Q — Have any notable people lived in Montavilla?
A — Actually, several notable people have lived in Montavilla, and I will introduce them in several articles, beginning with Annie Miner Peterson.
Annie Peterson (1860-1939) is remembered for her contribution to our knowledge of Northwestern indigenous cultures. She was the last living speaker of the Miluk and Hanis languages. She also remembered and shared her memories of tribal history and lore of the indigenous peoples of the southern Oregon coast. Although she lived in the Coos Bay area most of her life, she resided in Montavilla for about a dozen years. Several accounts of her life have been published, most notably Lionel Youst’s 307-page biography. His title, She’s Tricky Like Coyote, is a translation of her Hanis name, ts’mii-xwn. (Luckily, the Multnomah County Library has copies.)
Annie was born in 1860 in a traditional village on Coos Bay’s South Slough. Her mother was of Hanis and Miluk (aka Coos) blood. The father Annie never knew was British. As White settlers started moving onto tribal lands, the U. S. government forced local indigenous peoples to relocate to the Yachats and then to the Siletz reservations. This is where Annie spent her early years. Conditions on the reservations were harsh. Many died from starvation and diseases. Annie did not attend school. She never learned to read or write. But she was a gifted linguist, and she picked up additional indigenous languages spoken on the reservation. She also learned many traditional crafts, such as basketry. She acquired survival skills such as foraging for local food. And, unlike many young people, she loved listening to the elders reciting their tribal histories and traditional stories. When she reached adolescence, she was sold, according to tribal custom, to her first husband.
Annie left the Siletz reservation in 1877. In 1880, she began living and working in White communities in the Coos Bay area. After enduring decades of poverty and traumatic marriages, her recently widowed friend Ida Wasson (1870-1966) convinced Annie that they should start anew in Portland. They took the new railroad line to the metropolis and found lodging in a boarding house somewhere in Portland. Annie, who was broke, was able to pay for her food and board by doing laundry for the owner. It was here that she met her fifth and final husband, the kindly Carl Peterson (1871-1939), a naturalized Swede.
Carl worked in a logging camp near Kelso, Washington, during the week, and, like other loggers, he liked to go to Portland on weekends to relax. There, he met Annie, fell in love, and asked her to be his wife. She said yes, but first, she needed to divorce her current husband, Charles Baker. She returned to Coos Bay and began the divorce process. Her ex-husband’s situation probably strengthened her case. He was in jail for smuggling alcohol into Oregon, which was then a dry state. Annie was granted a divorce on the grounds of cruelty. Oregon newspapers had followed the landmark Baker case; The Oregonian even reported the divorce.
Annie and Carl married in Vancouver, Washington, on October 15, 1918. Carl had bought a modest house in Montavilla on 74th Street (now 74th Avenue) between Glisan and Everett. The house has been replaced by a modern residence. At this time, Annie had not been discovered by anthropologists, so she and Carl lived a quiet life until at least April 1930, when they appeared in the 1930 census.
What was Annie’s and Carl’s life like in Montavilla? Fortunately, Annie’s granddaughter, Iola Aasen Larsen, lived with the couple from 1921 to 1923, and she described aspects of their lives to Annie’s biographer, Lionel Youst. Carl continued working at the lumber camp during the week and came home on weekends. On weekends, they would go for drives in Carl’s car and to movies, very likely at the Granada Theatre, which was just a block away from their home.
During the week, Annie often occupied herself with traditional skills she’d learned early in life. She was skilled at basketry, beadwork, and sewing. She also applied her foraging knowledge in the new suburban environment, foraging for serviceberries, blackberry shoots, salmonberries, nettles, and wild tubers in nearby Sullivan’s Gulch—where I-84 runs now—and other nearby locations. Her favorite food was fish, a coastal indigenous staple. For this, she had to find a local market. In the 1920s, there were two stores on Glisan Street that offered fish: Rupert’s Grocery Store and the Montavilla Meat Market, both an easy walk from her home. On weekdays Annie and Iola liked to go to vaudeville matinees downtown. Since Annie could not read, Iola said she read her newspapers cover-to-cover, and when attending movies, then still the silent type, Iola whispered the captions in Annie’s ear.
While still living in Montavilla, Annie and Carl liked to spend their brief summer vacations in Charleston on Coos Bay’s South Slough, the area where Annie was born. They moved to Charleston permanently at the beginning of the Great Depression when Carl had lost his job. They sold their Montavilla house and made their summer cabin their new permanent and final home. On the South Slough, Annie could gather seafood galore for free, and Carl found employment as a deep-sea fisherman.
On November 11, 1931, Annie testified in hearings held in North Bend regarding reparations for the lands taken from Coos County Indians and given to White settlers in the 1850s. Annie was then the second or third-oldest Coos Native still alive. She testified in the Hanis tongue about the boundaries of the Coos tribal land. She also described the harsh conditions of life on the reservations where she grew up. The food shortages. The public beatings of those who left and were captured. Annie broke down on the stand, and proceedings had to be halted. She did not live to see the partial restoration of Siletz tribal lands in 1980.
Annie’s life changed in the summer of 1933 when Professor Melville Jacobs of the University of Washington came knocking at her door.
Since the early twentieth century, anthropologists had been trying to understand the culture of Oregon’s indigenous peoples. Jacobs himself had been doing field research to document the language, culture, music, and oral traditions of the indigenous tribes of the Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately, there were few people by then who remembered the old ways or the old languages. Professor Jacobs must have been ecstatic when a group of Hanis Natives told him of a Miluk speaker in southern Oregon. He would discover that Annie Peterson, besides speaking Miluk and Hanis, was also a treasure trove of traditional lore.
In 1933, Jacobs began recording Annie as she sang tribal songs and recited tribal stories she remembered in abundance. In 1934, he returned to Annie’s home in Charleston to continue recording Annie’s recitations, now using the portable electric recorder just invented by two University of Washington colleagues. The new recorder was battery-powered, allowing Jacobs to play back what Annie had just recorded.
Jacobs published many of the stories and songs in 1939 and 1940. Below is an example.
Annie Peterson was 73 and 74 when she recited the traditional stories. Because she retained them without the assistance of written records and because she was willing to share them, she saved them for posterity. PSU anthropology professor Douglas Deur called Peterson “the foremost source of ethnographic and linguistic information on the Coos and Coquille tribes” of southern Oregon. Annie had escaped the diseases that took many lives on the reservations, but she died of tuberculosis at age 83 on May 19, 1939, in her Charleston home. She was buried in the white buckskin dress that she had tanned, trimmed, and sewed. Her husband Carl died a few months later, also of tuberculosis.
Acknowledgment: I am grateful to Peter Sv-gvs (Black Bear) Hatch, History & Archaeology Specialist, Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, for sharing information with me about Annie Miner Peterson. The Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians website includes a short biography of Annie Miner Peterson.
Note: If you know of other Montavilla notables, please send me an email, and I’ll see what I can discover. ~Patricia Sanders~
Title image digitally enhanced from a Coos County Historical Society sourced photo
Disclaimer: This article includes historical texts with terms for Native people that are considered derogatory. Its use here is necessary to provide the reader direct references and is not indicative of this publications use of language. Please direct any concerns around terms used in an article to editor@montavilla.net.
This is an installment of Montavilla History Questions Answered. If you have questions about Montavilla’s past that you’d like answered, local historian Patricia Sanders will investigate your question. Please email your questions to history@montavilla.net and we may feature it alongside Patricia Sanders’ research in a future post.