The Skirmish at Chelan River
Two Indigenous farmers and two white squatters face off in a dispute over land rights and cultivation.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Two Indians, known as Coltus Jim and Bob, living across the Columbia river just above the mouth of the Chelan, are having some trouble with two white men about their land. They together claim a tract of about 800 acres and have a small part of it in cultivation. Bob has lived on it three years, and Jim all his life, and they think it belongs to them though they have not severed their tribal relations, and have not filed on the land according to United States laws. The white men squatted on the land and a fist fight grew out of the matter, but nothing serious. White men in the same circumstances might think themselves in the right.
“Bob has lived on it three years, and Jim all his life, and they think it belongs to them though they have not severed their tribal relations.”
This 1889 account highlights the era of dispossession in Washington Territory, where the collision between traditional land use and the rigid requirements of the Homestead Act frequently sparked localized violence. It captures the exact moment when the federal government's legal definitions began to aggressively erode ancestral rights, a precursor to the systemic land-tenure battles still felt across the state today.
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