Surveying the Edge of the Colville Reservation
A grueling three-month expedition through dense forests and mountain terrain reveals the challenges of mapping Washington's frontier.
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.
Recently arrived surveyors tell of a curious creek of nature at the head of the San Poell and Curlew creeks on the Indian reservation. It seems that on the divide between these two creeks, a stream comes down from the mountains and forms a delta at its mouth. One of the delta mouths runs north into the lake from which Curlew creek takes its source, while the other mouth runs south to form the lake at the head of the San Poell, whence the water runs south into the Columbia. The Maxwell survey party has arrived at the Columbia River after working over a mountainous and densely timbered country for over sixty miles. The party's ninety days' exile in the Indian hunting ground did not injure their health, but their clothing and boots told a tale of weary tramps over sharp mountains and months of desperate wrestling with black pine forests and alder bottoms.
“Their clothing and boots told a tale of weary tramps over sharp mountains and months of desperate wrestling with black pine forests and alder bottoms.”
The Colville Reservation was established in 1872, and land surveying was the prelude to the government opening up vast swaths of Indigenous land for non-Native settlement. This account captures the physical hardship of that colonial project, framed as a romantic adventure of 'wrestling' with the landscape.
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