Anna Pike Rosler Homestead

Carla Higginson holds a portrait of her great-great grandmother, Anna Pike Rosler, in front of the elm tree she planted at her homestead

NPS Photo/Sara Dolan

Article written by Nicole Martin, PhD

---

On the southern end of San Juan Island in northwest Washington State, a large white farmhouse with green trim built in 1897 still stands strong. It includes a fantastic panoramic view of Mt. Baker, Mt. Rainer, the Olympics, and Turtleback Mountain. Next to it stands a majestic elm tree that has grown as high as the farmhouse over the course of five generations. “I just love this tree,” Carla Higginson, the family historian and current homeowner, reminisces. “As a child I used to climb up and stretch out on the branches to read a book. The leaves were so thick that sometimes even my sisters would not know I was there.^”1

Anna Pike Rosler Homestead

NPS Photo/Sara Dolan

Higginson is the great-great-granddaughter of Anna Pike Rosler, a Tsimshian woman from Metlakatla, Alaska. In her youth, Anna ventured to the San Juan Islands every summer to fish and hunt with her Alaskan Native family. During one of these visits, she met her future husband, Christopher Rosler, a German immigrant who was a soldier in the U.S. Army stationed at American Camp. They married in 1861 when Anna was fifteen years old. Together, they homesteaded and raised nine children on 160 acres, some of which is now part of San Juan Island National Historical Park.²

Living on the Margins

Well before late eighteenth-century traders and explorers brought diseases that devastated the local populations, ancestors of modern Coast Salish Tribes and First Nations on both sides of the U.S. - Canada international boundary established permanent villages on San Juan Island near important subsistence areas and saltwater fishing grounds. Tribes who were signatory to the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott ceded millions of acres of land in Washington, including the San Juan Islands, in exchange 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. Those who chose to stay had very little if any rights or status as citizens. Native people who didn't relocate to the reservations were considered squatters. Coast Salish in the U.S., as in other parts of the country, couldn't file homestead claims until the Indian Homestead Act of 1884.³

At the time of the treaty, the settlers who began to swell the population of San Juan Island were largely employees of the London-based Hudson’s Bay Company. The creation of Washington Territory in 1853 piqued American interests in the island as well. The resulting immigrant population – many of whom had not spent much time in Britain or the United States – created a unique society of fluid national identities on the margins of western empires.⁴

In 1859, an American resident shot and killed a company pig, sparking the “Pig War.” While a single shot was never fired, joint military occupation ruled the island for the next twelve years until Kaiser Wilhelm I mediated the boundary dispute in favor of the United States. With this decision, homesteaders claimed acreage for family farms, and in the process displaced Coast Salish from accessing their traditional resources.⁵

Copy of the original Rosler warranty deed for their property from 1897. Note Anna’s “X,’ for her signature, as she could not read or write.

Interracial Unions

Christopher Rosler was one of many who came to San Juan Island during the Pig War. He married Anna at a time when Indigenous-white unions were banned in Washington Territory.⁶ However, their union was far from unusual. European and American men commonly relied on intimate and economic bonds with Native women in settler societies. In fact, intermarriage was the norm on San Juan Island when Anna and Christopher married, creating a period of “interracial intimacy and mixed race predominance” that reflected the diversity and fluidity of island society.⁷ Higginson recalls stories from her grandmother Sylvia Landahl (Anna’s granddaughter-in-law) about families of all backgrounds helping each other with chores and then enjoying dancing and singing at each other’s houses until the early hours of the morning, when they would make the rounds to help each other milk the cows.⁸

During the transition from Coast Salish homeland to U.S.-Canadian borderland to U.S. territory, Native women faced limited choices. While marrying white settlers provided some protection against the legal and racial biases of the time, as seen in instances of neighborly community building, the courts continually denied Native women their spousal rights as wives to American husbands. When interracial unions were illegal, it meant Native wives had no right to their husband’s property. Even when Washington territory overturned the ban on interracial marriages in 1868, Indigenous wives were not granted explicit rights within family law as heirs to their husbands’s property or as custodians of their biracial children.⁹

Some Indigenous-white marriages involved abuse, stripped women of their family networks and property, or ended in desertion. Others, however, created lasting unions marked by affection. These unions created secure homes for women and their families and provided access to privileges usually afforded only to white Americans.¹⁰ Overtime, many of these marriages have been marginalized and forgotten, as Indigenous women often “disappeared” from legal and social records due to both subtle and overt racism. Anna’s unbending will differentiates her story.

Anna Pike Rosler with her youngest daughter Laurena, Carla Higginson’s great grandmother, in front of one of Anna’s fruit trees on the homestead.

