Jim Kershner’s this day in history

From our archives, 100 years ago

Yakima (now spelled Yakama) Tribe member Louis Mann took his family up into the Cascades to pick huckleberries, but he was run off by a watchman for the city of Tacoma, which maintained the area as a watershed.

Mann wrote a letter in which he mocked the idea that Tacoma could own the mountains 64 miles from their city.

Yet he also had an angrier and much more serious point. It is “merely prejudice against our race,” he said.

“God had planted fish, deer, roots and berries and wild birds for the red man to live on,” Mann wrote. “When the Caucasian discovered our country, they said it was a new country, but our foreparents were there in America living on fish, deer, wild roots, birds and berries. He studied how to deceive them and crowd them out.”

He said he was “run off like a coyote” and he and his family were forced to go back home on the train.

From the church beat: The new Sacred Heart Catholic Church, at Seventh Avenue and Chandler Street, was dedicated in front of a crowd of 650 people. The Rev. Edward O’Dea, the bishop of Seattle, presided over the celebration.

The new church was built at a cost of $20,000, and there was also a new $10,000 parsonage. A 30-voice choir sang, and 30 altar boys were in attendance.