Tammy Wagoner: Relocating the Monaghan statue ends a vital history lesson

By Tammy Wagoner

By June 30, the city will pay $88,000 for a crane to lift 120 years of Spokane history off the corner of Riverside Avenue and Monroe Street. When Ensign John R. Monaghan stood his ground in a Samoan jungle in 1899, he wasn’t thinking about the “Tripartite Convention” or German coaling stations … He was thinking about the wounded friend at his feet. To some, his monument is the removal of a racist relic; to others, it is the loss of a local hero. But for the rest of us, its relocation is a missed opportunity to confront a complicated truth with mending dialogue.

To understand why a young man from Spokane died on a plantation 5,000 miles away, you have to look at the Pacific not as an ocean, but as a chessboard. By the time Monaghan arrived, Samoa was already a crowded colonial battleground, with Great Britain and Germany having spent decades carving out commercial and political footholds. The islands weren’t “undiscovered,” they were occupied.

The U.S. and Germany were locked in a cold war over who would control the deep-water harbors, the vital refueling stops for global trade. Monaghan didn’t choose the politics of empire when he enlisted, but he became a literal pawn in a global strategy designed in Berlin and D.C. His story isn’t just about a “last stand,” it’s about what happens when local lives are spent to secure global assets for distant governments.

The monument itself, crafted by renowned sculptor Sigvald Asbjornsen, is a masterclass in early 20th century mythmaking. While the bronze figure captures Monaghan in meticulous detail, the bas-relief at the base and the text of the plaque take a sharp turn into fiction. It is important to note that the dehumanizing words on the plaque were never Monaghan’s own; they were the choices of the monument’s creators years after the fact.

Asbjornsen depicted the Samoan warriors with bows and spears, a deliberate choice to frame the battle as “civilization vs. savagery” that ignored the reality of Samoan soldiers using modern firearms. By choosing artistic stereotype and inflammatory language over historical accuracy, the creators built a propaganda piece that has colored Spokane’s understanding of this conflict for over a century.

For the Samoan people, this wasn’t a skirmish against “savages.” It was a defense of a homeland against foreign empires who arrived with maps and cannons. While we focus on naval logistics, the local people were fighting for the right to choose their own leaders and keep their land from being carved up. When we remove the statue without telling their side of the story, we continue the 1899 tradition of treating the Samoan people as secondary characters in their own history.

The relocation of the Monaghan statue is more than a logistical shift – it is a retreat from a difficult conversation. In these divisive times, Spokane had a rare chance to transform a site of conflict into a landscape of healing. Instead of “burying” the monument in a private cemetery, the city and the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture could have risen to the occasion, surrounding the bronze officer with the voices of the Samoan people and the cold truths of the Pacific chessboard.

By choosing to put the statue out of sight and out of mind, we’ve missed the opportunity to show that we are capable of holding two truths at once: that a man can be personally brave while serving a flawed imperial mission, and that a community can honor its neighbors without erasing the anchors of its past.

As the crane lifts the monument this June, it leaves behind an empty pedestal – a perfect symbol for a city that chose the silence of a mausoleum over the messy, necessary work of historical education.

Tammy Wagoner, of Spokane, is a local history enthusiast.