The Fight Over Tribal Land in the Path of Progress
Booster newspapers in 1889 editorialized against the reservation system, calling for the seizure of Indigenous land to satisfy a hungry real estate market.
The reservation system is standing in the way of public improvement. At Yakima the best lands are withheld from home-seekers; in the Colville country vast tracts valuable for grazing, agriculture, and for minerals are closed against the advent of enterprise, and in several other places the situation is nearly as bad. It is particularly irritating that the Puyallup Indians, who number only a few scores, are allotted in severalty and have twenty times as much land as they can possibly use. They have all the privileges of citizens, including that of suffrage, and yet are not subject to the laws which force communities of white citizens to give way to necessary public improvements. It is time for this absurd reservation system to give way to a system that, while allowing the Indians all their conditions require, will not block the progress of the country.
“The Indians do not need the land, in fact do not and cannot occupy it. They are few in number and growing fewer each year.”
This editorial reflects the aggressive settler-colonial rhetoric of the late 19th century, which sought to dismantle reservations through allotment. It echoes the historical tension in Washington where property 'boosterism' often framed Indigenous land sovereignty as a barrier to civic economic development, a logic that permeated early territorial real estate law.
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