A Captain at Eighteen, a Pioneer at the End
John A. Steeves survived a Cape Horn shipwreck, mined in Butte, and became one of Squak Valley’s most trusted settlers. He died at his Sixth Street home after a three-week illness.
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.
Captain John A. Steeves died at his residence, 2301 Sixth Street, yesterday morning of pneumonia, after an illness of three weeks. He was one of the most widely known and respected early settlers of Squak Valley and was also well known in Seattle, where he had lived for over four years.
Captain Steeves was born in New York City July 4, 1816. He was the youngest son in a family of twelve, there being fifteen years between him and his next older brother. At thirteen he went to sea with his uncle Archie. Five years later he was captain and master of the sailing vessel Flower of Maine. He made forty-four voyages across the Atlantic. His last trip was around Cape Horn; the vessel was wrecked in a storm, but another ship rescued all hands. Steeves was the last man to leave the doomed ship. Landed at Caracas, Venezuela, with hardly enough money for a meal, he walked along the South American coast north until he found a ship to New York.
After years at sea he tried his luck on land, crossing the continent to the mining excitement at Butte and Silver Bow, where he was foreman of the largest works for a long time. Twenty-five years ago he arrived in Seattle and settled a preemption claim in Squak Valley, where Derby station on the Lake Shore is now located. He was postmaster at York, constable, justice of the peace and school director, and was said never to have had an enemy in the region. Five years ago he sold the claim and moved to Seattle, investing in property on Sixth and Madison streets. He married Miss Lillie E. Blackburn at Tacoma on January 17, 1883. He left no other heirs. Funeral services were expected at the family residence tomorrow afternoon, with Rev. Clark Davis officiating, if Mrs. Steeves’s sister arrived from Vancouver, B.C.
“Captain Steeves was the last man to leave the doomed ship and it was with great difficulty that his life was saved.”
Seattle’s early histories are full of people who arrived by sea, failed at sea, and reinvented themselves on land. Steeves’s route—shipwreck, mining camp, preemption claim, then city property—maps the booms that made the city. His Sixth Avenue house is gone, but the pattern of remaking a life here is not.
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