Passing of Kotiocken, Son of Kamiakin
The death of a Yakima Indian leader highlights the ongoing tensions regarding assimilation and the encroachment of the Northern Pacific Railroad.
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.
Kotiocken, chief of the renegade band of the Yakima Indians, died on Friday of last week of fever. Kotiocken and his followers refused to accept the advances of civilization and become farmers and artisans, as many in the tribe did, but retained their dress of blankets, leathers, furs and paints, lived by hunting, fishing and the sale of their ponies, and endeavored to propitiate the spirits by incantations and tamanimus dances. They live, mainly, on the reservation, a short distance below Union Gap, where the medicine house is situated. When the Northern Pacific engineers were locating through Yakima county, Kotiocken and his Indians pulled up the locating and grade stakes and it was only by the assistance of the sheriff and his posse that they were persuaded to let the stakes remain where they were originally driven. Kotiocken was the son of Kamiocken, the great chief of the Yakimas, who led his braves in the wars during the '60s. Kotiocken was about 46 years of age.
“When the Northern Pacific engineers were locating through Yakima county, Kotiocken and his Indians pulled up the locating and grade stakes.”
This report captures the paternalistic bias of late 19th-century white journalism while documenting the resistance of the Yakima people to land dispossession and the forced assimilation policies that sought to dismantle their way of life.
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