Seattle’s Pioneer Square grew from the city’s earliest settlement, beginning when families of the Denny Party came ashore in 1851 and then moved in 1852 to the harbor across Elliott Bay, where Chief Seattle welcomed them before the Duwamish were later exiled to the Suquamish Reservation by treaty. Friendly Duwamish warned settlers before the 1856 attack on Seattle, allowing them to take refuge while U.S. Navy troops from the Decatur ended the fighting. David S. “Doc” Maynard promoted renaming the settlement Seattle, and he and Catherine Maynard helped the young city by opening its first hospital and giving away much of what became Pioneer Square. The district developed from forest and tidelands through landfill, regrading, and expansion tied to Henry Yesler’s steam sawmill, lumber shipping, and the city’s first public gathering place, while Sarah Yesler became a civic leader in suffrage, libraries, and child welfare. Seattle’s early social history also included Asa Mercer’s recruitment of New England women, the 1886 anti-Chinese violence in which the Home Guard defended Chinese residents though most were driven from the city before returning, and the growth of Chinatown and Japantown. After the Great Fire destroyed thirty blocks of downtown in 1888, brick and stone buildings rose in a Victorian-Romanesque rebuilding, even as the business center shifted north and projects such as the Jackson Street Regrade reshaped the landscape. The Klondike Gold Rush and rail connections made Seattle a supply center and gateway for would-be miners, while hotels, saloons, brothels, banks, garment factories, and outfitters thrived in Pioneer Square. In the twentieth century, the area reflected both prosperity and hardship: women won the vote, Mayor Hiram Gill was recalled, Asian trade expanded, labor radicalism stirred conflict, Hooverville spread nearby during the Great Depression, entertainment and vaudeville flourished, and later literary, artistic, and gay communities found space there. Decline by the mid-twentieth century was deepened by the forced removal of Japanese-American families in 1942, earthquake damage in 1949, and redevelopment threats in the 1960s, but preservationists, architects, property owners, and the city ultimately restored the neighborhood, established the historic district in 1970, and created Occidental Square Park.