Fireflies

No Stranger to Change: The Oyster Bay of Katie Gale

Presented at NW History meetings in Portland in Spring 2014

LLyn De Danaan, Ph.D.

Emerita, The Evergreen State College

June 2014

“History is usually written by the winners. Their lives comprise the archival collections, and historically these have been white men enjoying political and economic privilege. So long as we rely on the materials at hand, we keep telling the same old stories.” — Jean Barman (BCBW, Volume 23, No 3, Autumn 2007)

Introduction

This conference and its theme of Migration, Encounter, Exchange gave me a good reason to revisit the Native American woman whom I’ve studied and written about during the past decade. My book based on her life was produced for a general audience and though well researched it is not as critical as it would have been for historians of the American West.  Today I want to explore, though briefly, how Albert Hurtado and Ann Laura Stoler’s notes on “intimate frontiers” and the post-colonial concept “aesthetic regime” offer interpretative strategies that are useful in understanding of Katie Gale’s life with her non-Native husband Joseph.

At the end of the piece, I’ll introduce, also briefly, two other layers of imposed sensibilities…the tourist eye and the nostalgic eye…as they molded and distorted the presentation of Native American women in late 19^th and early 20^th century.

The story of Katie Gale’s late 19^th century life as an oyster farmer on Oyster Bay, Totten Inlet, southern Puget Sound is in some ways a uniquely new story. There were many women laboring in the rural west during this period. Some biographies examine these women’s lives in detail. Some novels such as Willa Cather’s My Antonia or Ole Edvart Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth, have given these women an indelible place in literature.   Bold Spirit, the memorable story of Helga Estby by Linda Lawrence Hunt, makes us wonder what other tales we have yet to learn about and makes us dig deeper. But what is perhaps exceptional about the Katie Gale story is that she was a Native American woman, one of many whose lives off-reservation during the early post-treaty period are seldom examined or given treatment in our texts.

My representation of her life is also somewhat exceptional. A straightforward biography of Katie Gale was not possible given the paucity of material about her or written by her. In fact, the only mark in the record decisively made by her hand is an X firmly inscribed on several court documents. Thus I strove to bring to what I knew of her life a perspective, and to work from what Monique Wittig called an angle of approach that allows us to understand something of her in the context of her time if only from “out of the corner of the eye”. I have more particularly attempted in my book and in this essay to articulate when possible the dynamic interplay of gender, race, and class as these operated in her life. That is I have tried to understand her life from the perspective of a woman marginalized by the dominant culture not just by gender but also by race.   My depiction is a history from, so much as possible, “below,” that is, from the perspective of the margin and told from the point of view of a subaltern experience of the period.

Though documents produced by either Gale are limited, I try through a study of other sources to examine her life through the examination of a particular place and time period, Oyster Bay in the mid to late 1800s. Oyster Bay is a kind of social historical laboratory…one that because it is in the developing west…offers many archival documents:  homestead and donation claim papers, censuses, some diaries and journals, some letters, newspapers, and reports and letters associated with the United States Indian agencies and their officers.  Thus it is not just Katie Gale’s life that I represent (and in no way does the book claim to be a story of the Coast Salish people or any particular band or tribe), but a depiction of a maritime community of great diversity during the early commercialization and exploitation of its resources and statehood. The people of the Bay in many ways did form a community of place and interaction in a shared historical period in a era of great change.

Karen Leong wrote an essay in which she rather optimistically said that biographical studies of non-white women have released a “plethora of unbound voices” that have reshaped the discourse of the Western historical experience. Still, most biography of western women is not analytical, and the majority of these remain “fixated on white women.” and, as Susan Armitage has said, do not challenge much at all.

However critical attention to women’s stories, where it occurs, allows us to understand how gender and race, interacted with structures of power in the west. In Katie Gale’s case, these dynamics take on different significance due to her status in the post-treaty /early statehood period of Washington. Hers is not simply a tale of “survival” or a depiction of daily life on the “frontier” with all its challenges and tragedies.

Katie Gale’s story is in fact primarily a story of gender, racial inequality and the power exerted over her, her kin, her work and her body by an occupying colonial force embodied by her husband, Joseph.  Indeed, Katie Gale’s life exemplifies, I believe, Hurtado’s notion of the “intimate frontiers” of empire “a social and cultural space where racial classifications were defined and defied, where relations between colonizer and colonized could powerfully confound or confirm the strictures of governance:”

When I began work on Katie Gale’s story, everyone I spoke with and everything I found in print about her assumed that she was married “Indian style” to Joseph Gale or was at best his common law wife.  Indeed, I was told that white men married Indian women so that they could acquire their families’ tidelands. Oystermen, some prominent in the area, were known to have had such wives, legal or not, and fathered children by them, but the women are unacknowledged in local histories and biographies.  Katie Gale’s story does not follow this oft-repeated narrative and my guess is that many of these other women who have been dismissed from the history books would have a rather different and significant tale to tell as well.

Katie Gale, probably from a village up river from Puget Sound, had lived through the occupation of Oregon and Washington territory by colonial forces.  She and other western Washington indigenous people, those who lived in drainages of rivers and streams that flow to Puget Sound, had been forcibly removed to prison encampments when they embarked upon a war of resistance (1855-56) with complaints about treaty provisions and reservations. After the war, they were expected to go to reserves.  There, their customary activities, including hunting, gathering, and religious practices, were frowned upon if not outright outlawed. Promised goods and services, spelled out in the treaties made with the United States, were late in coming if they came at all.  The peoples’ ways of relating to one another, the land and water, and their children were undermined by these new rules and the placement and condition of the reserves. Children were taken from the influence of their families and assigned to schools that sought to destroy every semblance of their past lives and values.

