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(Seattle & Northern 1890)

Skagit River Journal

of History & Folklore
Subscribers Edition Stories & Photos
The most in-depth, comprehensive site about the Skagit.
Covers from British Columbia to Puget Sound. Counties covered: Skagit, Whatcom, Island, San Juan, Snohomish & BC. An evolving history dedicated to committing random acts of historical kindness
Noel V. Bourasaw, editor (bullet) 810 Central Ave., Sedro-Woolley, Washington, 98284
Home of the Tarheel Stomp (bullet) Mortimer Cook slept here & named the town Bug
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Harry Lincoln Devin, frontiersman,
homesteader, businessman, hunter
and he launched Sedro real estate

By Noel V. Bourasaw, ©2004, updated 2006
Part 1: Iowa, the fertile crescent for Sedro pioneers
We were saddened to learn that Harry Duncan, grandson of Harry Devin and one of our main sources
of information for the story over a period of ten years, passed away in California on March 1, 2004
(bullet)
Harry Lincoln Devin
      Harry Devin is another of our very early Sedro pioneers whose name has fallen through the cracks of history. He was the first to open a real estate office when there was just a small village by the river, he was the first postmaster after founder Mortimer Cook, and he later recorded both the weather and history of the town for nearly 50 years. On top of that, he was recognized as the best hunter of the region and became a partner in the longest-lived real estate office in the county. All his volumes on history and weather have been lost through the ages, but we have found many members of his family who have been kind enough to share some of his writing that was saved along with memories of several generations.
      Devin was born in Ottumwa, Iowa, on June 16, 1862, the youngest of four children in a family of means. His father, John Davis Devin, was an attorney and would later be judge of the district. Harry's grandfather, Thomas Devin, was a pioneer merchant and was a shareholder in the company that platted the town. He owned large tracts of land and was one of the wealthiest citizens in the area. His family experience would help him in the future as he helped build and consolidate the towns of Sedro and Woolley. Harry's family was originally from France, where they were Protestant Huguenots. In the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, King Louis XIV made their worship illegal and the DeVinne family fled to Ireland. From there they emigrated to Maryland, where Thomas was born, and then to Ohio, before moving to southeast Iowa in 1843. One of his ancestors, John DeVinne, owned a bookstore in Boston prior to the French and Indian Wars of 1754-63 that resulted in English dominion over Canada, Florida and several Caribbean islands. Harry Duncan — Devin's grandson, remembers seeing DeVinne's name on a list of the first 32nd Degree Masons in the U.S.
      Originally the home of ancestral Indians known as the Mound Builders, the county where Harry was born was named for Indian Chief Wapello, who moved his village in 1838 to a site just south of Ottumwa. Harry's high school sat on the site of Wapello's original campsite there. Two commonly accepted meanings of Ottumwa in the local Indian dialect are "place of perseverance or self will" and "land of rippling waters." The first meaning fit Harry to a "T" and the second was for rapids in the river.
      Seven years after Harry's birth, Olaf Polson settled in the Ottumwa area after emigrating from Sweden. After an initial trip here in the late 1860s, Polson moved his family to the LaConner in 1871, where they became one of the founding families and established a retail network that became famous all the way down to Seattle. Just 15 miles upriver was Chillicothe, a town that was laid out by Andrew J. Wicker. Wicker's son, Charles J. Wicker Sr., became one of the first homesteaders in our area in 1884 and would ultimately be Devin's real estate partner. Eighty miles farther northwest is Des Moines, the state capital, where Albert Mosier was born. Mosier would eventually be Devin's real estate partner in Sedro. Eighty miles north is Marengo, the little town that produced six of Sedro's pioneer families. Now you can see why Sedro was like a little corner of Iowa.
      When Harry was five, John Devin took his family to Florida by steamship down the Mississippi, where Harry first fell in love with oysters. After practicing before the Supreme Courts of Ohio, John Devin was offered the judgeship of the U.S. court of Eastern Florida but turned it down because his wife, Frances, was in such poor health. He accepted a position as U.S. Registrar for the federal reconstruction and was welcomed by the educated class of St. Augustine, Florida, but opposed by the "poor white trash," as Harry recalled. Harry's mother and sister feared that his father would be assassinated, but he made friends with a family of ex-Confederate soldiers. The father and three sons "let it be freely known that 'any man laying a hand on John Devin had a blood feud with them,' as they were considered four of the toughest fighting men in that part of the state. My sister always believed it saved father's life."
      His father hired an ex-slave named Mose who became Harry's dear friend. He fried mounds of "beautiful browned" oysters for Harry and further spoiled the boy by baking him pies and cakes. It was while Mose was rowing on the St. John's river in a skiff that Harry was first introduced to the danger of bears. He remained fascinated with the rest of his life. The father of the Indian family considered it more sporting to hunt bear with a bowie knife instead a gun. We will share his stories about his hunting lessons when we post selections from his journal later this spring and summer.

