Katie Gale: A Coast Salish Woman's Life on Oyster Bay

9. The People in Her World

67 9 The People in Her World Jennie Krise, one of the many local women Katie Gale knew, was another Indian woman from the Kamilche area married to a white man. Jennie was also a midwife and was known as a healer when Katie was raising her children. Jennie’s spouse, William, had a small house and oyster business for a while just in front of the Gale place. During that time Jennie and Katie may have seen each other every day. William Krise was a European American adventurer born in Warren County, Ohio, on July 2, 1822. He traveled from Dayton, Ohio, to Western Washington with the “John Lane Immigrant Train” in the 1850s. Along the trail he shot game for the immigrants’ stew pots. The Lane group became the first of the wagon trains to cross into Western Washington at Naches Pass, 4,928 feet high in the Cascade Mountain range. The pass was heavily used by Indians, who traversed the mountains for trade or hunting, to gather shellfish, to visit kin, and to establish new ties through marriage. The route was certainly known for hundreds if not thousands of years. Indeed, many well-established trails led back and forth between Puget Sound and eastern Washington. Charles Wilkes, the allegedly contentious and clearly scientifically minded leader of the U.S. Exploring Expedition, sent a party to explore the Naches crossing in 1841. Therefore, its features and aspects were not unknown to those European Americans who came later. At some point The People in Her World 68 in the early 1850s, during his own crossing, William Krise apparently met up with and joined a party of surveyors working around the pass for Isaac Stevens and the Pacific Railroad Survey project. They were under the leadership of Capt. George B. McClellan. Krise arrived in Washington Territory in August 1853, ahead of the wagon train with which he’d started the journey west. Those wagons struggled up the steep, rocky grades of the Cascades over a rough road that was barely, if at all, carved from dense forests and stone. It was a fine pathway for foot and horse travel, but it was a challenge for the heavy wagons and hard on the hoofs of the poor oxen required to pull those wagons. Still, as they passed over the Cascades, what glorious views they would have had of the river valleys and canyons below and of the loveliest of volcanic peaks, the stately Mount Rainier. After celebrating the heroics of reaching the summit, the travelers had to brace themselves for the downward, still farther westward journey. Theodore Winthrop described the eastern descent down a trail that those already settled in Puget Sound had wrought as “an elaborate inclined plane of very knobby corduroy down the steepest slope.”1 After much struggle (they were forced to cross the meandering White River seven times, for example) they reached Connell’s Prairie and the Puyallup River, where the salmon were running in abundance. Perhaps the promises of the bounty of the Northwest they’d heard at home were true! In October they reached Clover Creek, south of Tacoma. By 1855 William filed for a donation claim of 160 acres in what was then Sawamish County, named for the village and people at the mouth of Big Skookum, now called Hammersley Inlet. In 1864 the territorial legislature renamed the county Mason after the late Charles Mason, who was Washington Territory’s secretary of state and acting governor during the war of 1855–56. This act of naming was among the many that tended to wipe out evidence of the territory’s roots.2 Charles Wilkes , for example, named local waters and land masses largely after his own officers. We have him to thank for the appellations Budd Inlet, Fox Island, McNeil Island, and Eld Inlet, for example. It was George The People in Her World 69 Vancouver who bestowed the name Puget’s Sound, after Lt. Peter Puget, who journeyed to the inland sea’s southern reaches. William Krise served in what has become known as the “Indian War” of 1855–56. He was a volunteer militiaman and served in F Company in Fort Skookum, located just across from Arcadia Point on the A. M. Collins donation land claim. One can see the site of the fort easily from where the present-day Squaxin Tribe holds First Salmon Ceremonies. The distance from Arcadia...