Missing Pages: Additional Signatory Tribes to the Willamette Valley Treaty
For more than 166 years the following pages were missing from the history and legal record of the Grand Ronde Tribe. It appears that sometime in early March…
Tag: Chinook
Encounters with Chief Kiesno of the Columbia
Chief Kiesno was one of the most powerful chiefs on the Columbia at the time of the fur trade and American settlement. He was related to tribes throughout…
Etienne Lucier First Settler in the Willamette Valley
Etienne Lucier (Lussier, Lewis) was a French fur trapper who worked for the three principal fur companies in Oregon. He first arrived after traveling overland in 1811 as…
Ongoing Chinook Territorial and Recognition Claims, Pt. 1
The Chinook Nation is still seeking recognition in 2018, despite having one of the oldest and longest relationships with the United States of any tribe on the West…
William Slacum’s Chart of the Columbia River 1837
As a spy in the Oregon Territory, and a Navy man, William A. Slacum was tasked with documenting the possessions of the British, but he also worked extensively…
Ethnography of Oregon Indians 1841: Horatio Hale of the U.S. Exploring Expedition
Horatio Hale’s created what may be one of the earliest ethnographies of the tribes of the Pacific Coast. Remarkable as it is, Hale’s ethnography is both interesting and…
Lower Chinook Vocabulary by Robert Shortess, 1853
Robert Shortess married a Clatsop woman in the late 1840s in Astoria, Oregon. He had arrived in Oregon in 1839 and was active around the Willamette Valley for…