Zanesville, Ohio, where his mother was born and died
(Southeast View house)
Update 2006: see Part Two for photos of how Mark Chatt and family have totally remodeled the Devin house in Sedro-Woolley.
      After nearly two years in Florida, the health of Harry's mother, Frances, turned worse and John moved the family to Ohio to the town of Zanesville, where she was born as Frances Peters, about 600 miles due east of Ottumwa. Frances Peters was descended from an old English family who emigrated to the vicinity of Hagerstown, Maryland, about 1740. She was the granddaughter of Col. David Chambers, who fought in the Revolutionary War. Harry Duncan, who was Harry's namesake and was often his companion, has provided us much valuable information for the story. His mother, Agnes, was Harry's second daughter of three. She recalled that she went along with her family to meet her maternal grandparents' family, the Peterses, in 1900 in Ohio. While there, they discussed how President Grover Cleveland was a cousin. The Peters family insisted, however, that Cleveland's name was seldom mentioned in their home because he was a Democrat. Both sides of Harry Devin's family were Republicans, through and through and he certainly their beliefs.
      David Chambers moved his family to Zanesville in about 1830, where he was a banker. They brought with them a family of slaves, who acted as house-servants and drove the family's carriages; Chambers freed them after the move and Harry recalled that they almost became members of the family. Seven-year-old Harry loved living in the large two-story brick house that fronted on the Muskingum river. In his diary, Harry recalled many lessons learned as he sat around his grandfather's fireplace, listening to businessmen and cronies:
      He used to send me out to get fresh mint, water etc. He would never give me any hard liquor, but would give me a glass of wine and let me sit in a chair at the other end of the sideboard while he and his cronies discussed everything from business to ethics; from horses to the best ways to age liquors. I gathered that the greatest thing was to always be a gentleman:
      (bullet) If a man could not carry his liquor like a gentleman, he should leave it alone
      (bullet) That no gentleman would deceive or impose on those weaker than himself
      (bullet) [That a gentleman] must always be courteous to his inferiors as well as his equals
      (bullet) That there was no excuse for a gentleman to lie except to protect a woman's reputation.
      Harry's mother died in Zanesville in October 1869. A year later, Harry's father sent him with his older sister, Alice, and older brother, David, to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where they entered college and Harry attended grade school. By then, Harry had established his independence and his bravery. While attending Sunday School, the teacher told a parable of a naughty boy who played hookey on Sunday and went rowing in a boat and was drowned — the fate of all such boys, according to the teacher. Harry doubted the story and slipped away one afternoon to test it. He "walked a couple of miles to a small lake. Finding a boat, I rowed across the lake and back, watching all the time to see something rise out of the water and pull me in, but nothing happened and I walked home satisfied that just because something was printed in a book, it was not necessarily true."

