At the turn of the twentieth century, city officials, commercial businesses, and private citizens in Seattle adopted the totem pole as a distinctive symbol based on the city’s experience as a northern entrepôt during the Klondike gold rush of 1897-98. This close association between an art form indigenous to southeastern Alaska and British Columbia and a city hundreds of miles away began in 1899, when the city of Seattle erected an immense, 60-foot totem pole in Pioneer Square. The pole, already a century old, was the gift of several members of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, who had stolen it from a Tlingit village at Fort Tongass, Alaska. The pole belonged to the Raven Clan, for whom it memorialized an ancestor known as Chief-of-All-Women.

For non-Native Seattleites, the totem pole linked the city to Alaska in the public imagination. A reporter for the Post-Intelligencer suggested that such a work of public art—Seattle’s first—distinguished the city and heralded future greatness: “So thoroughly is Seattle identified with Alaska that it is generally felt no more appropriate municipal decoration could be set up than this magnificent emblem of the north land.”^[1] Promotional materials advertising Seattle soon featured the Chief-of-All-Women pole prominently, and it rapidly became one of the city’s most popular symbols.^[2] The totem pole in Pioneer Place Park today is a 1930s replica of that original pole, carved by Tlingit tribesmen and later restored by John C. Hudson, Jr., a carver from the Tsimshian Tribe of Northern British Columbia, in 1972.[3]

Seattle residents and tourists, then as now, could purchase Northwest Coast art, including totem poles, in stores such as Ye Olde Curiosity Shop. In fact, at the turn of the twentieth century, American Indian and Native Alaskan art and material culture were popular decorative items for white middle- and upper-class American women, leading some historians to refer to an “Indian craze.”[4]

Credits and Sources:

Description by Madison Heslop on behalf of the American Society for Environmental History.

"Alaska Totem Pole Brought from Port Tongass by the P.-I. Excursion to Be Set up in Pioneer Square." Seattle Post-Intelligencer. September 3, 1899.

Bsumek, Erika Marie. Indian-Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868-1940. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008.

Hutchinson, Elizabeth. The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890-1915. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.

Karin Link, Karin. “PROPERTY: #39406 Pioneer Square, 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/.

Thrush, Coll. Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007.