LLyn De Danaan

Research Files

Katie Gale's Tombstone

The Work of Researching a Life

Sometimes a story just must be told. But how does a researcherproceed when there are no letters, journals, or even secondary sources to consult? On a late summer morning in 2004, I set off with two local history buffs, Stan Graham and Jan Parker, in search of a small burial ground near the Olympia Oyster Company just half a mile from my home on Oyster Bay at the head of Totten Inlet near Olympia, Washington. A local man had visited the Mason County Historical Society to report that he had seen a small burial plot when he logged the area in around 1960. We drove down the road with our clippers, leather gloves, and a small-scale map on which an oversize × marked the several acres of land we would need to search. We decided first to explore the flat land high on the bank overlooking the bay. There would be a grand view of Mt. Rainier across the water to the east from that bench of land. The hike up the steep hill from where we parked the truck was through a jumble of vines and stumps. The climb was the beginning of a much longer journey. Remarkably, given the heavy vegetation and the vague directions, we found the site.

The first inscribed stone we saw was leaning against a blocky, moss-covered base. The children of Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, it read, Hattie and Henry. Henry died in 1895, age seventeen. Hattie died in 1897, age eighteen.¹ We stood silent for a few moments on this sacred ground, thinking about the children and wondering about the cause of their deaths. We imagined the grief of losing two youngsters, so close together in time.

Katie Gale's tombstone was found by the author and colleagues after a tip from a local logger.

Courtesy of the author

Then, lying on the ground beside its base, we saw a column of stone — a pinkish stone, probably marble, engraved with a pair of low-relief doves:

KATIE, WIFE OF J.A. GALE, DIED Aug. 6, 1899, AGED 43 yrs.
Gone but not forgotten

The grave itself was not evident, the grave site ungroomed; it had been unvisited perhaps for years. Nonetheless, the name on the headstone was familiar to me. We had found the tombstone of Katie Gale, an Indian woman I had read a snippet about years before in two memoirs written by white late-nineteenth-century residents of the area. On that warm rise encumbered by the exuberant foliage of big leaf maple, the pricking canes of invasive Himalaya blackberry, low-lying holly, and young Douglas firs, an ordinary late summer day in 2004 became special. I wondered what I could hope to discover about her life more than the anecdote or two, specifically stories of fights between Katie and her husband Joseph over ownership of land, that circulated among the few I knew of who had heard her name. So far as I knew from the one or two notes I had read about her in the memoirs, she had not kept journals or written letters.² She did not, I decided later, read or write at all. She signed her mark with a firm cross. I would have to imagine the very texture of Katie Gale's daily life. Although the task seemed daunting, I knew in those initial moments that I wanted to tell her story.

Where to begin? If there were any truth in the stories of Katie's disputes with her husband, common-law or otherwise, might there not be some record of the land or tidelands in question and the disputes themselves? We turned to archived records, specifically legal documents, and found much more than a simple glimpse of the life of the woman called Katie Gale.

Documents do not speak for themselves. They must be deciphered. One must learn to read difficult handwriting, decode references to geographic places whose names have long since changed, and consult dictionaries and other reference material to sort out usage and terms in the context of the year in which the document was produced. To render the documents useful, historians proceed through a variety of intellectual exercises — analysis, authentication, verification, contextualization, and interpretation — without which the document is a meaningless scrap. Those who labor in the service of otherwise obscure subjects learn how to bring the relevant documents foreword, make their significance transparent, and weave them into a story. We must be attentive to the smallest details.

In October 2004, my hands hovered above a case file, a folio of paperslikely untouched since first placed in an archival box and relegated to a storage area in the Washington State Southwest Regional Archives many years ago. Anyone who loves doing historical research will tell you that at this moment, this instant of giddy apprehension when you know you are going to learn something that you have longed to learn, your heart is in your throat.

