FOOTPRINTS OF UNKNOWN TRAVELERS
Antedating the first arrivals of white people to the Sound in the 40’s,
were found in various parts of the country numbers of things showing
that white men or civilized or half-civilized people of some color
had visited the country. One instance particularly was the remains or
indications of a settlement or camp at the mouth of the Duwamish river.
As nearly as good judgment could fix it, this camp must have been located
at the beginning of the present century. It is not improbable that at
some very early day, some navigator bold built a new one or repaired
very materially a sailing vessel at that place. Stumps of trees that
showed they had been cut for scores of years were found, and the trees
themselves gone; strong proof that whoever stopped there did so for a
purpose, executed it and went on their way, leaving nothing behind by
which their identity could be made known to those who came after them.
The Indians had no recollection or tradition of those who cut the trees,
though it is not improbable that some one of the early navigators shortly
subsequent to Vancouver tarried there for a time.
Another find of later years was the uncovering of a strange and very old
cave, an old tomb in one of the public streets of Seattle.
There was not line or marble, nor carving, trinket, old coin nor scroll
to tell its history, to name its day. It was way back in the palmy days
of 1872 when the old tomb was unearthed and once more saw the light. The
toilers of that day were grading down to the virgin soil and carrying
Front street to the north. In their path at a spot opposite where the
Frye block now stands and just north of Marion street stood a small
mound. It must be cut down, and cut down it was; and the dirt carried
to a distance south of the present crossing at Marion street and dumped
into a small ravine or depression through which an old log-run threaded
its course to the higher ground. In the digging of the mound the workmen
laid bare the old tomb; and such a tomb! In the center of the mound it
was about five feet from the surface. Built up for two or three feet
with four walls of stone, boulders from here and there, but in a way
showing rudimentary knowledge of architecture and design. Inside was
the half-mummy, half-skeleton of some one unknown. Filling all of the
space of the sarcophagus was beach sand, apparently having been procured
with great care and toil. Such was the story of the unknown dead. It
astonished the local historian of that day as it is still the wonder of
those same historians who are yet living here today. The old tomb was at
least 100 yards from the then high tide line, and the carefully gathered
white beach sand had most certainly been carried over the intervening
distance from sea to grave. Some joints of the skeleton were decayed,
others not. The skull was perfect and what caused the local historian to
wonder, and wonder, and wonder again, was that the poll of the skeleton
was not flattened. For 20 years after the whites settled here, and for
times out of mind before that the Indians of the Sound had universally
flattened the skull. But then it was not Indian, why? Because the Indians
said it was not. Old Kitsap’s people said it was not, and the traditions
and customs of all the local Indians disproved such a proposition. It
was on the edges of the high bluffs around the bay, just underneath the
grass roots and tufts that clung to the very edges of the bluffs, where
the Indian dead were buried, had always been buried, and even up to the
present winter days of 1895, when an unusually heavy rainfall may occur,
the bones of the dead Indians may be found at odd spots along the bluffs.
They never put their dead under ground. The local historian has two
probable theories for the cave. In Vancouver’s first explorations of the
Sound his ships anchored off Blakeley rocks; after coursing Admiralty
inlet Lieu. Puget took a boat’s crew and paddled away even to a greater
distance up the Sound. Naturally they would explore such a pretty bay as
that around the rim of which the Queen City so proudly sits, and it might
have been that one of his men died and was buried here. Lewis and Clark’s
men or some early explorers may have ventured down the valley of the
Duwamish river in the dawn of the present century. Trees had been cut and
the stumps were still standing that marked the sites of the early camping
grounds, and axes had been used in the cutting. It might have been one of
those explorers bold, died and was buried in the stone grave so carefully
arranged to preserve the bones placed within. But these are only theories
and the wonder of the little mound will perhaps forever remain a riddle
unsolved.