Tribal Histories of the Willamette Valley

By David G. Lewis and Greg Robinson

From oral history to written word, learn about the history of Oregon through the stories of the Indigenous peoples of the Willamette Valley.

The Willamette Valley is rich with history—its riverbanks, forests, and mountains home to the tribes of Kalapuya, Chinook, Molalla, and more for thousands of years. This history has been largely unrecorded, incomplete, poorly researched, or partially told. In these stories, enriched by photographs and maps, Oregon Indigenous historian David G. Lewis combines years of researching historical documents and collecting oral stories, highlighting Native perspectives about the history of the Willamette Valley as they experienced it.

The timeline spans the first years of contact between settlers and tribes, the takeover of tribal lands and creation of reservations by the US Federal Government, and the assimilation efforts of boarding schools. Lewis shows the resiliency of Native peoples in the face of colonization.

Undoing the erasure of these stories reveals the fuller picture of the colonization and changes experienced by the Native peoples of the Willamette Valley absent from other contemporary histories of Oregon.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ooligan Press
• Release date: Nov 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781947845411

David G. Lewis

David G. Lewis, PhD and member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, is a recognized researcher, scholar, writer and assistant professor of anthropology and Indigenous studies at Oregon State University. His publications include "Willamette Valley Treaties," "A History of Native Peoples of the Eugene, Cascades & Coast Region," and others. For more than twenty years, Lewis has been passionate about studying the original histories of the people of Oregon and California and has an extensive record of collaborative projects with regional scholars, tribes, local governments, and communities. Lewis's research specializes in the history of Kalapuyans and other Western Oregon tribes, which he explores through journal essays and on his blog The Quartux Journal. He currently resides in Chemeketa, now Salem, Oregon, with his wife, Donna, and two sons, Saghaley and Inatye.

Book preview

THWV_Cover_JPG.jpg

Tribal Histories

of the

Willamette Valley

David G. Lewis

Tribal Histories of the Willamette Valley

© 2023 David G. Lewis

ISBN13: 978-1-947845-40-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Ooligan Press

Portland State University

Post Office Box 751, Portland, Oregon 97207

503.725.9748

@ooliganpress.pdx.edu

www.ooliganpress.pdx.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lewis, David G. (David Gene), 1965- author.

Title: Tribal histories of the Willamette Valley / by David G. Lewis.

Description: Portland, Oregon : Ooligan Press, Portland State University,

[2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023006305 (print) | LCCN 2023006306 (ebook) | ISBN

9781947845404 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781947845411 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Indians of North America--Oregon--Willamette River

Valley--History. | Indians of North

America--Colonization--Oregon--Willamette River Valley.

Classification: LCC E78.O6 L49 2023 (print) | LCC E78.O6 (ebook) | DDC

979.5/300497--dc23/eng/20230301

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006305

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006306

Cover design by Laura Renckens

Cover Art by Greg A. Robinson

Interior design by Dani Tellvik

Maps illustrated by Claire Curry

References to website URLs were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Ooligan Press is responsible for URLs that have changed or expired since the manuscript was prepared.

Printed in the United States of America

I dedicate this book to the Tribal People of Western Oregon, who deserve to be told the truth about their history.

Acknowledgments

This book took years to produce, and many dozens of people helped in its creation. Innumerable conversations and research projects took place all throughout western Oregon. Many archival repositories helped with sources and information; I especially want to thank Scott Daniels of the Oregon Historical Society Library for consistent aid whenever I asked. The staff at all archives were helpful and welcoming of my many requests. Of the scholars I consulted with, Henry Zenk, Robert Boyd, and Tom Connelly were the go-to researchers that always seemed to have an answer. Tribal researchers David Harrelson (CTGR), Eirik Thorsgard (CTGR), Patricia Whereat-Philips (CTCLUSI), Greg Archuleta (CTGR) and Joe Scott (Siletz) were also helpful in supporting my work. I also want to recognize George Wasson Jr. (Coquille) who led the SWORP project and inspired me to continue working on Oregon Tribal ethnography. Scholar and teacher Margaret Matthewson, who studied world Indigenous weaving traditions, was instrumental in understanding Kalapuya weaving. Other people who helped in various ways were David Craig (Willamette), Bill Lang (PSU), Deana Dartt (Coastal Chumash), and Scott Byram (Archaeologist), the co-author of my first publication in 2001. Support for my work at OSU was also instrumental in getting this completed, and that from Susan Bernardin, Joan Gross, Natchee Barnd, Bryan Tilt, Loren Davis, Drew Gerkey, Melissa Cheyney, and Patricia Fafita were particularly welcome. Writing and research can be a lonely project, and I have forgotten many people that helped through this process, but I thank you all. Supporters of my blog site, ndnhistoryresearch.com, also kept me going, asking questions, and continually reading my new articles, as well as donating to my research. Community groups also helped me by keeping me busy with presentations and in many, I practiced newly researched histories for the first time. My mother, Polly, taught me to appreciate books, and my father, Gary, gave me the charge to become a tribal historian; without them, I clearly would not be here. But, most importantly, my wife, Donna, and sons, Inatye and Saghaley, endured my absence for many years while I worked on the book, and I am forever grateful for them giving me this time.

