Dead Bob's True Tales

The history of our fair city is thick with tales of colorful rogues, cutthroats and buccaneers. Why, it's a fact that Seattle was built by pirates.

We were here a full ten minutes before the Duwamish Indians, and we'll still be here when Elliot Bay has dried up and the Mariners have moved to Okinawa. So here, for the edification of our readers, is a collection of little known, painstakingly researched and practically indisputable facts about Seattle's piratical heritage.

• Prior to the invention of the wheel, what is now Yesler Way had to be covered with slippery mud so that the Moby Duck could slide down hill on her axles. That's how the infamous street came to be known as "Skid Row."

• Receding glaciers on Mt. Rainier occasionally yield gold doubloons that were buried there before the last ice age. The ancient treasures can be seen shimmering down along the Puyallup River, driving the migrating salmon and steelhead crazy with gold fever.

• Green Lake was once inhabited by an old sea captain known as Omar "Iron Lung" McPhog – a fearsome freebooter who had the uncanny ability to hold his breath for forty days and forty nights (a hereditary trait that allowed his ancestors to survive the flood.) As far as anyone knows, he's still there to this day, ruling over his mermaid harem, enforcing the "No Swimming" ordinance, dining on Canada geese and millfoil, and occasionally surfacing for 12-egg omelets at Beth's Cafe.

• Long before the construction of the Lake Washington floating bridges, East King County was a vast, unexplored frontier. Early map makers considered it Terra Incognita, and would often fill the otherwise empty space on their charts with the warning, "beyond here there be dragons."

Finally, in 1601, famed explorer and privateer Henry Horace Fishback sailed Eastward from Leschi Point and landed safely on the sandy shores of Factoria, believing that he had landed in Idaho and proving once and for all that the world was round.

• Denny Hill, an active volcano that once loomed high above the South end of Lake Union, was formerly the site of a magnificent lighthouse. In those days, the Pacific Ocean came all the way to what is now Fourth Avenue, and the Great Denny Hill Lighthouse was a familiar landmark to sailor and landlubber alike.

The keeper of this lighthouse was Kanute Kanudson, an ex-pirate and the inventor of drink called the Red Rum Swizzle. Kanudson, the victim of medical malpractice, had a peg arm and a hook leg, and was unable to negotiate the spiral stairwell, so he stayed up in the revolving observation deck of his lighthouse, eating pistachios and drinking red rum swizzles, all day every day right up until his death at the age of 105.

Now, as every school kid knows, Denny Hill erupted violently in 1889, sending a huge plume o volcanic ash blowing westward. The debris that was once this proud and lofty peak eventually settled and formed the Olympic Peninsula, Kitsap County and Bainbridge Island. Although Denny Hill was gone, the great revolving observation deck of the lighthouse remained suspended in midair, spinning aerodynamically for several years.

Folks would gaze up at this queer sight and wonder if old Kanute was still there. They thought often of those pitchers of Red Rum Swizzle that were fermenting up there, and soon they organized to build a set of columns that would reach this spinning suspended platform. The installation of the elevator in 1962 was celebrated the world over. They even put in a monorail to make it easier to get there.

So you see, it's no wonder that Seattleites look forward to Seafair and the annual Pirates' Landing. It's part of our proud and unique heritage, and a chance to look back at those great pirates who came before us. We owe them so much!


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