part of the pioneer experience. Day after day, as the wagons rolled west across prairies green with spring, Maynard counted the graves beside the trail:

MAY 21. Passed the grave of A. Powers, of Peoria County, Illinois, died on the 20th inst. about sixty-five miles west of St. Joseph. Traveled about eighteen miles. Was called to visit three cases of cholera. One died, a man, leaving a wife and child, from Illinois, poor. He lived seven hours after being taken.

MAY 22. Rainy. Fleming and Curtis taken with the cholera. Wake all night. Called upon just before we stopped to see a man with cholera, who died soon after.

MAY 23. Curtis and Fleming better but not able to start in the morning.

MAY 24. Camped at Blue River. One grave, child eleven years old. Forded the stream. Raised our loading. Got my medicine wet.

The doctor himself was touched with the disease. He said nothing, not wanting to worry his companions, but he confided his trouble to the journal:

MAY 29. Started at six o’clock, going about eighteen miles. Water scarce and poor. Curtis gave the milk away. Went without dinner. A drove of buffaloes were seen by a company ahead. Left the team and went on ahead. Saw one buffalo and one antelope. Took sick with the cholera. No one meddled or took any notice of it but George Moon.

MAY 30. Feel better. Start on foot. Continue to get better. Travel up the Little Blue twenty miles. Wood, water, and feed tolerable.

That week they passed Fort Kearney, a low, wood-and-mud building on a sandy plain that rose into sandhills. Maynard wrote with wonder of the tame buffalo grazing near the fort. A spring cloudburst caught them on the Platte and for two days the party shivered, unable to get a fire going; there was more cholera.

JUNE 4. A man died with the cholera in sight of us. He was a Mason. I was called to see him but too late.

JUNE 5. Have a bad headache; take a blue pill.

JUNE 6. Unship our load and cross a creek. One death, a Missourian, from cholera. Go eighteen miles. Pass four graves in one place. Two more of the same train are ready to die. Got a pint and a half of brandy. Earn $2.20.

The next day cholera changed Maynard’s life. But at the time Maynard was most impressed by the fact that he earned nearly nine dollars, doctoring.

JUNE 7. Start late. Find plenty of doctoring to do. Stop at noon to attend some persons sick with cholera. One was dead before I got there and two died before the next morning. They paid me $8.75. Deceased were Israel Broshears and William Broshears and Mrs. Morton, the last being mother to the bereaved widow of Israel Broshears. We are eighty-five or ninety miles west of Fort Kearney.

JUNE 8. Left the camp of distress on the open prairie at half-past four in the morning. The widow was ill both in body and mind. I gave them slight encouragement by promising to return and assist them along. I overtook our company at noon twenty miles away. Went back and met the others in trouble enough. I traveled with them until night. Again overtook our company three miles ahead. Made arrangements to be ready to shift my duds to the widow’s wagon when they come up in the morning.

The Broshears’ train was headed for Tumwater at the extreme southern tip of Puget Sound, where the widow Broshears’ brother, Michael T. Simmons, had settled five years earlier, in 1845—the first American to homestead on the Sound. Maynard agreed to stay with her until she reached there. The doctor, who had never so much as switched an ox, now found himself in charge of a team with five yoke of oxen and two yoke of cows. He was also physician to a group that was deathly ill; even with his ministrations, the party had seven deaths from cholera in two weeks. And he was the newcome leader of a group split by dissension; several members wanted to turn back. For two weeks after shifting his duds to the widow’s wagon the doctor was too busy even to write in his journal—the only lapse in his record—but by the Fourth of July things were in good enough order for him to note: “We celebrated a little.”

They kept moving. For two months the Broshears’ train edged westward, four miles, ten miles, occasionally twenty miles a day. Maynard experienced the routine hardships of the Trail and knew too the occasional joys of good water, of fresh fish, or a day without petty disaster. He underwent the ordeal that gave the settlers of the Pacific Northwest a hard core of mutual understanding. Nearly every family that came to Seattle during the early days had passed through the trials by dust and dysentery that Maynard, writing by firelight or in the early dawn, penciled in his little journal:

Dragged the team through sand eight miles to Devil’s Gate…. Oxen sick; vomiting like dogs…. Discovered a party of Indians coming upon us. We heard that they had just robbed one train. Prepared for an attack. When within half a mile they sent two of their number to see how strong we were. After viewing us carefully left us for good…. Kept guard for fear of Mormons….

Traveled in sand all day, and camped without water or feed…. I was well worn out, as well as the team, from watching at night. A miserable company for help….

Traveled all day and night. Dust from one to twelve inches deep on the ground and above the wagon a perfect cloud. Crossed a plain twelve miles, and then went over a tremendous mountain….

Team falling behind. Found them too weak to travel…. Left camp at six-thirty, after throwing Lion and doctoring his foot, which Mrs. Broshears, George and myself did alone….

Indians are plenty…. Was called to see a sick pappoose…. Got to Fort Hall. Found the mosquitoes so bad that it was impossible to keep the oxen or ourselves on that spot. Oh, God! the mosquitoes.