Ottumwa, Iowa
(bullet)
The Devin house on the town square in Ottumwa, Iowa
      Sometime in 1870-71, Harry and his sister returned to Ottumwa where his father, John Devin, had moved into a smaller house and farmed 140 acre. The Union Pacific railroad came through in 1862 and by 1870 the population had grown to 5,000. Soon the town would be known for its wholesale grocers, wholesale hardware, fruit and drug companies, and a dozen cigar makers. Later it was known for Joseph Collingwood's fine violins and still later it was known on television as the fictional home of Radar O'Reilly on Mash. Harry's paternal grandfather, Thomas Devin, donated a public square and the cemetery to the city before his death in 1873
      Soon after returning, young Harry Devin was accepted as the friend of the Indian boys at the camp of the Fox and Sacs. He explained to biographer Catherine McClintock in 1935 that they taught him their language and many lessons of stoicism and courage. His Indian friendship would be tested 15 years later. By age 12, Harry had sharpened his skills at observing people, an asset he would draw on the rest of his life. In his diary he tells about learning the tricks of grifters:
      When I was about 12, I saw the three-shell game demonstrated, while riding in the smoker of a train going to Happy Hollow one day. Two men were riding in the two seats in front of me; the front seat had been turned so they faced each other, the sharper in the seat in front of me had a board across his knees with three half walnut shells and a pea on it. Facing him was an old man with grey whiskers, roughly dressed. The sharper would bet the old man he could not guess which shell the pea was under. He let the old man win some one and two-dollar bets, then pretending to get mad, he said he would bet him fifty dollars he could not do it again. The old man dug up fifty dollars and placed it on his side of the board. The sharper started to shuffle the shells. [Then], when the old man demanded that he put up his fifty dollars the same as he had, the sharper pretended to be insulted, but came through. Boy, like I was leaning over the back of the seat and watching every move. When the shells and the pea had been shuffled enough, the sharper told him to pick the [correct] shell. The old man's hands came over the board, one holding an eight-inch bowie knife, while the other gathered in both piles of money and shoved them in his pocket. Then, with the knife, he turned over all the shells, one at a time and showed that there was no pea under any of them. The sharper started to make a fuss, but the old man told him to keep his hands on the board, that if he made a crooked move, he would "slit his gizzard."
      The conductor was attracted by the rumpus and pulled the bell rope and when the train stopped, he threw the sharper in the brush. Then the old man explained to me that the sharper would get the pea between his fingers and hold it there, so there would be no pea under any shell.

Ohio calls again, as does marriage
      Harry Duncan recalls that Harry was well educated and attended Oberlin College, and according to Julian Hawthorne's 1893 book, History of Washington, he attended two years at Ann Arbor University, the alma mater of his brother and sister and that is now the University of Michigan. We also know that he served several years on the Sedro-Woolley school board. As a young man, he apparently moved back and forth between Ohio and Iowa. Starting back in 1876, at age 14, he farmed a 240-acre tract for his father, according to Ms. McClintock's interview. In letters to his grandson Devin in 1927 and 1933, he talked of being relatively small but he urged: "you will find that you have some crevice in your armor that you must guard unless you are superman, so remember the other fellow also has an Achilles heel; use your wits to find it out and 'never say die.'" Harry was bronchial as a boy, but his father sent him out to a horse ranch in Montana to toughen him up and it worked. He told his grandson years later that he injured a ligament in his back at age 16 while lifting a 450-pound weight. But he noted that four years later, he could tote a 640-pound rail.
      In January 1882, Harry moved to Vermilion, Ohio, located on the south shore of Lake Erie and a half-hour away from Oberlin, where he and a partner, a shipping magnate, opened the firm of J. C. Gilchrist & Co., a mill that manufactured bank and office furniture and stairwork in addition to putting the interior finish on hardwood. He owned that company until he moved to Washington state in 1888. On June 17, 1885, he took time out to marry Lenore Mosier of Des Moines and took her on a honeymoon that also served as a prospecting trip for a permanent place to live. Iowa was apparently not high on the list because he took the same old route down the Mississippi that he took 17 years before as a child. But this time, at New Orleans, he went west, investigating from the Gulf of Mexico over to the Rio Grande river. They returned to Oberlin, undecided about where to live permanently.

"Unless this Indian eats, you eat lead."
      In the summer of 1886, Harry traveled alone on the Union Pacific Railway to Salt Lake City. From there he rode on horseback as he did as a child. He galloped all over Northern Utah and soon his old Indian friendship was tested. In 1935, he told Mrs. McClintock about the trip, presumably through Sioux territory in either South Dakota or Nebraska
      He met a Sioux Indian named "Horsehead," who proclaimed Harry his brother, following an incident in a restaurant. Harry had made the Indian's acquaintance previously, and the two of them were having lunch when two cowboys entered the place and started cursing because there was an Indian at the counter. They grew surly and abusive and finally Harry drew his gun, saying: "Unless this Indian eats, you eat lead." Tough as they were, lead was not in their diet. Horsehead, deeply grateful, had the occasion to repay Harry for his kindness by steering him away from an Indian massacre.
Grandfather David Chambers's example of treating people equally and fairly would influence Harry Devin's relations with various races often in his life. Harry shared details of one such challenge with his own grandson Harry Duncan. Sometime after the turn of the century, he was in Anacortes on business when he encountered some drunken miners who were about to push a Chinaman into the sound. Still packing a firearm in those days, Harry whipped out his pistol and dared them to proceed. They fled instead. For the next 40 years, Harry received a large can of fine Chinese green tea from the man's family every Christmas.
      Meanwhile, back in 1886, Harry rode from the Dakotas over to Idaho and Oregon and then to Puget Sound, next to Northern California before he was drawn back to Puget Sound. He checked out Tacoma, where Northern Pacific was building its company town and then went up to Old Whatcom (now Bellingham), presumably by steamboat since there was not yet either a train or passable roads through the forest. From there, he probably rented another horse and rode down through the forest over present Duke's Hill or through Jarman Prairie on his way to Mortimer Cook's settlement of Sedro.

