Cheshiahud: Not the last lake Indian in Seattle

Head about a mile south from Solid Ground’s office on North 45th Street in Wallingford and you’ll find a shoreline path called the Cheshiahud Loop that rings a body of water we now know as Lake Union.

The name for this 6-mile trail comes from an Indigenous canoe carver and guide who was famous for persisting. He persisted through European diseases that decimated the Native peoples of Puget Sound. He persisted in the face of white colonialists who pushed those who survived onto reservations far from their homes. And he persisted in defiance of the newly founded City of Seattle that banned all Indigenous people from living in the city.

A blue street sign that reads "Cheshiahud Loop"

A sign for the Cheshiahud Loop around Lake Union (photo by Neal Simpson)

Despite it all, Cheshiahud – known as “Lake John” to his white neighbors – was determined to live with his wife on the banks of the lake he knew as x̌áxəʔ̌ču (HA-huh-choo). It’s here that he spent his days carving canoes and growing potato-like tubers called wapato, until a few years after the turn of the century, when he too moved to a reservation.

History sometimes remembers Cheshiahud as one of the city’s last Indians – but that, of course, is not true.

The Indigenous people of this land never really left Seattle, and they continue to live here today, shaping the culture and community of a place they’ve shepherded since time immemorial. More than 17 decades after they were legally banned from the City of Seattle, Native people still make up about 0.6% of its population. They also continue to live with the weight of those many decades of violence, racism, displacement, generational poverty, and cultural extermination.

A tug boat pushes a heavily loaded barge under a tall bridge.

A tugboat pushes a loaded barge on the same waters where Chesiahud once paddled his canoes (photo by Neal Simpson).

Today, Indigenous children in the Seattle area are three times more likely to die in their first year of life than white children, and nearly four times more likely to live in poverty. One in five Indigenous adults in the Seattle area lack a high school diploma, compared to one in 30 white adults. And across Washington state, Indigenous people have the shortest life expectancy and highest rates of infant mortality, asthma, and colorectal cancer among all racial groups.

Yet they continue to persevere, even thrive, while shaping the communities that have grown up on their ancestral lands.

In fact, more than a century since Cheshiahud last plied the waters of x̌áxəʔ̌ču in one of his hand-carved canoes, a new building dedicated to his craft will soon rise beside the metal-and-glass skyscrapers that have overtaken the landscape. Called the Canoe Carving House, this new structure on the south shore of x̌áxəʔ̌ču “will give everyone in Seattle a chance to see, feel, hear, and be an active element of Native Culture that is largely unseen in our city,” as the United Indians of All Tribes put it.

Honoring the lands where we work & live

Solid Ground is on a journey to better understand our role as a nonprofit in colonialist systems that continue to oppress Indigenous peoples today.

We also seek to build authentic partnerships with Indigenous communities to reduce the harm that we cause as an organization, help undo the erasure of Indigenous histories, and celebrate the resilience of the first peoples of Seattle and King County.

At the recommendation of Solid Ground’s Community Accountability Council, we started by amplifying the Indigenous history of the lands we occupy as an organization, from our Giving Garden at Marra Farm and Solid Ground Transportation facilities in South Park to our offices in Wallingford and housing at Sand Point.

The first installment in this blog series, A sacred spring and the ever-flowing resilience of Indigenous peoples, looks at the history and significance of líq’tәd, a red ochre spring that still flows near where Solid Ground operated a Regional Access Point until a few years ago. The second blog post, Sqʷsəb and the people of the big lake, examines how the Sand Point peninsula has changed since colonization, and what it meant to the xacuabš people who lived on Lake Washington. The third, Seattle’s first people and the river that shares their name, traces the history of the Duwamish River itself and Native-led efforts to restore it.

Land Acknowledgement & Deeper Engagement Resources

People of the littlest lake

For much of the last half century, Solid Ground has served the communities of Seattle and King County from offices in neighborhoods around x̌áxəʔ̌ ču, primarily Fremont, Eastlake, and most recently, Wallingford. In doing so, we have occupied and benefited from the ancestral land of the xacua’bs (ha-huh-chu-AHBSH), or the “people of littlest lake.”

A picture of a sign on a bridge that says "1850: Duwamish people have lived here for hundreds of years in a village at this site, on this Native Lake.

A sign near the Museum of History and Industry marks the site of a former Native village (photo by Neal Simpson).

The xacua’bs were among the many Coast Salish peoples living in some 17 villages, totaling more than 90 longhouses, in the greater Seattle area when white colonizers began to claim the land as their own in the mid-17th century. In less than 50 years, every one of these villages was destroyed – some burned to the ground by colonizers and others abandoned by the Indigenous families as white settlers claimed their land and threatened them with violence.

At that time, what we know today as Lake Union was not yet part of the industrial waterway that now links the salt water of Puget Sound with the fresh water of Lake Washington through a series of locks and manmade channels. Instead, native people moved from Puget Sound to Lake Washington by portaging (or carrying) their canoes between bodies of water. The xacua’bs lived in the middle of that route.

Like most Coast Salish peoples, the xacua’bs were deeply linked to the waters that sustained them, both through a means to travel and through the food it provided. They were related to, yet distinct from, the “people of the large lake” (Lake Washington) and the “people of the small lake” (Lake Sammamish). One of the largest communities was at the south end of the lake, where several families lived in a house made of cedar slabs and bark. Another was located in the northwest corner, near the mouth of what would later become the Fremont Cut.

