by Larry Sivitz
150 years ago, when the Denny party first set foot on Alki Beach, a new chapter in the Puget Sound’s historical diary began to unfold. Over the decades, that history has been recorded by artists, scientists and journalists in virtually all media forms — by photographers such as Ashel Curtis, by newspaper men like Emmett Watson, and by writers and archivists like Walt Crowley.
By virtue of the new media mastery available during his “watch,” Walt Crowley’s role in the process has been transcendant. His crowning achievement, on top of his books, essays, and the once regular “Firing Line-style” debates he waged on TV news against conservative adversary John Carlson, is a Website with the ominous sounding name of HistoryLink.org. Born in 1995, HistoryLink is not just the best local resource for historical information on Seattle and King County, but what a great many believe is the most in-depth historical site for any city on the Web.
From thumbnail histories of personalities, towns, and neighborhoods, to 10-minute armchair tours, to more than 2,500 illustrated essays, all searchable by keyword, HistoryLink is unmatched in its scope. The site is also unique in that it invites the public testimony of Seattle’s citizens to contribute to the historical record. Visitors can add their voice as well as any documents, photographs, artifacts, or other historical materials associated with their story.
To Walt, Seattle’s sesquicentennial anniversary falls at an interesting time in the city’s development. “It’s really astoundingly short. If you think about 150 years, that is two average human lifetimes, which is to say we had people living into this century who had witnessed the birth of Seattle. For example, Louisa Denny. She was there at the birth. You could conceivably have Louisa’s daughter alive today.”
Here are exclusive excerpts from our interview with the man who is making Seattle history by making Seattle history come alive on the Web.
Seattle24x7: Walt, you have one of the most colorful resumes in all of Puget Sound. Can you sum up your involvement with Seattle history?
Walt Crowley: In sum, I’ve been writing history. My background is community organizing; radical politics, since the sixties, the underground press, which seguewayed into city government in the 1970’s as an administrator and working for Mayor Wes Ullman. I was a staff writer with the Seattle Weekly in the mid-eighties, policy director for the Municipal League in the late 80’s, and a consultant with Gogerty and Stark at the end of the decade. By then I’d started doing major historical research projects starting with The Rainier Club for its centennial history in 1988, followed by the centennial of Seattle University in 1990, the history of Metro Transit in 1993, my own history memoir of Seattle in the 60’s, entitled “Rites of Passage” which came out in ’95, followed by the History of Group Health about a year later in 1996.
Seattle24x7: How did HistoryLink.org come about?
Walt Crowley: The seed for this was planted in my mind coming out of writing Rites of Passage which required me to spend a about a year in the library just going through newspapers and primary sources to get the events of the sixties lined up in chronological order. By that time, ’95, I’d done several books and been very frustrated about the state of the historical record. The fact was that there were conflicts and discrepancies, and huge giant holes you could lose a truck in for the simplest, most basic facts and events about Seattle history.
Paul Dorpat [author of the Seattle Times magazine’s Then and Now section] and I started talking about the fact that the city was going to turn 150 in 2001, the anniversary of the Denny party, and that we really needed to lay a new foundation, baseline history, down. And that evolved into the idea of a chronological encyclopedia and we started discussing that in a fairly serious way and talking to UW Press, my publisher, about their interest in doing something like that.
Seattle24x7: When did you make the leap to cyberspace?
Walt Crowley: For that, I’ll give the credit to my wife, Marie, who’s much more computer adept than I am. She said, y’know, this is sounding a lot like a Website to me as opposed to a book. I credit her with that inspiration. I then turned to a friend, Stephen Leith, who is an expert in the Internet, and he said, Yea, it’s doable. It may not be cheap, but it’s doable. What you’re really talking about is a database with a Web interface.
I’m going to give the credit for the interface design to three people in particular, Steven Leith, Chris Goodman, whose our site administrator now, and again my wife. We worked as a group with the writers and the editors as well as designers and technologists to work through a variety of options to establish the architecture that we were most comfortable with.
Seattle24x7: What kind of staff keeps HistoryLink up and runing?
Walt Crowley: We have a regular full and part-time staff, (although everyone is in fact an independent contractor), of about eight, — that’s four staff historians who are regular contributors of content to the site, site administrator Chris Goodman, our senior editor, Priscilla Wong, myself, and my wife Marie McCaffrey who is our art director.
Seattle24x7: What strikes you most about the Internet interface vs. the book model?
Walt Crowley: I’d say the search. Our search engine looks for designated [database] fields, the abstract fields, written to contain the kernel of whatever the full essay might be, There are also hidden comments which are invisible to the search engine but not to the visitors. The thing that’s deep about that is that we have over 2600 individual essays. About a year ago we printed out our abstract. On 8-1/2 x 11 paper at 10 pt. type that was about 800 pages, just the abstract.
Seattle24x7: How do you think the Internet treats history?
Walt Crowley: That’s really the $64 question. The number one issue is still “garbage in, garbage out” which is why we source all of our material and if we find conflicts in the record we comment on them. For example, we had an anniversary on August 22nd, 1852 of the first Catholic religious service in Seattle, a bishop ceremony, at the Yesler cookhouse. Small problem. We don’t think the Yesler cookhouse was built in August of 1852. Henry Yesler did not arrive in Seattle until October 1852. Yet, we’ve got authoritative historians using that date.
