An investigation at Grand Ronde and the agent precipitated this meeting of the chiefs. The Indian Agent was asking for them to produce their own food and was demanding half of what they raised to feed the elderly. They produce a long list of problems and other information. The tribes they oversee were much reduced … [Read more…]
A letter was delivered in person to Joel Palmer, Indian Superintendent of Oregon, in 1855 of a complaint of Jacob Comegys about his pigs being chased and killed by Yamhill Kalapuyans and their dogs. Jacob had sold his lands in Missouri and moved his whole family to Yamhill Oregon where he took up a land … [Read more…]
A fellow scholar asked a question about if the decline of the tribes of Oregon could be termed as “gradual,” here is my response. The destruction of the Kalapuyans and many tribes was so sudden and severe that the population loss graph looks more like a cliff face rather than a hillside. The Malaria epidemic … [Read more…]
Between the time of the formation of the Umpqua Reservation in the Umpqua basin (1854) and the removal of the four tribes to Grand Ronde Reservation, in late January 1856, Joel Palmer the Indian Superintendent had to make fast and detailed plans. The war of the Rogue River Confederacy was raging in the Siskiyous and … [Read more…]
In the early nineteenth century, the United States assumed ownership of all of the Oregon Territory through “right of discovery”, first adjudicated in the United States Supreme Court in 1823 in Johnson v. M’intosh (Supreme Court of the United States 1823).[i] This ownership remained tenuous as it relied on the European protocols of exploration and … [Read more…]