Land and Water in North Seattle, part I: Introduction

Dear Diary,

I wanted to give you a Christmas present.  My first idea didn't work out fast enough, but gave me a second idea.  How would you like a basic physical geography of North Seattle?

Of course I'm not a geographer, though I was briefly a geography major in college.  Nor am I a topographer or hydrologist, those being the topics I actually intend to focus on here.  What I am is a guy who's walked much of North Seattle this year, who wishes I'd had such a page before starting, and who figures the best possible outcome would be that this set of pages so enrages a pro that she writes a better one.

My main sources are a series of government maps from the 1850s, from around 1900, and from 2020.  I got many of the relevant links from the posts about Seattle in the 2016-2019 blog by Jason King, Hidden Hydrology.

The 1850s:

The US Bureau of Land Management

This page asks for "Township" and "Range" numbers, meaning north-south and east-west.  North Seattle is entirely in ranges 03 E and 04 E, and townships 25 N and 26 N.  (To add the rest of Seattle, add townships 23 N and 24 N, and I think a sliver of Seattle is in T23N R05E.)  Enter the choices one at a time and execute a search.  In the resulting page choose the 1850s "cadastral" map, not any 1860s one that may be offered.

Around 1900:

US Geological Survey TopoView

Search for Seattle.  I downloaded PDFs of a 1908 Seattle map and the 1897 "Snohomish" one.

2020:

USGS current topographical maps.  These are updated every three years.  It takes five of them to fully cover Seattle, though one is only needed for Magnuson Park.  First check in TopoView as above, to verify what the latest year is.  Then do Web searches of this form:

"US Topo 7.5-minute" "[location]" "[year]"

for example

"US Topo 7.5-minute" "Seattle North" "2020"

Besides Seattle North, the main other North Seattle map is "Shilshole Bay"; for Magnuson Park also get "Kirkland".  Much of the rest of Seattle is already on these, but for the remainder see "Seattle South" and "Duwamish Head".

Let me explain something to you, dear Diary.  In my junior year of high school I took a "world" history class, meaning Europe.  I had an assignment about the Portuguese Enlightenment - Pombal and the Lisbon earthquake, basically.  I got curious what had happened next, and discovered to my shock that my textbook contained not one word about Portugal after the 18th century.  It was as if, having served a brief historical purpose, the country had ceased to exist.  Nor could I understand what sources like the Encyclopedia Brittanica said.

Since then I've believed passionately in something that amounts to a kind of political correctness in history and geography.  I think it matters that Siberia had a history before Russian rule, and I wish I could read it.  I think all of the land now called Scotland existed throughout ancient history, not just the parts that happen to be sexy in each period, and I think Morocco was part of the Roman Empire.  More to your point, dear Diary, I think Meadowbrook Playfield is an important Seattle park even though it bores me.  And more to this series's point, I think there's more to the hydrology of North Seattle than the Ship Canal, Green Lake and maybe Thornton Creek.

OK, then.  I'll go around the coast, looking for past or present creeks and following them uphill.  As in the recent street end series, I'm starting at the northeast.