On an early March morning in 1893, a small flotilla of Indian dugout canoes landed on Seattle’s waterfront, filled to the gunwales with clothing trunks, furniture, tools, and passengers. Indians were hardly a novel sight around Puget Sound. The city’s namesake, Seeathl, was a former Indian leader revered by natives and whites alike. Natives plied clams and fish on downtown streets, harvested crops and felled trees in the surrounding countryside, or worked as domestics for affluent white Seattleites in the streetcar suburbs. But the sudden arrival of these “red denizens” attracted a “large and curious crowd.” These Indians were refugees. A gang of land-hungry white residents had razed their homes in West Seattle, across Elliott Bay, the night before. Their village, called Herring’s House, had survived the four decades since Seattle’s founding. Now, it was gone. As Coll Thrush argues, “every American city is built on Indian land, but few advertise it like Seattle.”1 Dispossession had preceded the sales pitch, however. Real Indians roaming the city were unwanted reminders that Seattle was a crude frontier town. Vanishing or legendary Indians were proof that it had become a cosmopolitan city. By removing Indians physically and symbolically, boosters could tell “ghost stories” of a distant and romantic past to sell a modern Seattle in the present.2
That same year, in another city built on Indian land and with an Indian name, two men converged to celebrate the anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to the New World. A young historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, came to Chicago to deliver an academic paper on the significance of the frontier in American history. Indians were critical to Turner’s story of free land and national expansion, but once they served their purpose as foils to civilization’s advance, helping to transform effete Europeans into virile Americans, they faded into stereotype or obscurity. The other man, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, instead turned the frontier story into a crowd pleaser. His Rough Riders enchanted audiences twice a day opposite the gates of the Columbian Exposition with his reenactments of the wagon trains and Forty-Niners. Unlike Turner, real Indians remained vital to Buffalo Bill’s story: Sitting Bull, Yellow Hand, Geronimo, and many less famous Pawnee, Sioux, and other Natives all participated in Wild West shows. Yet for all their differences, both stories “declared the frontier over” and each was an incomplete version of the other. Turner, as Richard White argues, took the conquest of nature as his premise and “considered savagery incidental.” Buffalo Bill, in contrast, “made the conquest of savages central” and the triumph over nature incidental. The seeming disappearance of untamed nature and uncivilized peoples, of empty spaces and unsettled places, meant the end of the United States’ frontier past.3
For white citizens of Seattle and other cities along America’s Pacific Slope, both narratives were also an urban story. To them, the conquest of nature and the conquest of savages were an intertwined tale because, as Richard Wade has memorably described, the “towns were the spearheads of the frontier.”4 Yet these Pacific cities came of age in an era when the frontier was supposedly closing, an anxious time when multiple crises gripped Americans: agrarian radicalism, political populism, the Panic of 1893, labor unrest, urban squalor, corporate malfeasance, and political corruption. Even as many Western urbanites commemorated their colorful past in expositions and parades, they also worried what an uncertain future might bring. Frontier anxiety was more than cultural phenomenon. It also shaped and was shaped by the Progressive Era city because political chaos and social decay were real urban problems.5 Channeling the spirit of the time, urban political and business leaders in the Far West tapped frontier angst to guide city planning and regional political economies. They took the lessons of the scholar and the showman seriously: the children of the pioneers were destined “to crowd into cities like worms” unless they redefined the contest between savagery, nature, and civilization.6
At the very moment that Frederick Jackson Turner mused about the closing frontier, residents of Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles were fretting too. They dreaded its closing, but they also feared it might never leave. Their response was to draw explicit boundaries between city and countryside, nature and civilization, health and disease, past and present. Each city wanted to escape a messy and chaotic frontier past in order to enhance its status as a future hub for transcontinental and trans-Pacific commerce. As Elliott West has noted elsewhere in this volume, this trade relied on influence over their metropolitan borderlands—but city leaders sought to draw a firm line against the rough-and-tumble past. This geometry of metropolitan promotion had two interrelated axioms: improving the natural environment and containing or expelling uncivilized peoples. And along the Pacific coast, savagery wore more than an Indian or Hispanic face because Asian migrants and itinerant laborers were other reminders of the outmoded frontier.7
Metropolitan growth and frontier anxieties were not coincidental. Each informed the other as dependent variables. From the late nineteenth century through the Great Depression, political and business leaders launched massive public works projects to spur industrial growth, protect public health, expand trade, and accelerate transportation. Moving earth, building sewers, reshaping shorelines and razing slums were all designed to rub out unwanted communities and unhealthful places in the name of social and economic progress. The majesty and effectiveness of these massive public works projects and planning schemes, however, masked the internal contradictions that sustained them. Extractive industries still needed cheap and pliable labor, which meant attracting still more migrants from across the West and round the Pacific basin. Open borders for labor also meant open borders for biota. Actual or imagined pathogens tagged along when humans and other animals hopped the rails or stowed away in ships. Often, both unwanted biota and unwanted travelers were segregated in the most disrupted local landscapes, justifying still more remodeling and renewal. In their effort to transcend earlier frontier conditions, urban elites unintentionally reproduced and amplified the chaotic frontier conditions they had hoped to efface.
