Seattle Kept Its Quarantine — and Cleared Every Native Family Off Ballast Island
With smallpox burning through Victoria and Vancouver, Seattle's health board refuses to reopen the port. Then a policeman hears Chinook on the waterfront and orders an entire encampment off the island 'until the quarantine is raised.'
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 board of health met last evening in the office of its president, Dr. Churchill, and the question of raising the quarantine against Victoria came up. A telegram from Mayor Robert Beaven of Victoria to Mayor Ronald, asking that the quarantine be raised, was read. The board finally decided to leave the matter in the hands of Dr. George H. T. Sparling, the health officer, who has thus far had the quarantine here in charge. Last evening Dr. Sparling decided that it would not be safe to raise the quarantine at this time, and he sent the following dispatch to Mayor Beaven: "Under the circumstances we do not deem it advisable to lift the quarantine."
J. W. Johnson, a logger who owns a sawmill and logging camp down the Sound, came to this city in a rowboat Thursday evening. He tied his boat up at Ballast Island, and while there overheard a lot of Indians, who have their home on the island, talking about the smallpox in British Columbia. Mr. Johnson speaks Chinook fluently, and he heard a dozen or more bucks, with their squaws, who had just arrived in canoes from New Westminster, say that several of their "tillicums" in British Columbia had died of the disease and many more were sick. Many frightened boatloads of Indians left for Seattle, Whatcom and Anacortes. Johnson soon after met Officer Sam Corbett and related to him what he had heard. The policeman immediately ordered all of the Indians from the island, and will not allow them to land or occupy the place again until the quarantine is raised.
Not a case has thus far been discovered in Seattle, and it looks as though this city is going to escape the disease altogether. The health officer is taking no rest, however, for last evening his assistant boarded the southbound trains from the north, as usual, and vaccinated a good many passengers who could not show new vaccination scars.
“The policeman immediately ordered all of the Indians from the island, and will not allow them to land or occupy the place again until the quarantine is raised.”
Ballast Island, at the foot of Washington Street, was a seasonal landing and camp for Duwamish, Snohomish, Skagit and other Coast Salish families shut out of the growing town — today it lies buried under the Pioneer Square waterfront and Alaskan Way. In one stroke a public-health emergency became the excuse to put a whole community off the land, a move no doctor ever had to justify. Every later Seattle fight over who gets to occupy the waterfront in a crisis starts here.
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