Spokane Garry (sometimes spelled Spokan Garry, Spokane: Slough-Keetcha) ( 1811 – 1892) was a Native American leader of the Middle Spokane tribe. He also acted as a liaison between white settlers and American Indian tribes in the area which is now eastern Washington state.

Early life and education

alt=Chief Garry of the Spokane Indian tribe, in headdress and beaded shirt.|thumb|Chief Garry of the Spokane Indian tribe, in headdress and beaded shirt.

Slough-Keetcha was born at the junction of the Spokane and the Little Spokane Rivers in or around 1811. He was the son of the tribal chief of the Middle Spokanes, whose name is given by various sources as Illum-Spokanee, Illim-Spokanee and Ileeum Spokanee.

When white settlers arrived in the area in 1825, the boy was one of two chosen by the Hudson's Bay Company to be taught at an Anglican mission school at Fort Garry, Rupert's Land (now Winnipeg, Manitoba), which was run by the Missionary Society of the Church of England. Before he left for Manitoba, he was renamed "Spokane Garry" in honor of his tribe and the deputy governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, Nicholas Garry. His baptism on June 24, 1827 is said to be the first Protestant baptism of a non-white person west of the Rocky Mountains. He was accompanied by another boy known as Kootenais Pelly, who became Garry's closest friend at the school. They returned to the mission the next spring, bringing five other students with them. In 1831 Garry was sent back to the West to notify the Kootenais of Pelly's death, which had taken place at Easter;

Garry spent much of the next few years preaching his simple Anglican faith in the Columbia Plateau and teaching his people methods of agriculture which he had picked up at the Red River settlement. He found that his new position within the tribal hierarchy created a stronger sense of duty to his people and a need to ensure their peaceful co-existence with white settlers. At this time he married a woman who he renamed Lucy.

In the 1840s the Spokanes were visited by a number of missionaries. Rev. Samuel Parker of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was impressed by the piety of the peoples of the region, but other Protestant missionaries thought less highly of the Indians' typical activities, while Catholic missionaries were hostile to both. None were successful in converting the Spokanes to their denominations of Christianity. had claimed that the government records in the case had been destroyed- a claim echoed by all subsequent biographers of Garry since- these documents uncovered by anthropologist David K. Beine in 2018, reveal many new details of the case as noted above. Further, the Skiles report uncovered by Beine reveals collusion in this fraud by Spokane’s founding father James Glover and several other leading citizens of the day. There was subsequent complicity in the fraud on the part of the Department of Interior’s Chief of the Indian Division J.C. Hill, who cherry-picked the investigator’s report, concluding in his commentary on the matter delivered to the Secretary of Interior, that Doak should be issued the patent to the land. Hill even twisted the evidence of notable founding citizen Reverend Henry T. Cowley, to make it appear that Cowley supported Doak when he actually defended Garry’s occupation of the land in his sworn testimony. Further complicity in the fraud and collusion in the case against Garry was then committed by the Assistant Attorney General of the United States, George W. Shields, who supplied the final decision on the matter. Shields, citing the seventh proviso in the Forest Reserve Act of 1891, concluded that since Doak had made a preemtive payment for the land and since within two years of the payment no valid protest contesting the entry had been brought forward, that by law Doak should be issued the patent to the land. While the Forest Reserve Act does contain this language, Shields conveniently omitted a single sentence that connects these two elements of the proviso. That missing single sentence reads, “…unless, upon an investigation by a Government Agent, fraud on the part of the purchaser has been found…” George Shields had John Skiles’ report in the documents forwarded to him, but conveniently chose to ignore the report of fraud filed by the US Special Investigator. The decision of the Assistant Attorney General of the United States was the final decision on the matter. The overall result? Garry lost his land and this once influential man, so significant to the founding the town of Spokane and the greater Pacific Northwest region, died soon afterward, a homeless and penniless pauper on January 13, 1892.

Garry was survived by his second wife and two daughters. After his death, they moved to the Coeur d'Alene Reservation in Idaho. In 1984, Garry's descendant Jeanne Givens became the first Native American woman to serve in the Idaho House of Representatives.

Legacy

In 1961 Dudley C. Carter created a carving of Garry on the site of St. Dunstan's Church of the Highlands in Shoreline, Washington in honor of a biography of Garry written by the then vicar of the congregation.

References

Sources

  • Beck Kehoe, Alice (1981). North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account, Prentice-Hall, .
  • Beine, David K. (2021). Whodunnit? The Continuing Case of Spokane Garry. I Street Press, ISBN 9781952337512
  • Drury, Clifford Merrill (1936). Henry Harmon Spalding, Caxton Printers, Ltd.
  • Drury, Clifford Merrill; Walker, Elkanah (1976). Nine Years with the Spokane Indians: The Diary, 1838-1848, of Elkanah Walker, A. H. Clark Co., .
  • Drury, Clifford Merrill (2005). A Tepee in His Front Yard: A Biography of H. T. Cowley, Kessinger Publishing, .
  • Josephy, Alvin M.; Josephy, Alvin M. Jr. (1997). The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest, Houghton Mifflin Books, .
  • Spokane Outdoors: History, News, Topography of the Spokane area
  • People of the Treaties: Biography of Isaac Stevens
  • "Fort Spokane" in Historical Readings about the Spokane Indians by Beth Gibson.