Sick all day and under the influence of calomel pills…. Started late on Lion’s account. Drove two and a half miles, and he gave up the ghost. We then harnessed Nigger on the lead….

Lost our water keg. Sixteen miles to water. Road very stony…. Traveled six miles to Salmon Falls … bought salmon of the Indians. This place is delightful. The stream is alive with fish of the first quality, and wild geese are about as tame as the natives…. Watched team all night. Am nearly sick but no one knows it but myself….

Crossed creek and climbed the worst of all hills. Went up three times to get our load up…. Geared the wagon shorter. Threw overboard some of our load…. Cut off the wagon bed and again overhauled…. Left this morning a distressed family who were without team or money and nearly sick from trouble…. Left Brandy and Polly to die on the road….

Here we began climbing the Blue Mountains, and if they don’t beat the devil…. Came over the mountains and through dense forest of pine, twenty miles. Traded for a mare and colt and Indian dress. Paid for the things a brass kettle, two blankets, a shirt, etc….

Bought a fine spotted horse, which cost me $55…. Came to the Columbia River twenty miles through sand all the way. This night I had my horse stolen. I was taken about sunset with dysentery, which prostrated me very much.

Drove to the Dalles. Sold the cattle to a Mr. Wilson for $110 and prepared to start for Portland down the river. Sat up nearly all night and watched the goods.

Loaded up our boat and left. Came down about fifteen miles and landed for the night. We buried a child which we found upon the bank of the river, drowned…. Hired a team and got our goods down below the rapids. Engaged Chenoweth to start out with us immediately, but he, being a scoundrel, did not do as he agreed.

Hired an Indian to carry us down in his canoe to Fort Vancouver. We had a hard time, in consequence of the Indian being so damned lazy. By rowing all the way myself we got to the fort at 1 in the morning as wet as the devil….

Left the fort with two Indians who took us down the Columbia thirty-eight miles to the mouth of the Cowalitz, which is a very hard stream to ascend…. Came to Plomondon’s landing about noon. Obtained horses and started out ten miles to Mr. J. R. Jackson’s…. Made our way twenty miles through dense forest and uneven plain twenty-five miles to M. T. Simmons’s, our place of destination, where we were received with that degree of brotherly kindness which seemed to rest our weary limbs, and promise an asylum for us in our worn-out pilgrimage.

2.

Maynard, of course, was in love with the widow Broshears, and he quickly fell in love with the Puget Sound country. The weather was wet but mild; after the dust and heat of the plains, after the cold of the mountains, after the alkali water of the plains, Maynard did not mind the rain. He liked the gray, overcast days when the firs and hemlocks on the near-by hills combed the bottom of the heavy clouds that pulsed in from the Pacific. The salt water fascinated him: the Sound stretched northward for more than a hundred miles from the Simmons’ homestead, a quiet inland sea, its shoreline charted but its surrounding hills almost unexplored. It was good too, after the weeks on the trail, to relax in a house with windproof walls, to listen to rain on the cedar shakes, to sleep in a bed, to eat white bread and fresh vegetables, to talk to Catherine Broshears, who was beautiful, or even to her sister-in-law Elizabeth Simmons, who was not.

The brotherly kindness shown by Simmons on the party’s arrival did not extend to Maynard after Simmons detected that his sister’s interest in the doctor exceeded that of an employer for her ox-team driver. It did not matter to Simmons that Maynard was a doctor and a fellow Democrat—he was also a married man. Simmons suggested that Maynard move on to California before the other fellows dug all the gold.

Maynard stalled. He had heard rumors that coal had been discovered on the lower Sound and he wanted to investigate. In mid-November he hired some Indians to paddle him north on a prospecting trip. The Sound stretches south between the Olympic Mountains and the Cascades. To the west the Olympics sheer up from the water “big and abrupt as a cow in a bathtub,” as one early traveler put it; they were almost black with fir and hemlock, and though explorers had located several good anchorages along the western shore, the absence of any extensive farm lands discouraged settlement. Like the Hudson’s Bay people who had covered this territory before him, Maynard skirted the eastern shore as he paddled north. The Cascades stood well back from the water; a plain nearly thirty miles wide stretched between the salt water and the rugged foothills. The plain was forested and useless for farming, but mountain streams flowing from the glaciers on Mount Rainier and Mount Baker had cut several valleys, which offered broad acres of rich, volcanic soil—the Nisqually, already cultivated by the Hudson’s Bay Company; the Puyallup, twenty miles to the north, and just beyond the Puyallup, the Duwamish.

