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MATHIAS D. BERGMANN

"we should lose much by their absence"

The Centrality of Chinookans and Kalapuyans to Life in Frontier Oregon

GUIDING AMERICAN FUR TRADING VESSELS around the daunting Columbia Bar and into the dangerous waters of the Columbia River's mouth in the early 1810s, Ramsey, a Chinook person who lived at the mouth of the river, knew the importance of his actions. He was helping maintain his peoples' pre-eminence in an emerging international trade network and likely securing a place for himself within his village hierarchy. Without him and his fellow Native guides and porters, Euro-Americans could not safely maneuver the waterway so crucial to their economic interests. By providing such service, Ramsey gained esteem within both Euro-American and Native worlds. The growing presence of Euro-Americans boded well for his people. Some of his linguistic kinsmen from the Upper Chinook, or Wasco, Indians found similar opportunities in the late 1830s as American missionaries arrived in their territory. A number of Wascos assisted Daniel Lee and Henry Perkins in establishing their Methodist mission by carrying wood, supplies, and much-needed provisions from the Cascade Mountains to the future mission site at The Dalles. Just a few years earlier, across the mountains in the Willamette Valley, John Calapooya, a young Kalapuyan man, had similarly assisted Lee's uncle, Jason Lee, leader of the region's Methodist mission. Working with several descendents of Euro-American fur trappers and traders and Native women, Calapooya participated in a barn-raising that helped complete the mission site and establish a permanent presence for the Americans.1 These are but a few of the countless interactions between Natives and newcomers as Europeans and Americans began to expand into the region. The common dominator in all of these episodes from the lower Columbian River frontier is the centrality of Lower Columbian Native Americans. 1

 

Map 1

Map 2

    These map details indicate the traditional locations of tribal groups in the lower Columbia River Valley region (above) and how those places came to be defined after newcomers began to dominate the region's culture and economy during the 1840s (below).

    Copyright 1981 by University of Oklahoma Press, Norman; published in Robert Ruby and John Brown, Indians of the Pacific Northwest.
 
 
      A frontier is a "territory or zone of interpenetration between two previously distinct societies." The frontier "opens," historians Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson continue, with the first intrusion and closes with one people securing political, economic, social, and cultural dominance.2 American and British ship-based trade with Chinookan Natives at the mouth of the Columbia River initiated the lower Columbian frontier during the late 1700s, and Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and their Corps of Discovery quickened the development of it in 1805 and 1806. The first sustained settlement by Euro-Americans in 1810 truly opened the frontier, and the emerging American socio-economic and political control closed it in about 1845. We know much about the Euro-American experience, but to fully understand the frontier society requires an appreciation of the complexity and dynamism of cross-cultural encounters and of the experiences and significant contributions of the Chinookan and Northern Kalapuyan peoples. 2
      The lower Columbia frontier is defined here as ranging from the mouth of the Columbia River upriver to The Dalles and from the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers south through the Willamette Valley to modern-day Salem. Two large groups of Indian peoples defined by language, the Chinookan and Northern Kalapuyan, inhabited that region. Numerous bands of Chinookans lived on both shores of the Columbia River from the mouth to The Dalles, including, in geographical order, the Chinook, Clatsop, Cathlamet, Multnomah, and Upper Chinook (Wasco-Wishram peoples).3 The Kalapuyan speakers lived in the Willamette Valley from roughly the Willamette Falls to the Umpqua River, but only the two northern-most bands — the Atfalati (Tualatin) and Yamel (Yamhill) Kalapuyans — are considered here. Those groups, more so than other Kalapuyan language groups, shared many socio-economic and cultural attributes with Chinookan people (including the custom of head flattening to distinguish free people from slaves), with whom they often interacted and intermarried.4 One key difference from Chinookan people was the Northern Kalapuyan's preference for wild game over fish.5 3

 

Figure 1

Figure 2

    Metal goods became prized Euro-American trade items among Chinookans. This wire wound blue bead (left) was taken from Station Camp and dated between 1792 and 1820; it is associated with the Lower Chinook tribe. The thimble was found at Fort Vancouver and is a trade item dated between 1829 and 1860.

