Archives West Finding Aid

John A. Simms, born ca. 1827, traveled to California in 1850 in the wake of the Gold Rush from his home in Leonardtown, Maryland. Within a year, however, he moved on to Oregon where he lived during most of that decade. In 1858 he moved from The Dalles to Walla Walla in the Territory of Washington. There in partnership with A. H. Reynolds and Captain F. T. Dent (brother of Mrs. U. S. Grant) Simms in 1859 built and operated one of the first flour mills in the region. That same year he was appointed by the Territorial Legislature to be an interim justice of the peace until elections could be held. During the Civil War years it appears Simms made his living by providing flour to settlers and especially to miners on their way into the gold fields at Oro Fino.

Simms was a member of the nine-man Territorial Council (upper house) where he represented Clark, Skamania, Klikitat, Walla Walla, and Spokane counties. He held this position from 1861 to 1862. Evidence from Owen's Journals and Letters tells us that Simms raised cattle and was regarded as a quiet, intelligent, and scrupulously honest man. During this time he had married Lucy McFadden, daughter of O.B. McFadden who had come from Pennsylvania to serve as an appointed judge in both the Oregon and Washington Territories.

Simms left for the east in 1868 in order to secure a federal appointment as Indian Agent in Washington Territory. By the spring of 1869 he was successful in gaining this commission and returned to eastern Washington to take up his duties in the Spokane-Colville region.

A disagreement over policy, in September, 1872, led to the resignation of W. P. Winans and the appointment of Simms as Winans' replacement. Simms' first assignment, the one Winans refused to carry out, was to convince the Spokane tribes that it was in their best interest to relocate to the newly formed Colville Reservation in the northern part of the territory and thus give up the improvements they had made to the land in the Spokane region. It was at this time that Simms assumed the position of principal Indian Agent at the Colville Agency. He held this position until 1883. John A. Simms died in Spokane September 1, 1890.