Contents

Introduction

Personally Encountering the New Grand Ronde Indian Reservation

Decline of the Tribes of Western Oregon

Changes to the Land & Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Seasonal Round

Settler Changes to the Lands

Unratified Treaties, 1851

Ratified Treaties, 1853-1855

Creating the Grand Ronde Reservation

Encounters with Settlers

Conflicts with Indian History

Conflicts in the Willamette Valley

Battle Creek, First Battle of the Willamette Valley

Battle of Abiqua

Klamaths in the Willamette Valley

Molalla Chief Crooked Finger

Kiakuts Wins His Case

The 1854 Tualatin Treaty

Stories from Linn County

Wapato Lake

Encountering Removal

Researching Temporary Encampments

Temporary Reservations of the Willamette Valley

Kalapuya Encampments

Temporary Reservations of the Santiam Bands

Calapooia Band of Calapooias Reservation 1855

The Yamhill Kalapuya Temporary Reservation

Molalla Temporary Encampment

The Clackamas Come to Grand Ronde Reservation

Preparing to Leave

The Dayton Encampment

Choosing the Grand Ronde Valley for the Reservation

The Umpqua Reservation in Coles Valley

Continued Removals

Promises Unfulfilled

Resettling to the Reservation

Reservation for the Willamette Valley Peoples

Chaos in the First Year

Starvation, Inefficiencies, and Wasted Time

The Path to Citizenship

Health Conditions at Grand Ronde

Boarding Schools and Assimilation at Grand Ronde

Schools at Grand Ronde

Encounters with Off-Reservation Indians

Falls View Encampment in Oregon City

Off-Reservation Peoples of Western Oregon

The Northern Molalla

Basket Weaving

The Halo Band of Yoncallas

Cottage Grove and Pleasant Hill Kalapuyans

Chemeketa the Gathering Place

Worship in the Ancient Form

Santiam Kalapuyans of Linn County

Kalapuyans Off the Reservation

Quinaby, Chemeketa Kalapuya

Indian Eliza Young of Brownsville

Old Lucy and Old Pete of Albany

Kalapuya Mounds

Continuing Thoughts

Historic Events Timeline

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

The Native peoples of the Willamette Valley, the Kalapuyans¹, have lived in this region for more than ten thousand years.² The Kalapuyans consisted of approximately nineteen different autonomous tribes and bands.³ These tribes lived in all parts of the Willamette Valley and into the Coast and Cascade Ranges. The most southern tribe, the Yoncallas, lived in the Willamette Valley and the Umpqua River basin. The other tribes in the Willamette Valley were the Molalla and Clackamas peoples. The Molallans occupied the western foothills of the Cascade Mountains and parts of the north Willamette Valley. The Clackamas occupied areas of land from the estuary of the Willamette River to south of Willamette Falls, and eastward along the Clackamas River.

The Willamette Valley is Oregon’s largest watershed for a river completely contained within the state. West of the Cascade Mountains, the valley now hosts the largest population in Oregon and contains the most fertile soils in the state for agriculture. The character and potential wealth of this vast landscape was noted early in the exploration of Oregon. The Lewis and Clark expedition (1805-06) did not enter the valley, but stories of its natural resources were communicated to Clark by a Clowewwalla Indian guide while they were on the Multnomah River, now called the Willamette River.⁴ The guide spoke to Clark about the populations of Kalapuya peoples in a great valley whose waters were drained through a falls (Willamette Falls today, the Chinuk Wawa name is tumwata). Further explorations by the Pacific Fur Company in 1812 found a rich valley full of fur-bearing animals, spurring the creation of trading posts along the lower Willamette. Later, the North West Company, Hudson’s Bay Fur Traders, and explorers like David Douglas, documented the benefits of the valley as having incredibly rich soils and a park-like setting, as well as a good number of Native peoples and villages along the rivers.

