The Daily News from Port Angeles, Washington • Page 17

THE DAILY Port Angeles, Oct. 10,1976 Chapter 41: The Indian showdown at LaPush The worst quarrel Dan Pullen had with the Quileutes came in the summer of 1882. Obi, an Indian doctor of considerable Influence In the village, went to Pullen's house to complain that Pullen's pigs had broken down his fence and eaten his potatoes. Pullen said he would come and see the damage. When he got to Obi's house, Obi and his wife pulled him inside and began to beat him.

A friend, Sheesh-che-kop, Joined them and enjoyed the opportunity to vent some of the resentment all the Indians felt against Pullen. Undoubtedly they would have killed him, but Kla-kish-ka, the village chief, heard the din and came to Pullen's rescue Giving testimony at a later hearing, Kla-kish-ka said "I shouted, 'Don't hurt and I broke down the door. Pullen came out with blood running on him." This was too serious a matter to overlook. Blows had been exchanged before, but not an attempt at murder. Obi was taken into custody and transferred to the jail at Steilacoom to await trial.

Unfortunately for Obi, he had told Pullen while they were inside the house that he had already killed one white man and wouldn't mind killing another. At the time he probably felt Pullen was not going to get out alive, so the words would not be used against him. But Pullen was alive, and didn't hesitate to use the information. A second hearing was held on Obi, and several of the Quileutes admitted that Obi had, indeed, killed a white man on the beach 14 years before. A sad footnote to an already sad affair was Obi's mistaken effort to better his position with the whites.

In the jail at Steilacoom he choked to death a young Indian boy sharing his cell. He reasoned the whites were angry at the boy or they wouldn't have locked him up, and he, Obi, would win their approval if not their forgiveness by doing away with the boy No doubt he was sincere in his effort to soften their wrath but it didn't work. With Obi in jail, things quieted down at LaPush, but ownership of the land was still to be settled. The dispute came about because the Quileutes had been expected to leave the Bogachiel. When a treaty had been signed with them in 1856, they were a small tribe and it was understood they would move in with the Quinaults on the large Taholah reservation.

A few did move there, but most of the tribe preferred to remain in their traditional home at the mouth of the Bogachiel. For a time this situation was officially ignored and the Quileutes lived quietly in their village with no commitment to any agency. But, as settlement began in earnest and settlers, Dan Pullen among them, began to homestead near the village, a decision could no longer be avoided. The agents at Neah Bay and Taholah both urged a separate reservation for the Quileutes. Finally, in one of his last acts in office, on Feb.

18, 1889, President Cleveland signed an executive order that gave them a square mile at the mouth of the Bogachiel, with authority for the small reservation vested in the Neah Bay agent. Much of Dan Pullen's property, including the store building and his own rather pretentious two-story house, lay inside this mile. It was his to be settled before long- drawn-out his homestead rights preceded and precluded the reservation rights. There was enough logic in this that he had no difficulty in getting an attorney to take on his case. His brother-in-law, Alanson Wesley Smith, was always in the center of this controversy, with the Neah Bay Indian agent pressing him on one side, his brother-in-law and sister pressing him on the other; and often his own strongly felt commitment to the Indians in conflict with both.

Except for a couple of other homesteaders whose titles were equally threatened, Pullen had few sympathizers. His treatment of the Indians had always been arrogant if not violent, and he continued to bluster about his right to the land, ordering fences taken down, or buildings vacated even though he had no way to enforce his wishes. When Smith showed him a letter from John the agent at Neah Bay, he was furious. The agent had said, "The Indians hold the land jointly with him until the courts decide, and as for priority, their claim Is better as their fathers held possession before his forefathers came over the Atlantic Ocean." Pullen's response to this was to announce a raise in the rent of the schoolhouse, actually the old trading post which Baxter had put up years before. McGlinn refused to pay this, and on a weekend Pullen came in with some helpers and pulled down the building.

That fall (it was now 1889) nearly the entire tribe of Quileutes went to the Puyallup area to pick hops. This was an annual outing they looked forward to all year. While they were gone their village burned to the ground. The Indians were certain that Dan Pullen and two other white men who sympathized with him had deliberately set the fire. No good reason has ever been advanced to think otherwise.

McGlinn must have thought this too, as his report to the Indian Service pointed out that Pullen had quickly leveled the ground and put barbed wire around it. After this the Indians were obliged to rebuild their village along the beach where it was subject to flooding when high tide sent the Bogachiel over its banks. But the battle was nearly over. In 1891 the decision was handed down: the Indians' claim took precedence over the white settlers; Pullen would have to vacate his homestead. Pullen was not satisfied yet.

He instituted a suit to challenge the decision. The matter dragged through the courts for years, but he eventually lost the case, and most of the fortune he had built up went into court costs and attorneys' fees. More next Sunday A History of the North Olympic Peninsula by Patricia Campbell OJ partS planter was Pushed by hand. Wooden discs for the mechanism SiZ les for various kinds of seed Tin at left was onto the planter to hold seed. The planter or "seeder" is among a collection of old farm tools belonging to Robert Bundy and was used by the owner of his farm near Center.

The planter, with other implements, is hung on the wall near the ceiling of Bundy's workshop Daily News Photo by Virginia Keeting V. yi I 1 John Glover, the hero of Revolution's Dunkirk I By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Among its many distinctions, Brooklyn, N.Y., came within a foul wind, a fog bank and a gang of fishermen of being a temporary if not final resting place of the Revolution of 1776. After the Battle of Long Island, George Washington, to put it charitably, had his troops in a wringer. The remains of his Long Island army were penned on a small beachhead just south of where the Brooklyn Bridge today comes ashore. It had been raining for two days, and the soldiers' powder was too wet to flash.

Just over the muddy parapets were 20,000 waterproof British and Hessian bayonets. The Americans had hardly any. To make matters worse, the Commander-in- Chief, in another outbreak of unwisdom, had brought in reinforcements from New York to Brooklyn instead of evacuating vice versa. The only things that saved him from his folly were Sir William Howe's baffling forebearance and a continuing northeast storm that kept Lord Howe's hungry warships at bay. Fortunately it did not take Washington long to recognize that a retreating army was preferable to no army at all.

He summoned Colonel John Glover and his regiment of Marblehead seamen. He told Glover to assemble the "hay boats, canoes and batteaus" to bring over some troops from Paulus Hook (Bayonne-Jersey City). But when Glover reached the waterfront, he found the boats empty. John Glover learned what Parson Weems and his cherry tree did not: George Washington could tell a lie. The Brooklyn troops were coming off, God and the British willing.

John Glover came, saw, conquered and went home. Scarce are his monuments or memory, which is unjust, for three times in four months he rendered his infant nation extreme service. From a Great American Savings Loan Association by permission of THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE 1814: We hail another hero. Maybe our generals haven't done very well on the northern front. But do we have a fighter down south! The British have planned to seize New Orleans and kill our Mississippi trade.

They even think they'll hold Louisiana and trade it in at the end of the war for territory in the Northwest. Andrew Jackson has a different idea. He's a frontiersman and an Indian fighter. He knows how to use every man in the area, every gun and every mule. Never mind that they're too few.

Never mind that most of them have never before seen battle. He knows strategy, and his men know how to shoot. The British veterans attack. And Jackson and his handful show them what they know. It costs the British 2,000 casualties in a twenty-minute battle.

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