The town of Nespelem in Okanogan County is located on the Colville Indian Reservation in the Nespelem River Valley. The area is part of the traditional homelands of the Nespelem people. The Nespelem are now one of the twelve tribes that make up the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, many of which were moved to the area after the reservation was established in 1872. Several prominent Native American leaders, including Chief Moses (1829-1899) and Chief Joseph (1840-1904), spent their final years in Nespelem. Non-Natives were allowed to open mines in the area beginning in the 1890s, and to stake homestead claims beginning in 1915, bringing an influx of settlers to Nespelem. Construction of Grand Coulee Dam in the 1930s brought further growth, and Nespelem incorporated on April 15, 1935.
Colville Indian Reservation
The town of Nespelem in North Central Washington lies on the east side of the Nespelem River a few miles above where that river flows into the Columbia. Located within the Colville Indian Reservation, the town and river take their name from the Nespelem (nspiləm) people, whose name derives from the word for "prairie" in their Interior Salish language. (Some sources translate the name as "a beautiful valley between the hills" or "large meadow beside a stream" [Boom Towns ... website]).
The traditional homelands of the Nespelem people are centered along the Nespelem River and the stretch of the Columbia into which the Nespelem flows. Most of those homelands are included within the Colville Indian Reservation, which President Ulysses S. Grant established via an executive order signed on April 9, 1872. The reservation currently encompasses some 2,100 square miles in southeastern Okanogan County and southern Ferry County. Although the reservation location allowed the Nespelem people to remain on their traditional lands, they had to adjust to the arrival of displaced members of other tribes from across Eastern Washington and beyond that were moved to the Colville Reservation. Twelve tribes, which today make up the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, were assigned to the reservation -- the Lakes, Colville, Okanogan, Moses-Columbia, Wenatchi, Entiat, Chelan, Methow, Nespelem, Sanpoil, Chief Joseph Band of Nez Perce, and Palus tribes.
Not much is known about the site that would later become the town of Nespelem before the 1880s. Two Indigenous families living in the area were those of Johnny Frank and Chief Nespelem George (1863-1929). Chief Moses and many of his Columbia band moved to Nespelem after agreeing to give up a separate reservation they briefly received. Soon thereafter, with support from Moses, in December 1885, Chief Joseph and his Wallowa band of the Nez Perce Tribe moved to Nespelem from Oklahoma, where they had been sent following the 1877 Nez Perce War . Both Moses and Joseph spent the remainder of their lives on the Colville Reservation.
Joseph and his people initially set up their camp where the Nespelem telephone office was later established. "For many years Indians held their encampment circle around this spot, until the town was built up too solidly to leave room for their teepees. Later the government built a house for Joseph across Nespelem River" (Boom Towns ... website).
The home for Chief Joseph was not the only structure that the government provided for tribal members. A gristmill and sawmill were also constructed across the river from town. In the 1960s, Herman A. Friedlander (1885-1982) recalled the two buildings standing side-by-side, powered by the same steam engine so that only one mill could run at a time. Both were destroyed by fire.
Prospectors and Other Newcomers
Okanogan County was established on February 2, 1888, carved off from Stevens County. By then some early non-Native traders, trappers, and prospectors were beginning to settle in the Nespelem area. Some married local Indigenous women.
One of the early prospectors was also a physician. Dr. Frank O. Hudnut (1855-1937) had received his medical degree at the University of Michigan. He arrived from Chicago in 1889 with his wife Ida Isadore Wilber Hudnut (1858-1932), a school teacher. He practiced medicine in the community for many years while also prospecting and promoting mining on the reservation and beyond. Julius "Joe" Karl Albert Ott (1889-1970) of Nespelem worked for Dr. Hudnut for 16 years.
In 1890, Edward Hempstead Latham (1842-1928) arrived as the first Colville Indian Agency doctor, becoming the physician for Chief Joseph. Latham was also an avid photographer, documenting life on the reservation. In 1891, a census on the Colville Indian Reservation was taken by Major I. T. Keene. He and his team were reportedly the first and only who received the names of the Nespelem people. Not trusting the newcomers, the many Indigenous people did not want to provide their names. George W. Runnels, a well-known interpreter, reportedly assisted in providing the names. The non-Indian population of Okanogan County at the time was around 1,500.
