bruce zabel and susan wilner and alki beach and early settlement of seattle

Though I was delighted to read Young's personal story, I was not amazed or shocked by it, since I am intimately familiar with the evolution of the historical profession in America. It is relatively easy to understand what you have grown up with. But I didn't expect to see this "evolution" right before my eyes and, much less, on Alki Beach. For those of you who don't know, Alki Beach is the 2.5 mile stretch along the northern and western shores of West Seattle, a place to "see and be seen" as the advertisements have it, dotted with restaurants, the ubiquitous Starbucks and other signs of the triumph of yuppiedom in the early 21 st century. So, taking a Saturday afternoon break, I decided to walk up and down the beach, contributing to the "seen and be seen" scene, I am sure. I came upon a monument, which I would like to describe.

The Monument to the Earliest European Settlers

The "monument" is a square slab, about 7 feet tall, written on all four sides, commemorating the landing of the first European settlers in November 1851. They stayed on Alki for a year or so, but then decided that the Seattle location, about two or three miles away, was more protected and conducive to the building of a city. I knew immediately that the commemorative stone had to have been erected sometime in the 20th century because the simplicity of its design and its human scale would not have been as appropriate in the earlier "age of obelisks." Sure enough, the inscription on the front (which is the front, really?) said that it was erected to memorialize the first European settlers in Seattle on the occasion of the first "Continental Motorized Caravan" in September 1926. This caravan was endorsed by the fledgling AAA, no doubt helping to launch its tremendously successful services to motorists.

What was interesting about the 1926 monument was the way the information was presented on it. It says that the Schooner Exact (which had traveled from Portland for eight days before landing) landed here on November 13, 1851. Aboard were the following people, as listed on the stone: "Arthur A. Denny & wife; John H. Low & wife; Carson D. Boren & wife; Willam N. Bell & wife; Louisa Boren, Charles Terry and Lee Terry." Thus, 11 adults are listed, even though only seven names are given. The women, true to the common law doctrine of coverture in place at the time, were "covered" by their husbands and therefore could go unnamed. Lucky Louisa, however. She was 24 at the time and would marry Arthur Denny's younger brother shortly after he arrived a little later--but since she was single, she had a name.*

[*An interesting historical aside relates to how many adults were actually on the trip. The web site of the "Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History" lists twelve (with the names of the wives included--we will get to this), adding David Denny, 19, to the list, while the narrative on that same web site talks about how Arthur Denny, John Low and 8 other adults set sail on the schooner Exact . I suppose that two guys could have been waiting at Alki, but this sort of goes against the names inscribed on the monument. Well, I don't know how many were exactly on the Exact , and since the task to discover that might be exacting, I will leave it here.]

Fast Forward to Our Day

In any case, seven names are listed (with four wives indicated in addition) on the 1926 monument. But then, I went to another side of the monument and saw that in 2001 someone, probably the local historical society, had also put the names of the four women on the monument: "Mary Ann Boren Denny, Lydia Culborn Low, Mary Kays Boren, Sarah Ann Peter Bell." In other words, right before my eyes was an instantiation of the process that Young went through in his own professional life, from reading about the Revolutionary War and "ignoring" the women to "re-reading his notes" and finding them suffused with stories of women. So, this little act of justice in 2001 is indebted to the change in the way that historians learned to read texts in the intervening years.

But, there is more. On November 13, 2000, 149 years after the landing on Alki, the Native Americans also got into the act and inscribed on yet another side of the monument the following words: "Dumawish and other Natives helped the Alki Landing Party survive early years here," through their "shared space, their food and their knowledge." Then, it concludes with a note that Chief Seattle was the leader of the Dumawish and Suquamish Tribes of Natives. My, isn't this wonderful? Oh, I don't mean that it is necessarily wonderful that Chief Seattle helped out the Europeans, but it is sort of wonderful how the "outsider" groups in American history, who simply had no voice and no visibility in 1926, now have a little bit of one. At least the women in 1926 had some existence; the Indians weren't even mentioned.

A Glitch

I returned to Bruce and Susan's home happy that I had made these discoveries. Not only had I "seen and been seen" at Alki, but I had seen the effects of the evolution of the historical profession represented right before my eyes. And, I would have returned to my home with a sort of self-satisfied smugness (indeed, we ARE pretty progressive, aren't we?) had I not realized one other thing, to which the monument, at least as I recall, bears no witness. We know that there were also 12 children that were on the schooner Exact which landed on Alki Beach on November 13, 1851. We even know their names and ages. So, my question is, When will the children get THEIR advocate and have their names etched on the stone? When will they get their due? Is this the next group that will be "discovered" by our historians? You can be sure of one thing. Twenty years after the historians discover a group, their names will begin to appear on monuments...

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