A History of Treaty-Making and
Reservations on the Olympic Peninsula
• Conclusion
The patterns that played out on the Olympic Peninsula in the second half of the nineteenth century reflected fundamental shifts of an American Indian policy that was rooted in traditions first developed by the English colonists. What was new at the time the treaties were being negotiated in Washington Territory was the decision to concentrate Indians on reservations. That paternalistic policy, the latest in a series of unilateral actions by the U.S. government, was designed in part to protect Indians from white depredations and provide an environment where the Indians could be "civilized" through education and agricultural and industrial training. It was hoped that once Indians were civilized-a process that required Indians to surrender their cultural systems and spiritual beliefs and adopt Euroamerican cultural models and Christian beliefs-they would be ready for assimilation into American society as citizens. The reservation policy replaced Indian removal or barrier policies that saw the solution to the "Indian problem" as merely a matter of pushing the Indians further west. That removal policy became clearly inadequate when the United States became a transcontinental nation through the acquisition of Oregon (which then included Washington Territory) and California in the 1840s.
The creation and administration of Indian reservations was often a highly charged political process that could pit national, local, and political party interests against one another in determining the existence, size, and location of Indian reservations. It was a process in which Native voices often counted for very little-particularly as the nineteenth century progressed and whites demanded more and more land for settlement and exploitation. As a result there was often a huge gulf between the sometimes surprisingly well-meaning intentions of official policy and how those policies were implemented in the field.
The narrative of treaty making on the Olympic Peninsula coupled with the issuance of presidential orders explains how the individual reservations for the Makah, Quileute, and Hoh were created. It positions that process in the larger context of Indian affairs in Washington Territory, particularly the kinds of treaty negotiations that took place west of the Cascades. In retrospect, these treaty negotiations seem highly suspect: They were carried out in a language that was understood by few of the participants and inadequate to convey the complexities of the treaties; they were held between two cultures that had conflicting ideas about land ownership, contractual obligations, and even basic social courtesies; and, ultimately, the terms were virtually dictated by Americans negotiators who had little inclination to bargain. In the end it is never clear whether the whites or the Indians ever understood the other during these negotiations.
This history of Indian-white relations on the Olympic Peninsula also details some of the conflicts that informed and complicated the establishment of tribal reservations in the region. Not unexpectedly, some white settlers sought to deprive the local Native Americans of the tiny fragments of the homelands the Indians had been allowed to retain after the treaties were approved. What is more surprising is that the Quileute, Makah, and the Hoh found ready allies among some of the federal officials. Through a steadfast refusal to surrender to white pressure, the three tribes eventually succeeded in holding on to their remaining lands and establishing reservations that their descendants still call home.
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