In the 1890s the Colville Indian Reservation was opened to mineral exploitation, allowing non-Natives to stake mining claims. The north half was opened first, with the south half where Nespelem is located following a few years later. That opening touched off a rush to the area and many claims were staked. Some of the gold and silver ore found was transported by wagon to the Northern Pacific spur line at Almira in some 35 miles south in Lincoln County. Other loads were hauled to the mouth of the Nespelem River and transported by steamboat down the Columbia. Most of the ore ended up at a smelter in Tacoma. With the mining rush Nespelem became a supply center and the town grew rapidly. A Nespelem post office was opened in November 1899 with Francis M. Daugherty (1839-1932) as postmaster.
Developing a Community
Frank S. Matsura (1873-1913), a photographer from Japan, arrived in Okanogan County in 1903. Around 1907, he opened a two-room photography studio in the city of Okanogan where he conducted portrait sessions and sold postcards. From 1903 until his death in 1913, Matsura recorded everyday life in the region, including on the Colville Reservation where he established a good rapport with the tribal members.
In 1907, Fred "Fritz" Evers (1881-1970) inaugurated a mail and stagecoach route between Nespelem and Almira. The 35-mile journey took ten hours, with a stop at a halfway house for a meal and to change horses, and a crossing of the Columbia River by cable ferry, the only means of crossing that stretch until a bridge was built during construction of Grand Coulee Dam. By 1910 Nespelem had the post office, two general stores, and a rooming house, hotel, meat market, and livery barn.
The federal government, through the Colville Indian Agency, maintained a blacksmith shop and a commissary for tribal members on the reservation. An Indian agent was often in town, and in addition to the doctor, the reservation was assigned a matron field nurse and a government farmer who sought to teach the residents how to cultivate the new crops introduced by the arriving settlers. The Colville Indian Agency headquarters, which had been located at Fort Spokane, moved to Nespelem in 1913, locating two miles south of town on the site of a Native American racetrack. Nespelem was platted in 1913. The town held its first community Christmas celebration that year in the old schoolhouse, where the children enjoyed boxes of treats provided by storekeepers from Wilbur and Almira.
In 1914, Katherine Waters, who had arrived the year before as a matron for the Indian Agency, married James Leslie Davis (1880-1963) in the first wedding at the new agency. James Davis operated the Davis Drug and Confectionery, and opened the first movie theater in Nespelem on the second floor above the confectionery store. George Cleghorn (1861-1922) moved to Nespelem from the south side of the Columbia River and bought a livery stable from Harry Potter.
Although Jesuit missionaries had long worked with tribal members, "it was Father Edward Greva, who came riding into Nespelem on a bicycle in 1914 from St. Ignatius, Mont., who built the Roman Catholic church" in town (Boom Towns ... website). Completed in 1915, the church building was located on a hill above the Nez Perce Cemetery, a landmark visible across a wide area until its destruction by fire in 1948.
In 1915, the south half of the Colville Indian Reservation, including the Nespelem area, was opened to homesteading by non-Natives, which brought an influx of new settlers. They included Melvin Silas (1881-1947) and Marietta "Mamie" Grace (1882-1978) Parmeter, Stephen Thomas Avard, Dick and Katie Kinkaid, and Robert R. McClure. They raised cattle, horses, and sheep, and cultivated wheat and other crops. Mel Parmeter, a dairy farmer, would become the first mayor of Nespelem when the town incorporated 20 years later. That year Fritz Evers, who had been carrying mail, freight, and passengers by horse-drawn coach since 1907, began using his first truck. He would remain in business another two decades.
Jacob Merle Koontz (1891-1960) arrived in 1916. He worked in the store operated by Earl W. DeCamp (1882-1942). The next year Francis Daugherty built a building that Koontz leased as a general store. The building later served as a Grange Hall. Koontz's wife Odessa Viola Tussler (1895-1982) was a schoolteacher. The couple had two children. After the Catholic Church burned in 1948, the Koontz residence was purchased to serve as a church building until a new church, Sacred Heart Mission, was built in 1964.
More people moved to Nespelem in the years shortly after World War I. Oscar Ernest Schilling settled on a farm north of town, to which he soon brought in his new wife. Harry Hulbert and his wife bought the Steele Hotel, and Hulbert later ran a fish hatchery at Owhi Lake a few miles northeast of Nespelem. Thomas Earl Brittain (1883-1967) arrived from Missouri in 1921. For a number of years beginning in 1926, the Nespelem school and local churches organized May Day festivals with parades and other events.
