Title: Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle

Author: Murray Morgan

Completed: Aug 2024 (Full list of books)

Overview: Since moving back to Seattle in 2017, I’ve been reading different books about the history of this place, including about the people here or biking here and even walking in Seattle. This book was a wonderful addition to my collection and covers a much broader scope than most of the other books. It tells the tales of many of the pivotal characters from Seattle’s history, both those with streets named after them, but also those whose names we’ve mostly forgotten. Like with any good book about a place, reading this introduced me to two more Seattle books that are now on my list to read at some point. This is such an amazing town

Highlights:

• (Preface, about the author) Murray and Rosa had bought a kayak at Lilywhites in London and put in at the Danube’s headwaters at Ulm, traveling south by southwest through Europe, more or less disconnected from the news. Floating down 1,200 miles of the Danube in a kayak seemed like a lark, even if neither of them had ever paddled a kayak before, and Murray couldn’t swim. “We just decided to go until we ran out of money,”
• Seattle’s attraction for the misfit has shaped the city, for good and sometimes for ill. We are loath to judge, sometimes to a fault. We welcome new ideas, even if they are goofy. Our tolerance for the offbeat and the adventurous has shaped our politics, our booming (when it’s not busting) economy, our distaste for organized anything, notably religion.
• The bridge over Tacoma’s Thea Foss Waterway, where Murray worked as a tender as he wrote Skid Road, had been renamed the Murray Morgan Bridge.
• The half-million people in Seattle tend to look on Alaska as their very own. “We’re the only city in the world that owns a territory,” a booster once remarked, and the 128,643 Alaskans agree, though they are not happy about it. Seattle stores display sub-arctic clothing, though Puget Sound winters are usually mild; Seattle curio shops feature totem poles, though no Puget Sound Indian ever carved one; Seattle radio stations carry programs especially for Alaska, though Seattle is as far from the territory as New York is from Hudson Bay.
• A canal connects Lake Washington and Lake Union with the Sound; the second largest locks in the world raise ships from salt to fresh water.
• Here stood the mill that, in the (18-) fifties, meant Seattle was really a town, not just a hope; and here in the doldrum era of the seventies Val Wildman sold Seattle’s first stein of nickel beer. This is Yesler Way. Once it was called Mill Street, and before that it was simply the skid road, the route along which the ox-teams skidded logs to Yesler’s Mill in the Sag.
• Today Yesler Way is still a dividing line of sorts: to your left as you climb the steep street are the big new buildings, symbols of Seattle’s dominance over a state and a territory and its dreams of controlling the trade of a distant continent; to your right, in the redbrick buildings untopped by neon, along the unswept sidewalks where the rejected men stand and stare, are the symbols of the past, the monuments to men who dreamed the wrong dreams or, like Doc Maynard, the right dreams too soon.
• they all seem to have had the same notion about the role of a chief: a chief had little authority. He was merely a rich man with some eloquence, a man whose opinions carried more weight than those of his fellow tribesmen. Since wealth was hereditary, the chieftaincy often stayed in one family, but it did not necessarily go to the eldest son; the tribe might agree on a younger son, on an uncle, on anyone who was rich, or at least generous and wise, or at least persuasive. A tribe might agree to have more than one chief; nearly all had one leader for peace and another who took over during war.
• Denny was a Whig and a teetotaler; Maynard was a Democrat and a bit of a drunk. The doctor had been hitting the bottle when he conferred with Denny and insisted that since his streets not only paralleled the bay but ran due north and south, they should be continued across the Denny-Boren holdings. Denny, while admitting that it would be neat to have the town four-square with the compass, felt that it would be more convenient to have the streets in his section parallel the water too. “Maynard had taken enough to make him feel that he was not only monarch of all he surveyed but what Boren and I had surveyed as well,” Denny remarked dryly. No agreement was reached. The next morning, the day of filing, Denny turned in his plat first; some hours later Maynard, nursing a hangover, appeared at the cookhouse and gave his version of the plat to Yesler. Neither man would back down, so instead of the streets curving together across Mill Street (now Yesler Way), they hit it uncompromisingly, as far apart as the proprietors. They remain far apart to this day.
• Among those Indians who understood the terms there was not complete satisfaction. Unhappiest of the tyees was Chief Nelson of the Muckleshoots; his tribe considered their neighbors, the Duwamish, to be something less than human, but both tribes were assigned to the same reservation.
