Maynard was Seattle's first doctor, merchant prince, second lawyer, Sub-Indian Agent, Justice of the Peace, and architect of the Point Elliott Treaty of 1855.

He made and lost small fortunes in business and political ventures including railroading and a medical school that collapsed in the Panic of 1837.

When the leader of one small wagon train heading for Oregon Territory died, he assumed leadership and thus ended up on Puget Sound.

Mike soon agreed to his sister marrying Maynard, apparently on condition that they move the store to Duwamps and do something about that prior marriage.

In April 1852, Maynard claimed, as a married man, a tract of land of 640 acres in what is now Seattle's Pioneer Square neighborhood, and hired Indians to help him build a combination cabin and store.

Seattle's downtown still shows awkward bends and jogs where the plats meet, but the rest of King County follows Maynard's original design.

He drank liquor (while the Denny Party were mostly teetotalers) and, with his friend Captain Felker, found someone to start a good brothel in Seattle — the infamous Mother Damnable — believing that vice was essential to the economic success of a frontier town of that time.

Maynard's political skills helped defuse difficult situations with the Indian tribes, in particular between the Duwamish and the more powerful Snohomish, led by Chief Patkanim.

He sold a lot cheaply to blacksmith Lewis Wyckoff; people needing smithing therefore came to Seattle instead of its rival Port Madison.

In 1857, Doc Maynard traded his "downtown" acreage for Charles C. Terry's farm in West Seattle, but this new enterprise did not prosper; he and Catherine then opened a two-room hospital in what is now Pioneer Square.

The surviving city fathers minimized his role in their reminiscences in response to Maynard's autocratic rule of early Seattle.