On the opening page of the court record — the July 18, 1893, petition for divorce that Katie Gale filed against her husband in the Superior Court, Mason County, State of Washington — I read this: The "defendant has treated the plaintiff as a menial, has never been kind and loving to her and has repeatedly struck her, inflicting bruises and wounds upon her person, and on the 8^th day of July, 1893, the defendant struck her in her face with his fist.... and at the same place, at her home in Mason County, the defendant kicked the plaintiff with his booted feet, inflicting serious and painful wounds upon the person of the plaintiff.... "³

Government Land Office maps, such as this 1856 survey of Totten Inlet and Little Skookum, are a good starting point for identifying geographic features, donation claims, and homesteads.

Courtesy of the Mason County Historical Society, Shelton, Washington

The defendant, J.A. or Joseph Gale, Katie continued in her complaint, "is addicted to the intemperate use of Alcoholic liquors and is frequently in a beastly state of intoxication at his home." He is, she said, "violent and immoral in his language and actions while intoxicated."⁴

What incited Katie to seek a divorce after seven years of what was an apparently frequently contentious marriage?⁵ Was the beating in early July the last straw? After all, she had garnered her resources, found attorneys to represent her, and filed only ten days after Joseph's alleged attack. Was she inspired by the examples of friends and family members, specifically other Indian women neighbors who had acted in their own interests? Was she fortified by the attainment of citizenship status by some Indian friends and their enhanced legal status in the community and courtroom? Was she told she had a good case by activist attorneys whom she most certainly met through the Shaker Church. Did she fear that if she did not act, then she might lose all she had worked for in the economic panic that gripped the country that spring? Perhaps all of these circumstances compelled her to try to conserve what she had and secure for her children the property acquired as much by her labors as her husband's. She had four youth living with her in 1893: Hattie and Henry, the children she bore before she married Joseph Gale, now both in their teens, and Maud, eight, and Ray, five. They and Joseph were living with her in a house that was probably not much larger than three hundred square feet. She was thirty-seven years old, born in 1856 in the White River area of western Washington. There were plenty of reasons for her to go to court when she did.

Cull house and float house, in the foreground, are in front of Katie Gale's property and over her oyster tidelands. Her small house can be seen on the upper left. Circa 1898.

Courtesy of the Mason County Historical Society, Shelton, Washington

Women's status was generally high in the territory and the new state. At the least, it was regularly debated. By 1893, women, both half-Indian and white, had won and lost and regained and lost again the right to vote in territorial elections between 1883 and 1888. During this period, divorce was by no means rare and many women acted to protect their interests. By 1893, Nellie McClure, Katie's close neighbor whose mother was Indian and whose father was from Ireland, had put her own name on the land patent after her first husband died.⁶ Women in Mason County, where Katie resided, had been registering their property with the county auditor. Territorial marriage acts recognized community property and distinguished it from property acquired individually or brought into the marriage separately.⁷ But it was useful to make declarations regarding such property. In 1878, for example, Harriet Korter, an Indian woman married to a white man, Adam Korter, listed property purchased by "her own labor and personal earnings." She owned, she noted in the Mason County auditor's files, "one red cow, one spotted cow, red and white, one spotted yearling (ears marked with swallow tail), one brindle steer two years old, one reddish brindle bull three years old, one red ox about nine years old, one speckled white ox, about thirteen years old, two red sucking calves, and two beds and bedding."⁸

Indians — men and women — could acquire homesteads or receive allotments of land on reservations under the Dawes Act and thus acquire full rights as citizens if they abandoned their affiliation with tribes. ⁹ James Tobin, a half Duwamish Indian married to an Indian relative of Katie's, Louisa Kettle, had filed for and received a patent for land on Mud Bay in 1890.¹⁰ Mud Bay Sam, Mud Bay Charley, and Mud Bay Louie — all oystermen, Indians, and well-known members of the Indian Shaker church — had applied for and received patents for their homesteads much earlier. From the late 1860s through the 1880s, the Tobins and Kettles spent time on Oyster Bay where they lived and worked before acquiring their homestead and mingled with Oyster Bay and Squaxin people at gatherings. Katie, related to the Kettles, would certainly have known about the family's move to secure land off the reservation and would understand the significance their and others' entrepreneurial endeavors held for her own situation.

