Jim Kershner’s This Day in History

From our archives, 100 years ago

A U.S. Senate committee cleared the way for a significant event in the Inland Northwest: the opening of the Colville Reservation to white settlement.

The Jones Bill cleared the Senate Indian Committee and was on the way to the floor. The Spokane Daily Chronicle noted that this would open up the “last big Indian reservation” of Eastern Washington.

The reservations had originally been promised as a place free from white encroachment. But as the region filled up, politicians succumbed to the pressure to open up large swaths of the land to homesteading.

What did the tribes on the Colville Reservation think about this new development? The paper didn’t ask.

It just said that “it practically insures that lands will be opened for settlement as soon as allotments are made.”

The tribal members were eventually given an 80-acre allotment per person. White homesteading would begin in earnest by 1916.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1935: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating the Works Progress Administration. … 1960: President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1960.