Jim Kershner’s this day in history

From our archives, 100 years ago

The Bureau of Indian Affairs was hiring extra workers to prepare for a historic development: the “opening up” of the southern half of the Colville Reservation. In other words, the bureau was preparing to sell off all of the reservation lands that were left after the Native Americans had received their own allotments.

The superintendent of the project said he expected 1,325,000 acres to be available. The target date was early 1915. The superintendent said he had doubled his workforce, sending engineers, timber cruisers and laborers out over the vast reservation in order to “classify each 40-acre unit.”

They were using five classifications: grazing land, irrigable land, mineral land, timber land and arid land.

The superintendent was convinced there would be huge demand for the southern part because it is “ideally adapted to stock-raising, being well watered and covered with fine grass.”

He noted that most of the fertile valley sections had already been selected by the Native Americans.

He said he was under instructions to complete the work as soon as possible, “so that the land may be thrown open to entry at the earliest moment.”

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1896: The Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, endorsed “separate but equal” racial segregation, a concept renounced 58 years later in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.