Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/233

 THE VANCOUVER RESERVATION CASE. 225 tion of Major A. J. Dallas, another Catholic building a two- story frame was erected for the College of the Holy Angels. If some of the early Post Commanders seemed to be indif- ferent as to the rights of the government, it is only fair to say that no one back in the fifties could realize that in fifty years lots would be selling in the city of Vancouver. After the lapse of thirty-nine years, the spell was at last broken by the Post Commander ejecting the teachers and pupils of the so-called Holy Angels College, tearing down the fences around its enclosure, and taking possession of Heaven's half -acre itself. This trespass on the mission grounds left its representatives no alternative but to ask for an injunction from the courts. To secure this they had to bring suit, and in so doing had to set forth in detail their title to the property. The suit was brought under the title of: "The corporation of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Nesqually vs. John Gibbon, Thomas M. Anderson and Richard Zeatman." These de- fendants, representing the government, were the Department Commander and the Commandant and Quartermaster of the Post of Vancouver Barracks. First came an order restraining the military authorities from exercising control over that part of the reservation in dispute and giving twenty days in which to show cause why this injunction should not be made perpetual. Accordingly the Department and Post Commander went to Olympia to show cause why. There they met the United States District Attorney, who had been instructed to intervene in behalf of the United States. Then the church filed a complaint, or bill in equity. The complaint recited at length the decisions and counter- decisions of the Surveyors- General, the Attorney-General, the commissioners and secretaries, and finally set forth that they had to bring suit in equity because the Secretary of the In- terior had made a mistake in law; that he was right in his decisions as to questions of fact which induced him to offer them a patent for a half -acre, but wrong in not extending his ruling to the whole 640 acres. Therefore, they claimed that