In addition, Katie Gale and other Native people had been subjected on all fronts to what the literature of colonization calls a new “sensory regime.” All of the peoples’ lives and bodies including their senses/and sensory experience of home and land, were affected by institutional, white, western controls imposed upon them.  The “civilizing” political society made use of schools, churches, newspapers, and, on reservations, there were enforcers of change such as agents, doctors, farmers and schoolmasters.  It was during this post- treaty time, and after the war, that Katie Gale apparently joined her extended kin in the southern Puget Sound and with them sought work and livelihood off their inadequate reservation, Squaxin Island, and away from direct control of the agency administering the reservation. This is the context in which we must understand the life of Katie Gale and probably the lives and choices available to most Native women throughout the region during this period. 

The imposition of EuroAmerican hegemony was unlike anything that had been experienced by Northwest peoples. It is not as if the indigenous people did not know of and experience differences. Through loose or temporary alliances, trade with others, travel, and intermarriage, they had a vast understanding of and familiarity with a large territory, one Whaley calls Illahee. Contacts and trade included all the people of the Puget Sound, far north along the coast and into the interior with trails across the Cascades and along the Columbia and south at least to northern California. Many indigenous people were familiar with or fluent in several languages and some villages were bilingual. However, they did not organize for power or build empires or have rigid boundaries or borders but instead embraced relatively permeable home territories that were usually welcoming of others. They were especially welcoming to those with kinship ties for these extended rights to hunt or fish or gather. These were loosely structured social systems.  The word “tribe” was a term that in its strictest definition did not accurately describe how indigenous people of western Oregon and Washington territories were organized. Bands or small villages on drainages did, upon occasion, become allies in times of war. But the appellation tribe was applied and became commonly used to refer to those bands of people that were consolidated on reservations and compelled to live together.

Oyster Bay

Oyster Bay, at the head of Totten Inlet, was home to one of the richest native oyster beds in Puget Sound. In addition to the resident T’peeksin, a band of Coast Salish people that lived at the head of the Bay, the bounty of thumb- sized delicacies attracted Native American pickers from all around Puget Sound and beyond, probably for centuries. After treaties of the 1850s and the arrival of homesteading Euro-Americans and Europeans, things changed dramatically for the indigenous people and for Oyster Bay.

In the post 1850s Puget Sound war era, a Coast Salish woman named Katie Gale and her kin and friends, some from bands resident in the South Sound pre-treaty era and some not, were picking and selling Oyster Bay shellfish to non-Natives and making a life off reservation by lumbering, farming, fishing, and working for non-Native settlers.  Women were fully engaged in this work and some had their own “picking grounds.” They were forging unique lives and livelihoods in the post-1856 treaty economy.

Oyster Bay lay largely within what was then called Sawamish County, named after one of the bands of Native Americans who inhabited the territory. The earliest census figures for the area (post-1856) lists a population that includes Native Americans plus people from Scotland, Ireland, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick (not part of the Canada Federation until 1867), Northwest Territory (joined the Canadian Confederation in 1870), Russia, and France. Many were farmers or small-scale loggers, relatively benign neighbors and friends to indigenous people. By 1870, some Swedes and Norwegians had joined the mix. In 1878, what Raban calls the  “the great self-important juggernaut of American capitalism”  came to Oyster Bay in the guise of Joseph Gale and his partner. Joseph joined forces with Katie Gale whose family provided a work force, and had the resources, and the skills with which to cultivate and harvest oysters. Thus began commercial oystering on Oyster Bay. With this came more intensive gathering and parceling out of tidelands to non-Natives (and some Natives) as well as new territorial and then state laws (post 1889) governing the cultivation and harvesting of oysters.  At the same time, other institutions were well established or become established: fraternal lodges, transport, banks, newspapers (one bank rolled by Joseph Gale), steamboats, mills, bridges, and churches. The work of settlement and colonization was in full swing now, and the population grew with people intent on making this territory their own. By 1879, there were Danes, Newfoundlanders, Italians, an Australian or two and some Swiss on Oyster Bay. There were eight Chinese, a number that remained steady until 1889, the year of the Chinese Exclusion Case. Still, Chinese came back quickly: twenty-three on the census rolls, by 1892. There was a floating Chinese laundry on Oyster Bay and a upland one at New Kamilche. Katie Gale and Joseph had Chinese workmen and a foreman who was Cowlitz/Chinese mix. During that same period, the early 1890s and beginning in the late 1880s, right after Washington became a state, there was a large influx of “Canadians” and Norwegians. More than 300 Canadians were on the census roles in 1892.

Thus Katie Gale’s Oyster Bay, where she lived and worked from around 1860 to her death was cosmopolitan and rapidly changing. People from Europe and elsewhere who applied for homesteads would be working for citizenship at the same time in order to qualify and “prove” their claim. They would not be leaving.

