Notes for SAMUEL JONES SEATON

     I hope to find the complete article, in which case I will post it as well.  In the meantime, I am posting these excerpts as they were used in a family history by my cousin, Charles Seaton.  The article says the Seatons were Pennsylvania Dutch; in fact, the original Seatons were from Scotland, and were in Virginia prior to two generations who lived in Pennsylvania before moving further west.  Tom Seaton's wife was a descendant of the Sweedish Longacres.

Excerpts from Spokesman-Review (March 4, 1962)
See Copyright permissions, posted earlier today.

The Seatons were Pennsylvania Dutch who came by train to Spokane falls in 1888 when Sam was two, then in a hired rig to Wilbur. Casting off from Wilbur they settled on a piece of land 12 miles to the north where the wool grass whispered to the steady playing of the prairie wind. The wool grass proved quite an adversary.

"We used a breaking plow, and it was all four horses could do to break through," Sam Seaton related.  "You could pick it up like a ribbon, 30 and 40 foot lengths of it. My old man cut it up in chunks and built a sod house for the first two years."

Seaton's father, Tom, thought he could see the trend of things, so building a road down Cooper canyon in 1895 (the road was faintly visible in 1962) he started the first Seaton ferry to accommodate traffic stemming from the railroad terminus at Wilbur.

It was in 1920 and four miles downstream that Sam brought his wife and four children to the Columbia edge. She had been Mary Bertossa, the schoolmarm of forgotten North Star school when he married her in 1912. Like his father, he had seen the path progress would take, only this time it was the whole country to the north opening up, following the natural contours from Coulee City. The commissioners of Grant County built the new car road, and gave him the franchise to operate a ferry.

His house was a historic one, for at about this time a big bridge upstream leading to old Fort Spokane was torn down, and the choice squared timbers 60 and 80 feet long came floating obligingly to Sam's place. He made a little extra money selling them at $4 a thousand board feet to ranchers, besides building for his own family a big, square block-house type dwelling.

The Seaton place was on a sandy slope which petered out below the house on the big black river boulders. There was quite a complex establishment there; a small home orchard and all the buildings and corrals necessary to early ranching, while alongside the road where it swung off the ferry and headed for the coulee walls was a service station.

Sam in time became linked to fame through his Appaloosa horses and ranchers came from afar to buy the sturdy, speckled breed. Sam was a superb rider himself, for all his small stature and it is said that in the midst of his ferrying he was apt to go on a jaunt for days, running down a likely Appaloosa from one of the wild bands.

The first inkling Seaton had that something big was stirring for the Columbia came with the visit of Willis T. Batcheller, Seattle engineer often credited with making one of the earliest surveys on that section of the river.

"It was probably around 1919 that Batcheller came to my ferry to look the river over. His report to Congress was pigeonholed for ten years," says Sam.

Seaton saw all the politics, the pulling and tugging by various interests, the parade of the great and near great.  "Herbert Hoover came one day in his limousine and pulled up beside the ferry," he recalls, "and I was out in the midst of the river and all the time Mr. Hoover talked of a big hydroelectric project he would like to see go in." (This was at the time Herbert Hoover was Secretary of the Department of Commerce under Coolidge).

Finally, Congress decided to construct the dam and a way of life ebbed for the Seatons. They were given notice to leave but business being good at the ferry, with tons of material arriving daily, they stayed on. For one thing, Sam was not satisfied with the price. There came the day when a bulldozer made an onslaught upon one of the Seaton fences. Sam wrathfully describes it: "Without a by-your-leave or anything else, they were pushing over my fence." The upshot was, the driver of the "cat" got off his vehicle and walked away, and a Spokane judge was called on to issue a restraining order on the old homesteader.

After the government won the case, Sam moved seven miles downstream on Colville Indian Reservation land, to the ranch of deceased Joe Joe, an Indian woman who had erected in the '80s a cabin on the brow of a hill overlooking the land of her ancestors.

Around the cabin can be found glass fragments, amethyst-colored from the sun's rays. Rusted harness rings dig up with the toe of one's boot, and in a rich pocket of soil are gnarled peach trees reputedly carried upriver by Hudson's Bay bateaux.

There Sam and Mary Seaton find a pattern of life which contains many of the elements of the old way. The pole corral usually holds a colt or two and in the upper pasture a few saddle horses switch flies. Two brown hounds bay in the cliffs for bobcats while below the cliffs Seaton Lake contains the biggest bullfrogs north of the Mason- Dixon line. Their booming voices resound like steamboat whistles.

In Indian days, the only formal trail running along the river came through what is now Seaton's pasture. Pointing out the trail, Seaton indicated a large post standing upright beside it. "That charred post was here from the earliest I can remember," he said. "The Indians must have meant it for something. I'm just curious to see how much longer it'll stand there."

By Grant County Historical Society:

Old Seaton Ferry started by Tom Seaton in 1899.

Sam Seaton operated Grant County Ferry 1921 at site of Grand Coulee Dam.

Construction on Grand Coulee Dam began in 1933.  Grand Coulee platted in 1933.