Washington Territory beckons
      We do not yet have a detailed account of that first visit here but we know that several of his old neighbors were here. Charles Wicker Sr., from Chillicothe, Iowa, homesteaded here in 1884 along with his brothers and mother. In 1885, Wicker's brother-in-law Plin V. McFadden moved his family to the Skiyou area, east of Sedro, from Ottumwa, where he had operated the ferry over the Des Moines river. Another of Wicker's brothers-in-law, Ira Brown, also moved his family out from Wapello county with the McFaddens in 1885. Olaf Polson's family prospered very well in LaConner in the 14 years since they moved there from Ottumwa. Frank Hamilton settled on the future site of Concrete in 1880 after moving from Wapello county. His parents were also Huguenots who followed the same path as the DeVinnes; they may have known each other in Iowa. Apparently Harry was not yet impressed enough with the area to consider moving, especially when a railroad had not cut through to the area yet. While on his way back in 1886, he shot his first grizzly near White Salmon, Washington, on the north side of the Columbia from the Dalles. It was the beginning of his love affair with hunting in the Northwest and Alaska.
      Then, after he returned to Oberlin, Mortimer Cook, began shipping Red cedar shingles back to his hometown of Mansfield, Ohio, which was less than an hour by train from Oberlin. Cook's agents began visiting Devin's mill, showing him the superior product and Cook himself may have visited.

Harry's in-laws helped him decide to move to Washington territory
      Since we wrote the original Devin story in 2001, we have researched deeper and have finally found details about why Harry Devin finally decided to move permanently to Washington territory. We originally thought that Lenore might have influenced the move in order to join a family member. Her brother Albert decided to move to Seattle in 1888 after a strike halted his work as a construction superintendent on Burlington Railroad in Nebraska. But we did not know at that point in our research that Lenore's father, Cyrus A. Mosier, also moved with his wife to Washington in 1889. [You can read our website on Cyrus A. Mosier by going back to the Issue 20 main page for the link.] When Cyrus was a teen, his family moved onto government land in rural Polk county and planted a notable peach orchard. After rudimentary education — mostly at home from his schoolteacher mother, he became a schoolteacher himself in 1856 and soon launched an investigation of the Indian mounds of the area. His investigation soon branched out to cover all over the Mississippi valley and his research uncovered a sizable ancient Indian population that pre-dated the Incas. An avid reader, such pursuits remained his hobby from then on and led to a second career in middle age. After a few years, he also became a court reporter for one of his teachers who had been elected judge of the district court. He was appointed as the district school superintendent in 1866 but resigned two years later to become a full-time reporter. In 1889, he was appointed by Republican President Harrison to be a special agent of the General Land Office of the Interior Department and was assigned to Washington territory, which became a state that November. His duty was to supervise the government land and prevent encroachment upon the public domain. He served from 1889-1893 under Republican President Harrison, was replaced when Democrat Grover Cleveland was elected and then returned to the post in 1897-1900 after Republican William McKinley was elected.
      Back in May 1888, Lenore's brother Albert G. Mosier arrived in booming Seattle and immediately met up with Leigh S.J. Hunt, the editor of the weekly Post-Intelligencer [P-I] newspaper. Hunt was a very colorful historical figure both in Iowa and Seattle. A lawyer and public school teacher, he taught the Mosiers in Des Moines schools and in 1885 he became the third president of Iowa State Agricultural College, now Iowa State University, where he taught Albert.. His lack of experience soon became apparent and his aggressive style of leadership led to conflicts with the students and faculty. He resigned in 1886 after only a year as president and moved to Seattle, where he edited the P-I, which was launched as the Gazette in 1863 and was re-opened as the P-I in 1867. By the time that Albert appeared at his office, Hunt was on his way to also becoming a banker and a partner in real estate development such as Peter Kirk's east-side plat that eventually became the city of Kirkland.
      Hunt also knew the group of city fathers who started the Seattle Lake Shore & Eastern [SLS& E] railroad as competition with the Northern Pacific railroad, which committed the since of choosing Tacoma as its terminus. The SLS& E was once again flush with capital and needed talented young civil engineers for their West Coast Line, which they planned to run north to the border with Canada on an inland route. Two days after Albert arrived, SLS& E hired him as a location engineer and he soon left for Snohomish county, where construction bogged down when the company originally ran out of capital. Over the next few months, he searched for possible depot sites where water could be stored for the steam locomotives and towns could form around crossroads markets. That fall, the San Francisco Bridge Company built a railroad trestle over the Skagit, a half-mile west of Cook's village of old Sedro. Mosier apparently decided that Cook's village was not the best place for a depot because it was located on the low land on the north shore of Skagit. He chose instead a site about 3/4s of a mile northwest, above the bench that was once the north shore of the ancestral river channel. Sometime in the spring of 1889, Albert boarded at the home of Sedro-area pioneer David Batey near Sterling and helped the plat the village we call new Sedro.