• Finally Leshi was betrayed by his nephew, who received a reward of thirty blankets for turning him over to authorities at Fort Steilacoom. He was tried for the murder of an officer who had been ambushed during the war. (One of the two attorneys for the defense was H. R. Crosby, Bing Crosby’s grandfather.) The first trial ended in a hung jury, 10–2, for conviction. A second trial before a new judge in another district resulted in Leshi’s conviction. He was sentenced to death. A strong minority of pioneers, including Maynard, felt that Leshi was being made a scapegoat, that Governor Stevens was blaming the Indian for harm that had really been caused by unfair treaties. When the day came for Leshi’s execution some of his partisans arranged to have the sheriff and marshal who were to hang him arrested on a trumped-up charge. The execution was delayed, new appeals were made to the Territorial Supreme Court and the Territorial Legislature, but in vain; after another half-year Leshi was led to the gallows. The man appointed to hang him said later, “He was as cool as could be—just like he was going to dinner…. He did not seem to be the least bit excited at all, and no trembling on him at all—nothing of the kind, and that is more than I could say for myself…. I felt I was hanging an innocent man.”
• When a man tired of purely social intercourse, he could always buy a couple more drinks and lead his partner down the hall to one of the little rooms. There was no attempt to conceal what was going on at the water’s edge. One historian has argued that it was the establishment of Pennell’s place that led straight to Seattle’s present-day dominance of the Northwest, the scholar’s thesis being that word swiftly spread throughout the timberland about the type of entertainment offered at the foot of the skid road in Seattle. The town had, in that historian’s words, “the best mouse trap in the woods; hobnails and calks were deepening all the paths to its door.” While this economic argument gives more importance to sex than even Freud would be likely to admit, there can be little doubt that Pennell drew his clientele from all over the Sound country,
• It was not surprising that after Cooke had undertaken to finance the Northern Pacific, Congress enlarged the land grant until it covered sixty miles on each side of the right of way—more than seventy thousand square miles in all, a grant half again as large as all of New York State.
• It became apparent they were going to bypass the capital; the best Olympia could hope for was a spur, and the railroad said the town would have to build that itself. Seattle was still in a happy glow over its rival’s discomfort when the wire came locating the terminus on Commencement Bay. No news could have been worse. This meant not only that Seattle would be deprived of the terminus, but that the hamlet of Tacoma, with two hundred residents, a settlement barely two years old, would swiftly grow to challenge Seattle’s industrial leadership. The new town, only twenty miles away by water, would undoubtedly dedicate itself to the economic destruction of its nearest rival. The two thousand residents of Seattle, with no effective allies, were pitted against a community sponsored by a transcontinental railroad which was backed by the nation’s leading banker, who had the personal support of the President of the United States and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court,
• Eventually a Scottish engineer named James Colman took over the aborted project and reshaped it into a line to the coal fields behind the town of Renton. As such it served Seattle well and made Colman a millionaire, but it did not solve the problem of direct connections with the East.
• The Chinese had been popular once. They had been imported in large numbers by the railroad builders when cheap labor was needed. When the Chinese arrived the Western people had looked on them as genii who would bring from the East on their narrow backs the much desired tracks. The Chinese, one and all, were called “John,” and the stories of John’s prowess as a construction worker almost reached the status of folk legend. John could work twelve hours on a handful of rice; impassive John could handle blasting jobs that other men were too nervous to carry out; brave John would work all day at the end of a hundred-foot rope, chiseling notches for trestle supports; inscrutable John had the best poker-face in a poker-loving nation. Good old John. And then the final sections of track were laid, the golden spikes were driven, and the construction workers poured into the western cities, into Tacoma and Portland, San Francisco and Seattle. The streets teemed with restless men, men with money to burn; restless men, soon broke, the Chinese among them. The fact that the Chinese were accustomed to receiving less than the white men no longer seemed laughable to the white workers;
• there was competition for every job—and fear of economic competition always increases prejudice.
• The November 1 deadline passed quietly, but on November 3, in Tacoma, the Committee of Nine took action. Before dawn Cronin’s men circulated through the community, giving word to the underground to be ready to strike. When the steam whistle at Lister’s Foundry sounded at 9:30 a.m., hundreds of Tacomans poured into the streets. They marched through a steady rain to the Chinese shanties that dotted the business district and stretched along the waterfront, told the occupants to pack up, escorted them under armed guard to the railroad tracks, flagged a train, and while the conductor shouted joyously, “Put ’em aboard! I’ll haul ’em,” herded the Chinese into boxcars. After waiting a day in the rain at a siding the displaced Chinese were taken to Portland. The whole affair was carried off without violence, indeed with a horrible friendliness that enabled the vigilantes to chat with their victims as they forced them into boxcars. Among the whites were men who could say that some of their best friends were Chinese.