Dam Construction Spurs Growth
Construction of Grand Coulee Dam beginning in 1934 brought boom times to the region, including Nespelem, about 15 miles north of the dam site. Some of the many construction workers building the dam moved to Nespelem. With the population increasing to an estimated 500, the town's dirt streets were paved, telephones were installed, a water system was built, new homes were built, and many of the old log cabins disappeared. New businesses opened, including a lumberyard, existing ones expanded, and a large hospital was built at the Colville Indian Agency.
In 1934, newspaper publisher and editor Frank Spalding Emert (1895-1961) established the Nespelem Tribune as a weekly subsidiary of his Omak Chronicle. The Tribune covered the progress of dam construction, as well as the local mining, timber, and agriculture industries, and community and Colville Indian Reservation news and events. For two years it was sold out of Nespelem Drug Store every Wednesday. Emert sold the Tribune in February 1936 to Sidney Jackson Jr. (1949-1996), who published it only through that March.
With increasing growth and development, residents decided in 1935 to incorporate Nespelem as a town of the fourth class. The growth impacted local schools, which were soon seriously overcrowded, placing burdens on school staff. Plans were made to build "a new, large school" that would "bring all the classes under one roof and maintain a high standard of efficiency" ("New Building Will Help ..."). By October 1935, the Nespelem School was built and ready for use. New teachers were hired.
With workers and others needing to travel from Nespelem, and beyond, to the Grand Coulee Dam, a new state highway (now part of State Route 155) was constructed from the dam site to Nespelem and onward via Disautel to Omak, some 35 miles northwest on U.S. Highway 97. The connection to Omak gave Nespelem, previously linked to the highway system only from the Columbia River to the south, another good road access.
For four years, 1937 to 1940, artists Worth Griffin and Clyfford Elmer Still (1904-1980) of Washington State College, later Washington State University (WSU), held a summer art colony at Nespelem, where artists from across the country worked on the Colville Indian Reservation. They painted portraits of tribal members as well as landscapes of the Nespelem Valley. On weekends some traveled south to paint the ongoing construction of Grand Coulee Dam.
Colville Tribal member and WSU professor Michael Holloman discussed the significance of the art colony in a 2017 interview with the Colville Confederated Tribes Tribal Tribune:
"The story brings back some things that are telling about our own history ... It speaks to that transformative time of what was taking place at the end of the 1930s at Grand Coulee Dam with where we were at politically.
"This was before our sovereignty, our pursuit of our self-determination ... This was the era of the agency, the community around the Indian agency that very few people have memory of anymore" (Caudell).
Grand Coulee Dam began supplying electricity to the area via the Bonneville Power Administration in 1941, and the following year a Rural Electric Association (REA), a cooperative funded under the federal Rural Electrification Act, brought electric power to Nespelem.
By then the U.S. had entered World War II, and residents, including many tribal members, joined the armed forces or moved to larger communities to work in war industries. Two decades later, prominent tribal leader Lucy Friedlander Covington (1910-1982) recalled that, as a result, "Nespelem was deserted" during the war (Arnold).
Moving Ahead, Maintaining Heritage
Nespelem's population rose in the years immediately following the war, but since that time has mostly slowly declined with some fluctuations. The estimated population in 2024 was 185.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Colville Indian Agency moved in November 1961 from the Nespelem area to the town of Coulee Dam that had recently incorporated near the dam. The Colville Confederated Tribes took over the former agency building as their headquarters. In 2015 the Tribes opened a modern new headquarters building in Nespelem, named the Lucy Covington Government Center in honor of the longtime leader.
The Tribes honor the history of their people and region not only in the name of the offices but also through the Colville Tribal Museum, located in the town of Coulee Dam, whose collection includes work from the Nespelem Art Colony among the exhibits documenting tribal histories and cultures. Nespelem's history can be also be experienced at the Okanogan County Historical Museum, run by the Okanogan County Historical Society in the town of Okanogan, which holds many of the photographs that Frank Matsura took on the reservation.
Cemeteries in the Nespelem area, where tribal members and early settlers are buried and remembered, also help preserve its heritage. Sacred Heart Cemetery, owned by Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Nespelem, is located about a mile out of town on State Route 155, the highway to Omak. The Nez Perce Cemetery just outside the town line is on the National Register of Historic Places, but it remains in active use by the Chief Joseph Band of Nez Perce and visitation to the culturally sensitive site is not encouraged. The Nespelem City Cemetery, owned and maintained by the city, is located across the river a short distance outside of town.