The Gale union, a formally legalized and documented marriage, was one of the countless cross- cultural unions that involved Native American women and European or Euro-American men in the region and on Oyster Bay. Such marriages or common law unions are recorded in journals, diaries and letters from the early days of Fort Astoria, Fort Vancouver, and Fort Nisqually to name a few.Through these “tender ties” bonds were made between and among whole groups of people. Though much of the discussion in the literature concerns the marriages between trappers, esp. French and indigenous women, a fair amount has been published that depicts Native women in alliance with men who were either in positions of leadership, for example, in Hudson Bay Company, at Fort Astoria, or in nascent European villages or towns, and or rose to those positions during the relationship.  In many ways, these cross-cultural marriages could be positive and could change the climate or character of a community from one exclusively Eurocentric to one decidedly more cosmopolitan (given that the woman usually joined the husbands business or home). They could shift the meaning of home to one that was local rather than distant for the male. They certainly could and often did establish a reciprocating bond with the local indigenous community of the wife’s family. They also provided for intimacy for both partners. For the woman, given the depredations of the era, the loss of home and home territory, and the uncertainty of the future, the marriages provided or helped her to establish a certain stability and economic as well as social space. Of course the cultural differences between the pair often continued to be obstacles to truly successful relationships as did racism and the rules and legal obstacles the surrounding community of laws and prejudice placed in the way even when husbands defended and fully embraced wives. The children of these marriages, often referred to as Metis informally, were variously accepted, assimilated, and/or faced with ambiguous or changing legal status during the last half of the 19^th century of Washington. In terms of official United States policy viz the indigenous population, this period is known as the Assimilation Era.  In keeping with the dominant culture’s sentiment,  in some instances, a husband wanted to eradicate any relationship or identification the children of the marriage had to Indian roots. He might also wish to erase or eradicate the woman’s own race and culture in any way possible. This was the case of Joseph Gale.  Thus, to quote Stoler and Hurtado, The “tender ties” were also “sites of production of colonial inequities and therefore of tense ties as well.”   Stoler writes that “matters of the intimate are critical sites for the consolidation of colonial power, that management of those domains provides a strong pulse on how relations of empire are exercised, and that affairs of the intimate are strategic for empire-driven states.”

During the economic panic of 1893, Katie Gale feared that Joseph, in whose name their tidelands were recorded, would lose their wealth. Also, she had, she said, been treated as a menial laborer though she was a full partner in their enterprise. Joseph paid her for her labors at the same rate he paid other piecework laborers he employed. She sued, ultimately ran her own oyster business, and left considerable holdings to their two children. Her modest home was on the site of what is now the still successful Olympia Oyster Company. Her story from the point of her suit against Joseph is one of many that reflect the perseverance of women during territorial and early statehood as well as the complexity of the “encounters” between and among people in the early territorial days of the Northwest. She went to court to protect her holdings and during the proceedings she defined and spoke from her subaltern status as Native woman.

She is an Indian Woman

Pre-colonization Native American women in the region were full participants in economic activities of their families and bands.  There are many instances of leadership of women in the literature and oral histories. There were a number of paths by which women attained power, including spiritual power. Women might be shaman. Women could indirectly influence economic activity through their husbands. Some women transformed themselves and became “male” in order to exert power.  Native women in the Northwest, however, were nearly immediately compared negatively with European and EuroAmerican women by European explorers and entrepreneurs. Their “nakedness” offended, they bathed in the river, were deemed “devoid of shame and decency” and were called prostitutes. Denigrating language such as this is found in the letters and reports of agents assigned to the Squaxin Island Reservation, the reservation where Oyster Bay Native Americans would have been expected to reside. Women were often called “squaws” and Katie, married to an enterprising and upwardly mobile white man did not escape these judgments and deprecations.  In court Joseph repeatedly spoke of her disparagingly. “If she couldn’t support herself with the money he paid her, he suggested, it is because she behaves like an Indian. That is, she works until she received payment (and this was true, he added, before they married), “then she would go off and stay with the Indians sometimes for months.” He complained that she would, “get up in the night,” and be gone for days. He claimed she was, “running with Indian men.”He portrayed her as erratic and unpredictable. He denigrates her work habits.

Dismayed by such behavior, he complained that, “she usually returned broke and affiant would give her employment again.” She had, he said, “wild Indian ways.” She squandered her money he said, giving it to her, “tillicum and kindred.” Then there was her temper, he continued. “She is an Indian woman of vulgar taste violent and unruly temper and has often made life a burden for him.” Even her voice offended him and his mates. It was too loud and her language unseemly. She could not be trained into being a proper EuroAmerican ideal of womanhood. Indeed, some of the language used to describe Katie Gale by Joseph Gale and his friends (in courtroom settings) is almost identical to that found in the European and Euroamerican journals from the early 1800s. Katie Gale and other Native women were caught up in a new aesthetic regime that sought to colonize their minds and bodies.

The Colonization of Women’s Bodies

In the time remaining, I want to speak briefly of one of the many ways in which Native American women’s bodies were colonized and paradoxically idealized by the new regime.

From the moment Vancouver first admired the coasts, the waters, the woods, and the inlets of the Pacific Northwest, the dream was of colonization

From the first, what was here needed, it seemed to those entrepreneurial visitors, was Europeanizing. Vancouver did not see what was actually in front of him. He saw dreams of the future and the promise of a new land made to serve the interests of his country. He saw hedges and gardens. Drawings made by European artists and laypersons on Vancouver’s ship and those of French and Spanish voyages and later travelers such as Paul Kane may have depicted what was “seen” in sketches, but these were dressed up by engravers or by themselves in studios as they produced finished paintings or before publication. Composition was constructed by a European or EuroAmerican eye.   And European paintings informed what was “seen.” As Raban writes, “The ghost of Salvator Rosa, hugely popular in England at the time (of Vancouver’s voyage) hangs over the midshipmen’s efforts as they labor to translate the giddy heights and vacant solitudes of the Northwest into familiar pictorial terms.”

