The Skagit Farm Courtroom Battle
A landmark inheritance case hinged on the validity of an 1880s marriage between a white settler and a Swinomish woman.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A case which promises to become one of the most famous in the state was on trial in the superior court this week. It involves the title to 180 acres of farming land below Skagit City, belonging to the late John T. Wilbur, who died in 1884. The farm, now valued at $10,000, has been in the possession of Mrs. Sarah J. Wilbur since the death of her husband. It appears that in the early 1880s, Wilbur had an Indigenous wife, and his two half-breed sons are now claimants for the farm as Wilbur’s legal heirs. Their intention is to show that their father never was divorced from their mother, and consequently, the marriage of the present Mrs. Wilbur was a bigamous one.
Testimony was given regarding early modes of Indigenous marriages. It was shown that in the 1860s, Wilbur went to the Swinomish reservation, seeking the hand of a young woman known as 'Kitty.' He opened negotiations with her father, who demanded $60 as the price of his daughter. After three trips, the $60 was turned over to the father, and Wilbur gave Kitty $50 for her bridal trousseau. Later, he took his bride in his canoe to his ranch at Skagit City. In 1876, Wilbur discarded Kitty and married Sarah J. Wilcox, a white woman from New York. When Kitty went back to the reservation, she later married an Indigenous man named John Follensbee. Attorneys for the heirs contend the marriage was a valid common-law contract under tribal custom, while Mrs. Wilbur’s counsel argues that such customs have no standing in state law.
“Wilbur sought the hand of a young klootchman known as 'Kitty,' and he opened negotiations for the girl with her mercenary father who demanded $60 as the price of his daughter.”
This case highlights the legal precarity faced by Indigenous women and their children during the era of settlement, as courts frequently refused to recognize marriages that fell outside Western legal structures. Today, the case stands as a stark reminder of how land dispossession was often codified through the judicial invalidation of mixed-race families.
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