Americans began planning to take control of the region before they even arrived. In 1804, President Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the Oregon Territory to find the Northwest Passage and to collect information about the tribal people and resources there. Jefferson was an expansionist and dreamed of pushing the western border of the United States all the way to the Pacific Ocean. European countries were expanding their land claims worldwide, and Jefferson knew that the United States had to begin to carve out its claim to the remainder of the continent before it was too late. There was also a need to establish a more direct trade relationship with China, and what better way than to have the country border the Pacific Ocean? With these plans to claim and populate this vast area, little consideration was given to the fact that the region was already occupied by hundreds of tribes who suffered from the colonization of this frontier. Over the next century, Native nations were pushed aside as American settlers claimed the land, declaring that it was the Manifest Destiny of the United States of America to own the land between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.

When American pioneers arrived in Oregon, tribal ownership of the lands was ignored. Settlers discredited all tribal claims and the tribes’ basic humanity by suggesting and acting as if tribal peoples did not have religion, civilization, laws, governance, or ability to manage their own affairs, much less own land. Tribal people did not keep their history written down, nor jealously guard their land claims as Europeans did. Consequently, early folklorists and anthropologists suggested that the tribes did not have a concept of land ownership, and their oral histories were not to be credited as history since they were not written down. Instead, the histories were considered only folklore or mythology and ignored.

For roughly one hundred and fifty years, the history of the Oregon Territory became a recitation of a few basic assumptions about the tribes. The histories concerned a few well-chronicled tribal groups, like the Nez Perce. The histories primarily addressed acts of war by tribes upon the settlers, like the Modoc War, and a few stoic chiefs who became the symbols of the tribes, like Chief Joseph. Tribal histories became curious and quaint⁵ side notes to the more important history of the settlement of Oregon by the pioneers who—according to their way of thinking—were satisfying the will of God, exercising their Manifest Destiny to travel the Oregon trails and settle down in the pristine landscapes of Oregon. Many stories of the colonization included how settlers and missionaries saved Indians from their savagery.

Early produced tribal histories of Oregon were fictionalized, romantic notions of how the tribes accepted their fate, surrendered, welcomed the pioneers to Oregon, and helped settlers take over the land. Frederic Balch’s famous book Bridge of the Gods (1890) is one such fictionalized account, which elucidates a history that legitimized the colonization of Oregon and created the fictional character of Chief Multnomah. There is no known person by this name in the history of settlement.⁶

The settlement of Oregon is a story of environmental changes imposed by pioneers on the character of the Willamette Valley. Prairies were plowed up and turned into agricultural fields. Forests were cut down to clear the land and build settlements. Rivers were dammed to control the water and to make millraces to run mills: sawmills, grist mills, and woolen mills, to produce products for world markets. Rivers were dredged and channeled to make river boat travel easier, to control flooding, and to maintain farmer’s land claims. Animals were hunted to near extinction to feed the fur trade (e.g., beaver, fox, and otter) or exterminated as nuisances to American settlers (e.g., grizzly, wolf, and condor). In short, the pristine landscape was decimated in anthropogenic (human-caused) ways to fit American perceptions of a settled and civilized world. Tribal stewardship practices created over thousands of years of Native peoples living in the Oregon environments were forced to end, as settlers only saw them as nuisances to their continued extraction of wealth in the farms and forests. Tribal peoples’ cultural lifeways⁷ were altered forever by these changes to their homelands. Many tribes rebelled against the taking of their land and what was happening to their world, and for that they were hunted down and forcibly relocated to reservations or murdered in extermination campaigns.⁸

