Burning over the Columbia Bayou
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…
Tag: Oregon indians
Records of the Cascades Watlala Removal to Grand Ronde
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…
Palmer’s Ledger of Vouchers for the Willamette Valley Treaty
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…
A Policy of Forfeiture of Rights and Annuities under the Peace Treaty of 1853
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…
Forced to Pay for the Rogue River 1853 War
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…
Champinefu Temporary Reservation at Corvallis
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…
Grand Ronde Chiefs Statements About Agriculture, 1862
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…
Yamhill Dogs Chase Comegys’ Hogs
A letter was delivered in person to Joel Palmer, Indian Superintendent of Oregon, in 1855 of a complaint of Jacob Comegys about his pigs being chased and killed…
Gradual decline or Catastrophic loss
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…
Removal of Four Tribes from the Umpqua Reservation 1855-1856
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…
Imagining the American Nation, and Ignoring the Tribes
In the early nineteenth century, the United States assumed ownership of all of the Oregon Territory through “right of discovery”, first adjudicated in the United States Supreme Court…
Curry’s Volunteers
This letter from General Wool is remarkable for its transparency in revealing the actions and decisions of Governor Curry of Oregon. General George Law Curry was a two-time…
Planning the Reserve on the Sea Coast
The following letters detail one side of the conversation with Joel Palmer, Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Oregon, and John Wool, commander of the Pacific Department. (I don’t…
Rector Responds to the Catholic Boarding School Proposal, 1862
In 1862 the Catholic Church of the United States made a proposal to open boarding schools to serve all of the Indian reservations primarily served by their own…
Dave Yachkawa becomes Tualatin Chief 1864
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…
Native Details of the Battle of Hungry Hill
As noted by Dr. Mark Tveskov in his 2017 article “A “Most Disastrous” Affair: The Battle of Hungry Hill, Historical Memory, and the Rogue River War” (OHQ Vol.…
Development of Tribal Cultural Identity at the Grand Ronde Indian Reservation
A good number of people have over the years shown some confusion about the identity of the tribal members at the Grand Ronde tribe. Many natives and non-natives…
Cast to the Edge: the Falls View Rancheria in Oregon City
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.…
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…
A Petition to Change the Name of Lane County
In this new period of “wokeness” there are calls for the elimination of racist names and statues from our institutions. Christopher Columbus statues have been torn from…
Revisiting the Schools I Attended
As a native person, a member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and a descendant of the Santiam, Takelma, and Chinook peoples of western Oregon, I have…
The Second Plague: Indian Reservations
Much has been written about the impact of pandemics on indigenous populations. Columbus and his exploratory contemporaries brought slavery and conquest to the new worlds, and that conquest…
The Willamette Mission Development
Thanks to Jim Sheppke, former State Librarian for the state of Oregon, I received a digital copy of the thesis“Mill Place” on the Willamette a new Mission house…
An Early Account of Native People Near Falls City
Each archive I enter I find new information about the native peoples of that county. Generally, the stories are of early encounters with a few native people, experiences…