Skid Road

I thought a friend had recommended Murray Morgan’s “Informal Portrait of Seattle” as an entertaining People’s History of my adopted hometown. Unfortunately, my memory was in error and I am now unable to thank whoever it was that prompted me to pick this up at the cat bookstore.

Morgan covers the history of Seattle from its founding in 1852 up through the 1950’s, with an afterword that says a few words about developments up through 1980. The prose is overly florid for my tastes, but it’s still readable and the book is so packed with interesting anecdotes and information that griping about its style seems churlish. As the subtitle indicates, this is not an academic history of the city. Morgan illustrates the story of each era by focusing on a single main character along with their supporting cast of local personalities.

So, for example, the book opens with the larger than life figure of Doc Maynard – a likable if somewhat dissolute man fleeing his overly domestic life in Ohio – rolling up in an Indian canoe and laying claim to most of what is now Seattle south of Yesler Way. One might imagine this causing some annoyance among the natives, but in fact Doc Maynard was a good friend to many of the local tribes, and, in any event, they couldn’t imagine the party of 5 white guys who wanted to live on Elliot Bay much of a threat. Morgan goes on to tell the history of early Seattle's increasingly fraught relations with the Native Americans, through the lens of the life of Doc.

Later, we get a chapter on the coming of the railroads and the troubles of Chinese immigrants as told through the story of Mary Kenworthy, an unlikely early advocate of populism. This is another particularly interesting bit of history because of all the complex crosscurrents at work at the time. There was the economic exploitation of the railroad monopoly, the local populist agitation against it, the national response to what some saw as creeping socialism, the scapegoating of the Chinese, but also their defense by National forces brought in to protect them from the local mob. This is one of the strengths of history told through personality – it can more easily accommodate all our contradictions.

The book also covers the town’s reinvention as the doorway to the Klondike Goldrush – with all the scams, gambling, and prostitution this role entailed – by narrating the life of John Considine, the most enterprising pimp of the era. The final chapters relate the stories of corrupt Mayor Hiram Gill and the newspaper era, and (also corrupt) Dave Beck and the postwar union time frame. Overall, I feel like I now have a good sense for the various phases of development of the city, and a greater appreciation for some of the names on the streets.