    Lot 2234 Specimen 1
    Courtesy of National Park Service, Ft. Vancouver
 
 

  
      Native peoples played a determinative role in the formation and development of frontier society in the lower Columbia. The Chinookans were a skilled trading people who derived power from their location, kinship alliances with rival bands, and military capabilities. Chinookans occupied three strategic locations along the river highways: the mouth of the Columbia; The Dalles of the Columbia, where they controlled portage around impassable falls; and the falls of the Willamette River. Thus, Chinookan speakers were the middlemen of the region's trade system well before sustained contact with Euro-Americans. The importance of trade in Chinookan cultures contributed to the rise of a lingua franca known as Chinook Jargon or Chinuk Wawa, which first utilized words from various languages spoken by peoples involved in regional trade and further evolved when Euro-Americans entered the region.6 Traders also used Dentalium, beaver and otter pelts, and beads from China as common means of exchange that facilitated communication between linguistically different peoples. Long before white settlement, what became known as The Dalles was a thriving center of trade, with participants gathering from throughout the Pacific Northwest Coast to the Mountain West.7 After adapting to cultural norms, fur traders had only to step into the established economic system once they arrived in the 1810s.8 4
      Lower Columbian Natives' subsistence, land-use patterns, and marriage practices influenced relations with Euro-Americans. Chinookan peoples had established a seasonal fishing and gathering society that forged extensive economic ties among other villages and bands through marriage. During their seasonal movements or when in need, Chinookans and Kalapuyans generally went to the localities in which their relatives (including those related by marriage) lived.9 Those seasonal movements, based on resource accessibility and seasonal rituals and practices — such as Northern Kalapuyan field burning and the Chinookan First Salmon Ceremony — came to shape relations with Euro-Americans.10 The Chinookans and Kalapuyans were open to cultural borrowing, assimilation, and co-habitation with others, which helped create the emerging frontier when Euro-Americans entered the scene more permanently in the early 1810s. 5
      From day one, the men of the fur trade depended on Native inhabitants, and they had to accede to Native practices to maintain profits and even to survive. The Natives' practice of exogamy — that is, forming intimate relationships across social or cultural groups — their materialistic and stratified culture, and their geographic and environmental knowledge did much to facilitate the establishment of Euro-American commercial trade. Yet, Native people also provided obstacles to the traders — deliberately or not. Their refusal to adhere completely to Euro-American ways and demands, cultural rituals, and frequent intertribal conflicts and seasonal movements often altered, if not impeded, the efforts of fur companies throughout the frontier period. Yet, the commercial and materialistic attributes of Chinookan and Northern Kalapuyan cultures meshed well with Euro-American economic objectives. The Natives' preoccupation with prestige ensured that the Euro-Americans would have both a market for their goods and a labor force willing to supply fur, and the extension of exogamy to Euro-Americans forged familial and political ties and facilitated trade. 6
      The first group of Euro-Americans to settle in the lower Columbia and promise a consistent supply of trade goods was John Jacob Astor's multi-ethnic Pacific Fur Company (PFC), which established Fort Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia in 1811. Those hundred or so men, including the crew of the Tonquin, encountered "one of the most densely non-agricultural populations of Native American people in the precontact world."11 After less than two years of physical and financial insecurity and misfortune, the PFC management sold to the largely French-Canadian Northwest Fur Company (NWC) out of British North America, which merged with the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) under a royal mandate in 1821. The men of these successive companies constituted the entirety of the non-Native population until 1831; and their families, including children they had with Native women, had a significant presence in the increasingly multi-cultural communities of the 1830s and 1840s. 7
      Euro-American women rarely visited the region before the 1830s.12 From the beginning, sexual relationships between the trappers and traders and Chinookan and Northern Kalapuyan women were one of the primary venues of cultural interaction among the frontier groups. As in other frontier zones, Indian women forged relationship with white men to further their village's — and therefore their own and their family's — political and economic positions. Native leaders encouraged such exogamic marriages, because they had proven to be an effective way to smooth over political disputes, secure alliances, and facilitate trade and daily interaction. Chief Concomly, of the Chinooks located on the northern side of the mouth of the Columbia, had wives from several neighboring and upriver villages and also married his daughters to men of high stature. Among his more prominent sons-in-law were his rivals, Multnomah Chief Casino and Clatsop Chief Coalpo.13 By the time whites arrived, Concomly had virtually a monopolistic control of trade and was one of the most powerful chiefs in the region. The presence of whites, Yvonne Hajda argues, "probably magnified" his position.14 Concomly's daughters married PFC partners Donald MacKenzie and Duncan McDougall. McDougall, following Native customs, had asked Concomly for his daughter Illchere's hand in marriage in the summer of 1813, when the PFC was struggling to succeed. Having a Euro-American at Fort Astoria as an in-law not only increased Concomly's access to goods but also brought prestige, and marriage into one of the most powerful families in the region extended to the Euro-Americans much-needed economic and physical security.15 For both parties, the marriage was the most rational and mutually beneficial way to bolster their positions in the emerging frontier. 8
