SPOKANE — A slab of grilled meat — the cut, texture and doneness all lost to history — arced over a fence and landed with a thud on a plot of ground on the flank of modern-day Beacon Hill in December 1883. Joseph Morscher, a German immigrant, had dark intentions; before tossing the muscled package he’d injected it with a deadly poison, strychnine.
“My children were going up to the fence where he threw the meat. I called them away,” Nellie Garry recalled in an 1891 interview. “My dogs went and eat the meat and three of them died that day.”
Scared for her life, Nellie Garry gathered her children and left the land, never to return. Her father, Chief Spokane Garry, was away angling for salmon on the Spokane River. By the time he’d returned, Morscher had taken up residence on the 15 acres Garry called home for more than 30 years, a home that hosted white dignitaries and power brokers of the day including Washington Territorial Gov. Isaac Stevens and the Rev. Henry Cowley.
Today, that land is choked with weeds, slabs of concrete and industrial trash. For decades, it was a camel farm. In the future, the land that Chief Spokane Garry once farmed is slated to be a 230-unit housing project nestled at the base of Beacon Hill, its appeal predicated on close-to-town beauty.