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"Forest Conservation for a Better Future"Okanogan County - Thumbnail History
HistoryLink.org Essay 7608Okanogan County, often called The Okanogan, is the third largest county in the United States, and is home to 38,400 people including members of the Colville Confederated Tribes on the Colville Indian Reservation. The area was one of the last in Washington settled by whites because of its remoteness, but it was an early thoroughfare for prospectors enroute to gold fields in British Columbia. In the twenty-first century, the county earns its living from agriculture and forestry with tourism offering additional opportunities. Grand Coulee Dam, the largest producer of electricity in the U.S., sits astride the Columbia River at the county's southern boundary.
The Okanogan Valley is drained by a tributary of the Columbia River flowing out of British Columbia. The international boundary cuts across Lake Osooyos, which feeds the Okanogan River. The Canadian valley is spelled Okanagan. In the 77 miles between the lake and the Columbia River, the river drops just 125 feet, giving the route to the north an easy grade for travelers and vehicles, with plenty of fresh water and grass for stock. The Methow ("Met-how") Valley is another tributary of the Columbia flowing out of the Cascades. Okanogan County is 5,281 square miles in size with as much as 70 percent owned by the state and federal governments. The west half of the Colville Indian Reservation occupies the southeast corner.
First Peoples
For at least several hundred years prior to contact with Europeans, the indigenous peoples of The Okanogan consisted of three major bands of a group called the Northern Okanogans or Sinkaietk, the Tokoratums, the Kartars, and the Konkonelps. They spoke as many as seven dialects of the Interior Salishan or Interior Salish language related to the languages of Puget Sound tribes, but very different from the other languages of the Columbia basin.The Okanogans led a semi-nomadic existence, starting in permanent camps through the winter, then leaving to hunt bears in the spring, catch salmon in the summer, and hunt deer in the autumn. One of the most prolific fisheries was at Kettle Falls where the Columbia dropped as much as 20 feet. Women gathered any of 100 varieties of nuts, roots, and berries. Permanent camps consisted of teepee-like longhouses covered with hides, bark, and particularly tules, which grew along water courses. Each house was 12 to 15 feet wide and as long as 150 feet, housing a dozen or more people. Summer huts were covered with transportable mats woven from tules.
The Okanogans traded with other tribes to the south and across the Cascades to the west. In the late 1700s, the Okanogans acquired horses from other tribes both for transportation and for food. In 1782-1783, a smallpox epidemic may have cost the lives of a third to a half of the people in the Okanogan.
Contact
William Clark of the (Lewis and Clark expedition) Corps of Discovery was the first to map the Okanogan River based on his interviews of Indians at the mouth of the Snake River in 1805. David Thomson of the North West Company was the first European to visit the Okanogan River when his expedition paddled past the mouth down the Columbia in July 1811. A few months later, David Stuart and Alexander Ross of the American Pacific Fur Co. built a log cabin at the mouth and called it Fort Okanogan. This became a base for trading goods for beaver pelts collected from the north by Indians. Fort Okanogan was taken over by the North West Co. in 1814, which sold it to the Hudson's Bay Company in 1821. The paths up the river became the Okanogan Trail.Territorial Governor Issac Stevens (1818-1862) signed the Walla Walla Treaty with tribes of the Columbia Basin in May 1855. He regarded the Yakima Chief Kamiakin as representing the Okanogan bands to the north, even though Kamiakin did not even speak their language. Stevens met, but never signed treaties with the northern tribes before war between the Indians and the whites broke out. The Indian War of 1855-1856 did not really touch the tribes of The Okanogan.
Gold strikes in New Caledonia -- the Okanagan (Canadian spelling) and Fraser River valleys of British Columbia -- in 1858 attracted prospectors from California to the region by way of the Columbia River. These incursions triggered Okanogan County's one battle of the Indian wars, an ambush of a 160-member party of miners at a defile called McLoughlin Canyon (named for the leader of the party) on July 29, 1858. Three miners died and several more were wounded. The U.S. Army launched a punitive expedition into the valley, but they turned back without finding anyone to punish. The following spring, the Army established Fort Colville at Mill Creek in the Colville Valley.