Perversely, but perhaps not unexpectedly, immigrant and Indian workers together with the urban poor would pay the highest price in the campaign to eradicate the urban frontier. Turner’s conquest against nature and Buffalo Bill’s crusade against savagery merged over time and became imbedded in place. The idea of progress so central to the frontier allegory was impossible to sustain without creating its counterpoint of decline. Dominating nature and dominating people were thus reciprocal and concomitant parts of frontier evolution. The result has been a concealed history of inequality lurking in the landscapes of America’s Pacific Slope.8
These ghostly histories were born in the late eighteenth-century Pacific world. As a new generation of borderlands historians maintain, “older master narratives” of successive frontiers have yielded to new stories playing out on “an open-ended historical stage” of entwined “imperial, national, and cultural journeys.” Decoupled from its traditional focus on the U.S.-Mexican boundary, borderlands history has gone continental and even global. It has also moved beyond its fixation on early North American history by helping scholars working on the modern era to shed their dependence upon imperial and national storylines.9
In this vein, almost two centuries before Americans seized the Pacific Slope and Far West, transoceanic trade and exploration had already reshaped the region. Prior to 1820, commerce between Alta California and other Pacific ports increased gradually. After Mexican independence in 1821, visits to Alta California swelled dramatically. In the two-plus decades before the Mexican-American War, more than five hundred vessels visited California ports. Although U.S. ships comprised the largest percentage, flags of at least twenty European and Pacific nations flew over California harbors. Attracted initially by the burgeoning sea otter trade, these vessels soon carried other valuable products, such as hides and tallow, with ramifications that spanned the continent.10 In an effort to blunt American expansion into its territory farther north, the Hudson’s Bay Company began to diversify its maritime and land-based fur economy. By the 1830s HBC employees shipped preserved salmon, lumber, and agricultural products out west to Hawaii and China as well as furs back east to York Factory or Montréal.11
It was native peoples who produced most of the resources for this worldwide trade. Yakut promyshleniki (Russian fur-trade contract workers), Aleut hirelings, Métis factors, Tsimshian traders, Californio vaqueros, and Chumash mission workers served as crew members, hunters, guides, and purveyors for Europeans and Americans, enabling the transmission of both goods and pathogens. The resulting epidemics ravaged native communities with successive waves of contact and commerce along the entire Pacific coast. Cumulative mortality rates ranged from 60 to 90 percent by the mid-nineteenth century.12 When colonists arrived to claim the Pacific Slope as their own, they landed in places well prepared for resettlement. Preexisting networks of labor, trade, and migration had done more than precede their arrival. They had also rearranged the landscape for their benefit.13
America’s Pacific Slope cities emerged amid these economic, epidemio-logical, and environmental instabilities. From Puget Sound to southern California, “high-intensity, low-frequency events,” as Mike Davis terms disasters, acted as “the ordinary agents of landscape and ecological change.” Earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, landslides, and natural and human-induced fires ravaged already shaky city sites.14 Seattle eventually straddled an isthmus of steep glaciated hills ringed by mudflats, scoured by high tides, and encircled by flood-prone rivers. San Francisco emerged on the headlands of a wind-swept, arid peninsula, fronted by the tempestuous Pacific on one side and salt-encrusted mudflats on the other. Los Angeles grew up alongside ample coastal lowlands but had no decent harbor save the small bay at San Pedro, and it was bisected by the Los Angeles River, which ranged from trickle to a torrent after heavy rains.15
In each case, reshaping these landscapes began with indigenous labor, yet regional geographies and histories determined the extent and duration of Native participation. Californio urban society and economy would have been impossible without Indian work. Despite the corrosive effects of disease and abuse, Indians outnumbered Spanish colonists as much as six-to-one in Alta California as late as 1820. Indians in Los Angeles, Monterey, and San José toiled as domestics, day laborers, and agricultural workers.16 During the Gold Rush years, many Forty-Niners exploited Indian labor when possible, even as most natives succumbed to disease or the brutal interracial violence that engulfed California. Those few who survived were pushed to distant reserves or were relabeled as Mexican by white Americans.17
The last of these cities to emerge, Seattle, relied most and longest upon Native toil. The first permanent American arrivals accommodated themselves to the longstanding practice of trade and intermarriage between Coast Salish peoples and Euro-American fur traders. Natives outnumbered colonists into the early 1870s and remained critical to Seattle’s growth for much longer as they folded extractive industrial wage labor into their preexisting seasonal subsistence rounds.18 For this reason, territorial governor Isaac Ingalls Stevens bowed to colonists’ demands during treaty negotiations, agreeing to locate reservations close to industries, and placating Indians with promises of unrestricted rights to fish, hunt game, pick berries, and harvest shellfish in their “usual and accustomed places.”19
It was a short-lived concord. A brief but bloody war in the 1850s turned neighbors into rivals. The subsequent decades only hardened enmities. By the 1880s, white property owners routinely ousted Indians from their lands, even though they continued to live in and move through Seattle as part of the region’s workforce. The torching of Herring’s House in West Seattle in March 1893 was only one scene in the larger drama unfolding throughout Puget Sound. Indian workers helped to build and run the wharves, sawmills, canneries, and warehouses that sustained early Seattle. Their labor helped those in power to redraw the physical landscape to sustain racial segregation while providing the necessary muscle for economic growth. But as Seattle grew, newcomers poured in. Employers did not need Indians and the Panic of 1893 drained the demand for labor of any kind, especially Indian labor, to almost empty. The refugees who arrived in Seattle that March morning were now unwanted. Indians had not disappeared from the city, but their roles had changed from vital laborers to nostalgic symbols even as many continued to work and live hidden in plain sight.20
Once the Panic of 1893 receded, the boom times returned thanks to the extractive industries stoking the explosive growth of the new cities of the Far West. If Richard Wade’s trans-Appalachian West was born urban, the Far West was born urban and industrial because of the trans-Pacific world that had preceded it.21 Gunther Barth has described the growth of San Francisco, an “instant city” filled with ravenous consumers, drawing resources from an ever-larger hinterland. The environmental consequences for the Sierra Nevada and Central Valley were dramatic. Hydraulic cannons flushed entire hillsides through sluice boxes. Downstream, acres of grasslands became fields of wheat or immense cattle pastures. Entire forests were milled into mineshaft braces and house frames.22 In the city, Gold Rushers became squatters, filling the mudflats and estuaries with garbage, construction debris, gravel, and sand from the city’s seaward shores so they could stake claims and erect buildings upon the new land. Like many nineteenth-century cities built of wood, San Francisco was a transmuted forest and often burned like one. Between 1849 and 1852, six fires consumed large sections of the city. After each blaze, as with all the others, the city move still farther onto the tidelands, unleashing more cycles of burning and building.23 The result was a sanitary mess. Pedestrians skirted “gaping holes in the planked wharf” to avoid being “assailed by bilge-like odors” escaping open sewers.24
Filling tidelands to make coastal real estate was hard work that soon fell to immigrant workers. Chinese labor helped to fill in the tidelands fronting the city as well as the marshy delta northeast of San Francisco, transforming what John Muir had once described as “the most extensive and regular of all the bee-pastures of the State” into private agricultural reserves.25 In the absence of strong federal oversight, speculators shaped tideland reclamation laws to fit their needs.26 This was “a landscape where people worked, but did not stay,” Matthew Booker has argued, part of the “wageworker’s frontier” in which itinerant laborers roamed between city and hinterland in search of their livelihood.27
A similar dynamic unfolded in Seattle, where tidelands again seemed to hold the opportunity for growth. Railroads would alchemize “the otherwise worthless resources of a country into gold,” territorial governor Marshall Moore declared in an 1867 address, but only if residents took the initiative to spin mud into treasure.28 As branch lines snaked out from Seattle and Tacoma to encircle timber camps, coal mines, and lumber mills, hundreds of speculators took Moore at his word and surged onto the mud to capture the prime sites for terminals and warehouses.29 Thomas Burke, a local magistrate and later representative for the Great Northern Railroad, noted that “the craze for salt water” had induced “lunatics of high and low degree” to roost “like so many cawing crows on the mud flats” of Elliott Bay in search of quick riches.30
Figure 7.1. Indian camp with canoes on the Seattle waterfront at Ballast Island, c. 1891. Courtesy University of Washington, Special Collections, NA 680.