Piecing together the story of Katie's kin, the Kettles and the Tobins, was an important part of the research process. County census records as well as Squaxin census rolls were invaluable for reconstructing household memberships and movements of people to and from the reservation. Newspapers sometimes reported on "potlatches" and named some attendees. Published accounts of death often include place of residence and names of relatives. Homestead records and tideland records note specific dates of transactions. Knowing these details suggested something about Katie's world. But her actions had to be placed in an even broader context of state and national politics and policies.

For example, Washington became a state in 1889, and the rules of the game, including those that defined white and Indian relations, were changing as a result. The disposition of tidelands was prominent in deliberations over the wording of the state constitution. Would the state turn over ownership to those who already occupied tidelands or keep the title to that valuable real estate? The new laws allowed for the sale of some tidelands, specifically those at some distance from a city. They were to be surveyed and appraised. First-class tidelands were those in front of or within two miles of a city. Second-class tidelands, those with improvements on them, were to be made available if a person owning improvements applied to purchase them. Third-class tidelands, those that did not fit into either category, were to be awarded if the applicant deposited enough money to pay for a survey and appraisal. Preference rights had to be exercised within a limited time period or otherwise sold by sealed bid.¹¹

Subsequent acts provided special consideration for the sale of tidelands upon which oysters had been planted. This included tidelands acquired and worked by Katie and Joseph Gale. Any person who had planted such beds prior to March 26, 1890, had between six months and three years to apply for ownership before the land could be sold by the state. Needless to say, these oyster tidelands were considered to be quite valuable and produced considerable income.

To take advantage of these acts, it was necessary to be a citizen of the United States. According to the state and the office of the United States attorney at the time, no special privileges were retained by Indians in regard to these sales, notwithstanding the treaty that explicitly reserved the right of Indian people to continue to harvest in "usual and accustomed" territories.¹² The Oyster Bay and Mud Bay Indians who had taken homesteads, purchased land, or been allotted, however, were qualified to file for tidelands. Katie Gale and a number of her friends and relatives on Oyster and Mud Bays could file for tidelands, pay the fees, and have the land surveyed as citizens.

By 1890, Mud Bay Charlie had applied for oyster tidelands, as had Little Charlie, Olympia Jim, Sally, Jack Slocum, John Slocum, and — in 1892 — Mud Bay Tom, Dick Jackson, Mud Bay Sam, Mud Bay Lewie or Louie (Youlouaut), Olympia Jim, and Sandy Wohaut.¹³ Prior claimants, those who had recorded with the county auditor and in accord with territorial law, were recognized as legitimate prior claimants by the board of appraisers for Mason County or Thurston County.¹⁴ These included "Thie" (Tyee) Bob, Jack Slocum, and Katie — all Indians — and Joseph Gale, Katie's white husband.

Dick Jackson, a prominent member of the Indian Shaker Church, built a small meetinghouse on his homestead across the bay from Katie Gale's home.

Courtesy of the Mason County Historical Society, Shelton, Washington

By 1893, the Indian Shaker Church, which by now had many scattered congregations in the region, had been chartered as a legal entity under these new circumstances. The church's founders were landowners and thus citizens. Consequently, the church, with its land-owning elders in the lead, was accorded certain rights and immunities. It was released from the authority and control of the Indian agent and the harassing circumstances under which it and its members had labored since the religion's inception. The attorney who helped with the charter was James Wickersham, who soon after became a state legislator and later a judge. Wickersham's signature appears on the agreement that settled property on Katie at the end of her 1893 complaint against her husband.¹⁵

The times were promising and the economy was booming. To add to the optimism of the citizens of the new state, the Great Northern Railway completed a transcontinental line to Seattle on January 6, 1893. Significantly, a national economic panic began that spring, seriously reducing employment and investment in Washington state over the next four years.¹⁶ There was no money for expansion, no money with which to repay loans, and no money to pay workers. And Joseph Gale had over-extended. He was running their oyster business in the red and was set to sell or encumber their lands and tidelands.

