White Swan

White Swan (18501904), or Mee-nah-tsee-us in the Crow language, was one of six Crow Scouts for George Armstrong Custer's 7th Cavalry Regiment during the 1876 campaign against the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne. At the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the Crow Indian Reservation, White Swan went with Major Reno's detachment, and fought alongside the soldiers at the south end of the village. Of the six Crow scouts at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, White Swan stands out because he aggressively sought combat with multiple Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, and he was the only Crow Scout to be wounded in action, suffering severe wounds to his hand/wrist and leg/foot. After being disabled by his wounds, he was taken to Reno's hill entrenchments by Half Yellow Face, the pipe-bearer (leader) of the Crow scouts, which no doubt saved his life.
On the 27th, after the battle, Half Yellow Face made a special horse travois for White Swan and moved him down the Little Horn valley to the "Far West" steamship, moored at the junction of the Bighorn River and the Little Horn, so he could get medical care from army physicians. White Swan was treated in a temporary Army hospital at the junction of the Bighorn and Yellowstone rivers. At the Crow encampments on Pryor Creek, other returning scouts reported that White Swan had died, but he survived his wounds.
Following the Battle of the Little Bighorn, White Swan continued for five years (1876 to 1881) to serve as a scout with the U.S. Army, though he was disabled from wounds received in the battle, including a severely deformed right wrist and hand, and a wound in his foot/leg which caused him to limp. In photographs, White Swan also had a scar on his forehead where he had been struck with a war club in a separate battle with a Sioux warrior. Either from this blow or from other sources, White Swan could not hear and thus was unable to speak in his later life. Eventually, he was awarded a small army pension.
In White Swan's later life, he lived at the Crow Agency, after it had been moved in 1884 to its present site in the Little Bighorn valley in Montana, close to the site of the battlefield. When he could no longer be an Army scout, White Swan began to produce drawings that represented key events in his life, including events of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. These drawings were bought by visitors to the Crow Agency and the nearby Custer Battlefield, providing White Swan with a welcome source of income. These drawings have now been discovered by collectors and their artistic value has been recognized. They have recently become the subject of collectors, exhibitions, books and university theses, and prints of his drawings are now commercially produced.
While living at Crow Agency, White Swan was painted by the artist J.H. Sharp, who knew him and described him as "Jolly, good natured and a general favorite." White Swan was also photographed by Frank Rinehart, and by William A. Petzolt, producing photos included in this article. White Swan's wife had died when he was only 23 before he became an army scout, and he did not remarry. He lived for a time with an aunt, "Strikes By The Side Of The Water" who was also the mother of Curly, another Crow scout, and he and Curly were known in the Crow Agency community as brothers, though their personalities were said to be the opposite of each other.
He died in 1904, leaving no direct descendants. He is buried in the National Cemetery at the Little Bighorn Battlefield at a location described below. Although his early death and his inability to hear and speak left him out of the limelight that later fell on the other surviving Crow scouts, his outstanding bravery during the battle and his artistic ability established an enduring legacy.
Biography.
Early life, Names.
White Swan was born in approximately 1851 though some sources state his birth date was in 1850 or 1852. He had been raised in the traditional manner of his tribe, and would have acquired warrior status in his early teens through deeds of bravery.
White Swan married, but his wife died in 1873, before his enlistment as an army scout. He never remarried.
In historical references White Swan is also referred as "Strikes Enemy" and "White Goose" or Mee-nah-te-hash in the Crow language.
Army Service as a Crow Scout in the Great Sioux War of 1876.
The Background of the Great Sioux War.
From 1870, the Crows had complained about hostile Lakotas encroaching from the east on Crow Indian reservation lands.
 The Crows requested that the U.S. Army take actions against these Sioux trespassers. From the point of view of the Crow Tribe, in 1876 finally something was going to be done.
However the Great Sioux War of 1876 that engulfed the life of White Swan, started because the U.S. Government also had its own larger agenda. Gold had been found in 1873 in the Black Hills on reservation lands granted the Sioux tribe by the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868). The gold strike had been made public in 1874 and by 1875 a full scale gold rush was underway. Motivated by growing unemployment caused by the Panic of 1873 ever-increasing numbers of gold seekers poured the Black Hills, establishing mining centers and boom towns. Being on the Sioux Reservation, these towns and mines were completely outside the usual framework of laws and jurisdictions for U.S. Territories, which generated chaotic conditions resulting in, among other things, no reliable base of organized law enforcement owing to the absence of federal law jurisdiction, as well as no federal marshals, courts or judges. Another important factor was the economic impact of the panic of 1873 which had left workers unemployed and the dollar devalued by a return to a de facto gold standard, augmenting a national priority for continued and increasing production from gold mines in the Black Hills.
The U.S. Government had tried unsuccessfully in 1875 to bring the Sioux living on the reservations to a conference to consider modifying the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty by the U.S. repurchasing the Black Hills back from the tribe. However in Article XII of that treaty any modification of treaty lands required the agreement of 3/4 of the tribe's adult males, and there were large bands of "off-reservation" Sioux (including influential leaders Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Crow King, Rain in the Face, Gall and many others) who did not reside on the reservations and who also did not want to cede the Black Hills back to federal control. These bands lived year round in their traditional migratory way on the huge hunting preserve in the “unceded Indian Territory” in Wyoming, Nebraska and South Dakota given the Sioux by Article XVI of the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) which included the vast area extending westward from the Black Hills across the entire Powder River Basin to the crest of the Big Horn Mountains. In the fall 1875, the U.S. Government gave up on fair or equitable methods and sent out messengers to each band with an impossible ultimatum — to leave their winter camps in the hunting preserve and immediately return to their agencies in the Dakota Territories by January 31, 1876. When this predictably did not occur, as deep winter restricted travel of migratory bands, in February of 1876 the Government directed army columns to converge from the south, east and west on these "off-reservation" Sioux bands in their remote encampments, with orders to bring them back to their agencies, by force if necessary.
Enlistment with the 7th Infantry, early skirmishes.
One such military column commanded by Col. John Gibbon was instructed to proceed from Ft. Ellis, near present day Bozeman, Montana and march eastward, down the Yellowstone River and take up a position in southern Montana Territory to block the "off reservation" Sioux from crossing north of the Yellowstone River. In furtherance of this mission, on April 9, 1876, Col. John Gibbon went with Lt. James Bradley to the Crow Indian Agency, which was then located on the Stillwater River Drainage in Montana, to recruit Indian scouts. In an embarrassing two-hour council the chiefs of the Mountain Crows expressed their reluctance to help the expedition. They pointed out that Indian warriors traveled light and fast and struck quickly, whereas the soldiers marched slowly with wagons and thus never found the enemy.
Fortunately for Gibbon, the young Crow braves did not follow the elders' advice, and sought adventure. On April 10, 1876 some twenty five Crows were enlisted for six months in the 7th Infantry by Lt. James Bradley, chief of scouts, including White Swan and Half Yellow Face. On April 13, 1876, the Crow Scouts went with Gibbon's 7th Infantry force of 477 persons, as they marched down the north side of the Yellowstone, arriving opposite mouth of the Bighorn River on April 20. Gibbon then moved eastward again along the north bank of the Yellowstone to
a camp opposite the mouth Rosebud Creek. The Crow Scouts ranged across (south) south of the Yellowstone, and located the main Sioux village in the process of moving from Tongue River valley to the Rosebud valley in May 1876. In the course of this move, the Crow scouts skirmished with Sioux scouts.
Meanwhile, General Alfred Terry's column was marching east from Fort Lincoln, in the Dakota territory, and Terry rendezvoused with Col. Gibbon's column opposite the mouth of Rosebud Creek on June 21, 1876. General Terry's command included the 7th Cavalry under General George A. Custer.
Scouting activities with Custer's 7th Cavalry leading up to the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
On June 21, White Swan was detached from the 7th Infantry to go with the 7th Cavalry, along with five other Crow Scouts who were Half Yellow Face (leader of the Crow Scouts), White Man Runs Him, Goes Ahead, Hairy Moccasin, and Curley. The 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer was ordered by General Terry to follow the trail of the large encampment of "off-reservation" Sioux who lived nomadic lives off the Great Sioux Reservation in present South Dakota. This group was making an annual westward spring migration from their camp on the Powder River valley to the Tongue and then to the Rosebud Valley, and on to the Little Bighorn. Custer was ordered to locate the encampment of these "off-reservation" Sioux on the Rosebud Creek, or in the adjacent Little Bighorn Valley, around 20 miles (30 km) inside the eastern border of the Crow Indian reservation.
The six Crow Scouts shared duties with 26 Arikara (Ree) Scouts, under a Chief of Scouts Lt Charles A. Varnum. However, the Crow scouts knew the Rosebud country much better than the Arikara because this had been traditional Crow country for centuries. As far back as 1805 records indicated that fur trader Francois-Antoine Larocque had camped with a band of Crows in what was later determined to be Little Bighorn River. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 gave the Crows a large reservation running west from the Powder River that including the river drainages of the Tongue, the Rosebud, and the Little Bighorn river valleys. The repeated aggressive westward incursions of Sioux bands beyond the Powder River in the 1850s and 1860s led to another treaty, the later 1868 Crow Treaty of Fort Laramie, which established a new western boundary for the Sioux/Crow reservations at the 107 Meridian, which ran north-south and generally separated the Rosebud drainage on the east from the Little Bighorn (aka Greasy Grass) drainage on the west. This boundary area was a sort of no-man's land with both Sioux and Crows hunting on it, and warriors from both tribes crossing it to raid and steal horses from each other.
The six Crow scouts joined Custer on June 21. "They are magnificent-looking men, so much handsomer and more Indian-like than any we have ever seen, and so jolly and sportive ... " wrote Custer to his wife, Elizabeth B. Custer. He also pointed out why it was important to get them connected to the U.S. Army, "I now have some Crow scouts with me, as they are familiar with the country." Charles A. Varnum spelled it out in his reminiscences, "These Crows were in their own country."
Since this was their ancestral homeland, the Crow scouts were relied on to undertake important scouting assignments for Custer in the days after June 21 leading up to the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25.
When Custer struck the trail of the "off-reservation" Sioux, the scouts' count of 400 to 450 lodges in the encampment confirmed army sources of an "off-reservation" nomadic group of about 800 warriors. This compared favorably to Custer's force of about 600 troopers. However this initial assessment on June 21 was made on encampments dating back to May 21, when the Sioux/Cheyenne crossed from the Tongue River to the Rosebud Valley. As the scouts followed this trail up the Rosebud, past Lame Deer Creek and then on to the divide with the Little Horn Valley, they found the older trail increasingly joined and overlaid by many newer trails. These newer trails were left by many other bands of Sioux/Cheyenne coming from the reservations to join the original "off-reservation" Sioux for their yearly summer gathering. Although it was not appreciated at the time, these late arriving bands of Sioux/Cheyenne swelled the encampment from 400 to about 960 lodges, able to field close to 2000 warriors.
Custer's prior experience in pursuing other Indian bands indicated that an Indian group would scatter if they knew they were being pursued. Custer used the Crows to check these trails to rule out a dispersal of the encampment he was following. Custer tended to disregard the Crow scouts' intelligence that more and more Indians were gathering together.