As in San Francisco, speculative building created conditions perfect for squalor and fire. The filled tidelands adjacent to Henry Yesler’s sawmill, the city’s first, became part of the infamous Skid Road district, also known as “the Lava Beds” for the smoldering piles of wood chips and sawdust alongside the mill. Several major fires erupted in the 1870s, culminating in the devastating 1889 inferno that inspired an updated water system and a downtown rebuilt in brick and stone. But instead of blaming haphazard growth, many white Seattleites blamed “the ‘siwash’ camps on the sand reef just across from Main Street”—Indian encampments—for the blazes.31
Blaming Indians for fires and pestilence also justified the seizure of still more tidelands for development. At the 1889 state constitutional convention, Seattle leaders backed efforts to use tidelands as inducements for industrial and railway development. Inland county representatives balked at giving railways such power, so convention delegates eventually agreed to recognize state ownership of beds and shores in navigable waters up to the line of ordinary high water. Improved land above that line would be available to develop into private property.32 The intention was noble, but the hoped for alchemy of law and capital did not yield the intended profits. With the arrival of the Great Northern Railroad in 1893 and the promotion of various schemes to dig canals and fill tidelands, the resulting land booms delivered more acres of filled mudflats into private hands. By the time city residents voted to create a public port in 1911, Seattle officials had to fight their way through a gauntlet of privately owned mud and gravel to reach the sea.33
The relentless transfer of tidelands from aboriginal to white control did not fully eradicate Indians, who continued to visit and camp on their traditional hunting and fishing sites. These were age-old practices, but whites increasingly saw only acts of trespass. For their part, many Indians had nowhere else to go. A 1915 federal report found one to three thousand “landless and homeless” Indians wandering “up and down the Sound, living on the beaches and constantly evicted or ordered to move on by their white neighbors.” Well-meaning reformers confused Indian destitution for backwardness and an inability to modernize.34 In one celebrated instance, after a winter gale destroyed the shoreline shack of the late Chief Seattle’s (Seeathl) nephew, Billy, and his wife, Ellen, white citizens started a relief fund. “In the old days Billy was a good provider,” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported, but “the camping places along the shores of the Sound are now privately owned and no trespassers are allowed; the game has been killed; even the fish are hard to get.”35 Left unanswered was why the landscape had changed and Billy had not. Seattle needed its ports and its transcontinental railways for the Pacific trade. Indian rights were not part of that plan.
To the south, Los Angeles represented a different variation on this theme of urban enclosure in the pursuit of transoceanic and transcontinental commerce. Just as the tidelands in Seattle and San Francisco had evolved from public resource to private property, water rights and sewerage followed similar trajectories in Los Angeles. Prior to American rule, Spanish and Mexican authorities had operated under water laws that mandated equal access, communal rights, and moderation to insure orderly development. The Los Angeles ayuntamiento, or town council, appointed an overseer, or zanjero, to supervise construction of zanjas, or irrigation ditches, along the Los Angeles River and to adjudicate subsequent disputes. During the early years of American rule, this system held sway so long as the Californios were the majority. As American conceptions of private property and water rights took hold, the old zanja regime evaporated.36
The old water-rights regime fell before the needs of the Southern California cattle industry, first to better-financed American rancheros, then to industrial ranchers such as the San Francisco-based Miller and Lux Company.37 Los Angeles political and business leaders wanted more than cattle lots, however. They imagined smokestacks and manufacturing jobs, too. After the railroad finally arrived, the Anglo zanjero, C. M. Jenkins, wrote in his 1883 report that if Los Angeles wanted “cotton, wool, paper, and dozens of other sorts of factories here,” the communally held zanja was doing nothing but sending “our streams, more precious than Pateolian rivers . . . running to waste in unproductive sand.”38 City leaders listened and systematically dismantled the zanja system piece by piece, replacing it pipe by pipe with modern sewer and water lines. But municipal construction crews bypassed Chinatown and Sonora Town, located on the banks of the fast-disappearing Los Angeles River. As the growing city sucked its namesake watercourse dry, new utilities redirected wealth toward white Angelenos and their communities—and away from the city’s poor and minority districts.39
It was not only industrialists but also their workers who shaped these new geographies of urban inequality. Turn-of-the-century Pacific cities were ports of entry for immigrant laborers as well as jobbing centers and settlement destinations. Indispensable as political pawns, necessary components of a dual labor system, Asian workers were both particularly despised and desired, and, like Indian workers, they were not dismissed but cordoned off from the larger community.40
The enclosure of Asian laborers in the Pacific West, like the exclusion of Indian workers, had both urban and rural dimensions. In the countryside, the passage of alien land laws made immigrant land ownership impossible, and extralegal violence against Chinese, Japanese, and other immigrants served as an additional means of subordination. Most had no recourse but to flee to the city, but housing covenants, school discrimination, and franchise restrictions proved equally oppressive.41 In many cases, public officials justified urban enclosure to prevent social and public-health problems. Yet they tolerated tremendous porosity in other social boundaries to facilitate free trade. Trade and labor overcame nativist sentiments, even after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, because a vibrant and vigorous transnational exchange of illegal and legal immigrants, goods, and commodities connected China with its expatriates across the Americas.42
No industry demonstrated this complex reciprocity within Pacific Slope cities much as fishing. By 1854, Chinese migrants established fishing camps on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay, before moving south to Monterey, San Pedro, and San Diego in the 1860s. The completion of the transcontinental railroads dispersed still more Chinese onto the seas. In the salmon canneries of Alaska and British Columbia, most Chinese were industrial laborers, prized by operators for their skill at cutting and processing fish—and reviled by white workers for the same reason. Seattle soon became a central jobbing center for Chinese labor contractors hiring out to Alaskan and British Columbian canneries after mining debris wiped out the salmon runs of the San Francisco Bay Area. Yet the perceived distinctiveness of Chinese fishermen along the entire coast led to an easy way to assign blame for shrinking fisheries: an 1880 law in California prohibited all aliens from fishing public waters. Eventually struck down by the U.S. Circuit Court as unconstitutional, the act found favor with both Progressive conservationists and anti-immigrant activists who were often one and the same.43
