The following section of a letter to General Joel Palmer details that at least one chief Soc-te-la knew they were to remove and was working to gather his people in preparation for such a move. It is unclear from the letter which tribe Soc-te-la belongs to and the letter mentions the Umpqua and Siletz rivers. […]
Read More…By the 1830s, right about the time that “fever and ague” a great plague, likely malaria (Boyd, the Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence,1999) hit the tribes of the Columbia River and Willamette Valley, Klickitat Indians began occupying parts of the Willamette and Umpqua valleys unopposed. It’s likely that they had been coming into the […]
Read More…On November 28th, 1882, Tom Gilbert, a native man enrolled in the Grand Ronde tribe allegedly murdered fellow Grand Ronde Reservation inhabitants Wapato Dave Yatskawa and his wife Ponomapa on their allotment on the Grand Ronde Reservation. Gilbert was reportedly drunk and had traveled from Willamina, and reportedly attacked the two with a hatchet, nearly […]
Read More…Some letters from the Natives at Grand Ronde are remarkable in the details they reveal of how the people are being treated by the Indian Agents. Shilequa’s (Selquia) letter of 1888 is one such letter, describing in great detail, and with awareness of the likelihood that the Agent is breaking the rules, of many […]
Read More…Eliza Young (Indian Eliza, Liza), was a native of the Mohawk Valley. The Mohawk Indians, were originally called the Peyu (Pee-you, Pe-u) Kalapuyans and were re-named by settlers after the river was renamed by early settler Jacob Spores. The Spores family had come from New York in 1847, the original homeland of the Mohawk […]
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