After Halting Native Burning, Came Grasshoppers
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 and other tribes. Recordation of the anthropogenic fires of the valley tribes begins with that of Jesse Applegate in his Boyhood Times book where he recalls native women setting fires on the grassy plains in the fall in the area of Salt Creek west of … Continue reading After Halting Native Burning, Came Grasshoppers