Barred from the fin fisheries, the Chinese turned to other species favored by East Asian consumers, processing shellfish for United States and Canadian Chinatowns or markets in Canton or Hong Kong. Drying or curing sea urchins, abalone, and squid was difficult work. The resulting odors, concentrating along urban shorelines, repelled white Americans and underscored the perception of Chinese as unhygienic and inassimilable.44 At the same time, the mounting environmental damage to San Francisco Bay helped to harden racial divisions. As native shellfish and fin fisheries declined, entrepreneurs transplanted Atlantic oysters, leading to another short-lived boom, until the sensitive bivalves succumbed to a noxious cocktail of pollutants: human waste, oil refinery spills, smelter runoff, and slaughterhouse offal. By the early twentieth century, harvests plummeted. Active only in restricting access instead of stopping pollution, state regulators now required expensive licenses, established catch quotas, and restricted certain gear. None of these efforts succeeded and the oyster fishery collapsed. By the 1920s “oyster pirates,” including many Chinese and other Asian immigrants, were catching and eating contaminated shellfish in secret while oyster growers were forced out of business.45
Nativist conservation policies also shaped reactions to the massive transformation of Seattle’s watersheds and subsequent fights over diminished fishing. A series of massive floods catalyzed a new consensus to build a network of canals, waterways, and levees around Puget Sound. Beginning in 1914, city and state engineers removed oxbows and meanders along the lower Duwamish River, the city’s largest, replacing it with the straight Duwamish Waterway. The nation’s entry into World War I turned the Duwamish into the Northwest’s industrial arsenal, home to shipyards, marine shops, and a young aviation company named Boeing.46
Remaking the Duwamish for global trade also led to the ultimate demise of Seattle’s local commercial fishery. Dominated largely by immigrants and Indians of limited capital unable to relocate, the fishery was already in trouble. Decades of habitat destruction and pollution had already depleted nearby salmon runs; retooling the city’s watershed added to the decline by changing fish migration routes or obliterating spawning grounds. State authorities were reluctant to oppose development now that Seattle was challenging San Francisco’s commercial dominance. Instead, officials turned to artificial propagation to make more fish, opening hatcheries across the state.47 Following the war, Seattle sport anglers allied with industrialists and shippers to complain that “aliens not only . . . completely monopolize our fishery,” as a 1919 report concluded, but they also “destroy it while monopolizing it.” After several contentious public hearings, the state fish commission closed Elliott Bay and the Duwamish River to commercial fishing.48 Throughout the 1920s, most charged with illegal fishing had Italian, Greek, Slavic, or Japanese surnames. Some others were likely Indians trying to find a living off reservation.49
Civic and business leaders celebrated their triumph in remaking urban space to serve commerce, yet they also faced again the contradictions of promoting Pacific trade while enclosing or excluding immigrant and Indian labor. In the first years of the twentieth century, following the forcible acquisition of Hawaii and the Philippines, plus the completion of the Panama Canal, urban boosters along the Pacific Slope saw an opportunity to tout their cities as gateways to the new transoceanic frontier. World’s fairs were one popular device. Modeled on the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the 1894 Midwinter International Exposition in San Francisco, complete with a sanitized rendition of the Forty-Niners’ mining camps, testified to the city’s rising economic and cultural ambitions. More than a decade later, Portland opened the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition, Seattle held the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, or AYPE, and San Diego and San Francisco, in 1915, staged rival expositions.50
Unlike other world’s fairs, these celebrations emphasized future commercial imperialism over historical commemoration. Anticipating the Panama Canal’s completion, San Franciscans built a five-acre working model of the waterway, complete with lighthouses, locks, and dams at the 1915 fair. Seattle built replicas of Alaskan mines and staged exhibits of Asian arts for their exposition, while San Diegans blended Mission-style architecture lit by modern electric lights. At all of these fairs, nature had a prominent role. According to The World’s Work, “Nature’s own great exposition,” held “the mind in thrall” at Seattle’s fair by opening the “world’s wondrous treasure box” for exploitation.51
Exposition promoters further hyped each city’s natural advantages by linking social and economic progress to racial advancement. “The red man of the Pacific Coast is present everywhere,” reported the Seattle Times: the “glares and grins” of the “dun-colored totem poles” dotting the fairgrounds, the instructional and scientific exhibits crowding the Smithsonian Institution and U.S. Government Buildings, the Wild West Shows staged by Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Lakota performers, and the Eskimo and Igorrote Villages of the amusement quarter peopled with Tlingit and Inuit from Alaska and Igorots from the Philippines.52 Actual Indians still worked and lived in Seattle, but they and other savages were denigrated as anachronistic relics. When an Igorot named Ka-lang-ad supposedly “escaped” from the village, the Seattle Times editorialized, “the time is past when tattooed and painted savages” roamed the woods.53 Yet the savage past still had work to do in the present at these fairs by reminding visitors why history mattered now. A young Herbert Hoover, visiting London in 1912 to promote San Francisco’s upcoming Panama-Pacific International Exposition, explained how “in these days of stifling struggle our people” needed to “have a heritage of race” as well as material prosperity.54
Fusing the conquest of nature to the conquest of savagery at these world’s fairs seemed to pay off for urban boosters, if measured by foreign commerce. Transpacific trade increased three times faster than transatlantic trade after 1913, doubling from 6 to 12 percent of the nation’s total foreign commerce.55 The opening of the Panama Canal was one clear reason why; effective promotion of the urban Pacific Slope was another. This was a success surely by any measure, but lost in the celebration was how the legacies of history now began exacting costs on each city’s immediate environment and their poorest, most marginal citizens.