The new aesthetic regime began its work in these earliest of encounters and it worked hand in hand with the privilege of  “discovery.”  That is, the discoverer is privileged to mold a landscape to his liking either by name, by design, or by force. This is the privilege of discovery. This is how the discoverer fabricates a land it can colonize. From making hedges, importing Scotch Broom, to sending Native children to boarding schools and putting them into unfamiliar clothing. Not just minds are colonized, but the hills, water ways, body and the skin …..everything.

European and EuroAmericans, particularly men, carried with them to the Northwest the will to colonize and this will was informed by a largely Victorian sensibility with respect to women (Victoria reigned from 1837-1901, roughly covering the period of the settlement of the Oregon Territory to the end of Katie Gale’s life) that translated into very specific expectation of women’s behavior, sexuality, and bodies.

Behaviors or dress that fell outside that expectation and sensibility were open to critical scrutiny and labeling. Women who challenged the Victorian ideal were chastised…whether in America or Europe or elsewhere in the colonial world.

Mid to late 18^th century Victorian standards for women put previously uncluttered lives of powerful women from communities of Native people into literal and metaphorical strait jackets of corsets and stays…and the burden of bustles and layers of fabric popular from about………..These were totally unsuitable for the “usual an accustomed” work of the daily lives of rural women generally and Native women like Katie Gale working on mud flats culling and cultivating oysters.

Still, the EuroAmerican ideal for Native peoples included American dress of the time and order and sensibilities that were American. By boarding school times, post mid 1800s in Washington Territory, young people were extracted from homes and sent off to mission schools or consolidated agency schools shorn and dressed in buttons and bows, vests, floppy ties and creased trousers. Even music was used as a tool of assimilation. Bands were popular at Chemawa school for the order and structure they required. Uniforms were military style and followed the model established by Henry Pratt at the Carlisle Indian School.The schools often changed students’ names and images of the now “civilized” children were published in order to gain support for funding. They were also groomed for work in northern cities, the girls to act as servants during school breaks. Ostensibly such work would help further the assimilation process.  And with the coats and dresses and boots and bands came the rest: lessons, books, manners and European and Euroamerican ideas of propriety, gender, and power. Ersatz European or Boston ideologies and aesthetic regimes came to overlay everything in the world of Pacific Northwest. Even the animals brought with them in their feed and dung the seeds of foreign plants that changed the landscape and the nostalgia for home led settlers to import plants like the Scotch Broom that is now ubiquitous.  Nothing was quite right. All had to be “tamed.”

Katie Gale’s as Katie Gale struggled to retain rights to live her life, make gifts and give money to relatives, stay within the Native community, and raise her children. But ultimately, her daughter Maud was kidnapped by Joseph Gale and, with the court’s approval, sent to an Olympia Sisters of Providence school where her husband complained even of visits by her mother and her mother’s Native American women relatives and friends. Though many of Katie Gale’s family had assumed the trappings of the dominant culture (see wedding picture from 1903), they were still Indian. Here in the Olympia school, though Maud had been doing well in the local mixed school on Oyster Bay, she was subjected to a regimen that truly distanced her from her mother’s Native influence. After Katie Gale died in 1898, her son was also sent to school in Olympia, attended the People’s University there, and became a bottler at the local brewery. Maud and Ray both married non -Natives and were absorbed by the dominant society.

Curiously, the corsets and bustles and the gingham dresses and aprons many Native women were wearing by the late 19^th century became symbols of loss by the early 20^th century. Newspapers marked the passing of aged Indian men and women with nostalgic obituaries. Many were said to be the “last of their tribe.” Edward Curtis passed through Puget Sound, removed the dresses and bustles, dressed women in woven cattail mats, let down their hair, and photographed these women in tableau-like reenactments of a life they no longer lived. These portraits became objects of “art” for an appreciative EuroAmerican audience.   End oral presentation.  The North American Indian project, of which these photographs were a part, was financed by J.P. Morgan and began in 1906. Other what might be called “end of the trail” art flourished in photographs and documentaries such as Curtis’ Land of the Headhunter, premiering in 1914, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, 1922, and the work of Marius Barbeau in Canada. It is no accident that songs such as Pale Moon with lyrics by Jesse Glick were popular in the 1920s and also employed “stereotypes that anchor Indian people firmly in a timeless, primordial way of life.” The operettas Pocahontas and The Captain of Plymouth and the song By the Waters of Minnetonka were also popular and depicted the “Indianist” music and confirmed many “non-Indian ideas about Indian culture.”

At the same time, tourism grew and with it the notion of collecting and seeing Indians first hand as part of a Northwest experience. Basket making was encouraged by the Department of Interior as a means of earning income and with the baskets, photographs of the basket makers were made and even sold as postcards. Through the early 20^th century, literally hundreds of tourists traveled by day rail to see Indians in the Puyallup hop fields. “See them play their native games” one promotion reads, and “secure one of the beautiful Native Woven Baskets.”  Tourists visited the Lake Quinault Lodge on the Olympic Peninsula and were feted by Indian performances and treated to the opportunity to purchase from Indian basket makers. (see picture) Now it was authenticity that was longed for by the EuroAmerican audience.