The stage was set for Katie to make some important decisions about her life, her land, her livelihood, and her relationship with her white husband. Though she may not have been able to read and write, she knew how to act in her own interest. Katie used attorneys, territorial and state community property laws, and her rights and immunities as a citizen to assert her claim to certain tidelands and upland properties. She was awarded what she requested at the conclusion of the 1893 proceedings, but there was no divorce. In a later courtroom statement, she said that she "forgave" her husband.

By 1898, however, Joseph Gale's business and career had recovered and soared. He was a deputy fish commissioner, a justice of the peace, a director of the local school district, a member of several lodges, and, at least among other white businessmen, a respected oysterman. He was brokering shellfish deals in Seattle and Tacoma and had a white mistress. He was rarely on Oyster Bay and had hired a Chinese overseer named Tom Kee to look after his oyster beds. Katie had become "burdensome" he declared.¹⁷ He went to court to divorce her.

Katie fought back again, but this time as defendant. Joseph attempted to portray her as unfit to mother her surviving children, three already dead, probably from tuberculosis. She could not, her husband lamented, prepare his children, Maud and Ray, for the, "station in life they are entitled to occupy." His children, he believed, should be free of Indian influence and the "superstitions" of the "uncivilized."¹⁸ So adamant was he that in an allegedly drunken state, witnessed by a neighbor and reported in an affidavit, he forcibly abducted his daughter and placed her in a boarding school in Olympia run by the Sisters of Providence, whose archives record the child's attendance.¹⁹ Katie could not, at first, find her. When she did, she and Indian women friends and kin defiantly took the lonely girl on excursions away from the boarding school. Katie would not abandon Maud to this white culture. Only death would allow that.

By November 1898, Katie may have already had symptoms of the tuberculosis that killed her. She had lost children, friends, and neighbors to consumption, a common cause of death on the bay and in Mason County. Tuberculosis accounted for about 28 percent of recorded deaths in the county between 1891 and 1901 and one in seven deaths nationwide. Thus, she would have been familiar with the warning signs, the probable course of the disease, and the likelihood for recovery. Katie made a legal will, signed on November 17, 1898, dictating that her property was to be transferred to her surviving children and that all her debts be paid. She noted that the debts connected with her illness be the "first considered." We have found no records that suggest doctors or hospitals were ever called upon during her decline — at least, there were no bills to be settled with them upon her demise. In the will, Katie appointed someone other than her husband to be guardian of her estate and the children. She bequeathed to Joseph Gale, "the sum of one <$1⁰⁰> to be paid out of the proceeds of my estate." All of these maneuvers, a testimony to Katie's keenness and spirit, we found in the records.²⁰

Joseph Gale built this up-to-date house (pictured circa 1901) after Katie's death and his marriage to Lillian. It was located on the same Oyster Bay property he purchased with Katie.

Courtesy of the Mason County Historical Society, Shelton, Washington

Katie died on August 6, 1899, aged forty three. Her casket and undertaking service were provided by Bates Brothers in Olympia at a cost of "$80."²¹ The cost was a claim against her holdings, according to papers filed by the attorneys that settled her estate.

On November 18, 1899, three months after Katie's death, Joseph Gale married Lillian McDonald. He lived only until September 1901. He was allegedly kicked while preparing to harness his horse to a buggy in early morning hours after an all-night party in Carr's Hall, New Kamilche, a nearby settlement and site of many local late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century frivolities. Though his lodge brothers called for an investigation into his death, doctors declared that a shoed horse hoof had caused the "concussion of the brain" that killed him.²² Joseph was buried with lodge honors in Shelton where his tombstone stands in solitude, no kin buried nearby or indeed in the cemetery at all. It was only after Joseph's death that Ray and Maud ordered and erected Katie's beautiful tombstone. The stone, purchased in 1902, cost $133.80.