      While, in the end, the alliance did not help the Astorians fend off their British Nor'Wester competitors during the War of 1812, it was effective against other Native groups who posed threats to the Astorians.16 That alliance transferred to the NWC after its purchase of the PFC in late 1813, partly because McDougall stayed on with the NWC after the sale. Because of the kinship connection, Clatsop Chief Coalpo and Multnomah Chief Casino aided the Nor'Westers in 1814 by avenging an earlier attack on NWC men at The Dalles by members of the Wasco-Wishram bands (Upper Chinook). Coalpo's wife, who also had kin among the Wasco Indians, played an important role as mediator in the conflict, further demonstrating the importance of exogamous relations.17 Marriages between Native women and PFC/NWC leaders, however, were merely a few of countless frontier unions, temporary and permanent, that developed in the region. 9
      Cross-cultural sexual relationships were common among Natives who lived in the lower Columbia, particularly with the Lower Chinook (largely as the bands from the Multnomah at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers to the coastal bands of the Chinook and Clatsop), allowing them to effectively foster trade and strengthen alliances with their new Euro-American neighbors as they had with other Native groups.18 Lower Chinook women traded hats, baskets, and other items they made; roots and berries they gathered; and their own or their female slaves' sexuality.19 Meriwether Lewis criticized the Lower Chinook's willingness to "prostitute their wives and daughters for a fishinghook or a stran[d] of beads," and the women for being "lude" and "Carry[ing] on Sport publickly." He perhaps failed to envision the significant role such liaisons would later have in trade and settlement.20 10
      In the mid-1820s, three NWC/HBC men — Francis Ermatinger, John Work, and Michel Laframboise — turned their interracial relationships into a competition, and Laframboise boasted of having "a wife in every tribe" from the Columbia to California.21 Such liaisons likely both provided intimate companionship and served as a means of cementing alliances. Native women had their own motives and often entered such unions, as anthropologist Susan Kardas explains, "for short-term advantages in order to enjoy the novelty and prestige associated with it and to further their [and their tribe's] trade network."22 Those unions were also important in the development of frontier society. After retiring in the 1820s and 1830s, many of the men settled in the region. Those retired men, their Native wives, and their children established the first community in the Willamette Valley, and they became the backbone of Willamette Valley settlement, providing assistance and labor for the Hudson's Bay Company, arriving missionaries, and future settlers.23 11
      While vital to cross-cultural exchanges and trade, the influx of Native women around Euro-American forts also became a source of insecurity for both fur traders and Natives. The intimate relationships between Lower Chinook women and white traders led to the spread of venereal diseases that physically harmed both parties and disrupted trade. Astorian Ross Cox complained that so many Native women lingered around Fort Astoria during the summer months of 1811 and 1812 that it was "difficult to keep the men." Besides being distracted, the fur traders also passed to and received from Native women debilitating diseases such as syphilis, which Euro-Americans had introduced to the frontier in the late 1700s. Nor'Wester manager Alexander Henry remonstrated profusely about the problem, noting in April 1814 that "few or none are exempt from it." Henry warned his men that lost time at work due to such diseases would be deducted from their pay.24 Natives were, of course, also concerned about disease, especially as trade expanded in the 1820s. 12
      After being ousted from the Columbian land-based trade by the PFC sale in 1813, Americans again used ships to trade with Lower Columbian Natives in the late 1820s. While that expansion in contact brought greater trade opportunities for Natives, it also sparked one of the most catastrophic epidemics in American frontier history. Referred to as "fever and ague" by contemporaries, malaria took a heavy toll on the Chinookan and Kalapuyan peoples, effectively destroying the frontier equilibrium and starting the Indians of the lower Columbia River Valley down the road to rapid population and power loss in the 1830s.25 More than anything else, the onslaught of diseases in that decade helped close the frontier and ensure American hegemony. As much as 92 percent of the Indian population of the lower Columbia River Valley perished from white diseases, so that, by 1841 — when Americans started to immigrate to the region in large numbers — the once thriving population was on the verge of collapsing.26 After 1830, he decline in Native power and agency (a people's ability to determine their own fate) was never complete, however, and should not overshadow the significant contributions Native people made during the first three decades of contact and beyond.

