Sorrowful Ceremony
On June 13, 1940, Native Americans from throughout the Northwest gathered at Kettle Falls in Stevens County for a Ceremony of Tears mourning the loss of their ancestral fishing grounds to waters rising behind Grand Coulee Dam. Work on the dam had begun in 1934, and by 1939 a vast reservoir -- Lake Roosevelt -- was taking shape, submerging towns and landmarks as it grew.
For thousands of years Kettle Falls was a central gathering point for a complex Native American trading network centered on ocean-going salmon. Huge numbers of fish passed through the churning waters, and the surrounding quartzite cliffs proved excellent places from which to catch them. When Canadian explorer David Thompson arrived at the falls in 1811, he took note of the important resource and described how the region’s tribes carefully managed the critical food supply brought by the river
The Ceremony of Tears marked the end of this fishery and its traditions. Within a year Kettle Falls was 90 feet below the surface of Lake Roosevelt, and thousands of members of the Colville Confederated Tribes had lost their homes to the dammed river. Woody Guthrie, who promoted the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project in the 1940s, sang that "this land was made for you and me." There were many who knew otherwise.
Pig-induced Acrimony
On June 18, 1812, the United States declared war on Great Britain, an act that would greatly affect the burgeoning fur trade in the Pacific Northwest. After the War of 1812 ended, Britain and the United States agreed to peacefully coexist in the region, and their joint occupation lasted until Britain ceded its claims on June 15, 1846, when the Treaty of Oregon established the 49th parallel as the international boundary on the mainland and awarded Vancouver Island to the British. However, the treaty ignored the existence of the San Juan Islands, leaving it unclear as to how the archipelago would be divided between the United Kingdom and its former colonies.
Amid rising tensions in the islands, on June 15, 1859, a wayward pig owned by the British Hudson's Bay Company wandered into an American garden on San Juan Island, which was jointly occupied by British subjects and American citizens. When farmer Lyman Cutlar discovered the boar digging around in his potato patch, he promptly shot it. The HBC demanded restitution, reheating a simmering dispute over the island's nationality that quickly escalated into a tense military standoff.
British authorities threatened to arrest Cutlar. U.S. soldiers from Fort Bellingham were dispatched to the islands under the command of Captain George Pickett, who later became a Confederate general in the Civil War. Accompanying Pickett's infantry company was Edward Warbass, Fort Bellingham's sutler, who opened a company store near San Juan Town. Soon after his arrival, Warbass was elected to the territorial legislature as a representative from Whatcom County (to which the disputed islands had been assigned by the legislature.)
Meanwhile, the stalemate between Great Britain and the United States lasted 13 years without a shot being fired in combat by either side. Eventually, diplomacy prevailed when Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm arbitrated the matter and in 1872 granted the San Juan Islands to the United States. That same year, Warbass -- who had left the island in 1864 to buy some sheep but was waylaid by a series of adventures -- returned just as the boundary dispute was being resolved. Seizing the moment, he successfully petitioned the territorial legislature to create San Juan County, with Friday Harbor as the county seat.
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