Title: Seattle from the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City

Author: Megan Asaka

Completed: Nov 2024 (Full list of books)

Overview: Two months ago, I posted “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.” Well, it’s time to add another book to that list. This one focuses on the people who have been pushed to the outside when building the city. I learned that the first large industry was hop growing which required lots of labor for harvesting for a month or two each year. This was the start of several large industries centered around Seattle needing seasonal, transient laborers who were mostly ignored or shunned the rest of the year.

Highlights:

• In the 1920s, an academic study estimated that Seattle had one of the highest transient populations in the entire country.
• In Lushootseed, the language of the region’s Indigenous peoples, Seattle was known as d^zid^zəlalič, or the place where one crosses over.
• Though Seattle has its own ugly history of redlining, which deserves far more attention than it currently receives, the process of segregation started much earlier, with the founding of the city itself in the mid-nineteenth century, and did not involve the federal government. At that time, white settlers removed the Duwamish people and segregated them in the southern fringes of the city, eager to take their lands but also to make them available as workers. [25]  Settlers even blocked efforts by the federal government to create a reservation for the Duwamish on their ancestral homelands because it would interfere with the city’s access to a steady labor supply.
• In Seattle, the north-south spatial orientation served to smooth over this tension between, on one hand, racial heterogeneity as demanded by capitalist accumulation and the ever-expanding search for labor and, on the other, racial purity as envisioned by white settlers. It allowed settlers to maintain an exclusionary white district while also accommodating an Indigenous and racially mixed labor force.
• Segregation was not something imposed on the city by the federal government; instead it evolved from the first days of Seattle’s founding in the mid-nineteenth century. White settlers established the north for the purposes of wealth accumulation via land and private property, then sought to protect this space through violence, policing, and municipal law. They dispossessed and displaced the Duwamish, rendering them outsiders in their own lands, then excluded others deemed racially undesirable, including Asian migrants, interracial families, and single men. As Black workers began to arrive in growing numbers during WWII, they entered a racial geography that had already hardened around the division between white and nonwhite, north and south. Though Seattle’s Black community predated the war, Asians and Indigenous peoples outnumbered them in the city and the regional workforce.
• But these settlers were not entering an empty land where they could simply arrive and impose their will. Their ignorance about the area’s terrain and maritime environment, as well as their low numbers, made them reliant upon the knowledge and labor of the Duwamish and other Indigenous peoples of the Puget Sound region. This gave Indigenous peoples the upper hand for a while, at least-and produced an early urban society characterized more by coexistence than outright domination.
• Yesler looked to expand the mill’s operational capacity. Though Indigenous people continued to provide the bulk of the labor powering the mill, they were joined by other workers, many of them single men from outside the United States—Germany, Scotland, Peru, India.
• In Seattle, settlers explicitly rejected the federal government’s efforts regarding “Indian affairs.” In 1866, nearly all the settlers in King County signed a petition against the creation of a Duwamish reservation along the Black River in south Seattle. Hundreds of Duwamish people had rejected the terms of the Point Elliott treaty, which created the Port Madison reservation across the Sound on Suquamish territory, and called for their own reservation located on their ancestral homelands near the fork of the Duwamish and Black Rivers. With backing from the Indian agent of Washington Territory, George Paige, the federal government appeared ready to move ahead with the Duwamish reservation when the settlers got wind of the plan and moved to squash it. As Paige noted in a report, “The white settlers in the neighborhood desire to have [the Indians] remain among them, that they may avail themselves of their labor, yet at the same time they are unwilling they should have a reservation where they are, because they, the white men, want to appropriate the valuable bottom land which they occupy.”
• throughout the United States and Canada, settlers attempted to diminish the power of Indigenous nations by specifically undermining and controlling Indigenous women. [39]  In the Pacific Northwest, the Donation Land Claim Act allowed white men who married Indigenous women to claim double the amount of land until 1855, which made intermarriage and mixed relationships materially beneficial to white male settlers. By the 1860s, however, when much of the land had been appropriated and more white women had migrated to the region, the fluidity of early Puget Sound societies gave way to a social order more rigidly structured around race and gender hierarchies, and a hardening division between whiteness and nonwhiteness.
• Situated at the convergence of multiple rivers, the lands that would become known as Seattle served as a crucial hub of Indigenous migrations. [2]  Though located within Duwamish territory, other Indigenous peoples up and down the Northwest Coast also had a presence in Seattle, whether for travel, resource gathering, or connecting with extended family. These migrations did not stop with the arrival of white settlers and the disruptions of urban displacement. Seattle’s role as “the place where one crosses over” persisted into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and beyond.
• In the 1850s, hop farms began to pop up along these waterways, claimed by some of the first settlers in Washington Territory. Ezra Meeker, who would later achieve worldwide recognition as “hop king” of the Pacific Northwest, first spotted the location of his Puyallup Valley hop farm on a canoe trip through the southern half of Puget Sound.
• A portion of the workforce that year also included Puyallup tribal members, whose displacement from their ancestral lands had allowed the first hop farms to emerge and the industry to expand throughout the valley. The name “Puyallup” comes from the anglicization of the Lushootseed word spuyalǝpabš , meaning “people from the bend at the bottom of the river,” although over time the word also came to mean “generous and welcoming to all who enter our lands.”
• Growers used the expense of housing as an excuse to not hire white pickers, whose so-called standards of living would require better accommodations. One grower declared that he “could not take care of white men even if [he] could afford to hire them,” adding, “The season is too short to warrant any outlay for that purpose, while Indians and Chinamen take care of themselves.” [54]  The temporary encampments further guaranteed that hop pickers left town at the season’s end, while white workers could stay on after the harvest or find work in the surrounding community.
