The Water Took Her: A Canoe Accident at Seattle's Wharf, 1877
A canoe overturns in the dark beside Mechanics' Wharf. The others make it to shore—but the old woman slips away before anyone can save her.
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.
Shortly before midnight on Friday, a canoe carrying five Indians tried to pass between the piles of Mechanics' Wharf. A high wind was blowing, and the frail craft struck one of the piles and upset instantly. An elderly Native woman in the canoe was pulled ashore with difficulty by the others, who carried her up the bank and left her in a nearby cabin. They then came downtown and built a fire in the slip between Horton's bank and the market. After their clothes had dried, they returned to the cabin—only to find the old woman gone. A search was made, and her body was found lying on the ground a short distance away. The exposure and suffering in the water had been too much for her. Officer Thorndike was sent for and saw that the body got a decent burial.
“The exposure and suffering in the water had been too much for her.”
In 1877, Seattle's waterfront was still a jumble of wharves and pilings where Native canoes and steamers shared the same dangerous waters. The brief, dignified notice of this woman's death—and the officer's care to see her buried—is a reminder that the city's Indigenous presence long predated the waterfront skyscrapers, and that the shoreline has always been a place of both work and peril. Today the Duwamish and other Coast Salish peoples continue to assert their enduring connection to these shores.
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