The Government Comes to Divide the Valley
A petition to remove the Pend Oreille Valley's Indian families instead ends in 160-acre allotments at Cusick — and a scramble for the best ground in the valley.
Clair Hunt, former clerk of the superior court of this county, who has for some time been engaged in the work of making allotments to the Indians on the Spokane and Colville Indian reservations, left this noon for Cusick, to start the work of making allotments of the Indian lands across the river from that point.
Mr. Hunt will have a crew of several men to assist him in the work, and took down today a lot of supplies and camp equipage. He states that the work will take about six weeks to complete.
The allotting of the lands to the Indians is the result of a petition circulated last winter, asking the Interior Department to remove the Indians to some reservation, alleging that they constitute a menace to the health of white residents of the valley; also that they should have school facilities and be properly cared for by the government.
The department sent an agent to investigate the conditions, and he found that they were very much opposed to giving up their homes in the valley. It was therefore decided to make allotments of lands to them and provide schools.
There is an Indian population in that vicinity of about 80. Not all of them are entitled to the full 160-acre allotments, and it is reported that since the news that an allotment would be made has gotten out a number of Indians from other points have come into the valley with the idea of getting in on the distribution.
At any rate there are enough Indians who have rights to take up about all the land they are now holding. These lands are classed among the best in the valley, and it would have been far better for both the Indians and the white residents had the government taken the red men to some distant agency and opened the land for white settlement and development.
“He found that they were very much opposed to giving up their homes in the valley.”
Allotment was sold as a kindness — schools, title deeds, 160 acres apiece — but dividing a valley into individual parcels was the quietest way to break a community's hold on its land, and the surplus went to settlers. The paper's own wish that the families be shipped to "some distant agency" shows what the alternative was. The Pend Oreille Valley's tribes are still negotiating the consequences of these surveys today.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.