Camas Journal, May 4, 2022
Today, I found time to visit a third field in Salem with lots of camas. Minto-Brown Island Park has several fields at least two of them have camas,…
Today, I found time to visit a third field in Salem with lots of camas. Minto-Brown Island Park has several fields at least two of them have camas,…
In 1856, Joel Palmer had some 4000 Natives removed from their homelands to the Coast and Grand Ronde Indian Reservations. Up to at least April of 1856 the…
The Charles Wilkes Exploring expedition came to Oregon in August 1841. The expedition split into two parts with some of the expedition venturing up the Columbia, and a…
The Chetco Indians, perhaps more than nearly any other tribe on the Oregon coast, were repeatedly attacked by racist white settlers before their removal. In a previous set…
The experiences of the Grave Creek Indians of southwestern Oregon mirror those of the other tribes in the region. They however hardly survived the 1850s as most of…
In Oregon, we have the well-known Wapato Lake, near Gaston. The lake originally was the center of seasonal activities of the Tualatin Kalapuyans (Atfalati) who lived near and…
In 1981 I took a job weeding onion fields out Hazelgreen Road on the outskirts of Salem, Oregon, as one of my first jobs. In the summer after…
There are numerous oral histories from tribal people in Oregon about catastrophic events, fires, volcanic eruptions, floods, tsunamis. Many of these stories are fantastically imagined and are likely…
Information about the Southern Kalapuyans, those south of Brownsville have been scarce to come by. The Kalapuyans in the north were settled earlier and seemed to have more…
The Santiam Forks Band of Molalla is not as well known as the Northern Molalla. We have had a few stories and while there is some information in…
The area of the south bank of the Columbia between the Sandy and Willamette Rivers is of particular interest to the tribes who once lived there. Historically, there…
Joel Palmer’s letters during his superintendency lend themselves to a timeline for the removal of most tribes. Palmer penned orders and received reports from his Indian agents, sub…
In Record Group 75 (Bureau of Indian Affairs) microfilm are many millions of records of the tribes as they were being managed by federal Indian agents. The M234…
In numerous essays on this blog I have noted that many of the tribes considered the most violent, and those who had participated in the wars in southwestern…
One of the most egregious of acts against the Rogue River tribes in southern Oregon was making them pay for the destruction of the property of the American…
In March 1855 there was formed a temporary reservation for Champinefu Kalapuyans at Corvallis. This was one of over a dozen such temporary reservations, sometimes called encampments for…
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…
In the final 10 months of Joel Palmer’s residency as superintendent of Indian affairs of Oregon, he was under a microscope by citizens of the territory for his…
William John Harris was born in Juneau Alaska March 29, 1884 to Richard Tighe Harris an Irishman, and Kitty a member of the Tlingit tribe. Richard Tighe Harris…
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…
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…
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…
Sometimes I find remarkable letters that sum up all I have been thinking about what was happening in the 1850s between the tribes and the settlers in Oregon.…
Documentation in the Lewis and Clark journals, especially for that of 1806, is of the Cascades tribe seasonal round, the seasonal lifeways of the tribes of the lower…