Maynard was headed still farther north, to the Stilquamish, a swift stream that enters the Sound at a point due east of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the channel to the Pacific Ocean. His journal of the trip is matter-of-fact, but it is not hard to imagine the feelings of a man from the plains as he rode in the black-painted cedar dugout over the gentle waters of the Sound, the islands dark with Douglas fir, the wind sharp with salt and sweet with the scent of red cedar. The great mountain rose in the east, its white cone streaked with blue-black ridges, and to the west stood the Olympics, white with the early snow. Seals bobbed up to stare round eyed at the black canoe, and porpoises curved through the waters ahead. Just below the surface floated translucent jellyfish, and when the Indians paddled close to shore Maynard could see giant starfish clinging to the rocks, and anemones, pink and green and gold, moving in the currents. Even the barnacles were open and waved pale tentacles in search of food. And fish! When the canoe drifted through the Narrows on the outgoing tide Maynard could look down and see salmon lying head to current in the deep water below the clay cliffs. The slap of fish breaking surface sounded almost as steadily as the beat of the cedar paddles. Gulls wheeled overhead on steady wings, turning their smooth heads slowly as they scanned the water for prey. When the canoe skirted the shore, cranes flapped heavily into flight. Sometimes mallard and coot skittered along the green surface, or a helldiver flipped under.

The party landed and bought salmon and potatoes and mats from some Indians who were smoking clams near the beach. They camped for the night—too low the first night and the tide drove them off, to spend the night on the water. Maynard lost a skillet cover and got his gun wet.

The next day a southwest wind came up and rain fell. The Indians raised a sail, and the dugout ran with the waves under a flat roof of clouds that stretched from the dark islands to the dark shore. In the rain Maynard coasted past the sandy spit where, within a year, Seattle would be founded, and in the rain reached the Stilquamish. The record of his exploration for coal is lost. He is believed to have found some traces and, on his return to the upper Sound, to have sold the pages of his journal describing the location to another explorer.

Maynard settled in a small community on Budd Inlet, three miles north of Tumwater. The place, now called Olympia, was then known officially as Smithter, though most people called it Smithfield, both names honoring Levi Smith, a Presbyterian divinity student who settled there in 1848 but lost his life when he suffered an epileptic attack in a canoe. While Maynard was living in Smithter, Congress awarded the town a customs house, and it became the first port of entry on the Sound.

The town prospered—but not Maynard, whose money ran out. There were not enough people on the upper Sound to support a doctor, so he borrowed an ax and between calls on the widow Broshears he cut wood. He kept cutting for half a year, and by the fall of 1851 he had four hundred cords piled at tidewater. Maynard persuaded Leonard Felker, captain of the brig Franklin Adams, to haul him and his wood to San Francisco. There the wood brought him more than two thousand dollars. He used the money to buy a stock of trading goods from a wrecked ship.

Before returning north Maynard looked up his old friend John Weller, who was reconverting himself to politics after serving as a colonel during the Mexican War. Weller tried to talk Maynard into staying in California, but the doctor protested that life in the gold camps was too rowdy: in two days he had been called to treat four gunshot victims. He would return to Puget Sound, where life would be more orderly. Weller told Maynard of two other Ohioans, Henry Yesler and John Stroble, who shared Maynard’s conviction that western Oregon had a future and who planned to start a sawmill somewhere in the Northwest. Weller said to Maynard, “Doctor, let me advise you. You have the timber up there that we want and must have. Give up your profession. Get machinery and start a sawmill. By selling us lumber you’ll make a hundred dollars for every one that you may possibly make in doctoring, and you’ll soon be rich.”

He was right, of course, but Maynard did not have enough money to buy machinery and he was tired of cutting trees by hand. He sailed back on the Franklin Adams with his stock of trading goods. Going down the Sound, the vessel passed a cluster of cabins on a spit near the mouth of Duwamish River, a settlement which, Maynard was told, was derisively called New York-Alki, meaning “New York-pretty soon.”

Maynard rented a one-room building in Olympia and opened his store. His business methods were unorthodox, even for the frontier. Since he had purchased his goods at half price, he sold them at half the price asked by other merchants. If he was feeling particularly good—and alcohol often made him feel particularly good—he was inclined to give his customers presents; he offered unlimited credit. Maynard was popular with the townsfolk but not with other merchants, among them Mike Simmons, who felt that Maynard was not only hellbent for bankruptcy but was a bad influence on customers. His business rivals suggested that Maynard would probably be happier selling his goods somewhere else.

One day an Indian named Sealth (pronounced See-alth and sometimes See-attle), the tyee, or chief, of the tribe living at the mouth of the Duwamish River (which was also known as the Duwamps and the Tuwamish and, to everyone’s confusion, as the White), paddled up to Olympia on a shopping trip. Sealth was a big, ugly man with steel-gray hair hanging to his shoulders; he wore a breechclout and a faded blue blanket. His arrival caused some stir in the little community, for the white...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• A Note about the Illustrations
• Preface to the 1982 Edition
• One Man’s Seattle
• 1 Doc Maynard and the Indians, 1852–1873
• 2 Mary Kenworthy and the Railroads, 1873–1893
• 3 John Considine and the Box-Houses, 1893–1910
• 4 Hiram Gill and the Newspapers, 1910–1918
• 5 Dave Beck: Labor and Politics, 1918–1960
• Index
• Illustrations
• About the Author