 13
SOME OF THE EARLIEST AND MOST vital contributions included logistical support and navigation assistance. Few non-Natives had the knowledge or skill to pass the Columbia River bar or to safely navigate the waterways of the Columbia and Willamette rivers. The mouth of the Columbia was treacherous; strong tides, currents, and winds, exacerbated by a large sand bar, claimed a number of ships and men during the frontier period. Several of the Astorians and their Tonquin shipmates, who arrived at the mouth of the Columbia in March 1811, were among the first white victims of the river. The Nor'Westers were little better at mastering the waterway, losing Alexander Henry, Donald McTavish, and others in 1814. Such ineptitude on the water made the "awkward and unskilled" Astorians and their Euro-American successors dependent on Indian guides and porters.27 Moreover, the impenetrable Cascades and Dalles of the Columbia forced trappers and traders to portage the river with help (and occasionally extortion) from Cascades and Wasco-Wishram (Upper Chinook) Indians.28 Beginning with the Astorians, Euro-American traders, captains, missionaries, and settlers, when they could, relied on Indian porters — such as the Chinook guide Ramsey — to guide their vessels, laden with precious furs or Euro-American goods, into the mouth of the Columbia and upriver.29 14

 
Figure 3
    Navigating the mouth of the Columbia River proved treacherous for Euro-Americans, many of whom depended on Native guides. Depicted here in an engraving by Alfred T. Agate, the 1841 loss of the Peacock —an American vessel participating in the U.S.-sanctioned Wilkes Expedition — illustrated the continued need for Native guides.
 
 
      The Lower Chinook also provided fur-trade companies with effective intelligence and communication systems. Located on both sides of the mouth of the Columbia, the Lower Chinook and Clatsop peoples were strategically located to spot incoming ships, while the Upper Chinook, located at The Dalles, were strategically located to sight canoes coming downriver. Their position and alliances grew in importance as Britain and the United States went to war in 1812. The Nor'Westers, for example, rewarded with two pistols the first Native informant to report foreign — that is, American — ships. Lower Chinook couriers delivered messages from post to post for the HBC, which controlled Fort Astoria (Fort George) and, after 1825, Fort Vancouver. By 1830, a combination of HBC and Native transportation routes crossed the lower Columbia River Valley. Chinookans along the river had played a significant role in developing pre-contact trade routes that stretched far into the interior, and the fur-traders' courier system was based on those routes. The system became so well-established during the frontier era that, when an Indian courier died en route from Fort Vancouver, interior tribes passed the letter along until it reached its destination.30 Due to the willingness of Natives to participate, the Euro-Americans secured an intelligence network without diverting company men from business activities. 15
      A critical component of those quotidian activities was procuring food for the men, something that plagued the Astorians and, initially, the Nor'Westers. Supply ships for the Astorians were infrequent and unpredictable after the loss of the Tonquin during the summer of 1811 in Nootka Sound.31 The demise of the Tonquin forced the Astorians, who were agriculturally inexperienced, to rely on Indians for provisions. Astorian trader Ross Cox noted that their "table was daily supplied with elk, wild fowl, and fish." Fish dominated their diets so much that Cox claimed he and others could not eat anchovies for "years afterwards." His fellow Astorian Alexander Ross complained about subsisting primarily on "boiled fish and wild roots" and lamented that they "had to depend at all times on the success or good-will of the natives."32 The PFC and later companies did have their own hunters, but the men were nevertheless dependent on Natives for subsistence.33 16
      "All who lived along the Columbia," writes historian James Ronda, "found that the seasons of the salmon controlled each day's food."34 To obtain the fish, Euro-Americans had to yield to Native rituals such as the First Salmon Ceremony, and cultural misunderstandings could turn dependency into a source of distress. Once the Astorians recognized and acceded to Indian rituals, trade flourished. Yet, as the Astorians became more dependent on Chinookan traders for subsistence, the Chinookans became more sagacious in their dealing.35 For all of the fur-trading companies, the provision trade was of "more urgent importance to a post's survival than fur acquisition," as historian Richard Somerset Mackie illustrates, and it created "the primary and most constant points" of interaction.36 It was also common for the HBC to send a portion of its French-Canadian fur traders to live with Natives during the winter, which was cheaper for the company and, according to clerk John Stuart, "Indians considered themselves honored." Such arrangements also provided great "knowledge both of Indians and the country."37 Not until the Hudson's Bay Company began farming at Fort Vancouver in the late 1820s were the Euro-Americans weaned significantly from their dependence on Natives for provisions. That change, however, merely altered and broadened the Euro-American–Indian relationship; along with providing provisions, logistics, and intelligence, Natives now added their labor.38 17

