Born: 1846 (circa), United States
Died: 1909
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Anna Pike
The following is republished from the National Park Service. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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. 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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.”
Anna’s life and legacy make visible what has far too often been forgotten. 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.