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indigenous people who had come to Seattle, but not to destroy it. Many of them had come to build it. 10
     
    Let there be no mistake: without the labor of Indians, Seattle would have been stillborn. As lumbermen and laundresses, hunters and haulers, indigenous men and women made the city possible. But at the same time, their presence also brought the needs of an “embryonic town” into conflict with the larger aims of federal policies designed to segregate and manage Native communities. Civic leaders challenged the remote federal government and created a local Indian policy based on the needs of urban communities like Seattle and predicated upon a weak federal presence in the region. Not everyone felt that “Siwashes” belonged in town, though, and a series of legal restrictions placed on indigenous people reflected settlers' deep ambivalence about the place of Indians in urban life. As at Alki Point that first winter, the presence and persistence of Indians simultaneously facilitated and challenged Seattle's urban ambitions.
     
    Seattle's indigenous workers included the men employed at Henry Yesler's sawmill, the primary engine of commercial development for the first two decades of the town's existence. In the early 1850s, nearly every white man in town worked in the mill, but its output of some eight thousand board feet of lumber on a good day required the additional labor of Native men. Edith Redfield, an early settler, described sawmills like Yesler's as “little kingdoms, a law unto themselves . . . here white men, Indians, Chinamen, and Kanakas [indigenous Hawai'ians] worked side by side and boarded at the Company's cook-house.” Indians and settlers may have worked and boarded together, but Natives also had particular contributions to make. John M. Swan recalled howindigenous men, seasoned by regular bathing in the Sound, were well suited for rafting lumber out to arriving ships. Remembering the loading of the Orbit for the San Francisco market, for example, Swan recalled that “several of us that were looking at them were shivering with the cold.” Indian mill workers were especially crucial during the Fraser River gold rush, when, in the words of settler William Ballou, “workmen could not be hired for love nor money on Puget Sound” as settlers hied off to the diggings. And as Indians carted sawdust away from Yesler's mill, they dumped it along the shoreline, filling the lagoon of Little Crossing-Over Place and destroying the flounder fishery for which it had been known. Indigenous labor, then, obliterated an indigenous place. 11
     
    Mill work was only part of the contribution Indians made to Seattle's livelihood. With supplies hard to find or outrageously priced, settlers depended on Native subsistence networks to survive. J. Thomas Turner told historian Hubert Howe Bancroft a quarter century later that whites in early Seattle “awaited upon the ebb and flow of the tides for their principal food…we were largely dependent upon the Native inhabitants… for our potatoes and food products of forest and Sound.” Jane Fenton Kelly, the daughter of a Duwamish Valley family, recalled that Native people made domestic life possible among the marshes and dense timber:
     
Mother would send us out to watch for a canoe and we would hail them and give them a written order to the grocery man. He would fill it, and they would bring it out to us. They charged twenty-five cents or “two-bits” as they called it, for each article they brought, large or small. I can remember after we were on the homestead one-half mile up the hill, an old Indian by the name of Jake carried a five-gallon keg of New Orleans molasses to us and charged us but twenty-five cents.
     
    In this way, the duck nets and salmon-drying frames of Seattle's indigenous geography fed its immigrant population. The arrangement benefited Indians as well; hunters who brought mallards and other waterfowl to white families were typically paid a quarter