The first detailed histories of the tribes were produced in the 1970s and featured ethnographic research notes about tribal culture, like The Kalapuyans (1972) by Harold Mackey, or stories of the wars upon the tribes like Requiem for a People (1971) by Stephen Dow Beckham. In the fifty years since these first Oregon tribal histories were published to wide acclaim and effect, the publishing of books, articles, and essays by tribal scholars of tribal history and culture has greatly increased. Native scholars have risen, and they offer different perspectives of many key histories of Oregon as they seek to fill in parts of the history that has been missing. Vine Deloria Jr. was hugely influential in helping scholars understand how to think about research of Native peoples by advocating for Native people to be represented and to analyze and write their own histories.⁹ Recently, Patricia Whereat Phillips (Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw) has affected regional perspectives around history and traditional ecological knowledge of tribes with her book, The Ethnobotany of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw (2011). Histories of the Oregon Trail rarely featured the perspectives of Native peoples, what they thought about the invasion of their lands, or what they experienced at the hands of the American settlers. Early history production was biased because important perspectives about that history were ignored or left out. Most scholars now realize that unless the perspectives of all the people involved in a history are included, we are only hearing a small portion of that history. It is now standard to include Native peoples’ perspectives in histories involving the tribes.

The stories in this book represent Native perspectives of the history of the Willamette Valley. Many of these stories are made of collated information garnered from the pages of a few scattered, out-of-print history volumes, as well as archival documents, federal correspondence, and microfilmed newspaper stories more than a century old. They represent significant parts of the story of the colonization and changes experienced by the Native peoples of the Willamette Valley that do not normally appear in any contemporary histories of Oregon.

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1 Kalapuya is the present-day linguistic and common version of the word for these people. Kalapuyans is the term used to represent all the different Kalapuya tribes. There are many different spelling conventions, Calapooia, Calapuya, etc. in historic literature. Many present-day place names use the older version of the word, Calapooia, while references to the people are Kalapuya.

2 Sturtevant, William, and Wayne Suttles. Handbook of North American Indians: Northwest Coast. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1978.

3 Mackey, Harold. The Kalapuyans: A Sourcebook on the Indians of the Willamette Valley. Salem: Mission Mill Museum Association, 1974.

4 Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: Volume 7 Parts 1 & 2. Digital Scanning Inc, 2001.

5 Vine Deloria, Jr. first used this phrasing and it well fits the context. See, Deloria, Vine. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.

6 I have hypothesized that Chief Kiesno served as a character model for Chief Multnomah, due to his close relationship with Hudson’s Bay Company fur traders. In addition, images of Chief Joseph became the stand-in for the image of the fictionalized Chief Multnomah. See discussion of Chief Multnomah in Lewis, David G. Four deaths: The near destruction of western Oregon tribes and native lifeways, removal to the reservation, and erasure from history. Oregon Historical Quarterly 115, no. 3 (2014): 414-437.

7 A term which refers to tribal culture and ways of living with the land. The word is a common term within the Grand Ronde tribe.

8 E.g., events surrounding the Rogue River Indian War, Modoc Indian War, Cayuse War, Bannock War, and attacks on coastal tribes like the Chetco.

9 Deloria’s key works include Custer Died for your Sins, Red Earth, White Lies, and God Is Red.

Personally Encountering the New Grand Ronde Indian Reservation

I am constantly engaging with the history of my tribe, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. When I first became a member of the tribe in the early 1990s, my grandmother, Norma (Mercier) Lewis, took me to the reservation to get enrolled. This was about the time the tribe was opening the Spirit Mountain Casino. I was ambivalent about the casino; I thought it would change the tribal culture in significant ways. I have since changed my opinion as I have seen people prosper at the reservation due to the availability of funding for education and other programs. The casino is a necessary part of the tribe’s economic development and is allowing us to recover much of our sovereignty and rights in Oregon.

Tribal recovery is a highly debated topic; the tribe is doing well economically, but the culture of the tribe still suffers. There is not enough investment in the culture, and many people are not engaging enough to recover knowledge taken from their ancestors generations ago. Assimilation has been largely successful, and that, along with the termination of the tribe in 1954, caused much division in the tribe.¹⁰ Still, there is cultural recovery happening. Some people would rather we not address this as recovery, as some families never lost their cultural knowledge. Each person needs to address this in their own time.

