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

That caveat is the panel. Lushootseed orthography is specialist work, and a name is not made more accurate by adding diacritics to it. An earlier draft of this room silently rendered the name with a glottalised consonant that appears in no source we hold; that draft was wrong, and this note exists so the error is not repeated.

The Burke Museum's Waterlines Project map — whose place names come from Coast Salish elders working with ethnographers, and from linguists including the late Vi taqʷšəblu Hilbert — is the authority we would rather cite. We have not yet been able to confirm its spelling of this name.

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.

This is not a marginal footnote to the landing. It is the condition the landing took place in, and it was recorded by the same encyclopedia that records the landing.

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.

An earlier draft of this panel said the Duwamish fed the settlers through the winter of 1851–52. Arthur Denny's own memoir does not support that date: he calls his first winter "quite a mild winter." The winter of real hunger was 1852–53 — "times of pinching want and great privation."

And it is in that second winter that Denny records the thing the panel was reaching for. The settlers' pork went out on the tide, their flour and hard bread gave out, and finally their potatoes. So they got in a canoe.

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.

Charles Terry stayed. He held the point until 1857, then traded his 320 acres for Doc Maynard's land south of Yesler Way — by some distance the better end of the bargain.

At Muckl-te-oh, Governor Isaac Stevens and the leaders of the Duwamish, Suquamish, Snoqualmie, Lummi and other tribes and bands signed away title to the land this city stands on, reserving small portions, payments and services — and reserving 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 text is a US government work and is in the public domain. Read it rather than a summary of it.

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 let settlers claim land in Oregon Territory — but only once Indigenous title had been extinguished by treaty. At Alki, Low and Lee Terry staked their claims on 28 September 1851. Denny, Boren and Bell claimed the eastern shore of Elliott Bay in February 1852.

Point Elliott was signed in 1855 and ratified in 1859. Every one of those claims was made before there was legal title to make it from.

Those claims are the first survey lines in this city, and later plats were laid over them. If you use the map on this site to look up what can be built on a Seattle lot, you are reading a boundary whose oldest ancestor is a claim filed with the General Land Office in the years before the treaty.

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

Built out over the tide flats at Duwamish Head on driven pilings, Luna Park was sold as the Coney Island of the West: a figure-eight coaster, a natatorium with salt and fresh water, a dance palace, and the best-stocked bar on Elliott Bay.

The bar was its undoing. West Seattle, appalled at being overrun by "boozers from Seattle," voted 325 to 8 to annex itself to the city two days after the park opened, in the hope that Seattle's reforming mayor would clean it up.

The park closed in 1913. The natatorium outlived it by eighteen years and burned in an arson fire on 14 April 1931. At the lowest tides the pilings still show.

The story told at Alki is that the farmer Hans Martin Hanson hung a kerosene lantern on his barn in the 1870s to mark the shoals. HistoryLink twice calls this legend, and we pass it on as such.

What is documented: in 1887 the Lighthouse Service put an official post lantern on the point and paid Hanson fifteen dollars a month to tend it — a job that passed to his son Edmund on his death in 1900, at the same fifteen dollars.

The present light station opened on 1 April 1913: a thirty-seven-foot octagonal tower with a fourth-order Fresnel lens visible twelve miles out, and a three-trumpet fog signal aimed north, south and west.

Before it was a neighbourhood, Alki was a summer address: bathhouses, a beach railway of sorts by ferry and streetcar, and cottages let by the season to people escaping the city across the bay.

The Seattle Public Library holds photographs of the bathhouse, the bathers and the summer homes from these years. They are the most ordinary images in this room, and they are the ones that show what the beach was for.

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 recognised. 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.

This is a live matter and it moves. The date at the foot of this panel is when we last checked it, and it should be read as a limit on the panel, not a decoration.

On the city's fifty-fourth birthday, more than a thousand people watched a granite pylon unveiled at Alki. Three surviving members of the landing party and three descendants pulled the flag off it together.

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.