The boundary between the U.S. and Canada ran through Lake Osoyoos and was marked only with a Canadian customs station at what would become the town of Osoyoos. As miners discovered gold and silver, a precise boundary was needed to clarify claims. From 1858 to 1861, surveyors from the Royal Engineers and the U.S. Army established a boundary starting at Point Roberts and running to Montana. The location of the border was determined sometimes through scientific calculation and sometimes through consensus and compromise. The engineers cut a 60-foot swath through timber and erected stone markers to mark their survey. Since most of the traffic was northbound in the early years, the U.S. did not establish a Customs Port of Entry until 1880.
Pioneers
The honor of being the first American to settle Okanogan County falls to one of two men, Hiram Francis "Okanogan" Smith (1829-1893) or John Utz (b. 1824). Utz was a "shadowy backwoodsman" (Wilson, 67) and moved on, but Smith stayed to became a prominent commercial and political leader, so Smith is often identified as the county's First Citizen. In the 1850s and 1860s, few pioneers made their homes in The Okanogan, but many miners arrived to dig gold and silver. With the departure of the Hudson's Bay Company, former employees took up farming in the Colville Valley.The Okanogan tribe and other tribes of north central Washington Territory never signed treaties ceding their lands to the U.S. Government. In 1871, Congress authorized the president to establish reservations by executive order and Ulysses Grant created the Colville Indian Reservation in 1872. This was to be home to about 4,200 Methows, Okanogans, San Poils, Nespelems, Lakes, Colvilles, Calispels, Spokanes, and Coeur d'Alenes. White settlers whose homes fell within the vast area protested and had the Colville Valley in the east subtracted. At one time, all of today's Okanogan County was an Indian Reservation. But miners and settlers lobbied the government relentlessly until the reservation was reduced in 1886 to the contemporary Colville Indian Reservation, home to the Colville Confederated Tribes.
Gold! Silver!
Once Indian title to most of the Okanogan had been extinguished in 1886, miners were free to exploit the gold and silver there. The ensuing mining boom saw the founding of Ruby City (later Ruby), Conconully, Solver, Loop Loop, Oro (later Oroville), and other camps, and the construction of some substantial mines and stamping mills. Chesaw comes from the Chinese chee-saw or good farmer and a cordial host and is the only municipality in the U.S. named after a Chinese. In 1890, the non-Indian population of the county numbered 1,509.
The end of the boom came with the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, the drop in the price of silver, and the Panic of 1893. Mining continued to be an important activity into the twentieth century, but Okanogan County was never more than fourth in gold production in the state.Home Rule
American settlers in the Willamette Valley had included The Okanogan in the Vancouver District of Oregon in 1844, then as Clark County in 1845. In 1854, the Washington Territorial Legislature placed the Okanogan Valley in Walla Walla County. In 1860, made it part of Spokane County. The legislature created Stevens County in 1863 out of Spokane and in 1864, Stevens annexed its old parent Spokane.In 1887, Colville was the county seat of Stevens County. Anyone needing to register or change a title to land had to travel days to the courthouse. Okanogan ranchers Cullen Bryant Bash, Henry Wellington, and school teacher and miner David Gubser organized a petition drive for a separate county. Bash delivered it to the Territorial Legislature and worked hard to get it passed. On February 2, 1888, Okanogan County came into being. In 1899, the State Legislature carved Chelan County off the south to establish Okanogan's final boundaries.
Ruby was the first county seat, but voters moved the seat to Conconully after eight months. In 1914, after periodic attempts at a new county seat, voters decided that Okanogan would be home to the courthouse.