Recently, the ideas around colonialism have come to the fore. Salem, the capital of Oregon, is a settler community; every building, house, government facility, college, and museum is an edifice of settler culture. The Capitol building has a giant golden pioneer statue on its roof, which clearly marks the state as a pioneer settlement. The original Chemeketa history was completely rewritten, and the name only survives in a parking garage, a 2-year college, and a street. There is also nearly no other information or signs of the Indigenous Kalapuyans in Salem. This is the same for most of the cities in Oregon. Our existence is completely overwritten, and we only have a few place-names to represent us. I have no nostalgia for an old Portland hotel, a farmhouse, a barn, or anything of settler culture. At the time these structures were in their heyday, Native peoples were not allowed to be off the reservations. We were forced into boarding schools, we had no wealth or possessions to speak of, and what land we did have was taken away during the termination era (for Grand Ronde 1954-1983).¹¹ Our people have no century farms (farms in family ownership for one hundred years or more are honored by a program at the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department). The existing historic engagements for me and my people are Chemawa Boarding School, the reservation-era houses, St. Michael’s Church at Old Grand Ronde, and the Fort Yamhill blockhouse, relocated to Dayton in 1911. All these historic structures represent the colonization, oppression, and assimilation of my people. Not having any property or housing to call our own caused my people to continue to be poor, and very few families have any wealth to speak of. What wealth they have has only been created in this last generation or two through access to college and opportunities for better jobs. This is the legacy of settler culture.

I grew up in Salem. My father, Gary Lewis, spent three tours of duty in the US Army, and got out in 1972. We moved to Salem and got a three-bedroom house on the G.I. Bill. That house has remained in the family, and my mother, Polly Lewis, lives there today. My mother’s family were settlers from Petaluma, California. While my mom attended college, my dad worked at a gas station and at Fairview Training Center¹² on graveyard shifts to keep us in the house. Later he got a job fixing computers and copiers, and we did better. We would get firewood from the forest and go to U-pick fields in the summers east of Salem. When I was a kid, the tribe did not exist, the reservation and tribal government terminated, and the land sold. There was not any tribal interaction except what I learned from my father, and my grandparents, aunts, and uncles. The tribal reservation was a parcel of land I heard stories about in the car when we travelled on the weekends to the coast for a day at the beach. We did not go on lengthy vacations, except to visit relatives at my grandparents’ A-frame cabin in eastern Oregon. My dad would supplement his income with fixing up and painting trucks and vans, and sometimes painting with his father, Delbert Lewis, who was a professional painter for the state, and with my uncle Larry Lewis. I did not realize until years later that our lifestyle was a result of our family being Native; there was no inherited wealth in the family at all. We held on desperately to a small, one-quarter-acre piece of property, acquired with the G.I. Bill, because we had nothing else. The irony is that our property in Salem is within the original Santiam Kalapuyan territory, one of the tribes I am a descendant from, yet we struggled to maintain a normal life only a few generations after our lands were taken away.

Our people have lived in Oregon for more than ten thousand years and lived well off the land. Yet in a short period of time in the 1850s, we lost all our rights and future wealth for generations to come. At some level we continue to relive that loss with each new generation. We are not a naturally poor people, despite the stereotypes of Indians. Our status as a disenfranchised people came about because of the actions of settlers in taking everything from us, then establishing an Indian administrative system which continued to enforce our poverty for the past one hundred and seventy years. When our people got a little land in 1891, and held onto it for twenty years, the federal government established new programs to take away that land. When we began to recover and again gain some land again in the 1940s, we were terminated, and again lost the land and any wealth we had saved. Our status is completely the result of a settler administrative system that continues to impoverish us so that we cannot exist except for relying on federal handouts.

The whole system seems meant to keep us perpetually in poverty so that we cannot ever claim what is rightfully ours: our lands and rights. We are divided in our knowledge and are perpetually fearful we will again be terminated. Many are so assimilated that they cannot conceive of any system other than what they are allowed by the federal government. Yet there are also many people in the tribe striving to understand our colonization, promote healing, make it possible for the next generation to be culturally conscious, and know how to speak a Native language and practice our traditions. The process of restoring our culture will take decades, but it is vital for the welfare of our people in the future. This is our history and our lot in life as we struggle to gather what rights we have remaining in settler society.

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10 Tribal Termination was a US Federal Government Indian Policy from 1952 to the 1970s. See Lewis, David G. Termination of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde: Politics, Community, Identity. University of Oregon, 2009.

11 Lewis, David G. Termination of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde: Politics, Community, Identity.

12 A facility in Salem, Oregon, for developmentally disabled peoples, which closed in 2000.

Decline of the Tribes of Western Oregon

At the time that Lewis and Clark sought the Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean (1805–1806), there were tens of thousands of Native peoples in western Oregon. The population estimate from scholars for the Kalapuyans is sixteen thousand people. On the Columbia River, the Lewis and Clark maps show a great number of villages, and they give voluminous notes for the numbers of houses and varieties