History of Seattle Before 1900

History Of Seattle Before 1900

Two conflicting perspectives exist for the early history of Seattle. There is what one might call the "establishment" view, which favors the centrality of the Denny Party (generally the Denny, Mercer, Terry, and Boren families), and Henry Yesler. A second, less didactic view, advanced particularly by historian Bill Speidel and others such as Murray Morgan, sees David Swinson "Doc" Maynard as a key figure, perhaps the key figure. In the late nineteenth century, when Seattle had become a thriving town, several members of the Denny Party still survived; they and many of their descendants were in local positions of power and influence. Maynard was about ten years older and died relatively young, so he was not around to make his own case. The Denny Party were generally conservative Methodists, teetotalers, Whigs and Republicans, while Maynard was a drinker and a Democrat. He felt that well-run prostitution could be a healthy part of a city's economy. He was also on friendly terms with the region's Native Americans, while many of the Denny Party were not. Thus Maynard was not on the best of terms with what became the Seattle Establishment, especially after the Puget Sound War. He was nearly written out of the city's history until Morgan's 1951 book Skid Road and Speidel's research in the 1960s and 1970s.

Read more about History Of Seattle Before 1900:  Founding, Relations With The Natives, Yesler's Mill, A City Grows, Railroad Rivalry and Encroaching Civilization, Relations Between Whites and Chinese, The Great Seattle Fire, Labor History in 19th Century Seattle, The Klondike Gold Rush

Famous quotes containing the words history of, history and/or seattle:

    The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.
    Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)

    Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.
    Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)

    If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people—including me—would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.
    Hunter S. Thompson (b. 1939)