On the early morning of June 25, 1876, White Swan and other Crow Scouts ascended a high point on the divide between the Little Bighorn River and Rosebud Creek. From this lookout point (which later became known as the "Crow's Nest") the scouts saw very large horse herds on the western margins of the Little Bighorn Valley, some 15 air miles away. These large horse herds indicated an unexpectedly large Sioux/Cheyenne encampment. The encampment itself was out of sight on the valley floor.
The Crow scouts questioned the wisdom of attacking such a large encampment. However, Custer was focused on his concern that his force had been detected that morning by Sioux scouts, and he feared that if he did not attack at once, the large encampment would break up into many smaller bands which would scatter in all directions, thus escaping and avoiding the decisive engagement the army hoped for. Custer accordingly made plans for an immediate attack, and as he proceeded down Reno Creek toward the Little Bighorn Valley, he created four separate detachments, intended to prevent the encampment from scattering, and to strike the village from different directions. Reno with three troops would attack the south end of the village. Custer with five troops would attack the north end of the village, and Benteen with three troops would scout briefly to the south and then join the battle to assist the other detachments; Lt. McDougall's remaining troop would act as rear guard protecting the pack train.
Wounded in action at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
As the Battle of the Little Bighorn unfolded, White Swan and the chief Crow Scout Half Yellow Face, along with Arikara scouts accompanied the detachment under Major Reno. The Indian scouts were told to stampede the horse herd on the western margins of the camp. Reno's detachment charged the south end of the village as ordered, but as warriors poured out to defend the village Reno ordered the troops to dismount and form a skirmish line. This outpouring of Sioux warriors frustrated the plan of the scouts to stampede the horse herd, and the scouts, including White Swan and Half Yellow Face began to fight alongside the cavalrymen. They were soon engaged in furious combat with swiftly increasing numbers of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. At one time, White Swan was faced by six warriors.
As more warriors swarmed out of the village, Reno's detachment pulled back into a patch of nearby timber along the river. After taking more losses in the timber, Reno ordered a retreat out of the timber and across the river and up onto the bluffs on the east side of the valley. By the time Reno had ordered the retreat across the river, White Swan had suffered severe bullet wounds in the right hand or wrist and in the foot, knee or leg (reports differ), and also could not hear, either from being hit on the head with a war club or because a rifle was fired close to his ear (reports differ).
The soldiers' retreat from the timber disintegrated into a rout, and the Sioux closed in on the now disorganized mass of retreating troopers, killing the stragglers and the disabled. Back in the timber, Half Yellow Face got the wounded White Swan on a horse and shielded by the timber, waited until the mass of Sioux warriors had turned their attention to Custer's column, now approaching the north end of the village, after which Yellow Face led the horse across the river and up the bluffs to the location where the Reno detachment was digging in, and where they were later reinforced by the other detachments under Captain Benteen and Lieutenant McDougall. This action by Half Yellow Face probably saved White Swan's life. Troopers with Reno later recounted how White Swan, though wounded, wanted to continue fighting, and disabled though he was, tried to crawl back to the firing lines.
After Reno's men fled across the river, the now thoroughly aroused and mobilized Sioux and Cheyenne drew back, and then launched a fresh attack to the north on Custer's separate detachment of five companies (about 210 men) who were now firing into the north end of the village. At this point the Sioux outnumbered Custer's men by about 8 to 1. Custer's detachment was first driven back to a low ridge east of the valley, and then overwhelmed and killed to the last man. This intense engagement lasted about an hour during the afternoon of June 25, 1876, after which the warriors returned to press the attack on Reno's entrenched position on the bluffs. The next day, June 26, the Sioux continued the attack on the beleaguered Reno contingent, where White Swan lay in the section for the wounded. However, Sioux scouts reported the approach from the north of the large army column under Generals Terry and Gibbon. In the late afternoon and evening, the Sioux and Cheyenne ended their siege of Reno and Benteen and hastily broke camp and withdrew south, up the Little Bighorn Valley.
Medical care following the battle, disability.
The next day, June 27, 1876, Half Yellow Face made a horse travois designed to carry the wounded White Swan in a sitting position, and used this to carry him about 12 miles from the battle site to the steamer "Far West" on the Bighorn River so White Swan could get more medical care. White Swan was carried on the "Far West" about 40 to 50 river miles down the Bighorn to the Yellowstone, where he was left in a temporary hospital facility with some of the less seriously wounded soldiers.
Almost immediately after the battle, the three scouts White Man Runs Him, Goes Ahead and Hairy Moccasin left for the main Crow encampment which was "two sleeps" away on the mouth of Pryor Creek, and Gibbon's other Crow scouts went with them. At the village they reported that both White Swan and Half Yellow Face had been killed.
Curly and Half Yellow Face had not gone with the other scouts to the Crow Village, and had returned with Gibbon to the mouth of the Big Horn where White Swan was in the temporary army hospital. On July 4, Col. Gibbon gave Curly and Half Yellow Face leave, but kept White Swan in the hospital so that he could continue to get medical treatment and recover.
White Swan was sufficiently badly wounded that his recovery was delayed. When he finally returned to his relatives and friends at the Crow village, they said it was like having the dead return. Records show that White Swan was discharged from Army scout duty in September 1876, but reenlisted in the Army for scouting activities in November 1877, through it is unlikely his wounds were healed by this time. He continued a recovery from his wounds, but suffered disabilities from them for the rest of his life.
Later life, after the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Although disabled, White Swan managed to remain an Army scout for much of the remaining five years (1876-1881) following the Battle of the Little Bighorn. When the Crow Reservation was further limited in size, the Agency was moved in 1884 from the site of present-day Absorakee, Montana on the Stillwater River to its present location at present-day Crow Agency in the Little Bighorn Valley, very close to the site of the battle. White Swan also moved to the new agency site.
White Swan continued to be limited by his battle wounds. White Swan had lost the lower half of his right hand, and he had a right wrist that was permanently deformed to bend sharply inward. (See photo above taken from the right side, showing injured wrist). He also limped from the bullet wound in his leg and/or foot. He was deaf and dumb, reportedly from a blow to his forehead by a war club in a battle with a Sioux warrior, probably at a time different than the Little Bighorn Battle.
J.H. Sharp, the noted western painter, came to know White Swan while he was living at Crow Agency, Montana and painting the Crow people. Sharp painted White Swan. He made this note to accompany the painting.
Reno's scout in Custer battle, wounded many times, picked up in battlefield two days later -- deaf and dumb from stroke of war club in forehead. A good artist in Indian picture-writing. Jolly, good natured and a general favorite. A full brother, and direct opposite in character of 'Curley', Custer's scout."
Although White Swan was quite limited in speech, probably owing to his deafness, he could still communicate by using the sign language of the Plains Indians.
Statements from White Swan's army pension file indicate that his wife had died in 1873, before he enlisted as an Army scout, and he never remarried. The 1885 Census recorded him as living with a widowed aunt named "Strikes By The Side Of The Water". This aunt was the mother of Curley, another Crow Scout, which would make White Swan and Curley cousins, though the artist, J.H. Sharp knew White Swan as the brother of Curley.
In 1894 White Swan was crippled and unable to hear or speak. In 1897 he applied for and received a pension of $17.00 a month for his military services. The 1900 census lists White Swan as "widowed" and the only member of his household. White Swan's only other relative was Sage Woman, a half sister on his father's side, which meant she was from another Crow tribal clan than White Swan, since clan relations are passed down through mothers. These facts indicate that White Swan lived in a more isolated fashion than he would have otherwise done, had he had a larger base of Crow relatives, either by blood or by clan. He died leaving no direct descendants and there were no indication of adoptive children, further indicating a limited group of close Crow relatives, by blood or clan, unusual in the Crow culture.
Artistic Ability -- Drawings and Weapons.
White Swan was known for his artistic abilities. While living at the Crow Agency in the Little Bighorn valley, he made drawings to illustrate key events in his life, including his role in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. At least fifteen drawings have been attributed to White Swan, and others remain to be discovered. Though not signed, his drawings can be identified by the many scenes they share, and by similarities in style with the few for which his authorship is definitely known.
In addition to his separate drawings, sources indicate that White Swan, though disabled, created drawings and paintings on pages from accounting ledgers to depict his role in the famous battle. White Swan also drew and painted on larger sheets of muslin canvas, showing multiple deeds from his life.
In White Swan's later recollection of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, before the battle started he watched the Lakota camp through a handheld telescope with his warhorse standing close by - this recollection would later become a favorite scene of the artist White Swan to illustrate his role in the battle.
Over the years since White Swan died, his artistic abilities have been recognized and his drawings have been collected. White Swan has emerged in Crow history as a talented artist. White Swan would have needed income after he had ceased to be an army scout and living at Crow Agency, just a few miles from the site of the famous battle, he found a ready market for this art. The famous battlefield drew visitors, and to a lesser extent so did the Crow Agency. These visitors included military men, government employees and other persons interested in the history of the famous battle, or simply interested in the Crow culture. Though White Swan could not serve as a guide or interpreter for visitors of the battle field as the other scouts did, owing to his speech impediment, his art allowed him to provide something unique to visitors who wanted to return home with an illustration that genuinely represented their encounter with Indians of the West. White Swan's art showing his war deeds ideally captured the essence of the Indian warrior tradition based on heroic acts.
In addition to his drawings, White Swan's craftsmanship is shown in his personal items, and particularly his tomahawk, pictured (a) in the photo above (which may be enlarged) and (b) further shown and described at this footnoted web source. A tomahawk in the Northern Plains warrior culture could evolve from being a weapon to an item carried primarily to count coup, which transformed the item into one possessing spiritual significance. Adornments to White Swan's tomahawk (see item pictured in footnoted source, or in the photo above), probably indicated brave war deeds, and/or instructions of critical spiritual import, received through visions or through the intervention of a spiritual leader/mentor (a "medicine man").
When living at Crow Agency on the Little Bighorn river, White Swan had a tepee which had drawings around the lower portion that depicted the Custer battle. A picture of the tepee is at the footnoted citation.
In his later life, White Swan was photographed by Frank Rinehart, and by William A. Petzolt. See photos provided above.
White Swan's tomahawk and his drawings remain today as a legacy of his time. White Swan's art is now drawing increasing attention from collectors, and they have been the subject of exhibits, and the subject of University thesis. and collections. Some of White Swan's works were collected as part of the Paul Dyck collection of Plains Indians art and artifacts, and are now part of the collection at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming.
Death and Burial.
White Swan died on August 12, 1904, at the age of 53 or 54. Having never remarried after the death of his wife when he was 23, White Swan left no direct descendants to carry on his name or his legacy.
White Swan was buried at the Little Bighorn National Cemetery in the section set apart for veterans. See the photos which indicate his grave marker and his grave site.
Places or things named after White Swan.
The White Swan Memorial Library at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument also houses the office of the park historian, and is located in the historic stone house (the original superintendent's headquarters). According to the National Park Service, this facility contains the finest collection of research materials available on the battle of the Little Bighorn, as well as other related historical events. Visits to the library and to the park historian are by appointment.


