File:Native Americans and canoes in Belltown, ca. 1898 - DPLA - 52fedff74dbe49bc3a720a7761581559.jpg

Transcribed from photograph: "Seattle Waterfront. 1882-1886. Canoes and Indians in Belltown. Foot of Vine St. Cedar and Broad St. Photo by Asahel Curtis."

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It's hard to know what to make of the date and authorship for this (though what follows comes to a rather solid conclusion). We have at least three copies of this photo on Commons, all from GLAMs, and they are not in agreement.

• http://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/digital/collection/curtis/id/331 (on Commons at File:Indian summer laborers' camp on the Seattle waterfront, near the foot of Broad St (CURTIS 331).jpeg) is from University of Washington Libraries' Asahel Curtis Photo Company Photographs collection, and it says the photo is by Anders Beer Wilse, whose work in the Seattle area is mainly 1897-1900, and none of it later than that. They date it as circa 1898. (As discussed below, this seems to be essentially correct.)
• http://cdm16118.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15015coll4/id/1551 (on Commons at File:Native Americans on waterfront in Belltown, ca. 1882 - DPLA - eb31eabf645929447ebb819d3d078326.jpg) is from Seattle Public Library and has hand-notated on the image itself, "A common scene in 1882, '83,'84, '85, '86 at the West end of Vine, Cedar, Broad Streets, Seattle. The canoes were those of Indians on their way from the North to the hop fields of White and Puyallup Valleys. This part of the city front has since been covered by four lines of railroad, wharves, warehouses, shops, streets, etc." They date this as circa 1882, and do not attribute authorship. However, it is not clear who wrote the annotation, when it was written, now knowledgable they were, or whether they were saying the photo came from that era or merely that the scene seemed typical of that era.
• http://cdm16118.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15015coll4/id/2405 (on Commons at File:Native Americans and canoes in Belltown, ca. 1882 - DPLA - 52fedff74dbe49bc3a720a7761581559.jpg, also from Seattle Public Library, also gives the circa 1882 date, but contradicts that by crediting the photo to Asahel Curtis, who was born in 1874. Given that UW Libraries' copy came from the Curtis collection, it is likely that this was one of the many older photographs of Seattle that Curtis obtained rights for and reprinted, so the authorship claim doesn't mean much.

To that we can add:

• The power or telephone lines in the background make an 1882 date a little too early: telephone service preceded broader electrical service in Seattle, and even Downtown was first served with telephone lines in 1883. By the end of the 1880s, though, there were certainly utility lines through this area.
• This part of the waterfront was relatively late to develop. There were a few piers around here as early as the late 1880s (see List of structures on Elliott Bay, but it didn't really fill in until about the turn of the century or a little after. In the 1890s, canoes would probably have had to paddle under a rail trestle or two to get to shore here, but they could imaginably still have found a stretch of beach like this.
• Also, note some Euro-Americans in the center foreground. Their outfits suggest the later end of the possible date range of 1886-1900.

It turns out (via correspondence with Matt McCauley) that Ron Edge worked this one out in 2005, doing some research for this piece by Clay Eals. He concluded that the photo is at the foot of Broad Street, and taken by Anders Beer Wilse circa 1898. In a very high-res scan, Edge identified the O.W. Peterson Store, which pins down the location with certainty. Prosch's notes about this being a common sight in the 1880s mean just that: it was common a decade-and-a-half before this photo, not that the photo dates from then. And, yes, the Native Americans shown here would have paddled under the railway trestle.