There is much more to mine from Katie Gale’s story and the history of Native American women living on Oyster Bay….for example how did the off-reservation women interact with and support each other? How did they interact with reservation women? How did they interact with EuroAmerican women? For example, we know of many stories of Native women acting as healers and midwives to white and Native women in the region. This includes Louisa Tobin, a cousin of Katie Gale. What were the boundaries of their acceptance beyond that role and others they played in their maritime communities?

NOTES:

Research Files, Katie Gale’s Tombstone: The Work of Researching a Life

by Llyn De Danaan. Oregon Historical Quarterly. Winter 2005.

See “The Straight Mind and Other Essays” by Monique Wittig. She defines “angle of approach in the context of discussing Djuna Barne’s work: “a constant shifting which, when the text is read, produces an effect comparable to what I call an ou-of-the corner-of-the-eye perception; the text bears the mark of that ‘estrangement’. P. 62.

I owe much to the work of bell hooks, “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center,” and Gramsci’s post-colonial theories. See Kate A.F. Crehan, “Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology.” Chapter five of Crehan’s book discusses the power relations that maintain subordination of the subaltern and the “cracks and fissures that could potentially lead to their overcoming it.”

Karen Leong cited by Margaret Jacobs, Pacific Historic Review, p. 592 and      Susan Armitage   “Wetern Women’s Biographies,” Western American Literature, 41, No. 1 (spring 2006), 72. Cited by Margaret Jacobs, ibid.

For example the wonderful and popular book Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America by Linda Lawrence Hunt, Anchor, 2005. A great story of an exceptional  Norwegian immigrant woman in late 19^th century Washington State.

Quoted in Margaret D. Jacobs, “Getting Out of Rut: Decolonizing Western Women’s History,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 79, No. 4, pages 585-604. 2010. P. 592.

Cited by Margaret D. Jacobs, ibid., Susan Armitage, “Western Women’s Biographies, “ Western American Literature, 41, No. 1, (Spring 2006), 72.

Albert Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque, 1999). See also “Settler Women and Frontier Women: The Unsettling Past of Western Women’s History,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 22, No. 3, Women’s West (2001), pp. 1-5.

A story of Katie Gale’s contemporary, Sally, is an example. She was married to a white man and lived and laboured with him for years as his spouse but was never allowed in his sister’s house and was denied any of their jointly earned wealth after his death and in the aftermath of two lengthy court hearings. The legality of her marriage was challenged by the dead man’s birth family and her legal standing was examined in courts and denied. She had been picking oysters from her “own bed” before she met and married the man and was well known to be making a good living on her own.

I am indebted to Margaret D. Jacobs for introducing me to the concept of “sensory regime” and the conversations about it in post-colonialism literature. See: “White Mother to a Dark Race,” by Margaret D. Jacobs, “The Anthropology of Colonialism,” Peter Pels, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol 26 (1997), pp. 163-183; “Racial Malleability and the Sensory Regime of Politically Conscious Brazilian Hip Hop, Jennifer Roth-Gordon, 7 July 2013, American Anthropological Association.

Gray H. Whaley, “Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee: U.S. Empire and the Transformation of an Indigenous World, 1792-1859.”

Not in the sense in which this term is used to describe Thai society. I mean it in the sense of the fluidity of the bilateral kinship system and marriage as well as the relative lack of structurally determined leadership and interaction between and among bands and individuals.

Other terms…nation, consolidated bands of…..etc.

Stevens treaties, 1854-55.  Donation Land Claims Act, 1850.  Homestead Act, .

Sally

Renamed Mason County in 1864 in honor of Charles H. Mason, the first Secretary of Washington Territory. One of the signs of increasing white settlement and EuroAmericanizing/colonizing is the substitution of Euro-names for Native names.

Jonathan Raban, “Passage to Juneau: The Sea and Its Meanings”, Vintage, 2000. p. 70.

The Canadian influx may have to do with the fortunes of the Simpson and Grisdale families who emigrated from Quebec. S.G. Simpson formed the Simpson Logging Company in Mason County 1890 and was joined by a relative and neighbor George Grisdale in 1889. George’s letters to his brother Bill may have been typical of the seductive descriptions of the area being written home. The trees, he said, were “really big and tall and thick” and had to be seen to be believed. At the same time, more thousands left the Maritimes due to worsening economic conditions. (cite Thornton)

Japanese do not appear in the area census rolls until the early 1900s.

The Homestead Act of 1862 Declared that any citizen or intended citizen could claim 160 acres of surveyed government land. The Indian Homestead Act  of 1875 extended the Homestad Act of 1862 to Indians provided they gave up their tribal affiliation.

Forthcoming book by Candace Wellman, The Peace Weavers: 19th Century Intermarriages at the Edge of the Salish Sea. This is to be a group of biographies of indigenous women married to army officers and settlers on the 1850s in one geographic cluster of intermarriages in the Bellingham Bay in Washington Territory. Also see Jean Barman’s new book, French Canadians, Furs and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest.  Jean Barman  September 2014 University of Washington Press. (UBC Press)

See “Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870. Sylvia Van Kirk. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983. Also Gray H. Whaley, “Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee,” University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Assimilation Era in Federal Indian Policy was 1887, the beginning of the allotment period, and 1943.

“Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” Ann Laura Stoler, The Journal of American History, Vol. 88, No. 3. December 2001. P.4. “Settler Women and Frontier Women: The Unsettling Past of Western Women’s History,” Albert L. Hurtado. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 22, No. 3, Women’s West (2001) pp. 1-5.

  Ann Laura Stoler “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, Duke University Press,  2006. page 4,   Quoted in Margaret Jacobs page 602

Example of one female shaman is the prophet Kauxuma-nupika who traveled from the plains and plateau to the lower Columbia in the early 1800s warning of coming disease and whites. Whaley discusses the role of “Madame Coalpo in the Columbia fur trade and comments that women were often at “the helm” of fur trading expeditions. Gray H. Whaley, “Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee,” University of North Carolina Press, 2010, p. 42.

Many biographies, including those of contemporary women leaders, are available. See Esther Ross’s (Stillaguamish) biography, Betty Mae Jumper’s autobiography, with Patsy West, A Seminole Legend: The Life of Betty Mae Tiger Jumper, Lakota Woman, by Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes , or Wilma Mankiller and Michael Wallace’s Mankiller: A Chief and Her People (1993). Also see stories of Lozen, the prominent Chiricahua Apache warrier and prophetess, and Mildred Cleghorn, first tribal chairwoman at the Fort Sill Reservation.

Whaley, ibid. p. 45.

This term was used to denote certain relationships between Indian women and EuroAmerican men on Oyster Bay. Indian Country Today ( HYPERLINK “http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/01/31/word-squaw-offensive-or-not-153328” http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/01/31/word-squaw-offensive-or-not-153328) circulated an account of the historical uses of the term written by Vincent Schilling.

Raban p. 161 and the painting of the loom.

Jonathan Raban p. 160

A new exhibit at MOHAI (Seattle’s wonderful revitalized Museum of History and Industry in its new home on South Lake Union) allows spectators to push buttons and watch hills around Seattle and Elliot Bay disappear as these features rise into the sky on long fish lines and vanish into the “clouds” as it were. With just the push of a button, the course of the Duwamish River becomes a straight line rather than the meandering oxbow it once was. There seems to be no ironic commentary or critique of this….we push buttons and “poof!” there goes Denny Hill. 

To Win the Indian Heart: Music at Chemawa Indian School, Melissa D. Parkhurst, First Peoples, Oregon State University Press, Corvallis. 2014. p. 34.

Ibid. p. 28.

Sisters of Providence were especially active in establishing schools for Metis children.

For a story of Edward Curtis’ life and work see Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan. 2012 Houghton Mifflen. The book further glorifies  an already glamourized man and it’s a “good read.”

Melissa Parkhurst, To Win the Indian Heart. First Peoples. Oregon State University Press. Corvallis. 2014. p. 58

Ibid. p. 59

Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth Century.  Paige Raibmon. Duke University Press. June 2005.

Spoil and Gob: The Remainders of Life                        The author with her father and mother as they inspect a model of the house he later built.

by LLyn De Danaan

It could begin with fear of the Internal Revenue Service, that hanging on to every scrap of paper with a number on it started for my father. He kept all the bills and receipts and delivery notices and cancelled checks for a house he built in the early 1950s. He lived in dread of an audit. True, these piles of papers, held together by gummy rubber bands, long past their use by dates, represented the history of a worthy endeavor. My father did not go to the South Pole, but he made for us a home. Here is the evidence of the concrete he ordered for the foundation and of the purchase of a small cast iron solder pot. Here is a bill stamped paid from a quarry where he handpicked the stones for the fireplace and chimney he built. And more. The asphalt tiles for the flooring, the tabs for the roof, the lumber for the studs, the yards of wiring and gallons of paint. A large panel of glass for the “picture window” that was a must in all suburban 1950s houses. It’s all there. I can reconstruct the stages in building the house in my mind as I read through these. I can visualize his line levels and saws, his shovels and trowels. The retractable cloth tape measure and folding carpenter’s rule. His heavy hammers and the manual hand drill with its interlocking cog wheels. With those tools and all those receipts, I could order all the same materials he used and build a replica of our house on my own land.
My father packed these and other papers in heavy cardboard cartons and moved them all over the United States with him and my mother. They left, the papers, Beavercreek, Ohio and found a home in a storage container in Sacramento. They rode a U-Haul truck back to Wellston, Ohio. They hitched a ride on a moving van to Olympia, Washington. The original house itself had long since been sold and the IRS, presumably, had long since lost interest in it. Or how much the cost of the nails and staples that held it, if not my family, together. Still, the papers, the proof of the enterprise and its cost, lived on.
And those were not the only papers that gathered dust and mold and lay yellowing, if not decaying, in boxes. There were letters sent from the South Pacific to his parents and my mother during World War II, correspondence with the Canadian Air Force (he had been rejected by the United States Army Air Corps—too old and bad teeth I believe), Army discharge papers, divorce and remarriage certificates (my parents’ bad spell), and, yes, more, carefully labeled and bound materials for the IRS.
My father was a life long employee of the United States Government. He was a rule abiding man who, as he made his way home from “the base” each day, passed through a gate arched by a sign that read, “What you see, what you hear, when you leave, leave it here.” He took no part in politics of any kind. He seemed to have over interpreted the Hatch Act, a bit of 1939 legislation that dictates the degree to which Federal Employees may be involved in the democratic process. My mother, meanwhile, ran for office and campaigned vigorously for Democrats. My father remained silent on such matters.
He was, in fact, timid in many ways. His matte black lunch bucket certainly drew no attention. His work overalls hid anything that might have individualized him. A nice man, “well thought of,” who did not smoke or drink (a concession to my Baptist mother and grandmother), had little or no ambition to be other than he was, to make more money, or to buy better cars. He did not pursue higher education though he could have (the G.I. Bill) and was content, it seemed, to slump into the cushions of my mother’s maple Ethan Allen colonial themed furniture with the Dayton Daily News after a workday. We ate dinner, served on her Russell Wright cobalt blue cutlery (the glaze of which may or may not have been slowly poisoning us) set formally on her Ethan Allen maple table (Refinished periodically by my father and polished by my mother after each use. ) around 5:30, soon after his predictable return.
There was with him, however, some underlying fear of and disdain for the government. He seemed to be a man who “lay low.” He wouldn’t fly, at least not after WWII. He did not enjoy driving, at least not when I knew him.