Here is where urban frontier anxiety turned back on itself. Frederick Jackson Turner may have cast aspersions on cities, but he did not ignore them entirely, referring to the “complexity of city life” and the rise of America’s “manufacturing civilization” throughout his signature essay.56 What he left unexamined was how urban Americans might survive the vanishing frontier. The responses were as varied as their proponents. Some advocated returning to Jeffersonian agrarianism principles through homesteading and irrigated agriculture. Others urged Americans to take up outdoor sports or nature education. Still others agitated for opening new frontiers overseas through colonization or trade. No matter the proposed solution, all relied upon the continued “frontier dialectic,” pitting savagery and nature against Western civilization and modernity.57 And all cast the struggle as mortal combat. As novelist Frank Norris explained in 1902, if the “blood-instincts” of the Old World were lost without the frontier, they might find new outlets through trade. “Competition and conquest are words easily interchangeable,” he wrote, and “we cannot speak of it but in terms borrowed from the glossary of the warrior.”58
This was Progressivism as primitivism and modernism combined. Seen this way, Richard Wade’s martial “spearheads” imagery takes on new relevance.59 By elaborating the border as the measure of national sovereignty, North American governments wanted to do more than extend their commercial reach. They wanted to restrict Asian migration as well as regulate Asian trade.60 Pacific Slope cities were literally on the front line of this foreign campaign and they were often the first to face the collateral damage at home. City leaders wrestled with the contradictions of expanding trade while restricting immigration, encouraging industrial growth while preventing environmental destruction, and promoting employment while discouraging vagrancy and social disorder. It was easy for some frontier worriers to tell city-weary Americans to light out for the wilderness. It was harder for those running the metropolis to detach frontier anxieties from urban life because the end of the frontier foreshadowed the end of progress itself.
Some Progressive thinkers offered a way out. Herbert Croly, in his influential 1909 book The Promise of American Life, blamed the frontier age, in part, for the “morally and socially undesirable distribution of wealth.” He called for newly empowered civic institutions “responsible for a morally and socially desirable distribution of wealth.” Croly pinned his hopes on cities in particular as “the most fruitful field for economically and socially constructive experimentation.” Urban leaders enjoyed the “unique chance” to protect their communities by using their expertise and resources “for the amelioration of the sanitary, if not the fundamental economic and social, condition of the poorer people.”61 Even those Progressives unwilling to jettison what they saw as the vibrant individualism and energetic entrepreneurialism of the frontier past accepted Croly’s advice. Writing in 1910, Theodore Roosevelt lauded the “pioneers that pushed the frontiers of civilization westward” but acknowledged that the “general welfare” now demanded “a greater variety of good qualities than were needed on the frontier.”62
Progressives like Croly had reason to hope cities might promote progress in a post-frontier America. By the dawn of the twentieth century, American cities had accrued significant powers to acquire water and power, condemn private property, regulate industry and commerce, pursue infrastructure improvements, and regulate citizens’ behavior and movement in the name of public health. (For example, many Progressives, including Theodore Roosevelt, endorsed Los Angeles’ seizure of the Owens River as its own.) In particular, public health officials and municipal engineers were, to paraphrase James Scott, the eyes and hands of an assertive metropolitan state.63 They were border guards who worried that porous borders had led to social and environmental instability. In response, these latter-day praetorians tried to reassert environmental and civic boundaries politically or, failing that, they tried to change their cities physically. They would erase what remained of the frontier in their city even as they eulogized their cities’ romantic origins.
In San Francisco, natural disaster provided the pretext for establishing a new order. The April 18, 1906, earthquake liquefied the filled tidelands, destroying several commercial and shipping districts. The resulting fires consumed what the temblor had not flattened, driving as many as 250,000 people from their homes. The refugees lived in makeshift tent camps until the following summer, but these were anything but homogeneous communities. Even in temporary quarters, middle-class and native-born whites segregated themselves from working-class immigrants, who, in turn, separated themselves from the even more lowly Chinese. Facing another round of recrimination and discrimination from white assistance groups, many Chinese decamped to Oakland or other Chinatowns, relying upon the segregated social networks of support spanning the Pacific Rim.64
Once rebuilding commenced, San Francisco’s ruling caste of real estate developers, city officials, newspaper publishers and their elected advocate, Mayor James D. Phelan, tried again to oust the Chinese, hoping to shove them to faraway Hunter’s Point, an industrial district of slaughterhouses and tenements south of downtown. Some white citizens had already taken matters into their own hands, looting Chinatown in late April as the embers still cooled. But the Chinese community’s transnational connections trumped local sentiment. Leaders formed the Sub-committee for the Permanent Location of Chinatown, and mobilized the Chinese legation and members of the Chinese Six Companies to apply pressure. The Chinese Consul-General informed federal authorities that trade might be redirected to other Pacific ports instead of San Francisco unless the Chinese were permitted to stay, and San Francisco Chinese merchants spoke openly about the appeal of Portland, Tacoma, or Seattle. These tactics worked. The nativists relented and within two years, Chinatown’s population returned to its pre-quake level.65
The victory of Chinatown did not end white persecution, however. In 1907, an outbreak of bubonic plague, the second in four years, provided city officials with another excuse for expelling the Chinese. “The disease must be built out of existence,” the head of the anti-plague campaign proclaimed, and then went on to explain why: whole neighborhoods of non-white and poor residents were unsanitary and needed to be eliminated. White San Franciscans, like their counterparts across the country, had long seen immigration and poverty as avenues for disease. For decades, sanitarians had conducted numerous campaigns to eradicate typhoid, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases often blamed on immigrants and social deviants.66
Since the plague originated in Asia, it was easy to blame the Chinese for new outbreaks. During an earlier plague scare in 1900, Chinese leaders successfully defended their community against charges that cultural practices caused and exacerbated disease. Now, seven years later, in the wake of disaster, they were less successful. Teams of sanitarians streamed into Chinatown and other immigrant neighborhoods. Whole blocks were fumigated with sulfur dioxide gas and washed with bichloride of mercury solution. Professional rat catchers earned $2.50 daily, plus bounties to eradicate the vermin. Hundreds of thousands of rodents were trapped, shot, or poisoned. City storm drains washed dead rats into the bay, where they floated in enormous rafts circling the sewer outfalls.67