• Still the fire roared on. It jumped Columbia Street and swept south. It crossed Second Street and closed in on Trinity Church on Third. No one tried very hard to save the church. “It was a wooden structure and had on its front end a tall belltower,” one volunteer fireman said later. “It was so ugly the fire would have been a failure if that tower had been left standing.”
• William Grose, Seattle’s first black businessman. He was said to weigh 400 pounds.
• The box-house was a saloon with a theater attached. The entertainment was rowdy, and the box-houses were restricted to an area where they competed with establishments offering even rougher entertainment. The box-houses were usually located in basements; they frequently had to close during the rainy season, when the floors were covered with water from an inch to a yard deep.
• They called it The Independent Order of Good Things, and they selected a motto, “Skin ’Em.” The next time the Order assembled things were a bit more formal. The members got together front center on the stage of the Bella Union. A Seattle lawyer who did frequent business with theater people was initiated; he drew up some bylaws, which were adopted unanimously. The month-old name seemed somewhat unspecific for a group with bylaws. Cort, looking at a picture decorating the stage curtain, suggested they call themselves the Eagles. Agreed. Next they drew up a short, earthy declaration of principles: “Not God, heaven, hereafter, but man, earth, now.” Under this mundane motto the Order prospered.
• a guide was expected to build a boat to take his charges down the Yukon to Dawson City. Alexander bluffed it out. He wandered about a riverside camp, watching the experts whipsaw lumber from the trees, arguing with the experienced boatbuilders, telling them what they were doing wrong, soaking up information when they explained why their methods were right. He learned enough to build a boat that looked like a boat, but when he put it in the river it listed dangerously. Quickly he hauled it ashore, explained, “Well, the job’s half done,” and made another. He lashed the two boats together and ushered his uneasy companions aboard. They made it to Dawson.
• Seattle and Alaska, Alaska and Seattle. Amid the Brainerd-created clamor the other claimant cities barely made themselves heard. They kept trying, but soon almost everyone except residents of the rival coastal cities considered Seattle the gateway to gold.
• It was along the Skid Road that the most famous of Alaska’s bad men, Soapy Smith, rounded up the gang that eventually operated the town of Skagway as its private enterprise. Soapy Smith—like Erastus Brainerd—was a part-time genius. He took a weird bunch of individualists, men who went by the names of Fatty Green and Kid Jimmy Fresh, Yank Fewclothes and Jay Bird Slim, and organized them into a syndicate that not only ran all the gambling and robbery at the southern end of the gold trail, but even took over the United States Army Recruiting Station at Skagway during the Spanish-American War and assigned men to pick the pockets of the recruits who were taking their physicals.
• Denny Hill went first; five million cubic yards of earth were sluiced down onto the tideflats and the maximum grade on the north-south streets was reduced to five per cent. Another three million cubic yards came off the Jackson Hill, and two million from Dearborn Hill. In all, sixteen million cubic yards were washed away, and when Thomson was through, traffic could move easily north and south. Ballard and West Seattle were brought within the city limits.
• Portland was perhaps the most notorious ship on the Pacific Coast. She had been built in 1885 and took to sea under the name Haytian Republic; she was seized four years later for carrying ammunition to rebels in Haiti during a civil war, and an attempt was made to sink her as she left Port au Prince. She began operating on the Pacific Coast in 1889 as a cannery boat, but government agents found a load of Chinese aliens and some packets of opium aboard her on one voyage; she was seized, condemned, and sold. Her new owners renamed her Portland and put her in the coastal trade as a passenger ship.
• Gill believed in letting people alone. If a man wanted to go to hell, Hi was unwilling to set up roadblocks. He didn’t believe morality could be enforced by legislation and he didn’t believe it was healthy to try to keep a town closed, especially a seaport town on the frontier. Strict law enforcement, he argued, merely drove prostitution and gambling underground.