Plying the waters of x̌áxəʔ̌ču in hand-carved canoes, the people of these villages were known to whip the water with sticks to drive fish toward a narrow stream in what is now Fremont, where they could more easily be caught. Away from the lake, the Indigenous people of the area would catch salmon in a weir built upstream at Ravenna Creek and suckers and perch on the shores of Green Lake.

Bits of life on the x̌áxəʔ̌ču are captured in the names the xacua’bs had for places on the lake:

gʷáx̌ʷap (GWAH-hwahp) – Meaning “leak at the bottom end,” this was the mouth of a creek that emptied Lake Union into Salmon Bay and would later be replaced by the Fremont Cut.

sč’axʷʔálqu (s-tchahw-AHL-qoo) – Meaning “thrashed water,” this creek in what is now Fremont was a good place to trap fish by thrashing the water with sticks.

báqʷab (BAH-quahb) – A prairie near what is now the Aurora Bridge.

stáčič (STAH-cheech) – The point on Lake Union that’s now home to Gas Works Park.

waq̓íq̓ab (wah-KAY-qahb) – Meaning “doing like a frog,” this was a small creek on the north side of Portage Bay.
dxʷƛ̕əš (duhw-tluhsh) – What is now known as Green Lake.

The perseverance of ‘Lake John’

Cheshiahud was born around 1820 and grew up about a mile away from Lake Union, on the shores of the big lake. He eventually became the leader of a village called baskʷíkʷiʔɬ (bah-SKWEE-kwee-thl), near what is now Madison Park, that was home to a longhouse and a people known as hloo-weelh-AHBS.

A black-and-white photo of an old man and woman sitting side by side.

Cheshiahud and his wife, Madeline, around 1904 (Denny, Orion O. General Indian Collection)

As a child, Cheshiahud would have had little interaction with the occasional white traders and explorers who passed through the region. But by the 1850s, white colonizers were rapidly settling in the area, and Cheshiahud soon learned of their potential for brutality.

In 1953, when a white man was reported missing and later found buried on Lake Washington, the sheriff arrested three Indigenous men, including Cheshiahud, for murder. But before they could face trial, a white lynch mob grabbed two of the men and hanged them. The sheriff stopped the mob before they could kill Cheshiahud, who was later found not guilty of murder.

Seattle was incorporated as a city a little over a decade later, and one of its first acts was to prohibit Indigenous people from being in the city after dark. The people who had called this land their home for millennia began to leave – many moving onto reservations with other groups – but Cheshiahud did not. Instead, he moved across the lake and made a home on a swamp near Bellevue, where he lived with his wife and at least two children.

Despite his earlier violent encounter with them, Cheshiahud remained friendly with his new white neighbors across the lake, particularly David Denny, one of Seattle’s founding fathers. When Cheshiahud decided he wanted to move back to his childhood home, Denny gave him a plot on Lake Union near where Denny was building a new canal to Lake Washington.

With little access to the resources the land once provided, Cheshiahud provided for his family by carving wooden canoes and guiding tours of white people through the lakes he knew so well. As more of his Indigenous neighbors moved away, including his own daughter, Cheshiahud and his wife, Madeline, became well known in Seattle as some of the last Indigenous people living in Seattle.

Cheshiahud finally left Seattle in 1906 after Madeline’s death and was living on a reservation with his daughter when he died just four years later. He was buried in Evergreen-Washelli Cemetery in North Seattle, where his tombstone still stands.

Cheshiahud’s legacy today

It has been more than a century since Cheshiahud paddled the waters of x̌áxəʔ̌ču or carved canoes by hand on its banks, but his name, craft, and legacy live on.

A picture of a plaque reading "A DEDICATION TO NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURE. A Native American canoe carver named John "Indian John" Shiahud and his wife, Madiline, lived near thsi site during the late 1800's. Native Americans used canoes to travel,fish, hunt and gather food for thousands of years. One source of food was the salmon. It was often referred to as "The Food of Life" and to this day, it remains a very important part of the Pacific North West Native American Culture. The art work on theses walls, created by George Starr of the Puyallup Trible, is dedicated to the Puget Sound Native American ancestors, like John and Madiline Shiahud, that helped keep the Native traditions alive."

A plaque at the end of Shelby Street in Seattle (photo by Neal Simpson)

At the bottom of Shelby Street, near the water’s edge, a plaque still marks the spot where Cheshiahud and his wife lived out their final years. In 2008, Seattle Parks & Recreation opened a new six-mile paved path around Lake Union named after Cheshiahud.

And now, at the south end of the lake, a new effort to preserve and celebrate the Native culture of this land is underway. Construction is expected to start in 2025 on the 1,200-square-foot Canoe Carving House, which will be operated by United Indians of All Tribes and provide a place for Native carvers to practice their craft and share it with the rest of the Seattle community.

On its website, United Indians emphasizes the deep significance of the Canoe Carving House: “On the shores of South Lake Union, where people of surrounding tribes can still trace their ancestors, we are building a space where practices that are thousands of years old can be witnessed again.”

A note about place names

Lushootseed, the language of the xacua’bs and other Native communities of Seattle, has been interpreted and anglicized in many ways over the decades, resulting in a variety of names and spellings for the same places, people, and even the language itself (also spelled Whulshootseed). The place names used in this post are taken from “An Atlas of Indigenous Seattle,” as published in “Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-over Place” by Coll Thrush, 2nd edition, 2017.