Week 3 Reading Response

While reading Native Seattle by Thrush, it came to my attention that the development of the city of Seattle was greatly being discussed. Looking at the life and death of Kikisebloo (Seeathl’s daughter) in 1896 and how the city and people developed around her, leaving her in the past as a ‘dying breed’ so to say. “When the funeral finally took place on 6 June, thousands of Seattleites lined downtown streets to watch the procession make its way to a full requiem mass at Our Lady of Good Hope. . . Her grandson Joe Foster . . . was the sole Indian present” (page 87). This shows that by this time in Seattle's history, there was very little Indian influence left.

The Great Fire in 1889 by some was seen as destroying the city, but others saw it as accelerating the growth that was already under way in Seattle. The boiling pot of glue made quite the flame in the development of the Seattle expansion after the Railroad Jubilee in 1883. The Northern Pacific Railroad had a huge impact on the development of Seattle, and it could be in part to a circulating image of Seattle by Mr. Glover.

 

Image courtesy of the University of Washington: University Libraries- Digital Collection "Seattle map, 1878"

It is quite interesting to look at how Mr. Glover’s bird’s-eye panorama of Seattle in the Spring of 1878 had such a large impact on how people viewed the city of Seattle. “. . . Panoramic city views from the nineteenth century usually bore little resemblance to the actual places they marketed, Instead . . . they ‘depart from reality so as to emphasize and exaggerate order, progress, prospects for future unlimited growth, and other themes dear to the hearts of urban boosters’” (page 67). I thought this was great because we had just been discussing this concept in class about how it is hard to judge a city off these “maps” because they are not exact and usually designed for prospector purposes rather than to be an actual map.

I found a somewhat reoccurring theme while reading in Spokane & the Inland Empire by Stratton. It seems that the essays are all describing development and growth of cities and the people who live in them, in the Spokane/Inland Empire area. The essays discussed wheat production and how the capabilities weren’t fully understood until about the mid 1860’s, or how labor development in the Spokane area was much different than that of other areas in the West while still experiencing the hardships caused by the market crash, etc., or how woman suffrage in the Pacific North West was beginning to gain voice in the 1860’s—especially through the voice of Abigail Scott Duniway.

Chapters 5 and 6 of Nearby History by Kyvig and Marty deal with unpublished and oral documents and the benefits found by using this type of document in historical research. They do suggest it is important to use published documents but also to remember to look for these unpublished documents in the archives and manuscript collections. Also mentioned are the difficulties with actually conducting oral interviews through video recording and the problems associated with oral documents. But as a graduate student and having a local archives building, it may be somewhat easier to use than if we were elsewhere.