Cayuga Indian Nation of New York v. Pataki

Cayuga Indian Nation of New York v. Pataki, 413 F.3d 266 (2d Cir. 2005), is an important precedent in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit for the litigation of aboriginal title in the United States. Applying the U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling in "City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York" (2005), a divided panel held that the equitable doctrine of "laches" bars all tribal land claims sounding in ejectment or trespass, for both tribal plaintiffs and the federal government as plaintiff-intervenor.
The ruling was the culmination of a two-decade-long litigation in the United States District Court for the Northern District of New York before Judge Neal Peters McCurn. Pursuant to a jury verdict, the Cayuga Nation of New York had been awarded $247.9 million, representing the current fair market value and 204 years of rental value damages for 64,015 acres conveyed by the tribe to the state in violation of the Nonintercourse Act (including pre-judgement interest).
This precedent has effectively ended the viability of all aboriginal title litigation in the Second Circuit (Connecticut, New York, and Vermont), the site of nearly all of the unresolved Indian land claims in the United States. Since the ruling, no tribal plaintiff has overcome the "laches" defense in a land claim in the Second Circuit. Four dissenting Supreme Court justices had previously adopted the view of the Second Circuit in "County of Oneida v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York State" (1985); there, the majority did not reach the issue.
Prior history.
The Second Circuit ruling came twenty-five years after the Cayuga filed their complaint in the Northern District of New York in 1980 challenging two conveyances of land to the state in 1795 and 1807, totaling 64,015 acres. The following year, a class of defendant land owners was certified.
In 1983, the Cayuga survived the defendant's motion to dismiss. Judge McCurn held that the Nonintercourse Act applied to the conveyances in question, held that the Cayuga had a valid cause of action, and rejected the affirmative defenses of: sovereign immunity pursuant to the Eleventh Amendment to the United States Constitution; statute of limitations, nonjusticiability, and abatement. McCurn's ruling preceded the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in "County of Oneida v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York State" (1985), which rejected several of the same affirmative defenses, among others.
In 1987, McCurn ruled on the motions for summary judgement. He held that: there was no evidence that the "treaties" through which New York State acquired the land had been ratified by the federal government; that the Indian Claims Commission did not have the authority to ratify the conveyances; and that his court had jurisdiction over the defendants. In 1990, he ruled that both the 1795 and 1807 conveyances violated the Nonintercourse Act, and were thus invalid. In 1991, interpreted the "reservation" terminology in the relevant treaty to also implicate that Act. McCurn also rejected the "laches" defense, on which the Second Circuit would eventually overturn his ruling. In response to the defendant's assertion of sovereign immunity as a defense, the federal government moved to intervene in the lawsuit, which was granted in November 1992.
Having established liability, the litigation turned to the remedy. In 1999, McCurn ruled on the appropriate method to calculate damages. The court rejected the state's arguments that damages should be limited to the fair market value of the land at the time of the transaction, without pre-judgement interest (the approximate method used by the Indian Claims Commission for statutory claims against the federal government). That same year, the court rejected ejectment as a remedy, thus ensuring that the Cayuga would be unable to recover possession of the lands; their remedy would be limited to monetary damages. The court also determined that joint and several liability would be inappropriate, and thus that the defendants would require separate trials. Finally, the court determined that the state would be able to offset from the eventual damages any amount of consideration paid in the original conveyances as well as the value of infrastructure improvements; moreover, the plaintiff's anthropologist's testimony would not be admissible on the question of valuation, the jury would not be able to hear evidence on "laches" from either party, the Eleventh Amendment would not bar damages, and the plaintiffs would not be able to claim emotional, psychological, or cultural damages—only the economic value of the land.
Preparing for trial, the court threw out the plaintiff's real estate expert and approved the government's real estate expert, applying the Daubert standard. He also clarified his prior ruling, to note that testimony on "laches" would be permitted inasmuch as it related to pre-judgement interest. In 2001, the jury returned a verdict for the Cayuga, calculating damages the current fair market value of the land and the fair rental value of the land over 204 years in excess of $36 million; with the addition of pre-judgement interest, the damages reached $247,911,999.42. The court also denied the defendant's post-trial motions, but stayed the collection of the judgement pending appeal.
Second Circuit opinion.
The Second Circuit reversed, and entered judgement for the defendants.
Majority.
Judge José A. Cabranes authored the panel opinion, joined by Rosemary S. Pooler. The court in large part relied on the U.S. Supreme Court's recent "City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York" (2005) decision, which, it stated, "dramatically altered the legal landscape against which we consider plaintiffs' claims." In summary, the court noted: "We understand Sherrill to hold that equitable doctrines, such as laches, acquiescence, and impossibility, can, in appropriate circumstances, be applied to Indian land claims, even when such a claim is legally viable and within the statute of limitations." While, "Sherrill" expressly did not disturb "Oneida II" (1985): "Because the Supreme Court in "Oneida II" expressly declined to decide whether laches would apply to such claims, this statement in "Sherrill" is not dispositive of whether laches would apply here."
Parsing the "Sherrill" decision, the court concluded that the dispositive factor there was the "disruptive nature of the claim itself." Thus, the court opted for a broad reading of "Sherrill":
Although we recognize that the Supreme Court did not identify a formal standard for assessing when these equitable defenses apply, the broadness of the Supreme Court's statements indicates to us that "Sherrill"'s holding is not narrowly limited to claims identical to that brought by the Oneidas, seeking a revival of sovereignty, but rather, that these equitable defenses apply to "disruptive" Indian land claims more generally.
Rejecting the Cayuga and federal government's argument that "Sherrill" did not bar monetary remedies, the court held that "this case involves comparably disruptive claims, and other, comparable remedies "are" in fact at issue." The court emphasized that "plaintiffs' claim is and has always been one sounding in ejectment; plaintiffs have asserted a continuing right to immediate possession as the basis of all of their claims, and have always sought ejectment of the current landowners as their preferred form of relief." The court concluded that the District Court had "'monetized' the ejectment remedy." The court's treatment would apply the defense recognized in "Sherrill" to nearly all aboriginal title claims:
[T]his type of possessory land claim-seeking possession of a large swath of central New York State and the ejectment of tens of thousands of landowners . . . is indisputably disruptive. Indeed, this disruptiveness is inherent in the claim itself-which asks this Court to overturn years of settled land ownership-rather than an element of any particular remedy which would flow from the possessory land claim. Accordingly, we conclude that possessory land claims of this type are subject to the equitable considerations discussed in "Sherrill".
Acknowledging that "laches" has traditionally been understood as an equitable doctrine, the court rejected any distinction between law and equity, holding that it barred "any remedy flowing from this possessory land claim." The court justified this holding with reference to the "sui generis" nature of aboriginal title. "To summarize," the court recapitulated:
[T]he import of "Sherrill" is that "disruptive," forward-looking claims, a category exemplified by possessory land claims, are subject to equitable defenses, including "laches". Insofar as the Cayugas' claim in the instant case is unquestionably a possessory land claim, it is subject to "laches". . . . The fact that, nineteen years into the case, at the damages stage, the District Court substituted a monetary remedy for plaintiffs' preferred remedy of ejectment cannot salvage the claim, which was subject to dismissal "ab initio". To frame this point a different way: if the Cayugas filed this complaint today, exactly as worded, a District Court would be required to find the claim subject to the defense of laches under "Sherrill" and could dismiss on that basis.
The court held that "laches" equally barred both the plaintiff's cause of action for ejectment and the plaintiff's cause of action for trespass. Acknowledging that the federal government had "traditionally not been subject to the defense of "laches"," the court did not interpret this as a ""per se" rule." The decision concluded with praise for the McCurn:
Our decision to reverse the judgment of the District Court and enter judgment for defendants should in no way be interpreted as a reflection on the District Court's efforts and rulings in this case. We recognize and applaud the thoughtful and painstaking efforts, over many years, of Judge Neil P. McCurn, who presided over this and related land claims in upstate New York with fairness and due regard to the rights and interests of all parties as well as with a keen appreciation of the complexities of the subject matter and of the relevant law. Our decision is based on a subsequent ruling by the Supreme Court, which could not be anticipated by Judge McCurn in his handling of this case over more than twenty years.
While claiming that it was applying "laches", the majority argument did not satisfy any of the traditional requirements for a laches defense. Among other things, laches requires delay in pressing a claim, but the Cayuga Nation had pressed its claim repeatedly since the 1800s, being stymied by various rules which prevented Indian nations from being heard in court. The doctrine invented for the purpose of denying the Seneca claim has been described as "New Laches" due to its lack of resemblance to the laches doctrine; it has been explicitly described as a new doctrine by later courts.
Dissent.
Judge Janet C. Hall of the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut, sitting by designation, dissented. Hall argued: "While ["Sherrill"] has an impact on this case, it does not compel the conclusion that the plaintiffs are without any remedy . . . ." Hall would have barred the ejectment of the present landowners, but not the money damages. With respect to the ejectment cause of action, Hall would have held that: "[W]here a plaintiff seeks ejectment damages, rather than restoration of a possession interest, application of the doctrine of laches to such a money damage claim is rarely if ever justified." Hall also would not have applied "laches" to the trespass cause of action.
Nor would Hall have applied "laches" to the federal government. Distinguishing the cases cited by the panel majority, Hall noted that "[t]hese cases cannot support the proposition that this Court has the authority to craft a federal common law defense of laches against an Indian land claim sought by the United States." In concluding, Hall examined the language of "Sherill" in greater depth, arguing that "Sherill" "does not reach as far as the majority reads it."
Subsequent history.
Although both the Solicitor General of the United States and the Cayuga asked the Supreme Court to review the Second Circuit's holding, the Court declined to grant "certiorari".


