Sarsarpkin

(This passage, drawn from my manuscript Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands, refers to the Sinlahekin Valley, a region of northeastern Washington that's one of my favourite places on Earth.)

The ghosts of the Sinlahekin don't live in town. Wade into a blue-skied draw, far from roads and barbed wire, where wormwood and dry grass ripple in the mind, and there, in the earth's own cleavage, wait. They will come.

By the late 1800s, every indigenous civilisation in the Oregon Country was lost or losing. The Haida were decimated, the Modoc deported, the Palouse ground to dust between soldier and Shoshoni. Smohalla died of grief; his dream, of Homily and Moses. Leschi, great statesman of the Nisqually, the settlers studiously strangled, following due process of law.

In this time Sarsarpkin withdrew his tiny Sinkaietsk band to the upper Sinlahekin. Congress had once reserved the entire American Okanogan to the First Nations, but the whites had never respected this. When gold was discovered, even the pretence of treaty was dropped. In the idiom of the day, the reserve was "opened to the public", leaving Sarsarpkin with an ultimatum: abandon his home and join the nations already herded onto the Colville reserve, or accept what we, in our own idiom, call "privatisation". Sinkaietsk land would be "allotted" – parcelled out – to individuals, who would be empowered to sell it to strangers if they wished. This, the old man knew, would only defer his people's dispossession of, and expulsion from, the Sinlahekin.

Sarsarpkin had fought the occupiers in the canyons, and he had fought them in Congress. He had never won. And so he lived the remainder of his days on a Sinlahekin allotment, still the moral, if not political, leader of his people. He attended Mass, maintained relations with Colville and Canadian nations, and by all accounts practiced neighbourly acceptance of the usurpers. None of which convictions suffered from his equally well-documented addiction to alcohol.

Neither could they overcome it. In November 1887, Sarsarpkin's older son Peter, also drunk, pushed his father over a cliff and killed him. The following spring, younger son Jack bashed in Peter's skull in like circumstances. The other Sinkaietsk families fell to similar pressures, kicking their allotments one by one into foreign hands. The scant survivors straggled into Nespelem, their very name shattered like busted sod.

Sarsarpkin was buried, along with his widow and his children, on a low rise outside Loomis. Years later the town erected a high marble cross on the site, but even that eventually disappeared. This day, a wire enclosure and two headstones were the only clue that a nation slept there beneath the scrub and jumping cactus.

But Sarsarpkin's heart still spoke, in words those who stood beside his grave could hear. In the end, he'd had a single choice: die somewhere else, or die here.

(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo of the Sinlahekin Valley courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)