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the mountains. A few years later, Denny would be among the surveyors to map what they called Snoqualmie Pass. And as for Saneewa, many of his people and their descendants were able to remain in the valley where they had always lived, rather than removing to reservations, in part because of the relationships they built with settler “headmen” like Denny. Here, urban and indigenous ambitions coincided, with trips to town reinforcing one Native leader's territorial prerogatives while also facilitating the opening of new routes for American settlement of the region. 8
     
    Hoopskirts and duck down, ponies in pastures and wedding parties near sandspits—each of these things highlighted the ways in which settlers and Indians encountered each other as indigenous men and women participated in town life during Seattle's first decades. Social status, religious observance, and political alliance were all part of the urban indigenous frontier on Puget Sound and offered means for Native men and women to participate in urban society. But throughout Seattle'svillage period, each of these reasons for coming to town was overshadowed by another: Indians came to Seattle (or, in some cases, never left the place that became Seattle) for jobs. As they contributed to the town's economy, they would prove all too well that Seattle's Indian history was nowhere close to ending. Indeed, indigenous people saw Seattle as more than a settler community: it was their community, since they had been partners in its creation. The question was what, if anything, the Bostons, their civic leaders, and their federal government were going to do about it.
     
     
    I N THE EARLY-MORNING HOURS of 26 January 1856, the U.S. Navy's sloop of war Decatur opened fire on the illahee called Seattle. Its targets were not the fifty or so white residents huddling in a tiny blockhouse at the corner of Front and Cherry; rather, the Decatur was gunning for the estimated one thousand “hostiles” in the woods behind town. They had come from indigenous communities in southern Puget Sound and the far side of the Cascade Mountains to sack Seattle, traveling down the old trail from Lake Washington to Little Crossing-Over Place and taking up positions beyond the cleared yards at the edge of town. They had already burned many outlying homesteads and now seemed about to raze what little existed of central Puget Sound's urban potential. Throughout the day, settlers and marines exchanged fire with the attackers, and by ten o'clock that evening, the enemy had retreated back to Lake Washington. No bodies were ever found, but some settlers estimated that as many as two hundred Native warriors had died; among the settlers, one man and a teenage boy had been killed. In less than twenty-four hours, the “Battle of Seattle” was over. 9
    Enshrined in local mythology as the ur-travail of early Seattle—a violent inverse of the Chief Seattle Speech—the Battle of Seattle is like countless other events held to have occurred in what historian Patricia Nelson Limerick has called the “empire of innocence,” in which blameless white pioneers earn honor and success by surviving threats from nature, Indians, or a corrupt government. But what on its surface might seem like a showdown between savagery and urbanity was in reality a much messier affair, illustrated by a map of the conflict drawn by the Decatur 's Colonel George S. Phelps. It shows a handful of streets and landmarks such as the blockhouse and the hotel belonging to Mary Ann “Mother Damnable” Conklin; above and to the right are the “hills and woods thronged with Indians.” But at the edges of the little town, we also see two clusters of cross-hatchings—almost like Plains tipis—representing Indian encampments. On the slope above Henry Yesler's mill sits “Curley's Camp,” and the other, named “Tecumseh's Camp,” stands across a dirt street from Mother Damnable's. Distinguished from the Native attackers, these were