What do we do with it? We acknowledge this does not quite make sense, we put the date on the site, we know he conducted the first Mass in Seattle and the first Christian ceremony, although the only Catholics in Seattle at that point were Indians. But the date makes us nervous. And so it’s a case where we don’t want to be a censor and say okay, this isn’t it, because we don’t know. There may be different errors in the record that we don’t fully appreciate. So what we do in our essay is acknowledge that this date is given by a trustworthy source but it’s problematical. We are trying to conduct ourselves with full professional diligence in interpreting and presenting the historical record. What is exciting about the Web in this is that we can do that, we can send off our people to do additional research, we can ask others, as we have already asked the archdiocese archives for additional research and we may come out of this being able to actually, definitively, pin down this date or provide an alternate.
It’s a dynamic process where you’re not simply regurgitating the accounts of the past and the errors of the past, but you have the opportunity to refine and improve the historical record. That is hard to do in conventional media. And it’s a long process in traditional, academic, historical research. We are able to be a little more nimble. And not focus o this particular error, and it’s not really an error, let’s call it an anachronism. This data issue has been in books going back fifty years. How can Demurs hold mass in Yesler’s cookhouse in August 1852 when he didn’t arrive Seattle until October 1852 and presumably stated work on the cookhouse after? I think it’s part of the strength of the media itself with the sensibility that these little disjunctions in the record can become much more visible
Seattle24x7: Have you encountered any challenges to your historical authenticity?
Walt Crowley: We’re working on a request now, and it’s a good one, from a visitor who challenged our citation of July 4, 1914 for Bill Boeing’s first flight in an airplane. There are a variety of sources that favor either 1914 or 1915. For example, Boeing’s official historical chronology gives you 1915 for the first flight, but if you consider all of the things that happened in 1914, it doesn’t make sense that he could move so quickly from his first flight in an airplane to incorporating pacific aero-products which was the predecessor of the Boeing company that Fall, and be building airplanes and be taking flying lessons in Los Angeles…it doesn’t make sense.
Seattle24x7: HistoryLink also serves as a portal for other Washington history sites?
Walt Crowley: We host other historical sites. We work with most of them in developing HistoryLink content and they in turn, use our records as appropriate in developing their materials. But the thing I stress about this is that we’re the front door, we are an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia should be the first word, not the last word. It’s the introduction, it’s the big picture, the broad brush, and I hope if done correctly, an inducement to go deeper.
Individual historical societies, that we work with, and make up the Association of King County Historical Organizations and whatever, these are groups that have much more detailed content available to them. They’ve conducted research that goes far beyond anything we might understand. So we host for example the ACKHO membership lists and we have a very large compendium of links both regional, national and international. We want you to go deeper, not only on the Internet but to these museums, historical societies, and to the library.
Seattle24x7: Is there a strict definition of what constitutes a historical piece of data or information?
Walt Crowley: If you want to affiliate any historical claim, just put a PhD after it (laughs). There’s a certain amount of elitism, to say the least, in the academic historical community. It’s starting to break down and they’re starting to recognize that community history brings new information and new humanity to a lot of subjects that are pretty sterile..
Seattle24x7: What differentiates historical record keeping on the Web?
Walt Crowley: The examination of data be it historical scientific, cultural, social economic is absolutely unequaled on the Internet, particularly when you’re using the Internet as a gateway to a well organized database. This is a wonderful way to write history. It is a wonderful way to publish history. And it is a wonderful way to discuss history with other scholars and with the community in general.
I do think it is more democratic, more participatory, and I think therefore ultimately if you’re diligent and honest, more objective because you have given the community the opportunity to help shape the record and to debate aspects of the record that may be controversial or ambiguous.
Seattle24x7: What is the historical significance of November 13?
Walt Crowley: November 13 is the day that the Schooner Exact arrived at Alki Beach with the majority of the Denny party that had come from Portland. David Denny and John Lowe. they were already in Seattle. They had come up form Portland to scout the Puget Sound area in September. There were other settlers at the mouth of the Duwamish, Luther Collins. Henry Van Essa, Jacob and Samuel Maple who were important but weren’t really the seed crystal for the group (in the city). So the Exact arrived, they say at 8:00 o’clock in the morning on November 13, 1851. I chuckle about 8 o’clock in the morning because we did not have standard time zones in this country until the early 1900’s.
Seattle24x7: Have there been any discoveries on the site that have really astounded you?
Walt Crowley: One of our historians, Greg Lange, did some excellent original research on the impact of smallpox and other European disease epidemics on the Native American population. It was far beyond anything I had imagined. And there was incredible callousness on the part of the white community. We were unprepared to deal with it.
Smallpox preceded whites into Puget Sound. George Vancouver was the first European to lay eyes on this part of the world ion 1702 and he recorded in his journal that Indians on Bainbridge island had scars from Smallpox. It had come with the Spanish and the Russians. They had infected Indians, and also the Voyageurs, the Canadian trappers and their Indian allies would come into the area and been spread through both by direct European contact and by infected natives then carrying it forth into the Puget Sound area and it killed thousands and thousands of people in a very short time. Chief Sealth, if you look at pictures of him, you wonder if he didn’t have a bout of smallpox as a kid because hes pretty pockmarked.
Seattle24x7: Was that the worst epidemic we’ve ever seen?
Walt Crowley: Well, we can’t forget the Spanish Influenza in 1918. That killed millions of all races. Seattle was virtually shut down for a month.
Seattle24x7: What has meant the most to you of the recognition you’ve received?
Walt Crowley: Our award page is hierarchical. Some of the upper tier awards are the big ones. The Medal D’or, and the Paris 2000 and the Webmaster awards we’re very proud of. The recognition from our own peers is an award form the state historic preservation officer for “Best Media in Service to Historic Preservation” which we received last year. Also, we were named co-winner for Best Long Term Project from the Association for King County Historical Association.