……
The asphalt tile on the floors of each room of the house was also killing us. The popular tile was made of asbestos fibers that sometimes comprised over 70 percent of the thin, brittle squares. Laid for a floor, they created a cold and hard surface that caused anything dropped to shatter. (My mother’s marble coffee table was shattered, but that was by a bowling ball which my father let loose while practicing in the living room one evening.)
The tile in our living room was a dark green shot with off white. Mother must have disliked it because she covered it with a fairly thin red medium-shag carpet. This carpet was vacuumed every day when she returned from work even before she removed and hung her coat. This manic vacuuming was, I presume, done to enliven the rug’s limp, lusterless nap. In the front door, open the closet, drag out the vacuum, freshen the rug, return vacuum to closet, take off coat, plump furniture cushions, generally “straighten things.” A typical 1950s home? No footprints on the carpet and no fingerprints on the furniture. Nobody impressions. A place for everything and everything in its place. No trace of human activity. Or crabgrass. It was one of my regular household chores to make rounds with a metal digger and root out starts of plants certain to spoil the golf course look of our “lawn.” There is this to be said for it: it look more alive than the flacid carpet.
The “picture window”, a typical a feature of “ranch style” houses in the 1950s, was enormous and from it we had a view of the scraggly sugar maples planted in our front yard, and, across Hanes Road into a field of red sorrel, bittersweet, golden rod and Queen Anne’s lace, a forest of beech and ash and hawthorne and elm in which, now and then, roamed a herd of hapless Guernseys. These were probably Mrs. Johnnnes’ errant cows. They had the highest butterfat content in the county and were the pride of Mrs. Johannes whose other claim to fame was that she regularly forgot to remove the rollers from her hair when she attended square dances.
Mother often reminded us that unlike tasteless women in the other ranch style houses, the likes of which abounded in Beavercreek, she had not placed a large table lamp in the middle of HER window. She was one who did not like to “follow the crowd.” (I was advised to be similarly unconventional in thought and behavior.) The mullionless oversized pane, she believed, was meant to provide access to the outdoors without actually having to be outdoors. Mother, in her dark moods, preferred the curtains to be drawn closed.
At the level of this long window sill and outdoors was a stone planter box filled with unruly phitzer junipers, a nonnative popular landscaping shrub of the period. Mother did not do flowers. We had,  my father and I, planted long rows of multiflora roses to demark the boundaries of our half-acre lot. These grew quickly and produced beautiful though small white blooms. The multiflora formed a “living fence” and is now considered one of the peskiest invasives in Ohio. I pray that the intruders did not get their first footholds on our property.

…….
My father’s fear of the government may have been as much a fear of men in uniform as anything else. He had, after being turned down by the Air Corps and Navy, managed to get into the Army. He was committed to being part of the American fighting force. Even though he had a new baby (me) and was the only male support of my mother and grandmother, he persevered. He was 30 years old with a great mop of dark hair and, if pictures tell the story, a certain swagger. He had been a football star and in a small town like Wellston, that gave him a certain cachet. After high school, he went to Oklahoma for flight training and came back home as a daredevil of a pilot who owned his own biplane.  He a colorful guy who rode a motorcycle as well as owning and piloting an airplane.  Today, he’d be the kind of fellow who would have a lot of friends on Facebook and would post pictures of himself riding into the wind with a white silk scarf flowing behind. He’d brag about a trout he’d caught or show us pictures of his girlfriends. That is, before his marriage to his real “catch,” the glam, redhead Doris, whom he had followed home after she paid a utility bill in his father’s appliance shop. What happened to that dashing spirit? My theory is that he initially chaffed against being told what to do by some fellow with Sergeant stripes or by an officer who was five years younger than he. Then he learned to take a deep breath and do what he was told. Something tamed him. Maybe it was his desperate, apparently nearly suicidal need to marry my mother. There was hell to pay and there were rules to live by. Just like in the Army.
Once, after I had moved to the west coast and he was visiting, we were coming across the Canadian border back into the United States after a few days visit. He was nearly frozen with terror when he was, inevitably and not surprisingly, asked if he had purchased anything while in Canada. The border guard, fully decked out in his border guard best, leaned menacingly into the driver side car window. My father began a recital that included recollections of every meal he had consumed, each piece of fruit he’d eaten, the chewing gum packet he’d bought at a news stand, a newspaper. I believe he stood ready to surrender an apricot. The border guard was quickly bored and flagged us on. My father, his brow dripping with sweat, seemed triumphant and righteous. The rest of the family were mortified with embarrassment.
Yes. It might have been uniforms. Or my mother. Or perhaps he really had done something terribly wrong. Perhaps he had to hang on to proofs of his labors, his existence, his movements. Perhaps he was in a witness protection program.
…….
It was his sister Susan who saved and, more than that, cherished the clippings and photographs that told the story of a family of Irish and Scots-Irish predecessors. My father’s father and grandfather look dour in portraits. Dour or maybe hard and perhaps slightly paranoid. All but Will and Uncle Charlie who are reputed to have been a “bit off.” Still, such mementos did not seem to interest my father. He did make a drawing, once, of the family farm on which he lived when he was a boy. And recorded a lengthy description of how to make a kite, something he did regularly with his mother, the apparent genius and inventor in the family, and brother.

