Chief Moses’ Nephew Wanted: A Family Murder and a Reservation Manhunt

SPOKANE, July 27.—Jack Osakin, a nephew of Chief Moses of the Colville reservation, is an outlaw alike from Indian and white man’s justice. He is hiding in the mountains of the western part of the reservation, and Chief Moses has given orders that he be shot on sight. On the 20th of July he killed his own mother, Shintah, a full sister of Chief Moses, and the old chief is grief-stricken. To quote his own expression, he has a “very sick heart in his breast.” Particulars of the crime have not been received.

Osakin’s hands were dyed with family blood before he killed his mother. Last December he slew his own brother, the favorite nephew of Moses and designated heir to the chieftainship of the tribe. Princes of the blood being few, Moses was loth to see Osakin hanged for his previous crime, and used his influence to save the murderer, pleading that the two were engaged in a drunken quarrel and that both were equally to blame. Osakin was cleared, and was looked upon as Chief Moses’s successor. The Indian police and reservation authorities are looking for the murderer, but it is feared he may escape across the Canadian border and there join some of the renegade bands recruited through years of flight from the reservations of the United States. The funeral of the murdered woman was largely attended.