KPMT-LP

KPMT-LP was a low-power television station licensed to Pullman, Washington. It was on air briefly in November 2008. The station broadcast on UHF channel 14, with no separate digital channel.
The station was to initially operate as a translator to station KIDQ-LP Channel 27 which operates in the Lewiston, Idaho area. The station was to serve the college towns of Pullman, Washington and Moscow, Idaho and was to include local programming.
KPMT-LP was granted a displacement relief application on 3/24/2008 to move from channel 46 to channel 14 due to an interference issue with a co-channel translator at Grangeville, Idaho.
KPMT-LP's license was cancelled by the Federal Communications Commission on March 19, 2015 for failure to file a license renewal application.


Linn City, Oregon

Linn City was a community in Clackamas County, Oregon, United States, that existed from 1843-1861. The former site of Linn City was incorporated into the city of West Linn.
History.
Robert Moore founded Robin's Nest in 1843, near the banks of the Willamette River. Originally, the town was platted on about of land. By 1845 the town had two log houses and a number of tents. Robin's Nest was renamed Linn City on December 22, 1845 in honor of Lewis F. Linn, a United States Senator from Missouri. Later, by 1846, the town's citizens had constructed fifteen homes. In addition, Linn City was home to a tavern, a chair manufacturer, a cabinet shop, a gunsmith shop, and a wagon shop.
The town grows.
Over the next few years Linn City grew. In 1849 the town held a hotel and two general stores among its businesses. The same year, James Moore, Robert's son, built a lumber mill and a gristmill. The mills provided at least 20 jobs to the people of Linn City. The mill complexes sprawled over the landscape. Many of the mill buildings were connected by docks nearly one mile in length. The town's post office opened in 1850, the same year that Robert Moore founded the local newspaper, the "Spectator".
During the California Gold Rush, the men of Linn City began to leave in search of gold. A couple of years passed and the same men who left Linn City returned, many of them with their fortunes. Some of the miners were so rich they refused to work and began to spend the money that their gold hauls brought in. Money changed hands quickly as many gambling tables became available all over town. It was during these years that Linn City was at its height.
By the 1860 United States Census, Linn City had a population of 225.
The flood.
The demise of Linn City came as a surprise over several months in 1861. During October a heavy and constant rain began to fall. Though heavy rains during October in Oregon are not out of the ordinary, the rain that continued into November was. By the end of November, the Willamette River overflowed its banks. By December, the water had risen over some of the town's streets. Citizens watched, helpless, from their windows as the water rose at a rate of nearly one foot per hour. The resulting great flood destroyed Linn City. The walls of the houses and stores began to shudder and cave in. Other buildings were picked up and swept away by the powerful deluge. When the flood ended on December 14, only three homes remained standing in Linn City.
No one died in the Linn City flood, but the destruction was simply too great for the town to recover. The citizens gathered what few possessions were not swept away by the floodwaters and moved out of town. Linn City was abandoned as a ghost town. Today the city of West Linn stands about where Linn City once was.
Public domain sources.
This document includes text from the following public domain sources.