All these and many other details engaged me and my colleagues formonths. Stan Graham, my research collaborator, and I often metin the Washington State Archives, eager to find more. At the Mason County Historical Society, Shirley Erhart found tidbits that became leads for the next week of detecting. We studied census records, grim accounts of deaths in newspapers, announcements of marriages, titles, deeds, guardianship records, wills, and files of photographs. The sometimes plaintive, sometimes cocky eyes that looked back at us from the discolored and dog-eared images helped propel us to that earlier time. Katie's life was a jigsaw puzzle and we found piece after piece that fit.

Katie Gale's concerns, joys, and responsibilities began to emerge for us when we discovered an inventory of her household goods, which included three horses, four milk cows, four yearling cattle, and four calves. Then we found an account of her earnings in a particular year and a note on her dealings at the nearby Kamilche store. Joseph Kullrich, the storekeeper at the settlement closest to her home, wrote in 1898 that she had purchased "a great many groceries and a number of pairs of shoes for the children" during the previous two years. He added that "defendant herself always paid this affiant for said groceries and shoes."²³ We discovered through a study of the records that Katie was a well-known member of a bustling late nineteenth-century community of farmers and oyster workers whose lives were intertwined and whose fates inextricably linked to one anothers'. And she was a woman apparently appreciated by others. Adolph Johnson wrote years later about the biscuits and creamed salmon she made for him as a schoolboy when he went home with his friend, her son Ray.²⁴ Oyster Bay neighbors and respected homesteaders, William Krise, a scout for a wagon train on the Oregon Trail, and C.C. Simmons, the son of Michael T. Simmons, one of the founders of Tumwater, Washington, wrote glowing testaments to her character and her dedication to her children. She was, they said, a virtuous woman whose children were well taken care of and unusually bright.²⁵ Another neighbor, John Leslie, a graduate of both Puyallup Indian School and Carlisle Indian School and a popular engineer on a local steamer, wrote in defense of her character and noted that the children were "excellently educated and trained."²⁶

Katie and her kin were among the thousands of Indians subjected to the terms of the Isaac Stevens treaties. They lived through the 1856 war that the Indians waged, at least in part, in protest of the size and location of reservations that had been set aside for them. They outlasted the internment camps, the largest on Fox Island, which they were forced to during the war. Records from Indian agents as well as their correspondence with Governor Stevens note the high death rate on the island camp, with consumption a commonly mentioned cause of death.

Oyster Bay School students and staff pose for a class picture in 1897–1898. The boy second from the right, in the second row from the bottom, is believed to be Ray Gale, Katie's son. On his right is Adolph Johnson, who wrote years later about Katie's delicious creamed salmon dish. The school was within a mile, walk or row, of their home.

Courtesy of the Mason County Historical Society, Shelton, Washington

At the conclusion of the war and their internment, Katie's family chose economic and political independence, eschewing full-time reservation life. Many of them lived on float houses in and around Mud Bay and Oyster Bay and secured off-reservation land when they could. Some of the women, like Nellie McClure, Harriet Korter, Jennie Krise, Louisa Smith (who married Joseph Gale's partner in the Oyster Business and lived just down bay from Joseph and Katie) married the white male farmers and businessmen who came into the area seeking land or jobs.

Though Katie married the entrepreneurial Joseph Gale, she did not turn her back on her relatives and her Indian heritage, even as she used all the devices of the new government to assert herself. She shared her earnings with relatives and friends and joined the Oyster Bay Shaker church, just across the Bay from her own place.

