Alki

Alki Point carries a Southern Lushootseed name recorded as sbaqwabqs, given as "prairie point." The spelling here follows the cited source exactly.

Lushootseed orthography is specialist work. We have not embellished or regularised the name, and we have not yet confirmed this rendering against the Burke Museum Waterlines Project or with a Lushootseed specialist.

When the Denny Party arrived there were at least seventeen Duwamish and Suquamish villages around Puget Sound. On the West Seattle peninsula, one archaeological site has produced material dating to the sixth century.

The point where the party came ashore had long been used as a Duwamish burial ground.

These are not details outside the landing story. They describe the place in which the landing occurred.

The beach at Alki has been seawalled, filled and regraded. To see the shore the Duwamish used and the Denny Party landed on, you need a chart drawn before the city.

The US Coast Survey mapped Duwamish Bay in 1854 — one year before the Treaty of Point Elliott, three years after the landing. It is the earliest detailed picture of this water we can put on a wall, and it is in the public domain.

Scouts had come first. On 25 September 1851 David Denny, John Low and Lee Terry reached the mouth of the Duwamish River, camped near an Indian village at Duwamish Head, and met Chief Seattle. On 28 September Low and Terry staked Donation Land Claims at Alki Point.

On 13 November the schooner Exact put ten adults and twelve children ashore — twenty-two people, joining the two already there. The cabin waiting for them had no roof. It was raining. The women, by the account of one of the men, "sat down on the loggs and took A Big Cry."

They named the place New York. Charles Terry platted it under the name Alki — Chinook Jargon for "by and by" — on 28 May 1853.

The Duwamish, in HistoryLink's words, "willingly provided the struggling newcomers with fish and other survival basics." At Alki that first winter, food supplies ran low and several of the party fell sick.

Arthur Denny remembered the first winter as mild. The deeper hunger came in 1852–53, when the settlers lost their pork to the tide and exhausted their flour, hard bread, and potatoes. They crossed the water by canoe to a Native settlement on the Black River for food.

Alki is exposed. Within weeks Arthur Denny, Carson Boren and William Bell were sounding Elliott Bay for a deeper harbour; they marked claims on its eastern shore on 15 February 1852 and most of the party had moved by mid-April.

It is tempting to read this as failure, and Alki has worn that reading for a century. The record is plainer: Boren, Denny and Bell "did not intend to settle at Alki Point; rather they used Alki as their base" while they looked for claims. The move was the plan.

At Muckl-te-oh, Governor Isaac Stevens and leaders of the Duwamish, Suquamish, Snoqualmie, Lummi, and other tribes and bands signed the Treaty of Point Elliott. The treaty ceded title to the land on which Seattle stands while reserving payments, services, and the right of "taking fish at usual and accustomed grounds and stations."

Congress took four years to ratify it. Some of what was promised in it has still not been delivered.

The full treaty is linked below so its language can be read directly.

Ten years after the treaty and six after its ratification, the Board of Trustees of the Town of Seattle passed its fifth ordinance. Section one barred any "Indian or Indians" from residing on any street, alley or vacant lot between stated bounds. Section two required anyone employing Native people to house them on their own property.

Read together: Native people could not live in Seattle unless a settler needed them to.

The ordinance was never repealed. Seattle's government was dissolved in 1867 at the request of its own residents, and when the town reincorporated in 1869 the ban was simply not re-enacted. Exclusion continued by other means — including the burning of the Duwamish winter village Herring's House in 1893.

The Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 opened Oregon Territory to settler claims while acknowledging that Indigenous title first had to be extinguished by treaty. Low and Lee Terry staked claims at Alki in September 1851; Denny, Boren, and Bell claimed the eastern shore of Elliott Bay in February 1852.

All of those claims were staked before the Treaty of Point Elliott was signed in 1855 and ratified in 1859.

Those claims became some of Seattle's earliest survey lines, with later plats laid over them. Open today's parcel map and you are reading boundaries whose oldest ancestors include claims filed with the General Land Office before the treaty.

The paperwork is incomplete: the claim papers of both Lee Terry and John Low are not extant.

Built on pilings over the tideflats, Luna Park offered a roller coaster, natatorium, dance hall, and bar. It helped prompt West Seattle's annexation to Seattle, closed in 1913, and burned in 1931. At the lowest tides its pilings still emerge—a shoreline briefly remade for amusement.

A local legend says farmer Hans Martin Hanson hung a kerosene lantern on his barn in the 1870s to mark the shoals. What is documented is an official post lantern installed in 1887 and tended first by Hanson and then by his son Edmund.

The present station opened in 1913: a thirty-seven-foot octagonal tower with a fourth-order Fresnel lens and a three-trumpet fog signal.

In the early twentieth century, bathhouses, ferries, streetcars, and seasonal cottages turned Alki into a summer address. Seattle Public Library photographs show both the leisure and the increasingly engineered shore: a homeland and landing place recast as a city beach.

The Duwamish Longhouse and Cultural Center opened at 4705 West Marginal Way SW, on a traditional riverside village site, after more than three decades of planning and fundraising by a tribe of about 570 members.

The Duwamish are not federally recognized. The tribe received acknowledgement in 2001 under the Clinton administration; by its own account that decision "was reversed in 2002" under the Bush administration. In March 2013 a federal judge found the denial arbitrary and capricious and ordered reconsideration; Interior denied recognition again in 2015. The tribe sued the Department of the Interior on 11 May 2022 and describes its case as still pending.

Federal recognition remains a live matter. The verification date below marks when this account was last checked.

The shaft lists the men by name. The married women of the party are cut into the stone as "And Wife." They waited until the 2001 sesquicentennial for a plaque of their own.

In 1926 the monument was rebuilt on a new foundation, and a stone carried west by the First Transcontinental Motorized Caravan was set into it under a tablet reading "From Plymouth Rock to Alki Point." A replica Statue of Liberty joined the beach in 1952. Alki has never been short of ways to compare itself to somewhere else.