Legal Battles Over the Puyallup Farm
Trustees and the government clash over the status of land patents and tribal property.
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.
Judge Antoine Jackson said today, in regard to the work of the trustees of the school farm, who were appointed at the recent meeting of the Puyallups: 'We have engineers already at work platting the farm. We have also started the drawing up of a bill to be submitted to congress which will patent the title to us as trustees. It will contain a full list of the distributees and a full declaration of trust.' 'What do you propose to do if the new congressional commission takes charge?' was asked the smiling judge. 'If they keep still we won't do anything to them; but if they take hold of the property we'll enjoin them. Oh, we've got all our plans made.' The trustees, so-called, are, beside Judge Jackson, Jerry Meeker and Augustus Kautz.
“If they take hold of the property we'll enjoin them. Oh, we've got all our plans made.”
This dispute reflects the intense pressure on the Puyallup Tribe in the 1890s as the U.S. government moved to dissolve communal landholdings through the allotment process. The struggle to maintain control over tribal school lands was a pivotal chapter in the long fight for Puyallup sovereignty.
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