• The town of Squak (known today as Issaquah) and its surrounding valley emerged as a major hop-growing center largely because of the railroad. In the early 1870s, Seattle settlers had banded together to fund the Seattle & Walla Walla railroad line as a response to Northern Pacific’s decision to locate its western terminus in Tacoma. The work progressed at a snail’s pace and was headed for disaster when Henry Villard, a railroad baron and financier, decided to buy the company and rename it the Columbia & Puget Sound Railroad. Villard’s interest in the line stemmed from his ownership of the Oregon Improvement Company, which operated several highly profitable coal mines east of Seattle.
• the Oregon Improvement Company, which operated the mines, discharged its Chine se workforce. By October, agitation had spread to Tacoma; it erupted in early November when white mobs expelled the entire Chinese population from the city. Seattle followed suit a few months later. On February 7, 1886, a group of white men rounded up the city’s Chinese residents and forced them onto a ship leaving for S an Francisco.
• The hop business was a potentially lucrative source of revenue for the railroad, which had just completed work on its transcontinental line. Committee members in Tacoma convinced local schools to extend summer vacation so white children could pick hops alongside their parents. Though missionaries and Indian agents had demonized Indigenous parents for taking their children to the hops harvest, accusing them of negligence and using it as further justification of parental unsuitability, authorities applauded white parents’ and children’s efforts to save the harvest and respond to these “emergency” circumstances.
• By 1910, lumber employed two thirds of the workers in Washington State. [2]  If hops had laid the foundation for Seattle’s role in the regional economy, the lumber industry cemented the city’s status as “the main clearinghouse for the migratory labor hordes” of the Pacific Northwest and far beyond.
• their wealth and prominence were achieved through the direct exploitation of their fellow countrymen. Contractors charged various fees and commissions from the laborers they  procured first an initial fee for job placement, then a monthly fee paid to the company via a foreman who managed the workforce. [43]  Contractors also charged workers for food and supplies, which often came directly from their own mercantile or grocery businesses. Furuya developed a particularly lucrative trade supplying Japanese labor camps around the region with Japanese food products and other items imported from Japan. The end result was a highly coercive system of economic dependency that was, in the words of one Japanese lumber worker, “no good for the workingman , just good for the boss.”
• companies favored some settlers over others, and spent considerable time and money recruiting those they considered the most desirable. [46]  Scandinavians were among the groups frequently targeted by railroad companies for permanent settlement. The Northern Pacific, for example, “became one of the most aggressive lines” in attracting Scandinavians to Minnesota, sending promotional materials and recruiters back to Europe to emphasize similarities in climate as a key regional selling point.
• The gold rush brought other changes to Seattle’s economy and geography, such as a booming retail business outfitting miners with clothing, supplies, and equipment, but housing continued to shape the physical landscape even after the craze died down. By 1905, Seattle’s hotels and lodging houses numbered over four hundred. “The city lacks neither sufficient high-class hotel accommodations or facilities for handling those who are looking for a cheaper shelter,” a local newspaper reported, dubbing Seattle “a city of hotels.”
• The Diller Hotel, located on First Avenue and University Street, was one of Seattle’s original first-class hotels. Built in 1890 by Leonard Diller, who migrated to Seattle from Ohio in 1876, the 80-by-111-foot brick building contained 140 guest rooms, each with private  bath, hot water, and a telephone. The Diller also featured a hotel cafe, complimentary stationary, and an elevator that whisked guests up and down its four stories.
• For a time, Seattle operated as an open town, with an official red-light district located south of Yesler; the neighborhood became known as the Tenderloin, after a similar district in San Francisco.
• stories reveal the wide gulf between what Filipino migrants expected of their life in the United States and their lived experience in a racially hostile society. As one man put it, “Here… you cannot win “
• Though Seattle’s urban landscape had been divided by race as well as gender from its origins in the 1850s, the 1920s witnessed a new era characterized by more explicit forms of segregation, such as restrictive covenants placing entire neighborhoods out of reach for nonwhite Seattleites.
• The Japanese had long played a crucial role within the urban and regional economy, as intermediaries who served and employed the itinerant, racialized workforce of the Pacific Northwest. As the resource-based economy declined, the Japanese were no longer useful and became disposable once again, their fates ultimately linked with the workforce they had relied upon and, at times, treated with disdain.
• The local motivations for building Yesler Terrace have not been critically examined. Often celebrated in local memory as a positive contribution to the city and evidence of Seattle’s open-mindedness about race, Yesler Terrace started first and foremost as a slum clearance project that targeted undesirable people, and the spaces they inhabited, as roadblocks to urban progress. [4]  In that way, Yesler Terrace was not exceptional; it repeated a familiar historical pattern that stretched back to Seattle’s founding in 1853, prioritizing white families at the expense of all others.
• government signs began appearing around Seattle ordering all persons of Japanese ancestry to depart the city. They had less than one week to prepare. By the end of May 1942, not a single Japanese person remained in Seattle. Nearly ten thousand city residents, the majority US citizens, were gone seemingly overnight.
• The longer history of the U Village mall thus reveals its creation not as an open, accessible retail space for down-on-their-luck Seattle families, but as an engine of segregation and white wealth accumulation built upon colonized lands and racialized displacement. As the story of University Village makes clear, we cannot understand Seattle’s present without radically reconceptualizing the city’s urban past. This book has sought to reframe the early history of Seattle as a history of displacement, focusing on the laborers who built the city and then were excluded and displaced as they tried to create stable lives for themselves.