Spokane Garry
[2] He was the son of the tribal chief of the Middle Spokanes, whose name is given by various sources as Illum-Spokanee, Illim-Spokanee[3] and Ileeum Spokanee.
[4] When white settlers arrived in the area in 1825, the boy was one of two chosen by the Hudson's Bay Company[5] to be taught at an Anglican mission school at Fort Garry, Rupert's Land (now Winnipeg, Manitoba), which was run by the Missionary Society of the Church of England.
The student waved off the inadvertent attack, leading Garry to realize for the first time that white settlers could be well-intentioned, but also that resistance to authority would likely be futile.
[9] Garry spent much of the next few years preaching his simple Anglican faith in the Columbia Plateau and teaching his people methods of agriculture which he had picked up at the Red River settlement.
[10] He found that his new position within the tribal hierarchy created a stronger sense of duty to his people and a need to ensure their peaceful co-existence with white settlers.
[3] However, the missionaries' denunciation of Spokane Garry's simple but "primitive"[3] faith was said to have lessened his reputation among the Christians and possibly among his people.
The chiefs agreed on a treaty and it seemed there would be peace, but soon the Yakama decided against allowing the whites to take their land and began to prepare for war against the United States.
Stevens promised friendship, but asked the Spokanes to decide immediately between signing a treaty that would hand most of their land over to the whites or declaring war against the United States.
If you say, "We do not wish to sell," it is also good, because it is for you to say...Garry made an impassioned speech itemizing all the grievances the Indians had and their unwillingness to give up their ancestral lands for the benefit of the whites.
His attempts to negotiate a new treaty with the territorial government were ignored; Stevens instead encouraged the Spokanes to abandon their traditional lands and take up individual ownership under the Indian Homestead Act of 1862.
Since 1863 Garry had occupied and farmed a 12–15-acre plot of land just east of the current Hillyard neighborhood in Spokane where he grew a variety of crops and raised his horses.
Further, the Skiles report uncovered by Beine reveals collusion in this fraud by Spokane’s founding father James Glover and several other leading citizens of the day.
Further complicity in the fraud and collusion in the case against Garry was then committed by the Assistant Attorney General of the United States, George W. Shields, who supplied the final decision on the matter.
Garry lost his land and this once influential man, so significant to the founding the town of Spokane and the greater Pacific Northwest region, died soon afterward, a homeless and penniless pauper on January 13, 1892.
