0.2 The funeral of bobo  (Page 6/12)

But Maynard also found it impossible to hold for himself any of the wealth he brought to Seattle. In 1855, the Washington Territory started forcing Salish natives onto reservations. Maynard—who had been the first settler there to employ natives, who had learned their language and counted many natives among his good friends—stocked Chief Sealth (after whom Maynard would eventually name Seattle) and the other natives being sent to a reservation across the Sound with enough supplies from his store to get them through their first winter away from their homes. When he sought reimbursement from the territorial government, he was rebuffed. He also was stigmatized as an “Indian lover” in the wake of that incident and ostracized by the rest of the city. Alienated, he traded away his Seattle land for a slightly larger and considerably less valuable parcel on Alki Point—site of the original New York-Alki settlement, now across the Duwamish River from Seattle proper—where he and his now-wife Catherine tried to make a go of farming. That venture failed largely because Maynard was an unenthusiastic farmer who gave most of what he managed to harvest away to less fortunate people. Finally, his house burned down and he and Catherine moved back to Seattle and opened a hospital. That enterprise went under in short order, even though Maynard’s reputation was restored among Seattleites, because he hated billing his patients.

Eventually, Maynard ended up afoul of the courts when his first wife, Lydia, came west to lay claim to half his land. Maynard had finagled a divorce out of the territorial legislature even though, as one of the dissenting legislators objected, his wife didn’t know she was being divorced. The dispute over his land dragged on for years, until finally the courts decreed that neither of Maynard’s wives was entitled to any of his land, since the first had never lived on it and the second hadn’t been married to him when he took a married man’s claim to 640 acres. Therefore, the state decreed, he had to give half his land back to the government. Slick. Since by then all Maynard had left were a few parcels scattered around Seattle, the rest having been given or traded disadvantageously away, he found himself destitute. When he finally died in 1873, Maynard was as broke as his city was prosperous. He was revered by his contemporaries as much for his misfortune as for his generosity, and all of Seattle turned out for his funeral.

The most fitting memorial to Maynard—a puzzling tribute left by an anonymous worshipper not on Maynard’s tombstone but on his wife Catherine’s—reads, ambiguously and hilariously, “She did what she could.”

Seattle was only 130 years old on the day I was standing outside Microsoft remembering Doc Maynard. The shadows of the other original settlers—Lee Terry, C.D. Boren, his sister Laura BOren, Arthur Denny—loomed everywhere in Seattle, in the form of downtown-Seattle street names, district names, and prominent families. But Maynard, whose only visible legacy was a rundown Pioneer Square tavern named Doc Maynard’s, loomed immensely larger in the Seattle imagination. He was the only one among Seattle’s founders who remained a genuinely compelling figure—a man who, in Morgan’s words, “tried to get rich and instead brought wealth to others,” who “was Seattle’s first booster, the man who was sure greatness could come,” but who “dreamed the right dreams too soon.” For a long time, Seattle was divided economically and socially by Yesler Avenue, the street down which Henry Yesler skidded logs to his waterfront mill. North of Yesler was respectable downtown Seattle, all gleaming office buildings and upscale retail outlets; south of Yesler was a disreputable district of squat, decrepit brick buildings known as Skid Road, the “place of dead dreams,” as Morgan called it. Until a concerted renewal project began in the early 1980s, much of the area was a slum. The district had been called by many names over the years (the Lava Bed, the Tenderloin, the Great Restricted District), but when it was first nicknamed, it was named Maynardtown.