 
Figure 4
    Salmon and other fishes taken by Natives at Willamette Falls (sketched here by Joseph Drayton in 1841), among other places, became important trades item and sources of sustenance for Euro-Americans.

  
 
      Starting in the early 1820s, lower Columbian Indians found that they could just as easily exchange their labor in a number of ways, beyond hunting and fishing, to obtain trade goods. Natives began producing goods, such as English-style hats or moccasins, and began working in the forts and mills of the Hudson's Bay Company.39 In 1831, Englishman George Roberts recorded that there were "a great many Indians at Vancouver," mostly Klickitat, running the plows on the HBC farms. Natives also labored in the small garden at Fort George and at the mills at Fort Vancouver. The difficulty and expense of hiring Canadian, Kanakan (Hawaiian), and métis (of Native and Euro-American parents generally, Objiwa and French specifically) settlers in the French Prairie, who were busy working their own lands, accounts for much of this dependence.40 The decline of the fur trade by the 1830s, due to the whims of fashion and the toll of over-hunting, coincided with the increasing focus on agriculture by both the Hudson's Bay Company and missionaries. With these changes, the Indians' role in the developing frontier shifted, and they became even more cognizant of the value of their roles and labor. Methodist preacher H.K.W. (Henry) Perkins at The Dalles showed frustration that it was virtually impossible to give the Indians "any satisfactory equivalent for their labor," given the Natives' ability to capitalize on the growing number of whites in the region who were vying for their services.41 18
      Indian labor was essential to missionaries and French-Canadians, in the 1830s, and to American settlers as they began to arrive in the Willamette Valley in the early 1840s. When Methodists Daniel Lee and Perkins arrived at The Dalles to establish a mission in March 1838 (expanding from their base in the Willamette Valley), Wasco Natives who lived nearby "proved ... willing to assist" and "gave their services free, dragging in timbers a stick at a time and packing in shingles on horseback from the mountains, making it possible to finish the house before winter." Wasco people also transported supplies and materials, including "considerable game and fish," from Fort Vancouver to the nascent mission. Missionary John Frost and his family were working in an isolated location near the mouth of the Columbia, and they also relied on Native hunters. Frost expressed relief when, in the autumn of 1841, Lower Chinook hunters arrived just "as our provisions were well nigh spent."42 19
      The Northern Kalapuyans in the Willamette Valley and the Lower Chinookans near the coast worked for the Methodist missionaries as laborers and river boatmen.43 According to Simpson, "about 1000 Indians of all ages" provided labor for the missionaries and settlers in the Willamette Valley in 1841.44 French-Canadian settler F.X. Matthieu concluded that "many of the Indians were good workers. They can handle an ax like a white man; and on the river they were the best boatmen." Settler George Wilkes recorded that Indians performed "a great deal of work for whites, and where labor is so scarce as it is here, they are of no slight assistance to the settlements." Native hired hands, he continued, were "useful in rowing boats, paddling canoes, herding cattle," and other essential operations. "Upon the whole," Wilkes concluded, "these Indians are a vast benefit to the whites of this region. In the present condition of the settlement, we should lose much by their absence."45 20
      Yet, this dependence on Indian labor came with some dilemmas for Euro-Americans, namely in justifying the profits garnered from Native slavery. The HBC, its employees, and settlers in the region directly and indirectly utilized or benefited from Indian slavery, which was a source of much vexation for HBC management, as Britain had been at the forefront of abolition since the late 1700s and was eradicating slavery within its empire. Both the HBC and the key missionary groups in the region (Methodist and Catholic) struggled to abolish the Chinookan and Northern Kalapuyan practice in the 1830s. Some Indian leaders, most notably Casino, acceded to the HBC demands, but most Indians refused to give up their age-old custom; it was too ingrained in their culture.46 21
