History of Seattle before 1900

Two conflicting perspectives exist for the early history of Seattle. There is 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.

What is now Seattle has been inhabited since at least the end of the last glacial period (c. 8000 BCE—10,000 years ago). Archaeological excavations at what is now called West Point in Discovery Park, Magnolia confirm settlement within the current city for at least 4,000 years and probably much longer. The area of [toˈlɑltu] ("herring house") and later [hɑˈʔɑpus] ("where there are horse clams") at the then-mouth of the Duwamish River in what is now the Industrial District had been inhabited since the 6th century CE. The Dkh^w'Duw'Absh (People of the Inside), and the Xachua'bsh (People of the Large Lake), of the (Skagit-Nisqually) Lushootseed Coast Salish Native American Nations occupied at least 17 villages in the mid-1850s (13 within what are now the city limits), living in some 93 permanent longhouses (khwaac'ál'al) along the lower Duwamish River, Elliott Bay, Salmon Bay, Portage Bay, Lake Washington within what is now Seattle, as well as Lake Sammamish, and the Duwamish, Black, and Cedar Rivers in what is now metropolitan Seattle. The Dkh^w'Duw'Absh and Xachua'bsh are today represented by the Duwamish Tribe.

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