Chief Seattle Fountain/Little Crossing-Over Place
The Chief Seattle Fountain is a monument to the city’s namesake, Duwamish Chief Seeathl (also spelled Si'ahl). It is also a reminder that before this place was Seattle—and long before it was Pioneer Park Place as you see it today—it was Little Crossing-Over Place.
By 1850, Indigenous peoples of Puget Sound had weathered at least five separate epidemics that killed thousands. The astounding destruction wrought by diseases that more than decimated Puget Sound Salish populations led Duwamish people to abandon one of their villages—called Little Crossing-Over Place for a trail that linked the site to the backcountry. At one point, there had been up to eight longhouses at Little Crossing-Over Place, but when Arthur Denny, Carson Boren, and William Bell left their homesteads at New York-Alki to find a new permanent location for a townsite in the late winter of 1852, only one ruined longhouse remained, grown over with wild roses.[1] Other Native villages such as Herring’s House in West Seattle and Clear Water, however, remained.
Plats for the town of Seattle were officially filed in May 1853, by which point it was already home to a number of new residents, including Henry Yesler. The white settlers named the town for the Duwamish chief who had taken in and aided the party after their arrival at Alki Point.[2] The Lushootseed (Salish) word for Little Crossing-Over Place was never considered as a town name, though it was familiar to the town planners. Seeathl’s reaction to the name has long been a point of debate among historians.[3]
In 1909, just in time for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition—Seattle’s first world’s fair—the Parks Board commissioned local sculptor James When to design a drinking fountain topped with a bust of Chief Seeathl for Pioneer Place.[4]
The two panels behind the fountain, installed by Edgar Heap of Birds in 1991, are more recent. The piece is titled “Day/Night” and the text, in both Lulshootseed and English, references Seeathl’s famous (but potentially apocryphal) 1854 speech in order to call attention to the plight of homeless Indians in Seattle today.[5]
[1] Coll Thrush, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), 36-38.
[2] Thrush, Native Seattle, 37.
[3] Thrush, Native Seattle, 37-38. For examples, see Frank Carlson, “Chief Sealth,” 27; Thomas Prosch, Chronological History of Seattle from 1850 to 1897(Seattle: n.p., 1900), 29; Clarence B. Bagley, History of Seattle from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, vol. 2 (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1916), 27; Roberta Frye Watt, Four Wagons West: The Story of Seattle (Portland: Metropolitan Press, 1931), 70; B. J. Bullert, Alki: Birthplace of Seattle (Seattle: Southwest Seattle Historical Society and KCTS Television, 1997).
[4] Karin Link, “PROPERTY: #39406 Pioneer Square, Occidental Square,” in Washington Information System for Architectural and Archaeological Records Data (WISAARD), n.p. last modified June 20, 2004, accessed August 14, 2016, https://fortress.wa.gov/dahp/wisaardp3/; Karin Link, "PROPERTY: #39509 Chief Seattle Fountain, Pioneer Place Close," in Washington Information System for Architectural and Archaeological Records Data (WISAARD), n.p., last modified June 20, 2004, accessed August 18, 2016, https://fortress.wa.gov/dahp/wisaardp3/.
[5] Link, "Chief Seattle Fountain," in WISAARD, n.p.; Thrush, Native Seattle, 179-80. For a discussion of the “Chief Seattle Speech,” see Thrush, Native Seattle, 5-7.
Credits and Sources:
Description by Madison Heslop on behalf of the American Society for Environmental History.
Link, Karin. "PROPERTY: #39509 Chief Seattle Fountain, Pioneer Place Close." In Washington Information System for Architectural and Archaeological Records Data (WISAARD). Last modified June 20, 2004. Accessed August 18, 2016. https://fortress.wa.gov/dahp/wisaardp3/.
Link, Karin. “PROPERTY: #39406 Pioneer Square, Occidental Square (not to be confused with present Occidental Square).” In Washington Information System for Architectural and Archaeological Records Data (WISAARD). Last modified June 20, 2004. Accessed August 14, 2016. https://fortress.wa.gov/dahp/wisaardp3/.
Bagley, Clarence B. History of Seattle from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time. 3 vols. Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1916.
Carlson, Frank. “Chief Sealth.” M.A. thesis, University of Washington, 1903.
Prosch, Thomas W. Chronological History of Seattle from 1850 to 1897. Seattle: n.p., 1900.
Watt, Roberta Frye. Four Wagons West: The Story of Seattle. Portland: Metropolitan Press, 1931.
