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ceremonies offered venues for cultural encounter in Seattle, but all too often the collision of indigenous religious observance with the norms of settler society highlighted the differencesbetween Seattle's two peoples. For many pioneers, Native ceremonies in town created lasting and deeply unsettling memories. David Kellogg recalled vividly the year 1862, for example, when he heard that a “Klale Tomaniwous”—a Chinook Jargon term that Bostons typically translated as “black magic”—was going to take place along the waterfront. Arriving at a small house made of cedar-bark mats and lumber from Henry Yesler's sawmill, Kellogg witnessed the initiation of a man known as Bunty Charley; “the pounding against the roof with poles and on the circle of stones around the fire was deafening,” Kellogg recalled. The proceedings soon moved outside, with participants tossing Charley's rigid body into the air and spraying it with mouthfuls of what appeared to be blood. Soon after, Charley began behaving like the Bear power that had possessed him, walking on all fours among the driftwood before shambling off toward the river. The next morning, he was seen in town wearing the badge of his new status: a dusting of white duck down on his head and shoulders. This was a traditional initiation into a secret society, and its staging on the Seattle waterfront was in keeping with the ritual's logic. Such practices were not just religious rituals but social performances, designed specifically to shock and impress observers and to cement the status of the secret society's members. It certainly worked in Kellogg's case. “Holy smoke but it was a sight,” he wrote years later, his shock still resonating decades later. 6
     
    The ducks that provided Bunty Charley's dusting of down likely came from the Duwamish River's estuary, which had been the source of other such emblems of status for centuries. But like new kinds of spiritual power, novel objects that could express social standing—old blind Charley's scarlet blanket, for example—could now also be procured in Seattle. Indian people visited Louisa Boren Denny to buy strips of silk cut from old dresses, and she reminisced that the men in particular “looked very fine with them around their waists, knotted at the side.” Meanwhile, Native women made use of that most cherished of pioneer symbols, the patchwork quilt, to highlight the status of their menfolk. Another Denny kinswoman described how the Indians' quilts of blue and pink on white groundwork were made into shirts, and how “when dressed in a pair of blue trousers and with a bright red scarf tied aroundhis waist and a gaudy red bandanna handkerchief… around his head, his feet encased in bead-embroidered moccasins, a siwash was a ‘hyas tyee’ (very fine chief).” Indigenous women were also regular patrons at C. C. Terry's store, where they bought tin cups to beat into ornaments, and it was not uncommon to see them dressed in hoopskirts and carrying parasols. As commerce with places like San Francisco grew in the 1850s and 1860s, such consumer goods provided yet another reason for indigenous people to visit. Along with dentalium-shell chokers and blankets woven from mountain-goat wool, now hoopskirts and parasols purchased in town could reflect their owners' prestige. 7
     
    Prestige and power could also be found in meetings of the mind between settler and Native leaders. In the 1850s, for example, Saneewa, a Snoqualmie headman from an important indigenous town at the foot of the Cascades, came every autumn with his family, his ponies, and his dogs to camp in Arthur Denny's pasture. Like Seeathl, Saneewa saw Denny, arguably the most powerful man in town, as a strategic ally, but the relationship was mutually beneficial. As the leader of a community located at the western entrance to the lowest pass across the central Cascades, which Denny coveted for a wagon road, Saneewa provided crucial information about the route through