New York Alki: The Landing That Founded Seattle
On November 13, 1851, the Denny Party stepped ashore at Alki Point from the schooner Exact — the rainy landing now remembered as the founding of Seattle.
They had come more than two thousand miles to stand on a rain-soaked beach at the edge of the known world. On the morning of November 13, 1851, a party of twenty-four men, women, and children stepped off the schooner Exact onto the shore at Alki Point — and, without knowing it, founded a city.
The group was led by Arthur A. Denny, a young pioneer from Illinois. That April he had set out from Cherry Grove, Illinois, with his family and friends, traveling overland to Portland, Oregon, with the express purpose of founding a town on Puget Sound. From Portland they sailed north up the Pacific coast and into the Sound aboard the Exact.
They were met with kindness. Chief Seattle — Si'ahl — and members of the Duwamish and Suquamish Tribes welcomed the newcomers and helped them through their first hard months, sharing food and knowledge the settlers desperately needed. The city the pioneers would build would later take the chief's name in his honor.
The settlers called their landing place "New York Alki" — Alki being a Chinook word meaning "by and by." New York, by and by: the name was a promise to themselves that this muddy beach would one day be a great port city.
The voyage itself had been an improvisation. The Exact had been outfitting in Portland for a run to the Queen Charlotte Islands with gold prospectors when her captain agreed, for a price, to drop the settlers at Puget Sound along the way. She sailed from Portland on November 5, 1851, crossed the treacherous Columbia River bar, touched at Astoria, and turned north — delivering her twenty-four passengers to Alki Point eight days later. But the first winter tested that promise. The site was exposed to brutal weather, and the following April, Denny gave up on Alki Point and moved the settlement to a better-sheltered spot across Elliott Bay, near what is now downtown Seattle. The first plats for the new town were filed on May 23, 1853.
What followed is one of the great American growth stories: from a rain-drenched beach landing to a logging town, to a Gold Rush boomtown, to the Pacific Northwest's largest metropolis — all in the span of roughly two human lifetimes. Washington's own legislature has recognized the arrival of the Denny Party at Alki Beach as the "birth" of modern Seattle and King County.
Every November, Seattle remembers the day two dozen hopeful settlers waded ashore in the rain, looked at a wilderness, and saw New York — by and by.
Photo: joiseyshowaa, CC BY-SA 2.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).
