Barely ten years following the stopping of tribes setting fires in the Willamette and Umpqua valleys, signs of the change visited the settlers. Settlers saw scourges of mice, lice, and grasshoppers in numbers they could not control. These insects and rodents would have been annually controlled by tribal traditional ecological stewardship practices of the Kalapuyans … [Read more…]
In about March 1855 there was formed a temporary reservation, or encampment, for the Champinefu Kalapuyans at Corvallis. This was one of over a dozen such temporary reservations, sometimes called encampments for the Kalapuyans, Molallans, and Chinookans created at this time to hold about 1000 native peoples who were party to the Willamette Valley Treaty. … [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…]
Information about the inner lives of the tribes in the 1860s is very sparse. A few federal reports exist but not a whole lot of information about the lives of the tribes besides a few complaints and details about food supplies and weather. But a few years ago a document surfaced at the Oregon Historical … [Read more…]
Oregon City, the settlement town, was established by Hudsons Bay company in 1829, but there was already a Clowewalla village in this location for more than 10,000 years. According to accounts of John McLaughlin and the Catholic church, the first non-native building was a sawmill built to take advantage of the hydopower of the falls. … [Read more…]