Seltice, Settlers Battled Hard Times Together

A variety of circumstances, from thin ice to hard times, brought Coeur d’Alene Chief Andrew Seltice together with the four white settlers he would later adopt.

Seltice met Quebec wagonmaker Julien Boutelier one winter in the 1880s. Boutelier and his half-Iroquois wife, Mary Elizabeth Chamberlaine, lived about a mile from the reservation.

The chief was returning home with heavily laden sleds when the horses and their load plunged through the ice over a pond. The Bouteliers’ sons rescued the chief. Out of gratitude, Seltice offered them all the reservation farmland they wanted.

In Patrick Nixon’s case, Seltice was the one giving help.

Nixon, an Irish immigrant, was married to New York native Mary Francis. The couple met in California, and moved to the Washington Territory after their San Jose hotel went bankrupt. They arrived in Spokane County in a snowstorm in 1879, living for several years in near-poverty in a small log cabin.

Taking pity on them, Chief Seltice offered the Nixons reservation land.

“It was a favor to them. The chief was a good-hearted person, and just felt sorry for them,” said Alberta Murray, 78, an author in Elk, Wash. Murray married the late George Murray, one of the so-called “white Indians” descended from the settlers.

Intrigued by her husband’s family history, she published a 1977 book about the adoptions and family histories of the settlers. The book, out of print but still in some local libraries, is titled “These My Children.”

As for the other two families of settlers, Seltice met them both when he lived near Liberty Lake in the 1870s.

One family was headed by Steve Liberty, a French-Canadian trapper and adventurer after whom Liberty Lake is named. Liberty, who married part-Indian Christine Barnaby, learned the Coeur d’Alene language and became an interpreter.

In 1884, according to tribal history books, Liberty traveled with Seltice and three other tribal leaders to Washington, D.C. There they lobbied President Grover Cleveland for title to the reservation, which had been shrinking as more settlers showed up.

Also at Liberty Lake, Seltice met Joseph Peavy, a French-Canadian blacksmith married to French-Indian Mary Pierce DeBeauharnis.

In 1877, as war loomed between the whites and the nearby Nez Perce, Seltice invited Peavy’s family to the reservation for safety’s sake. They accepted and were later invited to stay.

, DataTimes