Isthmus of Chignecto

The Isthmus of Chignecto is an isthmus bordering the Maritime provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia that connects the Nova Scotia peninsula with North America.
The isthmus separates the waters of Chignecto Bay, a sub-basin of the Bay of Fundy, from those of Baie Verte, a sub-basin of the Northumberland Strait that is an arm of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The isthmus stretches from its northerly point at an area in the Petitcodiac River valley near the city of Dieppe, New Brunswick to its southerly point at an area near the town of Amherst, Nova Scotia. At its narrowest point between Amherst and Tidnish, the isthmus measures 24 kilometres wide. Because of its strategic position, it has been important to competing forces through much of its history of occupation.
The name "Chignecto" derives from the Mi'kmaq name "Siknikt", meaning "drainage place"; the name of the Mi'kmaq District where the isthmus is located.
Geography.
The majority of the lands comprising the isthmus have low elevation above sea level; a large portion comprises the Tantramar Marshes, as well as tidal rivers, mud flats, inland freshwater marshes, coastal saltwater marshes, and mixed forest. Several prominent ridges rise above the surrounding low land and marshes along the Bay of Fundy shore, namely the Fort Lawrence Ridge (in Nova Scotia), the Aulac Ridge, the Sackville Ridge, and the Memramcook Ridge (in New Brunswick).
In contrast to the Bay of Fundy shoreline in the west, the Northumberland Strait shoreline in the east is largely forested, with serpentine tidal estuaries such as the Tidnish River penetrating inland. The narrowest point on the Northumberland shoreline is opposite the Cumberland Basin at Baie Verte. If sea levels were to rise by 12 meters, the isthmus would be flooded, effectively making mainland Nova Scotia an island.
Transportation.
As the Isthmus of Chignecto was a key surface transportation route since the 17th century, French and later British colonists built military roads across it to the Tantramar Marshes and along the strategic ridges.
In 1872, the Intercolonial Railway of Canada constructed a mainline between Halifax, Nova Scotia and Moncton, New Brunswick across the southern portion of the isthmus. It skirted the edge of the Bay of Fundy while crossing the Tantramar Marshes between Amherst, Nova Scotia and Sackville, New Brunswick.
In 1886 a railway line was built from Sackville across the isthmus to Port Elgin and on to Cape Tormentine. The latter was a port for the iceboat service. In 1917 Canadian National Railways established a rail ferry service to Prince Edward Island to connect with the Prince Edward Island Railway.
In the mid-1880s, the isthmus was also the site of one of Canada's earliest mega-projects: construction of a broad-gauge railway from the port of Amherst to the Northumberland Strait at Tidnish for carrying small cargo and passenger ships. This ship railway was never successfully operational, and construction was abandoned shortly before completion.
In the 1950s, while construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway was underway, a group of industrialists and politicians from the Maritimes called for a Chignecto Canal to be built as a shortcut for ocean-going ships travelling between Saint John and U.S. ports to the Great Lakes to avoid travelling around Nova Scotia. The project, while endorsed by the both the second Flemming government of New Brunswick and the Robichaud government that succeeded it, never progressed beyond the survey stage.
In the early 1960s, the Trans-Canada Highway was built on the isthmus to connect with Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Route 2 in New Brunswick and Highway 104 in Nova Scotia were built parallel to the existing Canadian National Railway trackage; this inter-provincial highway was upgraded to a 4-lane expressway in the 1990s. Route 16 in New Brunswick was built from an interchange with Route 2 in Aulac to the ferry terminal at Cape Tormentine. This was subsequently modified in 1997 to connect with the Confederation Bridge at Cape Jourimain.
History.
The first European settlements on the isthmus were French. The isthmus was the location of a growing Acadian farming community called Beaubassin. The isthmus became in 1713 the site of the historic dividing line between the British colony of Nova Scotia and the French territory. French military forces established Fort Beauséjour on the Aulac Ridge in 1749 in response to the British construction of an outpost called Fort Lawrence on the ridge immediately to the east.
Between the two ridges was a tidal stream called the Missaquash River, which France generally accepted to be the boundary between the territories. The powers had never determined and agreed to an official boundary. France also constructed Fort Gaspereau on the shores of the Northumberland Strait to effectively control travel on the isthmus.
King William's War.
During King William's War, the first of the four French and Indian Wars, the English colonial militia leader Benjamin Church led a devastating raid on the Isthmus of Chignecto at Beaubassin, in retaliation for an earlier French and native raid against Pemaquid, Maine (present day Bristol, Maine) earlier that year. Church and four hundred men (50 to 150 of whom were Indians, likely Iroquois) arrived offshore of Beaubassin on September 20. They managed to get ashore and surprise the Acadians. Many fled while one confronted Church with papers showing they had signed an oath of allegiance in 1690 to the English king.
Church was unconvinced. He burned a number of buildings, killed inhabitants, looted their household goods, and slaughtered their livestock. Governor Villebon reported that
"the English stayed at Beaubassin nine whole days without drawing any supplies from their vessels, and even those settlers to whom they had shown a pretence of mercy were left with empty houses and barns and nothing else except the clothes on their backs."
Queen Anne's War.
Major Church returned to Acadia during Queen Anne's War, in retaliation for the French and their Abenaki allies' sorties during the Northeast Coast Campaign (1703) and the Raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts. They killed many English colonists at Deerfield and took more than 100 captive. The captives were mostly women and children; they were forced on an overland march from western Massachusetts to Montreal. Some were held by the Indians for ransom, as raiding was active on both sides. Others were adopted by Mohawk families at the Catholic village south of the French city. Some adults, such as the minister of Deerfield, were redeemed by their communities or families paying ransom, but the process sometimes took years. His daughter Emily, adopted when a young teenager, never returned to live with her English family, as she married a Mohawk man and had a family with him.
On July 17, 1704 Church raided Chignecto. The Acadian settlers returned some gunfire but quickly sought shelter in the woods. Church burned 40 empty houses and killed more than 200 cattle and other livestock.
On this campaign against Acadia, Church also raided Castine, Maine, Grand Pré, and Pisiguit (present-day Windsor/Falmouth).
The British took control of present-day mainland Nova Scotia under the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), and Beaubassin became part of British territory.
King George's War.
During King George's War, the French used Chignecto as the staging area for their raids on British Nova Scotia. It was the gathering place for De Ramezay prior to the Siege of Annapolis Royal (1744). Chignecto was also the base of Coulon de Valliers prior to the Battle of Grand Pre (1747).
Father Le Loutre's War.
During Father Le Loutre's War, conflict in Acadia continued. On September 18, 1749, several Mi'kmaq and Maliseet killed three Englishmen at Chignecto. Seven natives were also killed in the skirmish.
In May 1750, Lawrence was unsuccessful in getting a base at Chignecto because Le Loutre burned the village of Beaubassin, preventing Lawrence from using its supplies to establish a fort. (According to the historian Frank Patterson, the Acadians at Cobequid also burned their homes as they retreated from the British to Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia in 1754.) Lawrence retreated, but he returned in September 1750.
On September 3, Rous, Lawrence and Gorham led over 700 men to Chignecto, where Mi’kmaq and Acadians opposed their landing. They killed twenty British, who in turn killed several Mi’kmaq. Le Loutre's militia eventually withdrew, burning the rest of the Acadians' crops and houses as they went. Le Loutre and the Acadian militia leader Joseph Broussard resisted the British assault. The British troops defeated the resistance and began construction of Fort Lawrence near the site of the ruins of Beaubassin. The work on the fort proceeded rapidly and they completed the facility within weeks. To limit the British to peninsular Nova Scotia, the French also began to fortify the Chignecto and its approaches; they constructed Fort Beauséjour and two satellite forts: one at present-day Port Elgin, New Brunswick (Fort Gaspareaux) and the other at present-day Saint John, New Brunswick (Fort Menagoueche).
During these months, 35 Mi'kmaq and Acadians ambushed Ranger Captain Francis Bartelo, killing him and six of his men while taking seven others captive. The Mi'kmaq conducted ritual torture of the captives throughout the night, which had a chilling effect on the New Englanders.
The British retaliated for the Raid on Dartmouth (1751) by sending several armed companies to Chignecto. They killed a few French defenders and breached the dikes, allowing the low lands to flood. Hundreds of acres of crops were ruined, which was disastrous for the Acadians and the French troops. In the summer of 1752, Father Le Loutre went to Quebec and then on to France to raise funds and supplies to re-build the dikes. He returned in the spring of 1753.
In May 1753, Natives scalped two British soldiers at Fort Lawrence.
Seven Years' War.
A British fleet of three warships and thirty-three transports, carrying 2,100 soldiers from Boston, Massachusetts, landed at Fort Lawrence on June 3, 1755. They attacked Fort Beauséjour the following day. The French forces abandoned Fort Gaspareaux on June 16, 1755, choosing instead to re-garrison at Fortress Louisbourg. This battle proved to be one of the key victories for the British in the Seven Years' War, in which Great Britain gained control of all of New France and Acadia.
On the isthmus, the British abandoned Fort Lawrence and took over the better-constructed Fort Beauséjour, which they renamed Fort Cumberland. Shortly afterwards, the Great Upheaval began when British forces started rounding up French settlers during the Bay of Fundy Campaign (1755). Most of these settlers would be deported, with their villages burned behind them to prevent their return.
During the Seven Years' War, at Fort Moncton (formerly Fort Gaspareaux), one of Captain Silvaus Cobb's soldiers was shot from his horse and killed in an ambush. Cobb assembled 100 troops but was unable to catch the Mi’kmaq. Monckton dispatched 200 men from Fort Lawrence but was also unsuccessful in catching any Mi’kmaq.
On September 15, Majors Jedidiah Preble and Benjamin Coldthwait took 400 men to destroy an Acadian village a short distance outside of Fort Monckton.
On January 20, Boishébert sent François Boucher de Niverville to Baie Verte to burn a British schooner. Niverville killed seven soldiers and took one prisoner before burning the ship. Meanwhile, Boishébert and his 120 Acadians and Mi’kmaq tried to set up a siege of Fort Cumberland, but ended up escaping capture in a possible ambush.
The Mi'kmaq and Acadians attacked Fort Cumberland on April 26, 1756. During the following two days, nine British soldiers were killed and scalped.
When Boishébert moved against Fort Monckton, the British abandoned it and burned it to the ground so that it could not be used by the French.
On July 20, 1757, Mi’kmaq captured two of Gorham's rangers outside Fort Cumberland.
On September 6, Monckton directed Lt. Colonel Hunt Walsh to take the 28th regiment and a company of rangers to Baie Verte to burn what was left of it. When they arrived, it was already vacated.
Yorkshire emigration.
In 1758 Governor Lawrence issued a proclamation inviting New Englanders to come to Nova Scotia, settle on vacated Acadian lands, and take up free land grants. He also extended the invitation to New England soldiers serving in Canada whose enlistments had expired and who were planning on returning home. Such settlers became known as the New England Planters. Following the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, the British created three 100,000-acre (400 km2) townships on the isthmus: Amherst, Sackville and Cumberland, which would later be dissolved into Cumberland County.
The drive to attract settlers from New England was not immediately successful. After a few small groups arrived in 1760 and 1761, some families returned home, and the British government decided to look elsewhere for settlers. Between 1772 and 1775, more than 20 ships arrived from England, carrying upwards of 1,000 settlers from Yorkshire to the new townships. The descendants of the Yorkshire emigration continue to be prominent in the area's development and history.
American Revolutionary War.
In October and November 1776, local guerrilla and colonial American forces led by Jonathan Eddy and John Allan attempted to take over Fort Cumberland and the Tantramar region. Eddy's attacking force consisted of "about twenty" Americans from Machias, Maine, 27 Yankee settlers from the Saint John River valley, 140 Malisseet and four Mi'kmaq, 21 Acadians from the Memramcook Valley and the Allen family farm, and about 120 farmers from Cumberland, Onslow, and Pictou. Eddy had insufficient forces to capture the fort in a direct assault so he besieged the fort instead. Rebel sympathizers from Sackville burned some surrounding buildings. After three weeks, British forces dispatched from Halifax and Windsor routed the invaders.
The British burned eight of the rebel Acadians' houses and barns at Inverma Farm, Jolicoeur. With winter coming rapidly, the Acadians were forced to relocate with their families to Memramcook. Eddy, Allan and many of the other English-speaking rebels were also expelled from Nova Scotia, but the American colonial government rewarded their efforts with land grants in Maine and Ohio.