Though we have only a fuzzy, distant photograph of what was probably Katie's house, her home and groomed grounds were probably not unlike Dick Jackson's place, described in a land entry file from the National Archives and Records Administration. Henry Weatherall, another early oysterman witnessed Jackson's "Homestead Proof" and wrote: "He has a house of sawed lumber, 14 × 24 feet, one story, a good floor of tongued and grooved lumber, 2 doors and 3 windows. The house is covered with dressed shakes.... He has a barn made of split cedar, covered with cedar shakes. It is about 28 × 32 ft." Land entry files are rich sources of information and provide an important glimpse of life on Oyster Bay in the late 1800s.²⁷

Using information from donation claims and homestead filings, censuses, early land surveys and survey notes, and patent information, most of which is available from the Bureau of Land Management website, I have mapped the residences along Oyster Bay for the 1860-1890 period, estimated family sizes, and speculated about relationships. Knowing who neighbors were and who could have heard or seen whom from the location of a home or houseboat is important when reading testimony, depositions, and affidavits in the court records and attempting to judge the veracity of reports.²⁸

Other documents that have aided in the reconstruction of Katie's life and the culture and society in which she lived include obituaries, marriage announcements, and even school records. The Oyster Bay School was located in Kamilche. It was built before 1890 and had one room until 1915. Its records from the 1890s include graduation programs. Ray Gale, Katie's son, born April 28, 1888, was a student there.²⁹ Ray's 1898 class had twenty one students from households around the area and a teacher named Miss Frances Galusha. Ray recited a verse in the spring 1898 program. Ray was second on the program and recited The Drummer Boy of Waterloo. He followed Harry Bloomfield, a predecessor of Pete Bloomfield, the man and logger who had led us unwittingly to Katie's tombstone.³⁰

Katie Gale is one of many late nineteenth-century Indian womenwhose stories have been obscured or ignored in the published literature of the Northwest. The circumstances and characters of these women's lives are slowly emerging as scholars, descendents, and tribal historians scour through records and construct biographical portraits, usually without benefit of diaries and letters. These portraits, sketchy as they may be, reveal women who faced adversity with strength and resiliency and whose stories challenge some hard-to-put-to-rest stereotypes.

Katie's case is an exemplar of both the possibilities and limitations of archival research. There are so many more things I want to know about Katie Gale. We do not even have a picture of Katie or any description of what she looked like. Though opportunities for doing this kind of history abound (there are countless unheralded heroes or heroines, villains, and saints), search, as we do, through journals, letters, tattered and stained photographs, and dusty folios of maps and legal documents, there are always unanswered questions, and the heart and soul of the person is missing, not to be found in these shreds. The danger is, of course, that we try to understand the past and these distant lives from our own late twentieth- and early twenty-first century point of view. I have often grappled with the temptation to overstate the evidence or make unwarranted imaginative leaps into Katie's life. But we must stick to the scant bits we find and be clear about how and when we construct interpretive commentary, while at the same time never ignoring unbidden hunches and tips. They almost always lead us to wonderful discoveries, to places we might never have thought to look, even to those hidden spots in the woods where a life story is waiting to be told.

Notes

The author thanks Jo Ann Ridley, Karen James, and Elizabeth Diffendal for comments and suggestions.

^1. Henry and Hattie were Katie's children from a previous relationship. A record of Henry's death lists his mother as Katie George and father as Ryalia Johns (Johnson?). George is one of the names used by "Old Man" or "Sitkum" Kettle, probably Katie's uncle for she is called Katie Kettle in some documents and was very possibly sent to live with the Kettles sometime after the death of her mother. The name Kettle derived from a Yakama name Ka tld according to Louisa Kettle Tobin's granddaughter, Maiselle Bridges. Ida Cush, Louisa Kettle Tobin's daughter and Maiselle's aunt, in a statement written in 1975, says the family name was Kethled and that her mother was of Squaxin ancestry. The Squaxin connection seems to be confirmed by Louisa Tobin's own statements recorded by Ruth Grenier in the 1920s. She says that her father was from Case Inlet. These statements and recollections are not necessarily in conflict with one another. The Case Inlet people certainly could have Yakama relations. Louisa's mother might have been Yakama on her mother's side, hence the Kettle name from that connection. Katie, coming from the White River area could most certainly have Yakama relatives.
The name Kettle appears again in association with Katie's first daughter. Hattie is called Hattie Kittle in court documents. Joseph Gale mentions Katie's first children, both Henry and Hattie, in his 1893 depositions. A strong though brief picture of Hattie emerges in court documents of 1893. We can deduce from the record that she and her mother are close, travel to Tacoma to visit friends and relatives together, and speak Salish and Chinook to each other to the disdain of Joe Gale.

