The First Winter at Alki Point
A vivid account of the 1851 arrival of the Denny party, their struggle for shelter, and the founding of the settlement that would become Seattle.
In the summer of 1851, the schooner Exact arrived on Puget Sound carrying the Denny party: N. Low, Arthur A. Denny, Carson D. Boren, William N. Bell, John Alexander, and Mr. Terry. They landed at Alki Point on November 13, 1851, finding only a single unfinished log cabin. Facing a harsh, rainy winter with no shelter and dwindling provisions, the men set to work felling trees to build cabins. For months, the entire party of twenty-four lived in rudimentary, cramped conditions. Mrs. Low later recounted the terror and loneliness of those early days, often guarded only by her husband and a Colt revolver, and the solace she found in reading Dickens novels while watching for ships from a high hill near the shore. Despite the hardship, only nine deaths occurred among the party over the next thirty-three years, a testament to the climate's healthfulness.
“They say white women are a great scarce here on Puget Sound; the best thing we can do is to go to work and make boards and get them under shelter so as to take care of what we have.”
Alki Point, once a rough, isolated beach for settlers facing down starvation and isolation, is now one of the most desirable waterfront residential neighborhoods in Seattle. The legacy of that first winter is still felt in the city's self-mythology of 'pioneer resilience,' though the narrative often omits the complex reality of Indigenous relations and dispossession that underscored the era.
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