Settlement
Since most of the county was Indian land through the 1880s, formal surveys did not begin until 1893 and would take 12 years to complete. Impatient settlers squatted on unsurveyed Indian land. They defied officials who might evict them when their claims conflicted with legal homesteads, so most of the squatters rights came to be recognized as valid. The population almost tripled from 1890 to 1900 and almost tripled again by 1910 as homesteaders moved in, not so much by prairie schooner, but by train. In 1913, migrants made the trip from St. Paul to Spokane in two-and-a-half days. Fifty years before, the journey had taken six months or more. Once the new arrivals took up their claims, they could take title by residing there for five years and improving it and by paying a $15 fee.Water
Although grass and field crops naturally flourished with the 12 to 13 inches of annual rainfall, orchards required additional water. Pioneer Hiram Smith irrigated an orchard near Lake Osoyoos in the 1860s. In the 1880s, squatters in the Okanogan and Methow valleys dug ditches individually and as associations. In 1908, Congress passed the Reclamation Act (Newlands Act), which got the Federal Government into the ditch business. At first, the bureaucrats deemed The Okanogan too small for their trouble, but finally approved $500,000 for the first Bureau of Reclamation project in Washington.Between 1907 and 1910, engineers built an earthen dam, which formed Conconully Lake, and the first water irrigated 2,000 acres that orchardists had painstakingly planted with apple saplings. Until the water flowed, they had carried buckets of water to keep each young tree alive. Seven years later, the first apples shipped from the project. In 1919, this became the Okanogan Irrigation District. The soil proved to be much more absorbent than planned and the project never achieved the dream of 10,000 acres of orchards.
This and other farmer-owned projects often required landowners to sell off most of their original homesteads since, by law, no more than 40 acres per plot could receive water. New arrivals moved in to snap up the smaller, potentially more profitable parcels. It took years for the projects to overcome problems with seepage, washouts, and evaporation, but irrigation transformed The Okanogan.
The federal Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 sought to integrate Indians into American society by giving each tribal member 160 acres of land to farm, and turning the rest of reservation lands over to white settlement. In 1898, the remaining 1.3 million acres of the now diminished Colville Reservation was opened to mineral exploitation. In 1905, a majority of the adult Indians were convinced to relinquish rights to the South Half in order to be paid for the North Half taken from them in the 1880s. Each Indian received $500. In 1916, about a third of the South Half was opened for white settlement and a new land rush.
In 1907, forest reserves owned by the federal government became national forests and the following year, Chelan National Forest was established. In 1911, Okanogan National Forest was split off from the Chelan unit and still holds the majority of land in the county both east and west of the Okanogan Valley.
Transportation
The Okanogan and Columbia rivers were both barriers and thoroughfares depending on the direction of travel and the time of year. Indian canoes ferried people, goods, and animals across the streams, but travel up and down the valleys was mostly by land. Beginning in July 1888, the Pasco-built stern-wheeler City of Ellensburgh, offered service up the Columbia and just up the Okanogan as far as Monse. The Columbia rapids and seasonal drops in the river prevented reliable year-round travel. If rapids were too swift, the crew ran a line to the shore and winched the vessel past the fast water. In the spring, steamboats might reach as far up the Okanogan as McLoughlin Falls. Freight and stage lines connected The Okanogan with points downstream toward Wenatchee and upstream toward Spokane.Rail service to Okanogan County resulted from James J. Hill's desire to link the transcontinental Great Northern at Spokane Falls to Nelson, B.C., and came to the county not from the south, but from Canada. Between 1902 and 1906, Hill built the Washington & Great Northern, which meandered north and west across the international boundary. In Canada the line was called the Vancouver, Victoria & Eastern.
Trains first reached Molson in the Okanogan Highlands from Spokane on November 2, 1906. County residents clamored for more direct service and finally the Great Northern laid tracks from Oroville south to Pateros by 1913 and to Wenatchee the following year. Twice-daily rail service to Oroville put the steamboats out of business and marked the end of Okanogan County's frontier days. With a rail connection, loggers moved into the county and began to exploit timber resources.
The Great Depression (1929-1939) did not devastate Okanogan County as it did other rural areas in the U.S. Residents already lived fairly simple lives with a high degree of self-sufficiency. Relief programs helped farmers and merchants, and hundreds of men in the Civilian Conservation Corps built roads, trails, campgrounds, fire lookouts, the Salmon Meadows Ski Lodge, and fought fires. The timber industry struggled with falling prices, but since the county did not produce dimensioned lumber for the construction market, demand continued. When the Government raised the price it paid for gold to $35 an ounce, miners returned to the hills either as employees of rejuvenated operations or as independent prospectors.