Homestead at Skykomish
      Harry Devin came to Washington again sometime in late 1888 or early 1889 and saw that the railroad dreams were turning into reality. As he surveyed land for the railroad right-of-way, brother-in-law Albert G. Mosier located three adjoining homestead sites somewhere along the Skykomish river in Snohomish county, upriver from the junction with the Snohomish river. [You can read the journal entry that Harry wrote about that time and place by going back to the Issue 20 main page for the link.] Harry did not say exactly where the homesteads were but he did say that they were 17 miles from the nearest grocery. The nearest one at that time would have been at Snohomish City, so that puts their land someplace between the present little towns of Gold Bar and Startup in the foothills of the Cascade mountains on present Highway 2.
      Harry's firstborn, daughter Frances, was born at Indianola, Iowa, on Oct. 14, 1887. In the spring of 1889, Lenore and baby Frances joined him at the Skykomish homestead and they lived in a crude cabin that Harry built. Harry Duncan shared a story his mother told about the harrowing trip the young family took to their new homestead. Two-year-old Frances was tied to the gunnel of an Indian canoe by buckskin thongs and Harry and his Indian guide paddled up the Skykomish and a mountain stream to their land. Charles and Albert G. Mosier accompanied them. In 1896, a biographer wrote this story about Cyrus and his family's similar trip:
      In April, 1889, Mr. Mosier moved with his family to Washington Territory, where he had many adventures in the deep, wild forests. Soon after his arrival he took his family in Indian canoes, manned by Indians, and ascended the Snohomish river for three days. After disembarking they had to walk on a mountain trail for sixteen miles, making six miles of the trail themselves, and camping without tent. On the second day (fifth day out) they reached a small cabin. They spent the summer in the Cascade mountains, and early in December descended the river to the town of Snohomish on tide water.
(Dawson claim)
This photo of a gold-mining claim near Dawson City is from a great site that will also give you lots of details about a miner who worked there in 1897, the first time that Harry mined there. Go to the second part of the Devin story for his Klondike days and his days in Sedro-Woolley.
      Harry Duncan wrote in a letter that Cyrus, Albert and Harry "proved up" on their homesteads in 1889-90, obtained title, and then sold them to St. Paul, Minnesota, timberman Fredrick Weyerhaeuser sometime over the next seven years. After a summer at the homestead, Lenore and the baby went back to Iowa, and Rachel Mosier took Charles back home to attend school in Des Moines. Harry went to Seattle to scout out a permanent place for his family to live, and Albert went to a little village called Sedro on the Skagit river to plat it as the location for a major depot on the rail line of his employer, the Seattle Lake Shore & Eastern railroad.. In December 1889, Cyrus moved to Snohomish City, which was the oldest town in Snohomish county. We do not think that Lenore ever lived with Harry in Seattle.
      Sometime late in 1889, Lenore moved back to Iowa and their only boy, Harry Junior, was born there on Jan. 21, 1890, but he died as an infant. Lenore may have shuttled back and forth to Iowa. This is understandable since old-Sedro was not exactly a gentile town at the time. Devin's family records show that Their second daughter, Agnes, was born in Des Moines on March 21, 1892. Harry Duncan's family record showed that Agnes was born on the Skykomish homestead, but we find no record of that.
Continue to Page 2: Harry and family move to old Sedro, where he defines real estate transactions
on the frontier. Read about his time in the Klondike gold rush and his hunting experiences and see his remodeled home.
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Story posted on Oct. 24, 2001, and last updated on March 17, 2006
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