150 Years of Love & Lust, Seattle-Style
20 tales of mad love, bad love, and glad love, plus 7 sex and love gurus.
I, Woman. You, Gumby.
A Clallam Legend
Long ago there was only one woman in the world, and no man. So she formed a man out of gum from a tree and wished he would come alive and be her husband. She went to sleep, and when she awoke he was alive.
The first woman and man lived together and had children. But because he was made of gum, he could not withstand the heat of the sun, which was hotter then than it is today. One day he went fishing and asked his wife to watch and make sure he did not stay out when the sun got too hot. But she fell asleep and did not watch the sun. It got so hot it melted him, and he died. —Recorded by the missionary Myron Eells in the late nineteenth century
Seattle’s First Love
Louisa Boren & David Denny
It was the perfect pioneer romance: Nineteen-year-old David Denny and 24-year-old Louisa Boren fell in love on the Oregon Trail in 1851, during the long trek from Illinois. They caught trout together at Soda Springs to feed the hungry party, then fended off a Shoshone brave’s attempt to trade horses for Louisa.
Denny, the party’s trailblazer, was the first to reach Puget Sound. Dispatched north to scout prospects, he sent back word: “Come at once.” On January 23, 1853, David Maynard, the territory’s first justice of the peace, joined David and Louisa in Seattle’s first wedding ceremony. It kept things all in the family, or families; David’s widowed father had already married Louisa’s widowed mother, and his older brother was married to her older sister. The mind reels.
David staked out 160 acres at the settlement’s wild north end, today’s Seattle Center (hence Denny Way). Louisa planted roses, earning the sobriquet “sweet briar bride,” and bore eight children. Optimistic and generous, David toiled tirelessly and invested eagerly in every new project—mining, farming, real estate, a sawmill, a streetcar line. He got rich, built a mansion, then lost it all in the Panic of 1893. He and Louisa retreated ever farther into the woods, first to today’s Fremont, then to a tiny cabin at Licton Springs, where he died 50 years after they wed.
Published: February 2010
Credit that blend of outward amiability and interior impenetrability known as the Seattle Freeze. “It manifests in a lot of confusion that would be unnecessary if people were more direct with each other,” she says.
So true.