The big spur to the economy of the county and the state was the construction of Grand Coulee Dam in the south near Coulee City. This part of the county had been bypassed by settlement and quickly became home to 15,000 people. By 1937, unemployment in the county was at 6 percent. Irrigation supplied by the dam enabled the cultivation of a half million acres of arid land.
Modern Times
Cattle ranching led to The Okanogan's most notable celebration and athletic event, the Omak Stampede. This annual rodeo was first held in August 1934. Publicity Chairman Claire F. Pentz proposed a horse race involving a wild plunge down a sandy bluff and across the Okanogan River to the arena. Most riders were Native Americans and the winner received a cash prize, a saddle, and a belt buckle. Winning was a significant accomplishment for residents of the Colville Reservation.The 55-second, one-fourth-mile Suicide Race became the most popular -- and most controversial -- of the county's annual events. Some horses were injured and a few had to be destroyed. When two 13-year-old riders were hurt, the minimum age was set at 16. Horses had to be five years old. Animal protection advocates persuaded some sponsors to withdraw in the mid-1980s and pressured organizers to stop the event.
In 1999, the race was cancelled when Indian participants boycotted the race over a dispute about parking for their encampment and when the river was too high. The Indians returned the following year along with the protests over cruelty to the horses, but the races still ran.
The late twentieth century saw residents struggle with economic development that would impact its rural way of life. (The county's first stoplight was installed in the early 1980s and the second, for a WalMart, in the mid 1990s.) The construction of State Route 20 from the Skagit Valley across Hart Pass to the Methow Valley in 1972 ended some of the remoteness of the Methow, at least in the summer. Winters, the pass closed due to snow.
In 1968, developers announced plans for a ski resort on Sandy Butte near Mazama in the Methow Valley. In 1978, Methow Recreation, Inc. made formal application for the 3,600-acre Early Winters resort. The project hoped to place Washington ahead of skiing destinations like Colorado and Utah and would produce 1,200 jobs, which might compensate for the decline of the logging industry. But Early Winters would attract an average of 3,500 skiers a day and drastically change the character of quiet, rural area, turning it into something like Vail, Colorado. The Methow Valley Citizens Council organized to block the project and the controversy divided the small community. The matter went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which cleared the way for the project in May 1989.
That same year, Crown Resources, a Denver mining company, discovered gold underneath Buckhorn Mountain near Chesaw and announced plans for the Crown Jewel Mine, an open-pit operation that hoped to extract 1.4 million ounces of gold over eight years. Crown proposed to build Washington's largest open-pit mine, which would generate some 97 million tons of waste and leave a lake in the pit. A process using cyanide would leach the gold out of the ore. Up to 75 high-wage jobs would be created in an area with chronically high unemployment.
The Early Winters project generally prevailed against its opponents in court, but in 1992, financing fell apart and the 1,200 acres of property were auctioned off to pay debts. The concept reemerged in 1996 as a smaller resort called Arrowleaf, with cross-country skiing instead of downhill skiing, and with some community approval. Developers hoped to expand Arrowleaf, but in December 2000 after spending $20 million and years waiting for regulatory approval, they dropped the plan.
A month later in January 2001, The Trust for Public Land purchased 1,020 acres once envisioned for Early Winters and preserved it from development.
Environmental groups opposed the Crown Jewel mine for 10 years. In 1999, U.S. Senator Slade Gorton sought to overturn a Clinton Administration ruling against the project by tacking an amendment onto funding for a military action in Kosovo. The key defeat for the open pit plan was a withdrawal of a State water permit in 2000 because of concerns about the pollution mitigation measures. By that time the price of gold had dropped and the new operators decided to dig an underground mine and to process the ore at an existing facility in Republic, Ferry County.
This history made possible by: The State of Washington
Washington State Department of Archeology and Historic Preservation
for sources see:
HistoryLink.org Essay 7608
By David Wilma, January 21, 2006Fort Okanogan
HistoryLink.org Essay 7522Fort Okanogan was the first American outpost in what is now the state of Washington. Established in 1811 by representatives of John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company, the "Fort" was a modest affair, initially consisting of only one small building at the confluence of the Okanogan and Columbia Rivers. The Canadian North West Company acquired it in 1814, expanded it, and later sold it to the British Hudson's Bay Company. The British replaced the complex with a second one, built about a mile away, in the 1830s. Today a small state park overlooks the second location. Only the wind and a simple highway historical sign mark the site of the original Fort Okanogan, which proved to be a temporary beachhead in an area that would not become part of the United States for 35 years.
