The Annual Migration to the Seattle Waterfront
As the hop-picking season nears, hundreds of Indigenous families from as far north as Sitka gather on the tide flats below the mills, turning the city's shore into a bustling hub of commerce and seasonal labor.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The annual influx of Indians is now at its height, and in the flat below the mills there are probably more than one hundred and fifty tents, containing a heterogeneous mass of aboriginal humanity. The papoose is of course the great feature, and tumbles about in the confined space he has to play in with a happy disregard for the mud. Among the tents are some forty or fifty canoes, some of them overlaid with mats drying in the sun, and others with stacks of rushes ready for the busy hands of the klosh-men to weave into mats and fancy goods. Among the canoes are some with high stems, showing that they have been built to encounter the seas of the open ocean, and in fact some of them have come from as far away as Sitka. The inhabitants of this colony range in age from the tiny babe to the withered crone. All are going to pick hops, and all either have already laid in their winter’s supply of provisions or are about to do so. The canoes that are drawn upon the beach are many of them laden with provisions to last them until the wanderers are again stowed. When however a family makes a good haul, they are apt to live well, but there is plenty of time to regret that afterwards. There are only about three places where cooking is carried on, but these seem to be occupied all the time, and one may see two or three klosh-men using the same fire, and half a dozen squaws sitting on their haunches and waiting their turn.
“Among the canoes are some with high stems, showing that they have been built to encounter the seas of the open ocean, and in fact some of them have come from as far away as Sitka.”
This account captures the seasonal rhythm of the Pacific Northwest hop industry, which once relied heavily on local and regional Indigenous labor. While the 'tide flats' have long been filled in to create modern industrial Seattle, the story reflects the overlooked labor histories of the land upon which the city was built.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.