The Ansonia

The Ansonia is a building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, located at 2109 Broadway, between West 73rd and West 74th Streets. It was originally built as a residential hotel by William Earle Dodge Stokes, the Phelps-Dodge copper heir and shareholder in the Ansonia Clock Company, and it was named for his grandfather, the industrialist Anson Greene Phelps. In 1897, Stokes commissioned French architect Paul Emile Duboy to design the grandest hotel in Manhattan.
Stokes listed himself as "architect-in-chief" for the project and hired Duboy, a sculptor who designed and made the ornamental sculptures on the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, to draw up the plans. New Orleans architect Martin Shepard served as draftsman and assistant superintendent of construction on the project. The assignee of the contractor proceed against Stokes in 1907, suing for $90,000. But Stokes defended himself, explaining that Duboy was in an insane asylum in Paris, and it was his belief that he was insane when, in 1903, he signed the final certificate on the plans, and should not have been making commitments in Stokes's name concerning the hotel.
In what might be the earliest harbinger of the current developments in urban farming, Stokes established a small farm on the roof of the hotel, where he kept farm animals next to his personal apartment. There was a cattle elevator, which enabled dairy cows to be stabled on the roof.
Stokes had a Utopian vision for the Ansonia—that it could be self-sufficient, or at least contribute to its own support—which led to perhaps the strangest New York apartment amenity ever. "The farm on the roof," Weddie Stokes wrote years later, "included about 500 chickens, many ducks, about six goats and a small bear." Every day, a bellhop delivered free fresh eggs to all the tenants, and any surplus was sold cheaply to the public in the basement arcade. Not much about this feature charmed the city fathers, however, and in 1907, the Department of Health shut down the farm in the sky.
History.
The Ansonia was a residential hotel. The residents lived in "luxurious" apartments with multiple bedrooms, parlors, libraries, and formal dining rooms that were often round or oval. Apartments featured views north and south along Broadway, high ceilings, "elegant" moldings, and bay windows. There were three thousand rooms. Arrangements could be made to rent a suite varying in size from a room and a bath to thirty rooms. Some of these suites were rented for $14,000 a year, the equivalent of more than $400,000 in 2018. The smaller units, with one bedroom, parlor, and bath, lacked kitchens. There was a central kitchen and serving kitchens on every floor, so that the residents could enjoy the services of professional chefs while dining in their own apartments. Besides the usual array of tearooms, restaurants, and a grand ballroom, the Ansonia had Turkish baths and a lobby fountain with live seals.
Erected between 1899 and 1904, it was the largest residential hotel of its day and the first air-conditioned hotel in New York. The building has an eighteen-story steel-frame structure. The exterior is decorated in the Beaux-Art style with a Parisian style mansard roof. The Ansonia features round corner-towers or turrets and an open stairwell that sweeps up to a domed skylight.
The building's copper cornices were removed during World War II and melted down for the war effort.
The Ansonia has had many celebrated residents, including baseball player Babe Ruth; writer Theodore Dreiser, in 1912; the leader of the Bahá'í Faith `Abdu'l-Bahá; Nobel prize winner in literature Isaac Bashevitz Singer; conductor Arturo Toscanini; composer Igor Stravinsky; fashion designer Koos van den Akker; and Italian tenor Enrico Caruso.
By the mid-twentieth-century, the grand apartments had mostly been divided into studios and one-bedroom units, almost all of which retained their original architectural detail. After a short debate in the 1960s, a proposal to demolish the building was fought off by its many musical and artistic residents.
From 1977 until 1980, The Ansonia Hotel's basement was home to Plato's Retreat, an open door swinger sex club. Prior to Plato's Retreat, the building housed the Continental Baths, operated by Steve Ostrow, a gay bathhouse where Bette Midler provided musical entertainment early in her career, with Barry Manilow as her accompanist.
In 1980, the building was inducted to the National Register of Historic Places.
In 1992, the Ansonia was converted to a condominium apartment building with 430 apartments. By 2007, most of the rent-controlled apartment tenants had moved out, and the small apartments were sold to buyers who purchased clusters of small apartments and threw them together to recreate grand apartments.
The Ansonia is home to part of the New York campus of the American Musical and Dramatic Academy.
Education.
Children living in the Ansonia are eligible to attend schools run by the New York City Department of Education. The building is zoned to P.S. 87, the William Sherman School, but it is unzoned for middle school. Residents of the Ansonia may contact Region 10 to determine the middle-school assignments.


Jobes Milling Company

Jobes Milling Company was a flour mill based in the St. Johns neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. It was constructed in 1904 by William Van Zant Jobes who relocated to St. Johns from Spokane, Washington. He died in 1907 and his sons took over the mill. In 1910, William Haskell Jobes died leaving sole ownership to his brother Allan R. Jobes. He sold the mill in 1918 and died three years later. The Rose City Flour Mill operated the mill as a subsidiary until the building was demolished in 1930.
History.
William Van Zant Jobes of Rockford, Illinois erected the Jobes Milling Company in St. Johns, Oregon in 1904 after leaving his son's flour mill in Spokane, Washington. At its inception, the mill could produce 400 barrels of flour a day. During a citywide fire in 1905, the mill was spared damage. Jobes ran for mayor of St. Johns in 1905, but lost to W. H. King. That same year he was discovered by a woman from Washington who said he failed to pay back a loan she made out to him in Spokane. According to a city attorney, Jobes used the loan to purchase lumber for a new mill in Spokane but sold it when he decided to relocate to St. Johns, Oregon. Jobes died in his office at the mill on July 9, 1907.
Following his death his sons, Allan R. and William Haskell Jobes took over the ownership of the mill. They sued the City of St. Johns in 1910 saying that a planned sewer would runoff into their property. A judge allowed the city to continue with the construction. William Haskell Jobes died of heart disease in 1911, leaving his brother Allan R. Jobes as the sole owner. By 1917 the mill was producing 500 barrels of flour per day. In 1918 the mill was purchased by the Rose City Flour Mill, who used it as a subsidiary. The new owners planned to double the production of barrels per day. Allan R. Jobes died in 1920. The flour mill was demolished in 1930 and a lumber mill was constructed in its place.


Ben Holladay

Benjamin Holladay (October 14, 1819 – July 8, 1887) was an American transportation businessman responsible for creating the Overland Stage to California during the height of the 1849 California Gold Rush. Ben Holladay created a stagecoach empire and he is known in history as the "Stagecoach King". A native of Kentucky, he also was hired as a private courier to General Alexander Doniphan of Missouri. Doniphan refused point-blank to carry out orders to kill the Mormons during the 1838 Mormon War in Missouri. His transportation empire later included steamships and railroads in Oregon.
Early life.
Holladay was born October 14, 1819, in Nicholas County, Kentucky. His father, William Holladay (born in what is now Spotsylvania County, Virginia) was a third-generation American, descended from John "The Ranger" Holladay. William migrated to Bourbon County, Kentucky, where he was a guide for wagon trains through the Cumberland Gap. Benjamin's mother was Margaret "Peggy" Hughes. Benjamin Holladay learned the freight business at an early age and left home in his late teens for a road trip to Santa Fe in what was then Mexico.
He then settled in Weston, Missouri, where he worked as a store clerk before serving as courier during the 1838 Mormon War for the state militia. After working at the store for a few years he opened a tavern and hotel in 1840, as well as starting what would become the McCormick Distilling Company, which claims to be the oldest distillery still operating in the same location. Business boomed with his supplies for General Stephen Watts Kearney during the Mexican–American War.
Transportation.
Holladay moved to California in 1852 where he was to operate of stage lines. Holladay acquired the Pony Express in 1862 after it failed to garner a postal contract for its owners, Russell, Majors and Waddell. In 1861 he won a postal contract for mail service to Salt Lake City, Utah, and established the Overland Stage Route along the Overland Trail to avoid confrontations with American Indians on the northern Oregon Trail and Pony Express routes. He added significant infrastructure along the trail, including Rattlesnake Station. Traveling to New York from San Francisco in July, 1862 Holladay was almost killed when the "SS Golden Gate" sank off Manzanillo.
Between the Overland Trail and six other routes, Holladay received government subsidies totaling nearly $6 million over a four-year period. Holladay sold his stage routes to Wells Fargo Express in 1866 for $1.5 million.
In August 1868, Holladay moved to Oregon, where he had organized the construction of a railroad along the Willamette River, purchasing the illegally incorporated Oregon Central Railroad of Salem, turning it into the Oregon and California Railroad Company. In April 1868, construction started on lines along both the sides of the river.
Holladay's "Eastsiders" completed of track before the competition, using "every trick known to man" in the construction, including bribing the Oregon Legislature in October 1868. The competition subsequently sold out to him in 1870. Holladay financed the operation via German bankers, who bought $6.4 million of bonds (out of a total $10.95 million).
He won a federal subsidy and built the Oregon and California Railroad as far south as Roseburg, as well as controlling the Willamette River commerce through the Portland Dock and Warehouse Company, the Oregon Transfer Company, and the Oregon Steamship Company.
The Panic of 1873 financial crisis stopped the effort. Holladay lost most of his fortune in the stock market collapse on September 18, 1873. In 1874, Henry Villard was sent by Holladay's German investors when he was behind on bond interest payments. In 1876, Villard took over the railroad.
Personal life.
Villard described Holladay as "illiterate, coarse, boastful, false, and cunning." Holladay's attorney, John Doniphan, described him as possessing "many of the characteristics of Napoleon." He was known for having "the bearing of one born to command", and for "being clever, shrewd, cunning, illiterate, coarse, and completely unscrupulous". Joseph Gaston described him as being "wholly destitute of fixed principles of honesty, morality, or common decency." After buying a large home from Doctor Rodney Glisan, "he remodelled it and immediately installed a harem of high class prostitutes."
Holladay and his first wife, Notley Ann Calvert (1824–1873), who he married in 1839, had two daughters who married members of European nobility. Their daughters were:
After the death of his first wife, he remarried to Lydia Esther Campbell (1849–1889), a daughter of Hamilton Campbell and Harriet (née Biddle) Campbell. They were the parents of:
Holladay died in Portland, Oregon, on July 8, 1887, and is buried at Mount Calvary Cemetery in that city.
Legacy.
An ordinance came into effect on June 1, 1866 renaming McGaa Street in Denver, Colorado to Holladay to honor the tycoon. At the heart of Holladay Street was Denver's red light district. Concerned relatives petitioned the city to strip Holladay's name from the street, which had become widely known as 'the most sinful street in the West.'
The city passed an ordinance on June 1, 1889 renaming Holladay Street to Market Street, a tongue in cheek reference to the activities that took place there. This brought much concern to the residents on Market in the more respectable areas to the north. In September 1899, the city changed the name of Market Street north of 23rd to Walnut.