^2. Cora G. Chase, The Oyster Was Our World, Life on Oyster Bay 1898–1914 (Seattle, Wash.: Shorey Book Store, 1976), and Adolph Johnson, "White-Indian Marriages Recalled by Old-Timer." newspaper clipping, Mason County Journal, 1977, vertical files (Shelton, Washington: Mason County Historical Society). Both of these sources are in error regarding Katie's marital status and other details of her life with Joseph Gale. I did not have any of Katie's daily activities recorded in her own hand, but letters, diaries, and journals written by the subject carry their own unique problems for historians. For example, Laurel Ulrich, the author of the compelling story of Martha Ballard, an 18th century New England midwife, had to search for suggestions of Martha's feelings, rarely directly disclosed in her journal. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (Vintage Press: 1991).

^3.Superior Court, Mason County, State of Washington, Case 255, Katie Gale v. J.A. Gale, 1893 (Olympia, Washington: Southwest Regional Archives). Katie's petition relies on a number of precedents, including the Territorial laws protecting the rights and property of wives, the fact that she was legally married to Gale in 1886, and laws that recognize the rights of Indian land owners as citizens. Gale tried to claim that her very "Indianness" made her unfit to mother her own children. Katie recognized the rule of law and used her knowledge and standing to challenge him, though, he would later complain, she was an uneducated superstitious woman. See also Brad Asher, Beyond the Reservation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 65–66.

^4.Superior Court, Mason County, State of Washington, p. 1, paragraph VI.

^5. Joseph Gale and Kate Kettle of Mason County were married December 19, 1886. The witnesses were A.G. "Saxy" Smith, one of Gale's friends and a fellow oysterman and W.A. Parish. Marriages-Mason County, Washington, Book A. Page 37, Entry 36. vertical file (Shelton, Washington: Mason Historical Society).

^6.Homestead Final Certificate 2205, Nellie M. Sutton, May 5, 1888 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration).

^7. See Statutes of the Territory of Washington Made and Passed. Olympia, Washington: 1869, 318. All property acquired after the marriage, except by gift, was to be considered common property. Women were to register an inventory of their separate property with the county auditor. This act was modified in 1879 and codified in 1881.

^8.Mason County Auditor, Oyster Land Records, 1877–1891, Volume A, Box 1 (Olympia, Washington: Southwest Regional Archives).

^9. An act passed in 1875 extended the benefits of the Homestead Act of 1862 and provided that "every Indian born in the United States, who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and who has abandoned or may hereafter abandon his tribal relation, shall ... be entitled to the benefits of the [Homestead] Act." The Dawes Severalty Act was passed in 1887 and provided that lands on reservations be allotted to individual Indians.

^10.Homestead Final Certificate 2935, James H. Tobin, June 28, 1890 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration).

^11. See Kenan R. Conte, Disposition of Tidelands and Shorelands: Washington State Policy 1889–1982, November 1982 (Olympia: Washington State Library).

^12. This opinion was rendered in a letter from the Acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs to William H. Brinker, United States Attorney in 1897. Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Letters Sent, 1870–19 08, Land Division, March 14, 1897, Volume 178 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration).

^13.Register of Tideland Applications, 1895–1904, Department of Natural Resources Archives, Commissioner of Public Lands (Olympia, Washington: Washington State Archives). Though some Indians were successful in filing claims, it wasn't a necessarily easy path, even for landed, "assimilated" Indian citizens. For example, Tom Sabudcup, a Squaxin, was charged by an attorney $25 an acre or over $500 for help in making his 1895 application for oyster beds he occupied. Wm. H. Brinker, U.S. Attorney for the District of Washington. Seattle, Washington to The Commissioner of Indian Affairs, letter, May 20, 1897. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75, Letters Sent 1870–1908 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration,). The paradoxes abounded. The Indians who were allotted or who owned land were citizens and not eligible for special privileges. Yet, under the Treaty, they should have had, at the minimum, the right to continue to take shellfish from usual and accustomed places.

