Alki and Plymouth: Tale of Two Thanksgivings

Did Seattle settlers celebrate Thanksgiving at Alki Point in 1851? The Denny,
Boren, Bell, and Low families, Illinois residents, knew about Thanksgiving festivities. In 1849, the last military governor of California, Barnett Riley, issued a Thanksgiving Proclamation, evidence that the holiday had made it to the West Coast.

Since 1850, Chief Seattle had invited Americans arriving on Puget Sound to bring their energies and skills to live and intermarry with his Duwamish natives, where both races could prosper. John Low and David Denny had earlier visited and valued the area’s potential and good relations with Seattle’s Duwamish. David wrote his older brother, Arthur Denny, to bring the families north from Portland.

Six months of jolting across the plains in covered wagons left the settler families exhausted when they arrived in Portland in late August. Arthur, head of the group, and his wife, Mary Ann, were sick with malaria, and Mary gave birth to Rolland Denny on September 2. Heeding David’s call, they took the schooner Exact north to central Puget Sound. On Friday, November 13, 1851, they landed at what became Alki Point in pouring rain near a native cemetery on a dark, forbidding shore. Seattle historian Roberta Frye Watt, who noted celebrating Christmas at Alki, wrote not a word about Thanksgiving.

Plymouth, Cape Cod Bay

In the US, Thanksgiving recalls the three-day Pilgrim harvest feast at Plymouth in 1621 celebrated with Native Americans. Given the early frosts in New England, it may have occurred as early as September. Harvests have been celebrated with feasts as long as farmers have farmed and herders herded. Northern Hemisphere harvests occur in autumn as crops ripen. Needing to cull animals so the herd can survive winter on limited feed, herders supplied fresh meat.

Alki

Native Americans’ harvest feasts on Puget Sound supported important cultural events. Since late winter, Duwamish and other groups had hunted, fished, and gathered garden crops until cold autumnal rains sent them back to their winter villages. There they celebrated winter dances — SPEEG peei gwud, “power singing” — as families returned to well-stocked longhouses. The dances’ religious and social intensity helped mark the transition from outdoor encampments to the rigorous discipline of families returning to confining longhouses.

Guardian spirits, believed to have spent the season travelling and gambling on the world’s edge, returned to their human hosts at the dances where the songs that they had
earlier gifted to supplicants. These songs they sang while dancing the length of fire-lit longhouses, sometimes demonstrating miraculous powers. Audiences joined in, keeping time to rhythms by pounding cedar staves against roof planks, creating a roar heard for miles in the chill night air. Travelling house to house, families shared food in a celebration
likened to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter combined.

Far from villages, memories of distant chanting and song suggest settlers heard
SPEEG pee gwud. But for the 12 men and women and 12 children of the Denny party crowding into a single roofless cabin (16 by 16 feet) and heated by a single, small, smoky iron stove also used for cooking, the pioneering verged on the traumatic.

As the men strived to complete more shelters into the first week of December,
Captain Daniel Howard arrived on the brig Leonesa, seeking piling for San Francisco. A contract meant re-connection with national markets, and men began felling, hauling,
and cutting trees in 50-foot lengths. By Christmas they had 13,458 linear feet, over
200 poles. Pushing themselves, they had had no time for Thanksgiving, though Duwamish Natives did.

Plymouth

Of the 102 passengers aboard Mayflower — the 37 pilgrims and their 13 servants were called Separatists for leaving England and the Anglican Church to worship freely. These pilgrims called themselves Saints. The rest of the whites, called “Strangers” to them, were employed by the Virginia Plymouth Company to expand English holdings. Storms drove Mayflower north to Cape Cod Bay where all spent a terrible winter. Arriving too late for planting, they survived on what they could gather or barter from neighboring Wampanoag people. Half the colony died.

The Wampanoag taught survivors how to plant corn, beans, and squash using fish as
fertilizer. The Wampanoag had suffered mass death from disease, likely smallpox, and
attacks by neighboring Narragansetts. The tribe offered pilgrims, armed with guns, an alliance; sick and outnumbered, the pilgrims agreed. A clause proposed that if one party was attacked, the other would come to its aid.

Alki

The Duwamish helped supplement settlers’ pinched diet with fresh fish, fowl, game,
clams, and bulbs. They taught Mary Ann Denny, too sick to nurse baby Rolland, how to keep him alive with clam nectar. Then an old Duwamish chief, KWAHSH chin, visited with
three adult sons, asking Arthur Denny, seen as the settlers’ Tyee (“leader”) to give them
“Boston” names. Bemused, Denny gave them Midwestern chiefs’ names: Tecumseh,
Keokuck, and William. But by doing so, KWAHSH chin offered alliance, a bond of
friendship the Duwamish never broke.

Plymouth

In fall, 1621, 53 Mayflower survivors harvested the crops the Wampanoag had taught them to grow. They had also learned native modes of fishing, clamming,
lobstering, and hunting fowl. The resulting feast was accompanied by athletic contests
including (foolishly) target practice. Away in their villages, Wampanoag heard gunfire and, fearing the worst, sent 90 armed warriors with bows and arrows to risk their lives honoring their mutual-assistance pledge. Surprised and curious the English welcomed them. Relieved, the Wampanoag brought five fat deer to the feast, and the celebration continued.

Alki

Duwamish fleshed out Chief Seattle’s vision of a prosperous hybrid racial
community by answering settlers’ needs and intermarrying with them as allies would. The first mailing address of the growing settlement at the river mouth, on the east side of Duwamps Bay, west of Lake Dwamis was Du WAHMPSH. Soon settlers took Chief
Seattle’s more mellifluous name without his permission to better market their town. The
Duwamish continued trading, working for settlers and intermarrying with them.

In the war with native groups over the treaties by which Americans seized the peoples’ land, they helped build Seattle’s protective wall and kept its economic heart, the first steam-powered sawmill on Puget Sound, running while young white militiamen drilled
and fought. The Duwamish helped found, build, and save Seattle. It can be argued that Wampanoag generosity and actions made the first Thanksgiving possible. The Duwamish brought to fruition what settlers at Alki could not accomplish alone.