James A. Ten Eyck

James A. Ten Eyck (October 16, 1851 – February 11, 1938) was a crew coach at United States Naval Academy and Syracuse University. He was born in Tompkins Cove, New York and is the father of Edward H. "Ned" Ten Eyck, who coached crew for the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1907 to 1910, and took over coaching duties at Syracuse from his father after his death. He was inducted into the Greater Syracuse Sports Hall of Fame on October 21, 2002.
Coaching career.
Ten Eyck began his coaching career at the Naval Academy from 1899 to 1901. He moved to Syracuse University in 1903 after Edwin Sweetland resigned the post. As Syracuse coach, he captured ten National Championships.
For his coaching accomplishments James Ten Eyck was honored in several ways. The Ten Eyck Trophy, awarded to the all-points champion at the Intercollegiate Rowing Association Regatta is named for him. In 1937, Syracuse named the boathouse for the rowing teams the James Ten Eyck Memorial Boathouse.


Van Cortlandt House Museum

The Van Cortlandt House Museum, also known as the Frederick Van Cortlandt House or simply the Van Cortlandt House, is the oldest building in the borough of the Bronx in New York City. It is located in the southwestern portion of Van Cortlandt Park, accessed via Broadway (U.S. Route 9).
The house was built in 1748 in the Georgian style by Africans enslaved by Frederick Van Cortlandt (1699–1749) for his family. Van Cortlandt died before its completion and the property was inherited by his son, James Van Cortlandt (1727–1787). It is a -story, L-shaped house with a double hipped roof. It was built of dressed fieldstone and is one of the nation's finest examples of the high Georgian style in stone.
The Van Cortlandts, a mercantile family prominent in New York affairs, established a grain plantation and grist mill on the property. The house was used during the Revolutionary War by the Comte de Rochambeau, Marquis de Lafayette, and George Washington. In 1889, the family sold the property to the City of New York as part of Van Cortlandt Park's creation. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1967 and became a National Historic Landmark in 1976. The house has been operated as a historic house museum since 1897, the first in the city and fourth in the country.


Harry Charles Moore

Harry Charles Moore (May 5, 1941 – May 16, 1997) was executed for the 1992 murders of Thomas Lauri and Barbara Cunningham. He was the second person executed by the State of Oregon since 1978. He had three children; Jennifer Moore, Aaron Speer, and Lawny Moore.
The crime.
Harry Charles Moore had been married to two of his nieces. Moore shot Thomas Lauri four times in the face with a 9mm handgun in front of a Salem post office. Moore then drove to Cunningham's house and shot her in the stomach. He then fired three more rounds into her head. Cunningham was Moore's half-sister and Lauri was her former husband. Moore said he had killed his relatives because he thought they would move to Las Vegas with his estranged wife and infant daughter, and expose them to a life of prostitution and drugs.
Sentencing and execution.
Harry Charles Moore was sentenced to death on July 20, 1993. Moore later threatened to sue anyone who tried to stop his execution. He also appealed to the Oregon Supreme Court to drop the automatic appeal of his sentence. Moore's last meal consisted of two green apples, two red apples, a tray of fresh fruit, and two 2-liter bottles of Coke.
Just prior to the execution Moore asked the warden if he could borrow the keys to the prison, promising to "bring them right back." The request was denied. As Moore lay dying, he whispered: "I want the last word I say to be Jennifer, J-e-n-n-i-f-e-r." Jennifer is the name of Moore's daughter by his niece Cindy Moore. He had a son prior to Jennifer, and another son after Jennifer.
Moore was executed by lethal injection on May 16, 1997.


Fortuna (steamboat)

The steamboat Fortuna was a vessel that operated on Lake Washington in the first part of the 20th century.
Construction.
"Fortuna" was built in 1904 at a shipyard on the west side of Lake Washington two blocks south of Leschi Park. She was 106.9 feet in length overall, and rated at 81 tons. The vessel is reported to have been acquired by Anderson Steamboat Company at a cost $31,500 in December 1906.
"Fortuna" was built for Captain John Anderson to join his fleet of steamboats on Lake Washington, operating under the name of the Anderson Steamboat Company. Anderson at that point may have been operating in partnership with the Seattle Street Railway. "Fortuna" had compound engines that had been built at Seattle Machine Works.
"Fortuna" was launched on March 31, 1906. She was christened by Miss Daisy Johnson, the 13-year old daughter of E. E. Johnson, of Seattle Machine Works. A sea wall collapsed under her weight during the launch itself and she was stuck on land. Anderson steamers "Cyrene" and "Xanthus" towed her off the beach later that day without incident.
Fortuna was the Roman name for the goddess of fortune. Captain Anderson named his vessels after classical gods, starting with "Xanthus" and "Cyrene".
"Fortuna" was known for her distinctive chime whistle, which had been personally prepared by Captain Anderson, filing away at the whistle’s pipe until the sound suited him. Later the whistle was transferred to another Anderson boat, the "Sightseer", which became one of the last steamboats of the Mosquito Fleet to operate on Puget Sound.
Conversion to ferry.
Publicly owned ferries (owned by King County on Lake Washington ran Captain Anderson out of the steamboat business by about the time of the First World War, so he sold his interest in the Anderson Steamboat Company. Later, Captain Anderson operated "Fortuna" and other former vessels of his as a lessee of King County.
In 1919, "Fortuna" was reconstructed into a ferry at Captain Anderson’s shipyard at Houghton. Unlike most purpose-built ferries, "Fortuna" remained a single-ender. Automobiles however could drive right through the once-beautiful steamer. The procedure was for "Fortuna" to dock bow-on at Roanoke, on Mercer Island, have autos drive on, then back out and head for the Seattle ferry dock at Leschi. On reaching Leschi, to unload the autos, Fortuna had to be turned and backed into the dock. This took great skill by her captain and engineer. "Fortuna" was ultimately judged too small for her route, and was returned to the county by Captain Anderson's Lake Washington Ferries company.
Final disposition.
On April 30, 1928 King County sold "Fortuna" at auction. King Shipbuilding Company of Seattle paid $1,150 for her. The leading source states that she lasted until 1938, but is silent as to her later career or ultimate disposition (probably scrapping).