Nor' Westers and Astorians
The fur trade was the opening wedge for white colonization in the future state of Washington. European and American ships began exploring the Northwest coast and trading for furs with the local inhabitants in the 1790s. Traders followed closely on the heels of Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery, the first non-Indians to travel through the area on an overland route from the east. In 1810, just five years after Lewis and Clark began to explore the lower Columbia River, the Montreal-based North West Company established a fur trading post -- called Spokane House -- on a tributary of the river. Located near the present city of Spokane, this was the first longterm white settlement in the Northwest. Since Canada was a British colony at the time, it flew the British flag.The first trader to reach the Okanogan country in Eastern Washington was David Thompson (1770-1875), head of the Columbia Department for the North West Company. In early June 1811, Thompson led a party of seven other "Nor'Westers" on a voyage from Spokane House down the Columbia to its mouth at the Pacific Ocean. Thompson hoped to beat his rivals from the Pacific Fur Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company in staking a claim to the rich fur resources along the way.
The Nor'Westers reached the main stem of the Columbia on June 19. Local Indians assured them that it was "only the Voyage of a Summer Moon" to paddle to the mouth of the river and back again (Johansen, 86). The Canadians spent two weeks at an Indian fishing village above Kettle Falls, building a canoe for the rest of the journey, then set off on July 3. They arrived at the confluence of the Columbia and Snake rivers six days later. They stopped long enough to erect a sign claiming the surrounding land for Great Britain and the "N.W. Company of Merchants from Canada" (Thompson, 152).
The next day, Thompson learned that he had lost the race to the coast: Indians told him an American ship had sailed in nearly four months earlier.
Tacit Alliance
John Jacob Astor (1763-1848), a New York merchant who had made a fortune in the fur trade with China, sent both a ship and an overland party to establish a presence in the Northwest. The ship -- the Tonquin -- left New York in September 1810. It arrived at the mouth of the Columbia six months later, on March 22, 1811. The men on board quickly built a trading post, named Fort Astoria, on the south bank, where the modern city of Astoria, Oregon, is now located. The group that traveled overland did not reach the coast until the following spring.The Astorians were preparing for their first trading expedition up the Columbia in mid-July 1811 when Thompson and his Nor'Westers hauled their canoe on shore at Astoria -- to the considerable surprise of the Astorians. However, the two groups quickly made a tacit agreement not to interfere with each other's trade. Both regarded the Hudson's Bay Company as the greater competitive threat. The Nor'Westers rested at the fort for one week. When they left, on July 22, David Stuart, a partner in the Pacific Fur Company, and eight other Astorians went with them.
The travel-hardened Nor'Westers soon outpaced the Astorians. The two groups parted company at Celilo Falls. Thompson and the Nor'westers pushed ahead, arriving at Spokane House on August 13. Stuart and the Astorians didn't reach the confluence of the Columbia and the Okanogan River until September 1. The arduous trip, against the current and rapids of an undammed river, had taken 42 days -- something more than "The Voyage of a Summer Moon."
Alexander Ross, a member of Stuart's party, recorded some of the hardships in his journal. "To say that there is not a worse path under the sun would perhaps be going a step too far, but to say that, for difficulty and danger, few could equal it would be saying but the truth," he wrote, describing a tortuous portage around the Cascades of the Columbia. "Certainly nothing could be more discouraging than our present situation -- obstacles on every side; by land, by water, and from the Indians -- all hostile alike" (Ross, 122).
The Astorians chose a site on the Okanogan River, near its confluence with the Columbia, and quickly built a small outpost, starting with one house made of driftwood. They grandiosely named it Fort Okanogan. What the structure lacked in material comforts it made up in location. It was strategically situated in the middle of a well-established Indian trail that led from present day Oregon north to the Fraser River in Canada, with easy access to two important waterways. Streams in the area were thick with beaver, the pelts of which were highly valued in the fashion centers of Europe, China, and the United States.