• The central feature in the planned community was to be a five-hundred-room brothel, the biggest in the world. When construction was about to begin, the contractors found their work would be simpler if they were to build eighty feet west of the original site. There was one trouble: most of that eighty feet was occupied by a Seattle street, so the city council thoughtfully granted the Hillside Improvement Company a fifteen-year lease on the thoroughfare. A contemporary observer remarked, “American cities have voted away their streets to gas companies, electric-light lines, and street railways, but Seattle is the first one that ever granted a franchise to a public thoroughfare for the erection of a brothel.” The huge building was completed by the autumn of 1911, but it was never occupied by the tenants for whom it was designed. Gill’s boys had gone too far. The great barn on Beacon Hill became a symbol of the administration.
• The first issue of Seattle’s first paper, the Gazette, had creaked off a battered Ramage screw press3 on the second floor of Henry Yesler’s office building at Front and Mill Streets (now South First and Yesler Way) on December 10, 1863. The Gazette was written and edited and put in type by James R. Watson, a frontier newspaperman who had found the competition too strenuous in the big town of Olympia;
• He bought a huge American flag and made a ceremony of raising it on top of the Times Building; he put the flag at the masthead of his paper too, and on the front page; when his opponents objected that no man should use the flag as a personal trademark he chided them for “resenting the display of Old Glory.” This trick of replying to an attack with an attack was typical of his operations. He never apologized, never sidestepped, and never defended himself; he just ripped into anyone who opposed him. To suggest that Blethen might be wrong was to prove yourself an unpatriotic crackpot in the pay of red-flag anarchists.
• A general strike, by dictionary definition, is a strike in all industries of a locality or nation, generally in sympathy for a smaller group of workers. Theoretically it brings about complete cessation of business. The first strike in the United States to meet that definition took place in Seattle. It began at ten a.m. on Thursday, February 6, 1919, and lasted until February 11. Sixty thousand workers went off their jobs, and they did bring about an almost complete cessation of business.
• The carpenters, perhaps the most conservative of all unions, voted to strike. So did the typographers. So did the musicians and the longshoremen, the stagehands and the millworkers, the hotel maids and the teamsters. One after another, a hundred and ten unions voted to strike. The Wobblies were not represented on the Central Labor Council, but they sent delegates to applaud the strike votes; the Japanese unions, kept off the council by racial restrictions, sent delegates to say they’d strike too. A general strike was approved overwhelmingly, but no one knew how to run one. It was one thing to walk off the job at some plant and try to keep strike-breakers from walking in. It was altogether different to stop the industrial life of a city of 300,000. It had never been done in America. No one was sure how to go about it.
• the Commercial Club, a lively group of small businessmen who had organized in opposition to the Chamber of Commerce,
• on Sunday, November 5, 1916, 280 demonstrators sailed for Everett. Pinkerton agents in Seattle wired that they were coming. When the Verona tied up at the Everett dock, the sheriff and 200 deputies were waiting. The sheriff asked the Wobs to point out their leaders. They refused. Somebody started shooting. Before the Verona cast off and moved away, five of the demonstrators and two of the vigilantes were dead, thirty-one demonstrators and nineteen vigilantes wounded. When the two ships got back to Seattle, everyone on board was arrested.2 Seventy-four were charged with murder. On March 5, 1917, the first of the defendants, Thomas Tracy, was put on trial for his life. Anna Louise Strong covered the trial for the New York Post, and the testimony she heard changed her life. Years later she summarized her dispatches by saying, “The news was that at every stage the Everett police and private lumber guards took the initiative in beating and shooting workers for speaking in the streets. The lumber guards on the dock had begun the shooting and continued firing as the Verona pulled away; yet none of them was arrested.
• Her father was a religious pacifist; she shared his moral scruples about killing and to them added her economic conviction that war was merely a way of making the rich richer and the poor dead.
• The closing down of Seattle’s industries, as a mere shutdown, will not affect the great Eastern combinations of capitalists much. They could let the whole Northwest go to pieces as far as money alone is concerned. But, the closing down of the capitalistically controlled industries of Seattle, while the workers organize to feed the people, to care for the babies and the sick, to preserve order—this will move them, for this looks too much like the taking over of power by the workers.
• Stevenson built up a large radio audience; he liked being an oracle and soon was hawking political nostrums along with dental floss. He had the technique down pat: he criticized specific wrongs and proposed vague remedies.
• Glynn Ross, a former prizefighter with a flair for aggressive promotion, astonished everyone but himself by proving Seattle ready for an annual season of grand opera. Bringing in singers of world rank, stressing the popular rather than the elitist aspect of opera, offering some seats at prices below those for a first-run movie, and presenting works alternately in their original language and in English, Ross made going to the opera something anybody might do,