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Review: How tribes in Washington lost millions of acres of land
Monday, March 28, 2011
Filed Under: Arts & Entertainment

"Richard Kluger has written a half-dozen novels, but he’s best known for telling true stories, hard stories, very well: Brown v. Board of Education (“Simple Justice”), the rise and fall of The New York Herald Tribune (“The Paper”), the cigarette wars (“Ashes to Ashes”) and, more recently, American expansionism (“Seizing Destiny”). Of late he appears to be drawn toward the deep, the dark and the lethal in our past. “The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek” is a worthy spinoff of “Seizing Destiny,” which described the active and often ugly process of taking the continent.

In Kluger’s new book the scale is small and the specifics unlikely to be familiar to most readers. After the 1846 Oregon treaty with Britain, Americans for the first time began to move into the Puget Sound region, north of the more settled Willamette Valley. Indians there, including the small Nisqually tribe, previously had experienced limited contact with whites. The British presence at Fort Nisqually amounted to a trading, not settling, enterprise called the Hudson’s Bay Company. As often occurred after wars and treaties in North American history, American land hunger changed the seeming solution into a new problem as settlers and some politicians sought loopholes. In the wake of the gold rush of 1848, a new federal law offered 320 acres to any white farmer who went to Oregon (640 acres if he was married and brought his wife).

Enter Isaac Stevens, an ambitious West Pointer appointed the first governor of Washington Territory in 1853. An engineer at a time when the Army trained the best of them, he volunteered to conduct a land survey on his way out West. He hoped to provide evidence in favor of a far northern route for the much-discussed transcontinental railroad.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the Mexican War of 1846, expansionists had come to dominate Washington, D.C. The Franklin Pierce administration made it abundantly clear that it expected the Indians to sign treaties surrendering their land. The governor of Oregon had ceded 7.5 million acres to the Indians for $200,000 in money and goods, only to have the agreement fail in the Senate because it set aside “overly generous reservations.”"

Get the Story:
How the Indians Lost Washington Territory (The New York Times 3/27)