The campaign to eradicate the plague initiated a wholesale reconfiguration of urban space as private spaces of domestic consumption became conflated with public spaces of civic production. As in other American cities at the time, fears over poor sanitation found new scientific credence with the growing acceptance of germ theory. Chickens, pigs, cows, and horses that had lived in the city alongside immigrant and working-class residents were now exiled to the countryside. Like earlier episodes in New York and other Eastern cities, San Francisco’s working poor tried and failed to resist. The city Board of Supervisors also passed new ordinances requiring that all wooden frame buildings have concrete, gravel, or packed earth floors or foundations to repel vermin. By 1909 more than six million square feet of San Francisco had been paved over with asphalt or concrete. It had also become a less rustic and more expensive place to live and work.68
Hatred for Asians, foreign pathogens, and invasive biota infiltrating the United States soon aroused authorities all along the Pacific Coast. Scientists, physicians, and municipal officials, drawing from Frederic Clements’s incipient theories on plant ecology as well as pseudoscientific eugenics, framed aliens as invaders intent on colonizing the New World and crowding out native species, including white Americans. They needed to be quarantined, removed, or bred out of existence if white native-born Americans were to survive.69 An America under siege and in decline horrified Frederick Jackson Turner in particular. In the twilight of his career at Harvard, he repeatedly lamented how the closed frontier heralded rising population and diminished resources. The safety valve no longer functioned, and Turner morphed into a crass Malthusian. In a gesture worthy of today’s most zealous environmentalists, he suggested in a 1923 note that a “friendly comet” or a “chemist’s bomb” might put an end to the quandary.70
Far West city leaders did not have comets to hurl or bombs to explode, but they did have laws and technology on their side. They used both to avert Turner’s post-frontier apocalypse by temporarily destroying their cities in order to save them. New borders were quickly drawn and erected between clean and dirty, white and non-white, affluent and poor, and domesticated and dangerous nature. The earlier fluidity of life in the frontier city was being intentionally concealed or erased. Professional sanitarians and white-dominated labor unions alike adopted surveillance techniques to track immigrants at work and at home. They also led boycotts of Chinese-made articles in the name of protecting health and workers’ rights. Immigrants disembarking at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay faced increasingly strict examination and quarantine regimens before being allowed, if at all, to set foot on the mainland. Local Chinese political and business leaders vigorously fought some measures, but as Nayan Shah argues, occasionally they also joined in the effort to sanitize Chinatown, eliminating remnants of an older Chinese bachelor society, rooting out opium dens, and closing residential hotels. Attacking recent immigrants was an effective means for some landed Chinese immigrants also to prove their loyalty and worth to city officials and white antagonists in the business community.71
In Los Angeles, the proximity to the Mexican border heightened clashes over immigration, disease, and civic improvement. Even as civic leaders romanticized the city’s Hispanic heritage to attract tourists and investors, they simultaneously struggled to whitewash its Mexican history. The undoing of the zanja system was one step; new zoning laws were the next. Impoverished ethnic enclaves in East Los Angeles, created decades earlier by municipal policy and civic neglect, now faced extreme social and environmental pressures. Across the city, residents of all classes protested noxious meatpacking and rendering plants that processed Central Valley cattle, refineries cracking petroleum siphoned from Southern California beaches, and crematoria collecting and burning human corpses. In response, reformers pushed through citywide laws curbing and redistributing pollution. Zoning created healthier and cleaner neighborhoods on the city’s largely white and affluent west side while pushing polluters into the east side’s dirtier, industrial neighborhoods populated by minorities and the poor.72
Changes in the metropolitan landscape of pollution and residence also intersected with changes in the regional geography of labor migration and immigration. The rapid growth of Southern California’s agricultural sector in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, driven by massive federal and state reclamation projects and investment by agricultural and railroad conglomerates, relied upon a pliable supply of labor to pick citrus, lettuce, strawberries, and other crops.73 Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Korean immigrants were both laborers and producers, but Mexicans and Mexican Americans now made up the bulk of the itinerant workforce. Pushed by the economic and political disruptions of the Mexican Revolution and pulled by labor contractors and enticements of higher wages, they dominated the orange groves and industrial floors of metropolitan Los Angeles, made possible, in part, by the appropriation of Owens Valley water. Mexican workers shuttled between city and suburb, countryside and metropolis, Mexico and the United States by rail, streetcar, bus, and automobile. But within greater Los Angeles, the transformation of the Southland’s landscapes, coupled with patterns of chain migration, channeled new arrivals into preexisting enclaves.74
The enclaves in town were subjected to the same assaults as in other Pacific Slope cities. When bubonic plague struck Los Angeles in 1924, local authorities immediately quarantined the “Mexican district” adjacent to the Los Angeles River. Police officers cordoned the neighborhood, home to 1,800 to 2,500 people, and then expanded their exclusion zone as the plague spread. Abatement crews fumigated homes and buildings with hydrocyanic gas and carbon monoxide. They also set rattraps and spread out poison over a broadening war zone. As one newspaper article later reported, officials “had to destroy a large part of Los Angeles”—more specifically, the Mexican part. Wrecking crews cut a devastating swath in the name of urban renewal and public health. Approximately twenty-five hundred buildings were demolished or burned. As buildings were swept aside, phalanxes of sanitarians marched block-by-block, fumigating buildings, killing rats, and collecting the bodies for autopsies.75
Much of the campaign was kept quiet for fear of negative publicity, less out of concern for displaced Mexicans, African Americans, Japanese, and other minorities than for the city’s reputation as a tourist destination and investment magnet. Blurring biotic and human others, city boosters and public health officials often portrayed Mexicans as rats, debating how to prevent measures that “would scatter” the problem or provoke an angry “stampede.” As one University of California zoologist wrote later, Mexicans tended to “huddle together,” thereby “spreading various epidemics throughout our population.”76 These observers were not entirely wrong. Crowded living conditions and insufficient sanitary infrastructure did provide fertile ground for infectious disease. What they failed to recognize was how the city’s planning and political economy had created this landscape of poverty and misery.