……..
What was left to whom was a discussion I overheard often as a child. Wellston, Ohio, it seemed, was rife with battles for the remainders of lives, those vases and crystal glasses and silver tea services that filled grand Victorian houses all up and down the tree-lined main street of town. I was, it seemed, related in some distant way, to almost all of those householders through my mother’s family. They were the elite of town. The monied ones. The bourgeoise. When the wakes were over, the bodies removed from the parlors to the cemetery, and the last tea sandwiches consumed, bits and pieces of a legacy were found to have gone home with the guests or even preceded them out the door. At least that’s how it seemed to me. I listened through grates and at doors to stories of Aunt Minnie’s vaseline glass and Aunt Lulu’s gold-rimmed dinner plates. Gone with the crystal and the cutlery. The stories were similar: some relative would have beaten the others to the house after the death of the loved one and taken something she (or he) had been eyeing for years. Relatives who lived out of town were out of luck. Relatives who cared for the dear one at the time of death got the best of everything. And who could fault a caregiver? Well, one could suspect that the caregiving was double-edged, that is, perhaps done with a hope for material gain. From the plush backseat of our Plymouth or the depths of my out- of- the- way bedroom with Jenny Lind walnut spool bed, I listened to speculation regarding the sincerity of distant cousins or great-great aunts, all of whom seemed gushily loving to me. They held me close to their cushy perfumed breasts and required that I kiss their powdered cheeks. They could not be two-faced, could they? And anyway, who, I wondered, would sacrifice “the best years of her life” for a piece of bone china. Hard for a child to fathom.
But, yes, remainders were hotly contested but the heat was under the breath, whispered and indirect and the contest might go on for years. Again, under the breath or from across any room the suspect dared to enter.
My grandmothers did not, so far as I know, play the game. One, my father’s mother, was relatively poor and seemed not to mind, at least in the eyes of a child. The other, my mother’s mother, got rid of nearly everything she had owned when she “set up housekeeping” and after her husband died. Even his law books were gone and the only things left to remind her of her only son, Ralph, who died in a plane crash, a lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, were his hat, his Sam Browne belt, and a tinted portrait of his agreeable, smiling face. No letters, no memorabilia. It is as if she had purged herself of all of it in order to live. Of her life, I have boxes of costume jewelry, a few hat pins, and a one or two hats. Nothing more.
…….
Photographs. Yes, boxes and albums full of photographs. Because in our family looking through photograph albums was a regular happy pastime. The pages were made of a course black paper. Photos were held to the pages by little black sticky corners. Each was identified by neat notations made with white ink. I loved sitting with “Nan” and mother looking at these images of my antique relatives and my young mother and father and me, a nude baby on a sheepskin or pinafored and imprisoned in an elegant red leather cushioned high chair or oaken playpen placed in a sleepy summer lawn. And these remain, though cannibalised through the years in order to create other albums.

……

Remainders of a life. What is it we save and why? What burdens do we place on those left behind when they are left to sort and toss and make the trips to thrift shops with clothing we ourselves have not worn in years? Will the things upon which we place such value mean anything to those we’ve left behind?
Some of my mother’s maple furniture went to my brother and sister in law with my blessings. I wanted nothing. The maple is still quite serviceable as is the silver cutlery mother kept in a velvet coffin-like box and used only on special occasion. The silver tea set made its way, I am glad to know, to my eldest niece. My father’s receipts, well, I believe they are long gone. I hope. Some were eaten by the dog Fred with whom I lived when those boxes were stored in my Olympia Decatur Street home’s garage. He was a living shredder and did away with small piles of papers my father had stored there without my permission. Each day, another. I didn’t care.
But the albums. The photographs. I have boxes and boxes of them, the remains of several lives. These I cannot toss. These I cannot burn. I mean, always, to take a few days to sort them, repackage them, put them into labeled files or envelopes. For whom? I have no direct descendants. No one sits and looks through albums with me. But I hold on to these images, just as my father held on to the receipts from the house he built.
The remainders are, after all, evidence, like the drawings in caves of Sulawesi or Chauvet, that we once walked this earth and did something of value.

*Spoil and gob are terms used in association with abandoned coal mines. In the early 1900s, my family were associated with mining in southeastern Ohio and West Virginia. Reclamation projects, especially of old strip mines, often reference the spoil tips and gob piles left over from years of pretty questionable practices.