3,000 Acres of Reservation Land Pulled Off the Market — for a Town
The Secretary of the Interior withdraws nearly 3,000 acres at the meeting of the Columbia and Okanogan rivers, deciding farmland is not the best use for ground inside the Colville Indian Reservation.
Nearly 3,000 acres of land lying in the Colville Indian reservation, near the junction of the Columbia and Okanogan rivers, has been withdrawn from entry by the Secretary of the Interior under the act of March 22, 1900. The land has been withdrawn for townsite purposes. Some delay has been made in announcing the withdrawal on account of a misunderstanding in the department. It is understood that the land is desirable for agriculture, but the officials of the department think that the land is better adapted for townsite purposes.
“It is understood that the land is desirable for agriculture, but the officials of the department think that the land is better adapted for townsite purposes.”
Two sentences of bureaucratic notice conceal the whole machinery of dispossession: acreage inside a reservation, withdrawn from entry by the Interior Secretary, reclassified from farmland to townsite. Within a generation this confluence country would be dammed and flooded for Grand Coulee — the town that went under the reservoir sits almost exactly here, near the Columbia-Okanogan junction. The pattern of a distant department deciding what reservation land was 'better adapted for' is the through-line from this notice to the Columbia River's drowned towns.
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