Like the Indians before him, Harvey Pike first saw the importance of this isthmus as a low and short portage between Lake Union's Portage Bay and Union Bay on Lake Washington. He was paid with this land for painting the original University of Washington building in 1861. Pike platted and named his prize Union City, and soon he also began excavating a ditch for moving logs. The big lake was then ordinarily around 9 feet higher than the small.

Predictably, Pike soon gave up this digging. Still, he kept an eye open for opportunities, and in 1871 transferred his deed to Californians with deeper pockets. They laid a narrow-gauge railroad across the isthmus. Between 1872 and '78, these rails carried cars filled with the black gold of Newcastle. In those years coal, not lumber, was Seattle's principal export.

Abandoned by the Eastside miners for a more direct route around the south end of Lake Washington to the Seattle waterfront, the Montlake Isthmus was at last sundered for logs in 1883 by Chinese laborers. This guillotine lock was built near the Portage Bay end of the cut, within a frog jump of the University of Washington's row of odd-shaped fish hatcheries set today beside Highway 520.

Paul Dorpat's two-hour videotape on Seattle's early history, "Seattle Chronicle," is $29.95 from Tartu Publications, P.O. Box 85208, Seattle, WA 98145.