The Midnight Wait for Sunnyside Land
Homesteaders staked out a long, cold vigil at the land office, only to find the government had already cut a backroom deal.
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.
Pursuant to the announcement that overlapping lands in the Sunnyside section, restored to the public domain by the failure of the Northern Pacific Railroad to build the Columbia River road, would be opened to homestead settlement on the 17th, an anxious crowd of filers began to gather at the land office as early as 4 o'clock in the afternoon of the preceding day. Prosecuting Attorney Jerry Rochford was the first to arrive, joined by others including Harry Spinning, W. C. Calhoun, R. I. Watson, and W. L. Jones. By 6 o'clock the hall was full, and the watchers settled in for a long night with improvised seats, cards, music, and coffee provided by Mrs. G. W. Rodman. When the doors finally opened, Register Krais refused to accept the filings, citing a secret letter from the Northern Pacific stating these lands had been sold to the Yakima & Kittitas Irrigation Company in 1860, a fact previously undisclosed. All applications were rejected pending a review by the general land office.
“The applicants evidently did not hail from Kentucky, for there was a noticeable absence of bottles.”
This event mirrors the perpetual tension in Yakima Valley history between small-scale homesteading and the massive private interests—like the Northern Pacific Railroad—that often controlled land title. The 'Sunnyside' dream was frequently a battle of who truly owned the water and the dirt.
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