The Anna Pike Rosler Homestead: A Tsimshian Woman's Legacy on San Juan Island

On the southern end of San Juan Island in northwest Washington State, a large white farmhouse with green trim, built in 1897, still stands, with sweeping views of Mount Baker, Mount Rainier, the Olympics and Turtleback Mountain. Beside it grows an elm that, over five generations, has reached the height of the house. Carla Higginson, the family historian who lives there today, remembers climbing it as a child and stretching out on its branches to read, hidden in leaves so thick her sisters couldn't find her.

The Anna Pike Rosler Homestead (NPS photo / Sara Dolan).

Anna and Christopher

Higginson is the great-great-granddaughter of Anna Pike Rosler, a Tsimshian woman from Metlakatla, Alaska. As a young woman, Anna came to the San Juan Islands every summer with her Alaska Native family to fish and hunt. On one of those trips she met Christopher Rosler, a German immigrant serving as a U.S. Army soldier at American Camp. They married in 1861, when Anna was fifteen, and went on to homestead 160 acres and raise nine children. Part of that land is now within San Juan Island National Historical Park.

Carla Higginson with a portrait of her great-great-grandmother, Anna Pike Rosler, in front of the elm Anna planted (NPS photo / Sara Dolan).

Living on the margins

Long before late-18th-century traders and explorers brought diseases that devastated local peoples, the ancestors of today's Coast Salish Tribes and First Nations — on both sides of what became the U.S.–Canada border — had permanent villages on San Juan Island near key food sources and saltwater fishing grounds.

• In the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott, tribes ceded millions of acres in Washington, including the San Juan Islands, for small mainland reservations and reserved rights to hunt and gather on "open and unclaimed lands" and to fish in their "usual and accustomed" places. Native people who stayed behind had few if any rights and were treated as squatters; Coast Salish people in the U.S. couldn't file homestead claims until the Indian Homestead Act of 1884.
• Most settlers at the time worked for the London-based Hudson's Bay Company, and the creation of Washington Territory in 1853 drew American interest. Many of these newcomers had spent little time in Britain or the United States, creating a society of fluid national identities on the edges of empire.
• In 1859 an American settler shot a company pig, setting off the "Pig War." No shots were fired between the two nations, but the island was under joint military occupation for twelve years, until Kaiser Wilhelm I settled the boundary in favor of the United States. Homesteaders then claimed land for farms, cutting Coast Salish people off from their traditional resources.

A union against the law

Christopher was one of many who came to the island during the Pig War. When he married Anna, unions between Indigenous and white people were banned in Washington Territory — yet such marriages were common. Intermarriage was the norm on San Juan Island then; about half of the island's households in 1870 were interracial or Indigenous. Family stories passed down through Sylvia Landahl, Anna's granddaughter-in-law, describe neighbors of every background helping one another with chores, then singing and dancing at each other's houses into the early morning before going round to help milk each other's cows.

For Native women, the choices were limited. Marrying a white settler offered some protection against the legal and racial biases of the time, but courts repeatedly denied Native wives their rights: when interracial unions were illegal, they had no claim to their husbands' property, and even after Washington Territory lifted the ban in 1868, Indigenous wives were not given explicit rights as heirs or as custodians of their children. Some marriages brought abuse, loss of family and property, or desertion; others were lasting and affectionate, giving women secure homes and privileges usually reserved for white Americans. Over time, subtle and open racism erased many Native women from legal and social records.

The Roslers' 1897 warranty deed. Anna signed with an "X," as she could not read or write.

Cultivating a home

Anna and Christopher's story has not been forgotten — preserved by the house and the tree. They staked their claim in 1872, after the boundary was settled, and built the present farmhouse in 1897 to replace their first home. Anna, a great lover of flowers, filled the yard with bulbs that bloomed every spring, and tended the elm, gardens and orchards; many of the flowers and fruit trees she planted still bloom.

When Christopher died in 1907, he left the farm and his property to Anna — a step that helped preserve her story. She lived there with her youngest daughter, Laurena, until her death two years later, and the house passed to Laurena. The local obituaries of both Christopher and Anna left out her Alaska Native ancestry, a common practice that wrote Native women out of the record in favor of the white pioneer woman. In the 1970s the National Park Service acquired part of the family's land from Anna's descendants to create American Camp, so the fruits of her work can be enjoyed by everyone.

In 1986, Sylvia Landahl wrote of the house on the hilltop as a happy home that stood firm through wind and storm — just like the families who had lived there for nearly 90 years.

A legacy made visible

Anna's life brings into view what has too often been forgotten: Native women, as wives and mothers of pioneers, were essential to the survival of San Juan Island's early settler community through their knowledge of the land and their work on it. The elm she planted has only deepened its roots over five generations — a living testament to her hard work, love and resilience.

Sources

• National Park Service, San Juan Island National Historical Park: "Anna Pike Rosler Homestead," by Nicole Martin, part of the Home and Homelands exhibition series, drawing on family writings held by the San Juan Historical Society and work by Katrina Jagodinsky, Peggy Pascoe and Candace Wellman. Family members' words are paraphrased here. The source's "Mt. Rainer" is corrected to Mount Rainier.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.