The $100,000 Estate and the Indian Marriage That Seattle Forgot

The argument in the case of Petersen against Mathias, a contest over the estate of the late Franklin Mathias, was concluded in the United States court before Judge Hanford yesterday, and the case was taken under advisement. The estate aggregates about $100,000, of which $75,000 is in cash, some Pennsylvania real estate, and the remainder in Seattle property. The suit has aroused much interest among pioneers because of the marriage-law questions involved. The complainant claims to be Mathias's legitimate daughter.

Franklin Mathias came to Seattle in 1862. In 1867, it is claimed, a marriage ceremony under Indian custom, in the presence of three Indian witnesses, took place between Mathias and an Indian woman known as Peggy Curly, niece of an old Indian chief known as Chief Curly. Mathias was a carpenter and lived in a house on the present site of the Squire-Latimer building, where the defendant says the ceremony took place. The complainant was born in December. Sixteen witnesses were called to show that Mathias and Peggy lived together at the time of the birth and continued to do so for two years, when their marriage relations ceased. The woman says Mathias then formed an alliance with White River Jennie, and that her mother went to the fireside of Chris Scheuerman and afterward bore him a family of nine children. Photographs of Mathias and the complainant were introduced and are said to bear some family resemblance. The testimony showed that Mathias and Peggy had lived together, but the dates could not be sworn to positively. Several witnesses testified to the affection Mathias showed toward the girl, who was prepossessing, and that he appeared proud of her. The complainant says she was always taught by her Indian mother to avoid Mathias and was systematically schooled to fear him.

Mathias died in 1890. The plaintiff claims she is his legitimate child by virtue of a good and valid marriage between her parents, contracted at a time when this was Indian country and Indian customs prevailed, and also that she is the issue of a valid common-law marriage contracted when common-law marriages were recognized in Washington Territory. On this contention the plaintiff argues that the federal courts are not bound by the state supreme court's decision against the validity of common-law marriages, because long before that decision the United States Supreme Court had held in Meister v. Moore that a common-law marriage was valid. The argument for the complainant was closed by E.H. Lindsay yesterday afternoon. He cited many cases from the Supreme Court upholding his contention as to the woman's legitimacy, and said she also claimed to be legitimate under several acts passed by the territorial legislature legitimatizing the offspring of all marriages declared null at law. These acts were passed in the 1860s. The claim to legitimacy is also made under the territorial marriage act of 1854, which provided that all children born of persons living and cohabiting together as man and wife shall for all purposes be legitimate. It was also claimed that legitimacy, once it attaches, is a vested property right of which no statute and no decision of a court can divest any citizen, and hence that a federal question is involved. When Job P. Lyon concluded his argument for the defense last Saturday he made a strong attack upon the character, reputation and conduct of the complainant's mother, and Mr. Lindsay replied, severely scoring some of the witnesses against the woman.