Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle
Murray Morgan

review by: Chelan David
Date: 7/1/03

As a recent transplant to Seattle I have been curious about the history of this latte-loving, tree-hugging, seaport town. While browsing through a used bookstore, I unearthed Skid Road by Murray Morgan – a book chronicling the history of Seattle’s first 100 years – and decided to get an Emerald City education.

The first thing I noticed about the yellowed paperback was its price, as indicated on the inside cover, had skyrocketed from $1.25 to $4.95. The second thing I noticed was the cover of the book looks nothing like modern day Seattle. The panoramic photograph on the front and back covers feature the Cascade Mountains and the Space Needle but nowhere to be seen are the towering skyscrapers which now define the downtown skyline. After determining when the book was written – it was copyrighted in 1951 with a second printing in 1971 – I paid my $5 and change and settled down for a wild read.

In the introduction I learned that Skid Road was named for the street where pioneers rolled logs by hand down to the waterfront. Over the years the term entered the national vernacular and now is defined as a squalid district inhabited chiefly by derelicts and vagrants.

Doc Maynard, who appropriately has a downtown drinking establishment named in his honor, was one of the men who helped put Seattle on the map. In 1850, Maynard was a 42-year-old heavy-drinking physician living in Ohio and mired in debt. Finding the appeal of the West Coast irresistible, "he shook hands with his wife Lydia, whom in twenty years of marriage he had come to dislike, kissed his two children, mounted his gray mule, and rode off toward California."

Maynard’s dream of a utopian life on the Sound shattered when Lydia Maynard learned her husband had claimed land in her name and traveled west to escort Doc to court. As Morgan narrates it, "When the steamer arrived, Maynard and the second Mrs. Maynard met the first Mrs. Maynard and together they went to the Maynard house, where the three lived in apparent harmony until Lydia had completed arrangements for her legal business."

Several months later Doc passed away. The troubles of Maynard stemmed from his relationships with multiple women. The problem of the other Seattle males were on the opposite end of the spectrum; only one adult out of ten was a female.

The entrepreneurial spirit that has guided such Seattle companies as Microsoft, Starbucks and Nordstrom was instilled by pioneers like Asa Mercer. While brothels sprouted up on Skid Road, Mercer, a pious man, wanted to import a better stock of women suitable for marrying. Mercer planned to import young maidens by the hundreds and his enthusiastic contemporaries endorsed this vision by electing him unanimously to the upper house of the Territorial Legislature.

For $300 paid in advance, his sales pitch went, he would bring a suitable wife from the East Coast. Mercer ran into a myriad of problems in his quest to transport brides and the majority of his customers were left without a bride and down $300. Instead of a boat filled with nubile maidens, the vessel contained mainly men and married women. Mercer however, married one of his imports and upon their vows fled to the Rocky Mountain area.

In July of 1897, gold was discovered in Alaska and almost instantly Seattle prospered from the Klondike gold rush. Looking to cash in on the city’s proximity to Alaska, the Chamber of Commerce started a clever marketing campaign positioning Seattle as the gateway to the gold. Not only did this crusade entice gold prospectors to seek lodging and purchase supplies on Skid Road, it also drummed up business for the saloons, brothels and dance halls that lined the district. Buoyed by the gold rush, Seattle’s population nearly tripled in a decade, ballooning from 81,000 in 1900 to 237,000 in 1910.

Another landmark for Seattle was the general strike of 1919. A general strike is defined as a strike in all industries of a locality or nation and theoretically it completely brings a halt to all business. The first such strike in the United States effectively brought an almost complete closure of commerce for five days. Sixty-thousand workers went on strike and although it seemed like a noble idea to the laborers, there was no objective for their work stoppage and nothing to gain – curiously like the recent baseball strikes. After five days the workers decided they wanted to go back to work and get paid. Such occurrences led Postmaster James Farley to declare, "There are forty-seven states and the Soviet of Washington."

In addition to labor policies, politics were not always the norm in Seattle. Marion Zioncheck was a University of Washington graduate who was elected to Congress in 1932 at the age of 32. A left-wing Democrat, Zioncheck made headlines mostly for extracurricular activities and drunken escapades with his wife Rubeye, whom he married after their first date. His antics included taking part in a student riot, throwing coconuts from a hotel window, being evicted from his residence, judging a beauty contest in a nightclub and getting in a fight with one of the loser’s boyfriends after the contest.

Finally someone realized his actions weren’t publicity gags and he was sent to a mental institution. After escaping from the institution on July 4, 1936, he announced he would run for re-election but one month later he wrote a farewell note declaring, "My only hope in life was to improve the conditions of an unfair economic system." He then jumped from the 5th floor of his office building in downtown Seattle and his body struck the pavement directly in front of a car occupied by his wife.

While some of the political figures in Skid Road like Zioncheck, are highly entertaining, Morgan focuses too much on the political history of Seattle. For instance in the chapter devoted to 1918-1960, he almost exclusively covers the politics which shaped the labor unions. He barely touches on other aspects that affected the growth of the city such as the rise of Boeing or the cultural assimilation which occurred with the influx of Asians and other immigrant populations.

In addition, while Morgan sprinkles his prose with humor, it is not an easy read as each chapter is essentially a different story with a large cast of characters and the abundance of names, businesses, organizations and events can be cumbersome to keep track of.

Even though the book is laborious at times, I learned a great deal about the history of Seattle and Skid Road provides a fascinating portrait of the city I now call home.