Urban renewal had not whitened the barrios in Los Angeles; instead, it had concentrated and excluded them. Attention soon turned toward limiting the number of Mexicans coming in the first place. Well-intentioned white reformers, often working with leaders in the Mexican American community, came to see Mexican immigration itself as a health threat, both to the body politic of Los Angeles and the bodies of white Los Angelenos.77 When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers later straitjacketed the Los Angeles River in a concrete aqueduct, it was no accident that the hydraulic reengineering of the river coincided with further marginalization of Mexican communities living and working along the hardening banks.78
Figure 7.2. Disinfecting crew at work, 1500 East 4th Street, Los Angeles, during the 1924 plague outbreak. Courtesy The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
But perhaps the best analog to Turner’s apocalyptic comet was the reengineering of Seattle’s landscape, where city engineers almost completely reshaped the entire city in a few short years. As the city spread across steep glaciated hills and filled-in tide flats, minority neighborhoods clustered in low-lying and neglected places became the target of the same reforms as elsewhere. Typhoid, typhus, and other diseases were commonplace in these enclaves, although Seattle was spared outbreaks of plague. It was also spared the disasters like the one that rocked San Francisco, but in the minds of some city leaders, the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897–1898 was the demographic equivalent of an earthquake. R. H. Thomson, the city engineer during the Progressive Era decades, recalled streets so full of hoboes, would-be miners, vagrants, and pimps “that you can hardly walk through them.” The population ballooned from 3,553 in 1880 to 237,194 in 1910, one of the fastest municipal growth rates in the Far West.79 Many of the poorest settled or squatted on recently filled tidal flats. “From the street car windows and railway coaches,” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported in 1899, “glimpses are caught of Shack-town, but the daily lives of the cosmopolitan inhabitants, their tales of adventure, of grinding sorrow, of domestic unhappiness are not revealed.”80
Seattle reformers wanted to tackle poor sanitation and immorality simultaneously. Thomson had concluded that the city faced three interlocked environmental problems: insufficient and contaminated water supplies, poor drainage, and rugged topography, each of which also yielded significant social consequences. The solution to all three lay in reestablishing proper boundaries between water and land. Beginning in 1892, Thomson oversaw sewer construction, tideland filling, and the acquisition of the Cedar River as the city’s proprietary supply, completing the hydraulic landscape by building a gravity-driven pipeline to Seattle ten years later.81 With water in hand and sanitation plans in place, Thomson then turned his attention to leveling the city’s hills, which he blamed for many “offensive” and “impassable grades,” some exceeding 10 percent.82
The first regrade, completed in 1898 along First Avenue at the foot of Denny Hill, relied on steam shovels and horse-drawn carts. When property values in the now-flattened neighborhood subsequently soared in an already hyper-inflated market, other businesses and residences embraced Thomson’s “struggles to up build this city.”83 With water from the Cedar River, contractors also turned to mining technologies, unleashing hydraulic cannons against the hills and running sluices to carry the tailings to the waterfront.84 City residents and observers alike championed regrading as “the product of Western conditions” that required “pioneering engineering methods.”85 They championed the sheer power necessary to reverse eons of geology while wiping away some of Seattle’s most blighted neighborhoods in the name of civic reform.
And the regrades were as impressive as they were destructive. On the first Denny Hill regrade, engineers and contractors sent nearly 5.5 million cubic yards of dirt and rock into Elliott Bay, displacing scores of squatters’ shacks along the shoreline to make room for development. The Jackson Street regrade cut through part of Seattle’s Asian and African American neighborhoods, enabling city inspectors to condemn whole blocks of homes and apartment buildings in the name of progress. According to Engineering News, remaking the physical landscape required altering the social fabric, too. Jackson Street, once a “dirty, filthy region that had naturally become the immoral center of Seattle,” was cleansed and uplifted thanks to what one city engineer called “a natural world-making force” for “municipal improvement.”86
Yet like a meteor strike, regrading left more ruin than renewal in its wake, justifying still more regrading despite growing opposition to the practice. In the former Jackson and Dearborn Street regrade districts, home to the some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, water percolated into the exposed slopes and triggered wave after wave of destructive landslides. Eventually even the state Supreme Court unanimously concluded in Wong Kee Jun v. Seattle, the last of the so-called “Jackson Street regrade cases,” that the city engineers were to blame.87 Yet despite legal challenges and wrecked homes, by the 1920s, property owners across the city were clamoring again for new regrade projects to remove “a very cheap and undesirable residence section” on what was left of Denny Hill and to eliminate Profanity Hill in the center of Seattle’s Skid Row, where the earlier Jackson and Dearborn regrades had yielded a slide-prone area filled with “dilapidated” abodes. Engineers again assaulted Denny Hill regrade, but the Great Depression turned off the money and the hoses for good before engineers could complete the remaining projects.88
The consequences of this earthmoving as usual fell largely on the city’s minorities and working poor. Displaced from their neighborhoods and unable to find affordable housing, many built shacks and houseboats along the polluted Duwamish Waterway and Elliott Bay waterfront. There were also exiles from Seattle’s impoverished rural environs, where sawmills, mines, and farms had never fully recovered from the short but severe depression after World War I. The famed sociologist Roderick D. McKenzie, then a young professor at the University of Washington, explained this social chaos in ecological terms, explaining how waves of “foreign races and other undesirable invaders” continued to sweep over Seattle. As a result, the city had not yet reached its “climax stage” where the “dominant type” of ecological community could “withstand the intrusions of other forms of invasion.”89 Thanks to these emigrants and immigrants, Seattle still displayed “many marks of the frontier” even as it was “rapidly entering upon a metropolitan area, the future of which lies in the Pacific.”90
The Great Depression forestalled Seattle’s metropolitan future as still more waves of displaced laborers washed over the city. In late 1931, hundreds of unemployed erected a Hooverville on vacant land owned by the Port of Seattle, just south of Downtown. One observer called the encampment “a junk-yard for human junk” and “a scrap-heap of cast-off men.”91 City officials tried to remove Hooverville by fire and truncheon, but the residents of this “hobo city” fought back, burrowing into the ground and constructing roofs of tin or steel. Eventually, the city relented and allowed squatters to stay, but refused to provide water or electricity to the thousand-plus men who lived there. Even this level of charity angered some Seattleites, who called upon city officials to redouble their efforts. “We recognize the fact . . . that it is unlawful to shoot or drown them,” Mary Gamble Young of the North End Improvement Club wrote to the city council about a squatter camp in the Interbay district, “but—we want you to do something about it.”92 The nation’s entry into World War II provided the pretext for action. In April 1942, the new Seattle Housing Authority torched the shanties and evicted the inhabitants.93
Wartime mobilization seemingly closed the chapter on the frontier past along the urban Pacific Slope. On the filled tidelands of San Francisco Bay and Puget Sound, shipyard workers displaced drifters to assemble destroyers and Liberty Ships. On the banks of the straightened Duwamish River and entombed Los Angeles River, airplane plants churned out a bomber or fighter plane a day. Still, past practices endured. Japanese and Japanese American civilians were evacuated and sent inland to relocation camps in the name of national security. Thousands of African Americans who came west and Mexicans who came north for work were funneled into the now-segregated landscapes of the metropolitan Far West. Meanwhile, public health officials again grappled with containing migrants and the diseases they carried. By the war’s end, boosters in all three cities believed they had escaped history and eluded the calamity of Turner’s closed frontier. What they failed to realize was how their faith in progress had helped to propel the inequities of the past into an unfolding future.
