Ever Heard Of Chesaw? Well, It's Been Around 100 Years

CHESAW, Okanogan County - Chesaw native Ruby Wiltz carefully slips the papers from an envelope.

They're tattered and stained brown with age. Many are marriage licenses, land documents and court papers, dating to the late 1890s and early 1900s.

All of them relate to the history of Chesaw, which turns 100 years old this year.

It was a time when mining created boom towns in the Okanogan Highlands, and no one knew exactly where the border between the United States and Canada lay.

"They opened it up for mining rights in 1896," Wiltz explained.

Gold was discovered, and the town was platted in a knee-deep mudhole called Chesaw's Ford Crossing by Jim Hill Mining and Milling. Wiltz is not exactly sure when it was platted, but she believes it was in 1898.

During its heyday, she estimates, Chesaw had 500 people living, at first, in tents and, later, in log cabins placed closely together.

Numerous buildings sprouted, including an assay office, a bank, post office, rooming houses with saloons, hotels, the area's first grange, a large school, fairgrounds, churches, a harness shop, a newspaper, butcher shops, hardware stores and livery stables.

In contrast today, the main street has a hardware store, a trading post, a fire-district office, rodeo grounds, several homes and the beginnings of a new community center.

There is no post office, no bank and no hotel. There's only a handful of people, but no one knows for sure how many because it's not incorporated.

The town was named after Chee Saw, a man who was half Native American and half Chinese, becoming the only town in the Pacific Northwest named after a Chinese person, Wiltz said.

The town now sits where Chee Saw had a teepee, along a ford that had to be crossed to get into Canada.

Wiltz has a letter from a U.S. Indian agent to the town's first land commissioner stating, surprisingly enough, that Chee Saw could no longer live on his wife's Indian allotment.

Authorities "decided the land had too much value, so they threw it out to homesteaders and wouldn't allow him to live on it," Wiltz explained.

By the time Chesaw was booming, Chee Saw was an old man. Wiltz has only met one person who remembered the man, and noted that her father homesteaded in the area in 1900 and never saw him.

Wiltz, 88, said her interest in the history of the area started nearly 70 years ago.

"I just started collecting documents and talking to people, making notes and throwing them in a box," Wiltz said.

Many of the documents came from several boxes she found in the back of an old barn in Chesaw in the late 1920s, after the land commissioner had left and the bank had pulled out.

She has boxes of old bank statements, court documents and photographs. Many are too old and torn to read.

"Over here in another box, I find my own grandfather had someone arrested for killing a cow," she mused.

Wiltz was born and raised in Chesaw. She married there and had her family.

Then, she and her husband, George, moved to Moses Lake for about 30 years when her two sons were still in school.

"We moved because of the school. It just kept going down. Finally, they all started going to Molson, and then to Oroville," she explained.

Now, she winters in Oroville but returns to her birthplace in the spring, to the homesteader cabin that was moved to town about 30 years ago.

And that's where the boxes of old papers come alive again, and documentation of the town's history becomes not a chore, but an adventure.

During its boom, everyone filing for a homestead went to Chesaw, site of the area's only assay office.

The land commissioner first worked from a tent. A few years later, a judge was sent from California to take over as land commissioner.

"It was because of gold," Wiltz said of the boom. "Mining was the big thing. It all centered around that."

Today, some local residents are hoping the town has reached its smallest and that the pendulum has begun to swing back toward new growth.

Chesaw is not exactly off the map, with Battle Mountain Gold proposing to bring gold mining back as a viable operation.