Philip Church

Philip Schuyler Church (1778–1861) was a judge, landowner, and founder of the town of Angelica, New York. From 1798 to 1800, during the Quasi-War with France, he was a captain in the U.S. Army and "aide-de-camp" to Alexander Hamilton, his uncle, who was then Major General of the Army.
Early life and education.
Church was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on April 14, 1778. He was the oldest child of Angelica Schuyler Church and John Barker Church, a British-born merchant and member of Parliament.
As a small child, he moved with his family from New York to Paris, where he and his mother were painted together by John Trumbull. After 18 months, the Church family moved to London, and Philip was educated for six years at Eton College. He began the study of law at the Middle Temple before returning to New York in 1797.
In New York, he continued his law studies, working in the offices of Nathaniel Pendleton. He also served as a U.S. Army captain and was appointed "aide-de-camp" to Alexander Hamilton from 1798 to 1800, while Hamilton was Major General and Inspector General of the Army during the Quasi-War with France. His mother, Angelica, was the sister of Hamilton's wife Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton.
Prior to his admission to practice law in New York, Church served as second to his cousin Philip Hamilton in his fatal 1801 duel with George Eacker.
Settlement of Allegany County.
In May 1800, at the age of 22, Church became a major landowner in western New York, with a tract of of land in present-day Allegany County and Genesee County, New York that had been a portion of the Phelps and Gorham Purchase.
Church's father John Barker Church had loaned money to financier Robert Morris, and accepted a mortgage on the tract in May 1796 as security for the debt owed to him by Morris. After Morris failed to pay the mortgage, John Barker Church foreclosed and sent Philip to Canandaigua in May 1800 to attend the foreclosure sale, where Philip made a successful bid and acquired the tract.
Philip Church traveled in 1801 to the area with his surveyor Moses Van Campen and four others to take possession of the land. Church selected specific acreage for a planned village along the Genesee River, with plots and design to be reminiscent of Paris. The plan included a circular road enclosing a village park at the center of town, streets radiating from the circular road to form a star, and five churches situated around the circle. Philip named the village Angelica, after his mother, and began to open it up for sale to settlers. By 1803, the village was populated with log cabin homes, including Church's, and he had erected a sawmill and a gristmill.
On February 4, 1805, Church married Anna Matilda Stewart (1786–1865), the daughter of General Walter Stewart. Soon after their wedding in Philadelphia, the two settled in the village of Angelica, where a small whitewashed house (locally known as the "White House") had already been built for the couple on the banks of the Genesee River.
In 1806, Angelica and John Barker Church began construction on a thirty-room mansion nearby, called Belvidere, which still stands as a privately owned home on the banks of the Genesee in Belmont, New York, near the town of Angelica. Although they had intended to make it their summer home, it instead became the residence of Philip and Anna Church when it was partially completed in 1810.
Career and later life.
Church was still under 30 when he was appointed the first Judge of the New York County Court for Allegany County, in 1807.
He died in Angelica on January 7, 1861, at the age of 82.
"The New York Times" cited the Erie Railway as Church's "great work to which for a number of years he devoted his time and applied his energies... which he lived to see completed and the process of transformation which followed fairly begun." The "Times" also credited Church with being the first to suggest the idea of the Genesee Valley Canal, and influential in its completion.
Children.
Philip and Anna Church had nine children. These included:


Bowers Airport

Bowers Field is a county-owned, public-use airport in Kittitas County, Washington, United States. It is located two nautical miles (4 km) north of the central business district of Ellensburg, Washington. This airport is included in the National Plan of Integrated Airport Systems for 2011–2015, which categorized it as a "general aviation" facility.
History.
The airfield was established in 1943 as Ellensburg Army Airfield and manned by the 302d Base Headquarters and Air Base Squadron. Though planned as a fighter airfield for Fourth Air Force, it was taken over by Air Technical Service Command as a maintenance and supply depot, supporting transient Lend-Lease aircraft being flown to Alaska for subsequent transfer to the Soviet Union. The airfield had one auxiliary field, located at , which is now abandoned, though remains of a runway are still visible in aerial photography.
Military use ended in February 1945, and the airfield was turned over to War Assets Administration for subsequent transfer to Kittitas County for development into a civil airport.
Bowers Field is named in honor of Ensign Keith Bowers, the first man from Kittitas County killed in World War II. Bowers was at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked by the Japanese on December 7, 1941. The field became a training base for military pilots during the war.
Established in 1975, Central Washington University's aviation program is the only fully accredited public university aviation program in the Pacific Northwest. More than 90 percent of the takeoffs and landings at Bowers Field are tied to Central Washington University's aviation program. Central Washington University took over hangar space and some fixed-base functions at Bowers Field last year. At the beginning of fall quarter, Central Washington University began hiring its own flight instructors, and started leasing and purchasing its own planes. The school earned its pilot school certification from the Federal Aviation Administration.
Today, large numbers of former aircraft dispersal areas are still maintained, along with an extensive system of taxiways with what appear to be modern aircraft shelters.
Facilities and aircraft.
Bowers Field covers an area of 1,032 acres (418 ha) at an elevation of 1,764 feet (538 m) above mean sea level. It has one runways: 11/29 is 4,301 by 150 feet (1,311 x 46 m) with a concrete surface. The former runway 7/25 was 5,590 by 150 feet (1,704 x 46 m) with an asphalt surface, but was permanently closed in June 2018.
For the 12-month period ending May 30, 2012, the airport had 60,445 aircraft operations, an average of 165 per day: 97% general aviation, 3% air taxi, and <1% military.
At that time there were 48 aircraft based at this airport: 90% single-engine, 8% multi-engine, and 2% glider.


Kootenai (sternwheeler)

Kootenai was a sternwheel steamboat that ran on the Arrow Lakes in British Columbia from 1885 to 1895. "Kootenai" was the second sternwheeler to run on the Arrow Lakes. This vessel should not be confused with the similarly named "Kootenay", an 1897 sternwheeler that also ran on the Arrow Lakes.
Design and construction.
The firm of Paquet & Smith built the vessel's frames in Portland, Oregon of Douglas fir. The frames were then shipped to the Little Dalles (now known as Northport), in the Washington Territory on the Columbia River near the border with British Columbia. Once the frames arrived, Henderson and McCartney, contractors for the Canadian Pacific Railway and shipbuilder E.G. Thompson assembled the rest of the hull with planks and timbers sawn on site from the local pine. The steamboat's engines were third hand, having been built in 1877 by Willamette Iron Works in Portland, Oregon, and previously installed in the "McMinnville", running on the lower Columbia River, and the Pend Oreille Lake steamer "Katie Hallett".
Operations on Arrow Lakes route.
Steam navigation on the inland waters of northern inland Washington and southeastern British Columbia was seasonal, and took place generally from May 15 to October 30 of each year. This was because ice or low water blocked river and lake travel at other times. Companies endeavored to launch steamboats early in the year to take advantage of the working season. The launch of "Kootenai" in late April 1885, and her first voyage in May was an example of this seasonally driven timing.
On May 7, 1885, Captain A.L. Pingston (sometimes spelled "Pingstone") who had also served as captain of "Forty-Nine" some ten or fifteen years before, took "Kootenai" on her first trip north up the Columbia River into British Columbia, carrying supplies and building equipment for the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. This route went north through the lower and upper Arrow Lakes and then further north up the Columbia to the town of Farwell, later known as Revelstoke. Farwell was a key location on the route of the C.P.R. as the place where the transcontinental line crossed the Columbia River. The first run up the river and lakes took "Kootenai" thirty hours. Other than the "Forty-Nine" in the 1870s, and the small steam launches "Midge" and, possibly, "Alpha" in 1884 and 1885, no other steamboats had made this run. On the first run Captain Pingston had to look for the channel and negotiate work up through rapids by attaching a line to a tree or rock on the bank and cranking the steamer upstream using the capstan. Later trips took less time as the crew and captain became more accustomed to the route.
On September 4, 1885, "Kootenai" ran on the rocks at Little Dalles, but was salvaged. "Kootenai" was laid up for the winter at Little Dalles. Captain Pingston was accidentally shot and killed on April 27, 1886, and "Kootenai" made only one run to Revelstoke that year, under Capt. Nathaniel Lane. After that, "Kootenai" was laid up until 1890, when she was purchased by the Columbia and Kootenay Steam Navigation Company for $10,000 in promissory notes. The new owners worked "Kootenai" in the first part of the season of 1890 as a passenger and freight boat, making enough money in the first few trips to pay off the notes. When the sternwheeler "Lytton" came into service later in the 1890 season, "Kootenai" was used mostly as freight boat. "Kootenai" made 27 trips up and down the lakes in the 1890 season, starting on May 13 and ending on August 12.
Sunk, raised, and dismantled.
On December 3, 1895 "Kootenai" ran onto a rock near Bannock Point and Wigwam, BC on Upper Arrow Lake. Although the steamer was floated off, the vessel was not considered worth repairing. "Kootenai" was towed to Nakusp, BC and dismantled. The steamer's machinery and fittings were used in building the sternwheeler "Trail".


8th Parliament of British Columbia

The 8th Legislative Assembly of British Columbia sat from 1899 to 1900. The members were elected in the British Columbia general election held in July 1898. Robert Beaven was asked to form a government but was not able to garner sufficient support, so Charles Augustus Semlin became premier. After a major government bill was defeated in February 1900, Semlin's government was dismissed. Joseph Martin succeeded Semlin but his government was subsequently defeated on a motion of no-confidence. An election followed later that year.
William Thomas Forster served as speaker.
Members of the 8th General Assembly.
The following members were elected to the assembly in 1898:
Notes:
By-elections.
By-elections were held for the following members appointed to the provincial cabinet, as was required at the time:
By-elections were held to replace members for various other reasons:
Notes:


Catholic Indian Missionary Association

The Catholic Indian Missionary Association was a Roman Catholic fund-raising organization that supported Catholic schools and mission work among American Indians in the United States.
History.
In 1875, Catholic lay women organized the association in Washington, D.C., and other major U.S. cities, with Jean-Baptiste Brouillet as its director and treasurer and Ellen Ewing Sherman as its principal organizer and fundraiser. It raised $48,700 in donations and bequests for the "Catholic Indian Mission Fund", which supported the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions and Catholic missions and schools on Indian reservations. The chapters in St. Louis, Missouri and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania raised the bulk of its funds and $6,000 was the most raised in any one year. The association ceased in 1887, when the Catholic Bureau experienced success in acquiring government contracts for the Catholic schools from the Office of Indian Affairs.