While the rest of the party dispersed, Ross stayed behind. He kept a small store of trade goods in a cellar beneath the house. During the following winter, he traded merchandise worth about $160 for beaver pelts valued at more than $10,000.
Furs and War
Despite the lucrative trade at Fort Okanogan, the Pacific Fur Company faced numerous financial and personnel problems, all of which were exacerbated by the beginning of war between the United States and Britain in 1812. Because of the uncertainties created by the war, Astor did not send a ship from New York to re-supply Astoria that year. In October 1813 word reached Astoria that a British frigate was en route to attack American possessions in the Northwest. The combination of a military threat and a dwindling supply of trade goods convinced the Astorians to sell "the whole of their Establishments Furs and present Stock ... on the Columbia and Thompson Rivers" -- including Fort Okanogan -- to the Canadians (Johansen, 105).The Nor'Westers took possession of Fort Okanogan in April 1814 and immediately began expanding it. By 1816, the outpost resembled an actual fort. A 15-foot-high stockade enclosed half-a-dozen structures, including a four-room headquarters building with a dining hall, two large houses for traders and trappers, a storehouse, and a blacksmith shop. The stockade was equipped with two blockhouses, with loopholes for muskets on the upper levels and light cannon on the lower floor.
The Canadians continued to face fierce competition from the British after they bought out the Americans. Over the years, the trade wars weakened both the North West Company and the rival Hudson's Bay Company. In 1821, the two merged. Hudson's Bay took over all the Canadian company's operations in the Northwest, including Fort Okanogan, and the fort changed hands once again.
Reign of the British
For the next two decades, Fort Okanogan served as an important base camp for trading expeditions up the Okanogan and Similkameen Rivers into what is now British Columbia. Furs gathered from all over "New Caledonia" (which encompassed most of northwestern Canada) were shipped down the Okanogan to the fort, for transfer to boats for passage down the Columbia to Hudson's Bay headquarters at Fort Vancouver (where the modern city of Vancouver, Washington, is today).The original site was abandoned in the early 1830s and a larger fort built on the Columbia about a mile away. The landing area at the first location, on the Okanogan, was too shallow and the banks too steep to accommodate the increased traffic in furs. In winter, the steep climb up to the fort was often muddy, making it difficult to handle heavy goods. Dust and mosquitoes made life miserable in the summer. The new location offered a good beach with a gentle incline to the fort.
By the 1840s, however, the fur trade was on the wane. Beaver hats fell out of fashion. Furthermore, the best of the beaver streams had been stripped clean ("trapped out," in the parlance of the traders). For a while, Fort Okanogan served as a key transfer point for a new trade, in buffalo hides, shipped from the Great Plains and across the Rockies to the Okanogan and Columbia rivers. When that trade dwindled, the fort declined again. "Okanogan is falling off and as a mere place of trade will not soon pay the wages of a clerk and two men," a Hudson's Bay report noted (quoted in "Fort Okanogan," Ghost Towns USA website).
In 1846, the settlement of a decades-old boundary dispute between Great Britain and the United States put Fort Okanogan firmly within American territory for the first time. The Hudson’s Bay Company received permission to continue commercial enterprises at the fort. However, the company gradually phased out operations because of the declining volume of trade, abandoning the site altogether in 1860. The fort, stripped of everything of value, was left to the elements.
Fort Okanogan State Park
In 1959, the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission acquired about 45 acres of land on a bluff near the location of the second Fort Okanogan and within sight of the first one. By that time, the last physical remnants of both forts had decayed and vanished. Archeological excavations were carried out for several years after the state acquired the property. However, in 1967, the sites were flooded by the reservoir created by Wells Dam, about 20 miles downstream.Fort Okanogan State Park today includes a day-use area and interpretive center overlooking the reservoir, called Lake Pateros after the name of a nearby town. (The town, in turn, was named by one of its early settlers after the village in the Philippines where he had grown up.)
From the interpretive center, visitors can see two flagpoles in the distance. The poles mark the locations of the two forts -- the most visible sign of what was once an important link in a complex network of international trade and politics.
This history made possible by: Peach Foundation
for sources see:
HistoryLink.org Essay 7522
By Cassandra Tate, October 26, 2005
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