^14.Thurston County Board of Tide Land Appraisers, 1894. Department of Natural Resources Archives, Commissioner of Public Lands (Olympia, Washington: Washington State Archives).

^15.Record of Shaker or Tchaddaub Church—1892. Indian Shaker Church, Ms 29, Box 5/11. Tacoma, Washington (Washington State Historical Society).

^16. See J. Kingston Pierce, "Panic of 1893: Seattle's First Great Depression," at http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=2030 (accessed October 26, 2005).

^17.Superior Court of the State of Washington of Mason County, Case 534, Joseph A. Gale v. Katie Gale, 1898 (Olympia, Washington: Southwest Regional Archives).

^18.Superior Court of the State of Washington of Mason County, Case 534.

^19.Student Boarder Account Book, Volume 1, 1881–1903. Providence St. Amable Academy, Olympia, Washington (Seattle, Washington:. Providence Health System Archives).

^20.Superior Court, Mason County, State of Washington, Record of Wills, In the Matter of the Estate of Katie Gale. August 10, 1899. (Olympia, Washington: Southwest Regional Archives). Notices of "Kitty" Gale's death and her will, appeared in the Morning Olympian, August 10, 1899 (Olympia, Washington: Washington State Library, microfilm) and the Mason County Journal, August 11 and 18, 1899 (Shelton, Washington: Mason Historical Society, microfilm). Further notes on the disposition of her estate were found in Mason County Probate, Box #2, Record 142 (Olympia, Washington, Southwest Regional Archives).

^21.Superior Court, Mason County, State of Washington. Creditor's Claim in the Matter of the Estate of Katie Gale. 1899 (Olympia, Washington State, Southwest Regional Archives).

^22. Mason County Death Records 1891–1906, p. 29. (Shelton, Washington: Mason Historical Society).

^23. Joseph Gale and Joseph Kullrich were planning to open a wholesale oyster house in Tacoma when Joseph died. "Fatal Accident of Joseph Gale," Mason County Journal, September 27, 1901 (Shelton, Washington: Mason County Historical Society microfilm); Superior Court of the State of Washington of Mason County, Case 534, Joseph A. Gale v. Katie Gale, 1898, affidavit of Joseph Kullrich. (Olympia, Washington: Southwest Regional Archives).

^24. Johnson, "White Indian Marriages."

^25.Superior Court of the State of Washington of Mason County, Case 534, affidavits of William Krise and C.C. Simmons.

^26.Superior Court of the State of Washington, Case 534, affidavit of John Leslie.

^27. The original Homestead Act was passed in 1862. The Indian Homestead Act was passed in 1875. Henry Isaac applied in 1888, Dick Jackson in 1879, for homesteads near or on Totten Inlet. James Tobin, who had tidelands on Oyster Bay, applied for land on Mud Bay. His certificate was signed in 1890. It is, incidentally, only in the past twenty years or so that culturally defined landscapes and the ordinary buildings on it have been seen as significant cultural "signposts," indicators of aesthetic and ethnic differences, habits, and life ways. The term "vernacular architecture" has been applied to this relatively new field. See for example Barbara C. Judge, Historic Farm Structures as Material Culture: An Oregon Study. (Corvallis, Ore.: Anthropology Northwest, Department of Anthropology, Oregon State University, 2005).

^28. For example, in witness of Nellie McClure's improvements, M.C. Simmons wrote that he lived about two miles from her and that she used to get her butter from them while her first husband was alive: "I could see their clothes hanging out on the lines from our house."

^29.Inventory of Birth Records, Mason County Journal, vertical file (Shelton, Washington: Mason County Historical Society).

^30. "Kamilche, May 30," Mason County Journal, June 3, 1898, newspaper clipping. Oyster Bay School District #11 vertical file. (Shelton, Washington: Mason County Historical Society).

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