The frontier is, after all, a metaphor, one that contains within it legacies of inequality and violence as often as the hope of renewal and innovation. In the case of the fin de siècle urban Far West, frontier rhetoric both justified and ignored particular changes within social and environmental networks linking city and hinterland. Those relationships were rarely equivalent in cause or consequence. In the longer history of the region, Pacific Slope cities illustrate how frontier anxieties lived on when civic and business leaders sought to reinvent their communities in response to unsettling changes. Given the state of scientific knowledge and political economy at the time, their triumphs were undeniable: improved public health, affordable utilities, innovative urban planning, and an elevated quality of life for many residents.
Yet these accomplishments were neither universally enjoyed nor democratically distributed. The legacies of dispossession and destruction became doppelgangers that haunted buoyant boosters of Western urban progress. These malevolent spirits, hard to exorcise and difficult to vanquish, never fully disappeared. Cities continued to reorganize their extractive and commercial hinterlands and reshaped their immediate environs in turn. With each round of remodeling, present tradeoffs piled on top of past consequences, the costs passed on to those people and places least able to oppose the penalties. As Paul Sabin concludes in his assessment of American expansion into the Pacific, “this past of the American West is truly unbroken and it remains so today.”94 And part of that past is metropolitan, too.
The histories recounted in this essay come largely from the turn of the twentieth century, but perhaps the most tantalizing and complex stories may come from reflecting back across even broader scales of time and space. As urban centers organized their hinterlands beginning in the late nineteenth century, the broader ecology of resources and energy production they marshaled influenced where and how urbanites built their homes, workplaces, and public spaces.95 This was never a simple case of geographical determinism, however. Migration and immigration have also shaped metropolitan environmental and social dynamics. As Dorothy Fujita-Rony reminds us, we must also examine the American West from the perspective of Asian immigrants, “a perspective shaped by both land and water.”96 For salmon cannery workers from Quezon City, mill workers from Osaka, fishermen from Canton, or miners from Thessaloniki, the foreign cities of San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles were not distant locales but second homes.97
Pacific Slope cities also became second homes to floral and faunal immigrants as well as points for overseas embarkation. Migrant laborers brought unwanted or even dangerous animals, food, microbes, and plants with them to North America. The dispersal of these weedy species along railway tracks and local waterways speak to the complex and cross-informing pathways of environmental history. The social and ecological consequences of military occupation, transoceanic trade, and tourism also link the histories of Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to Hawaii, Alaska, the Philippines, and Indochina.98 Biologically and socially, Pacific Slope cities truly were the “spearheads” of American global expansion.
Wade’s imagery is a reminder of why metaphors matter, even an exhausted trope like the frontier, but also why careful historical context remains essential. The frontier as an idea came of age, lived, and died in the span of a few short decades at the turn of the twentieth century even though we have debated its significance ever since. Yet metaphors can and do encapsulate histories that persist with us. The two frontiers of Turner and Buffalo Bill, the conquest of nature and the conquest of savagery, endure in today’s culture. They inhabit places as well as stories, processes as well as locations, borderlands as well as nations, no matter how much we try to remove or forget them.99
Present-day cities bear the traces. In Seattle, gleaming skyscrapers frame snowcapped peaks, trendy condominiums rise over the eponymous Denny Regrade neighborhood, container ships unload goods from China, and Boeing jets arcing toward Japan and Korea trace contrails in the skies. Boosters call this twenty-first-century “metronatural” Seattle a metropolis set in nature and made beautiful by man; yet a shadow city, a metrotoxic Seattle, stands here, too.100
These spectral cities lurk along the entire coast. At the San Francisco International Airport, city, state, and federal officials screen tourists and immigrants from East Asia for pandemic flu or other infectious diseases, while merchants in Chinatown shutter their shops after every Asiatic disease scare. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quarantine station at San Francisco International Airport is one node in a security system stretching from Anchorage to San Diego.101 Nevertheless, interlopers slip through: Asian longhorned beetles, Eurasian water milfoil, and human contraband. Several times every year, longshoremen at San Pedro or Long Beach open ship containers filled with dead and dying stowaways from around the globe. Most elude capture to join the denizens of illegal immigrants that sustain the Southland’s economy.102
And along the filled Elliott Bay waterfront and the straightened Duwamish Waterway, signs sprout from the mud, warning not to eat contaminated crabs, clams, oysters, or fish, especially after a heavy rain flushes pollutants into the former estuary. The signs are in seven languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Laotian, Khmer, Russian, and Tagalog. Tours along the concrete-encased Los Angeles River, the crumbling seawall at Hunter’s Point in San Francisco, the dusty alleys of Barrio Logan in San Diego, and the stagnant reaches of Portland’s Columbia Slough reveal similar places scarred by pollution and segregation. These are places where the past dwells.103
Much has changed since a band of Indians fled their burning homes in early Seattle, but much remains familiar to their living descendants today. In 2009, members of the Duwamish Tribe opened their new tribal longhouse and cultural center in West Seattle, a few hundred yards away from where Herring’s House once stood. Speaking to a packed crowd, tribal chairwoman Cecile Hansen noted how the tribe had “completed one phase of getting our own home.” The other phase remained elusive: the Duwamish were embroiled in a decade-long court battle with federal authorities to prove they were not extinct, facing opposition from both Bureau of Indian Affairs officials and rival Puget Sound tribes who feared the Duwamish would lay claim to scarce salmon and shellfish grounds.104
If early frontier cities stand for stories of national triumph, America’s more recent Pacific Slope cities are cautionary tales of overreach, unexpected consequences, and costs deferred to future generations. To paraphrase Richard Wade’s conclusion to The Urban Frontier, any history that omits this dimension of urban life relates only part of the story of the westward expansion.105
Otherwise, all we are telling are ghost stories.