Courtesy the San Juan Historical Museum

Cultivating a Homestead

Anna and Christopher’s union stands apart precisely because it has not been forgotten. It represents a love that survived the times, preserved through the home and elm tree that remain standing. Anna took pride in cultivating the homestead that they first staked a claim for in 1872, after the boundary dispute settled. When they built the farm home in 1897 to replace their original home, she worked diligently to beautify the grounds. As a “great lover of flowers,” she filled the yard with flower bulbs that created a “magnificent display” around the home each spring. She also planted and cared for the elm tree, gardens, and orchards. Many of the flowers and fruit trees that she planted still bloom today.¹¹

When Christopher died in 1907, he deeded the farm and personal property to Anna, helping to preserve her complex and rich story. She remained on the land and in their home with her youngest daughter, Laurena, until her death two years later. The home eventually passed to Laurena, while the National Park Service acquired portions of lands from Anna’s descendants in the 1970s when establishing American Camp. This act ensured that the fruits of Anna’s labor can be enjoyed by all for generations to come.

Writing in 1986, Sylvia Landahl movingly captured what Anna’s legacy has meant to her descendants. “I continue to live in this beautiful, comfortable, and happy home on the top of the hill where the sun shines brightly and the winds and the storms blow their hardest; but this well-built home gives neither a shudder nor a creak but stands firm and proud just like the families that have lived in it for almost 90 years.”¹²

Anna’s life and legacy make visible what has far too often been forgotten.¹³ Native women, as wives and mothers of pioneers, played a crucial role in the survival of San Juan Island’s early settler community through their knowledge of and labor on the land. Over five generations, the elm tree Anna planted and cared for has only deepened its roots. It has grown to a stunning size, all while providing shelter for Anna’s descendants and the home she built. Its survival is a powerful testament to an overlooked history and Anna’s hard work, love, and resiliency.

Home and Homelands Exhibition

This project was made possible through the National Park Service in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation.

---

¹ Carla Higginson, interview with Sara Dolan, Resources Stewardship Program Manager, San Juan Island National Historical Park, May 6, 2023.

² Unless otherwise cited, personal information regarding Anna Pike Rosler comes from her descendants, particularly the various family writings of Sylvia Rank Landahl Rogers, Carla Higginson’s grandmother and wife to one of Anna Pike’s grandsons. Her writings are housed at the San Juan Historical Society.

³ The author extends special thanks to Joe Dolan and Katrina Jagondinsky for helping guide her through the complicated legal and political history relating to Indigenous and settler communities on San Juan Island. For Coast Salish perspectives on this history, see Ann Nugent, Lummi Elders Speak (Lynden, Wash.: Lynden Tribune, 1982), and Pauline R. Hillaire, Rights Remembered: A Salish Grandmother Speaks on American Indian History and the Future (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016).

⁴ Katrina Jagondinsky, “A Tale of Two Sisters: Family Histories from the Strait Salish Borderlands,” Western Historical Quarterly 47, no. 1 (Summer 2016): 29.

⁵ Weber-Roochvarg, “Mitchell Bay Tribe Descendants.” Hillaire, Rights Remembered, 205-207.

⁶ For more on how miscegenation laws varied during the late nineteenth century in Washington Territory – from an outright ban of Indigenous-white unions in 1855 to repealing this ban in 1868 – see Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 98-100.

⁷ According to census data, about half of San Juan Island households in 1870 were interracial or Indigenous. Jagondinsky, “A Tale of Two Sisters,” 31-32, 48. Candace Wellman has found that in the first two decades of Whatcom county’s existence, which included the San Juan Islands at the time, 80-90 percent of marriages were between Native women and Euro-American settlers. See Interwoven Lives: Indigenous Mothers of Salish Coast Communities (Pullman, WA: Washington University Press, 2019), 15.

⁸ Carla Higginson, communication to the author, January 5, 2024.

⁹ Jagondinsky, “A Tale of Two Sisters,” 38.

¹⁰ Katrina Jagodinsky, “‘In Family Way’: Guarding Indigenous Women’s Children in Washington Territory,” American Indian Quarterly 37, no. 2 (Spring 2013); Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 94-104. For more on Native women’s role on the edges of empire in the North American West, see Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trader Society, 1670-1870 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1870).

¹¹ Sylvia Landahl, January 1972 and March 1978.

¹² Sylvia Landahl, April 23, 1986.

¹³ In fact, both Christopher’s and Anna’s local obituaries neglected to mention Anna’s Alaskan Native ancestry. This common practice worked to erase Native women from the historical record in favor of glorifying the white woman pioneer. See “Another Pioneer Gone to His Rest -Christopher Rosler Answers the Last Call,” San Juan Islander (February 23, 1907), 1; and “Anna Pike Rosler,” San Juan Islander (July 9, 1909).