      Continued Indian slave ownership did not concern company officials and missionaries as much as the possibility of Euro-Americans adopting the practice. Many settlers in the Willamette Valley during the 1830s seem to have used slave labor, and a number of the former fur traders and trappers either had purchased female Indian slaves as wives or married Indian women who brought to the marriage an entourage of slaves.47 John McLoughlin, chief factor of HBC operations in the region for much of the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, reluctantly conceded to the practice. He argued that it was the custom of the country to allow Native women to retain their slaves after marriage and offered the assumption that the Euro-Americans would not benefit from slave ownership. In reality, non-Natives did profit from slave labor, and the HBC also benefitted by purchasing provisions grown by settlers' slaves. As retired HBC employees brought their wives' slaves to the Willamette Valley, many French-Canadian and American settlers followed suit.48 22
      While free and enslaved Natives proved to be an important labor source, getting them to do the type of work or as much of it as the HBC and missionaries wanted was another matter. The Chinookans maintained their independence by keeping their seasonal practices, cycles, and customs despite Euro-Americans' efforts to conform Native activities to their own interests. That resistance was frustrating for agents of the Hudson's Bay Company, which owed "its entire prosperity, nay, its very existence, to commerce with the natives."49 George Simpson, the Hudson's Bay Company governor in Montreal, lamented in the autumn of 1824 that if the Chinookans "would but apply themselves to Hunting during the Winter Months the Trade would be greatly increased," concluding that "unfortunately they are indolent and lazy to an extreme and cannot be roused into habits of activity." To Euro-American eyes, Native resistance to western materialism was nothing more than "laziness" and evidence of their incivility and barbarism. Missionary Samuel Parker, for example, commented on the "characteristic ... indolence" of the lower Columbian Natives in his 1837 report. "It is very difficult to stimulate them to industry and enterprise.... The motives which influence civilized men to exertion in business produce an effect the reverse with them," continued Parker, who was baffled by their contentment with only "daily food and scanty clothing." Similarly, McLoughlin complained in his 1826–1827 Fort Vancouver Report that "the Abundance of Nutricious Roots ... Indulge[d] their Lasiness," adding that "the Natives content[ed] themselves with [roots] Rather than Labor to procure Better — And the Abundance of Salmon which in short makes them perfectly Independent of us for the means of procuring subsistence." McLoughlin continued by describing the effect of that independence on the fur trade; there was "a Good deal of Beaver Yet in the District but the Natives are so Indolent and so Independent of us they will not hunt [at all the times whites wanted them to]." The Chinookans had apparently also retained their middleman status among the bands of the Columbia. "Indeed," McLoughlin added, "the furs the Indians trade at Fort Vancouver they get in Barter from the more Remote tribes."50 Thus, the presence of HBC forts did not significantly alter their practices; Chinookans had merely added one more stop to their seasonal movements, which would remain intact throughout the 1840s.51 23
      As with seasonal movements, Euro-Americans could not eradicate intertribal conflict and instead had to deal with it. While Chinookan bands participated in the larger economic system of the region, had highly similar languages, and shared a hierarchical culture that included slavery, they were not a homogenous people. Although a few leaders such as Concomly (Chinook) and Coalpo (Clatsop) had consolidated power over multiple villages, quarrels and skirmishes were frequent among bands along the Columbia River, where authority lay with individual village chiefs.52 Perhaps the greatest animosity lay between the Upper Chinookans (Wasco-Wishrams) at The Dalles and the Lower Chinookans, who rivaled for control of trade. Occasionally, Chinooks on the river's northern shore and Clatsops on its southern shore also broke into skirmishes with each other. Such intertribal conflicts were not long lasting, however, for they interrupted trade — contrary to the objectives of defending and promoting trade that generally started conflicts — and usually ended in an exchange of wergild and a resumption of trade. As historian Alvin Josephy, Jr., argues, Chinookan societies were "marked by traits that inclined an intense, and at times almost paranoid, competition for status by the ostentatious acquisition and spending of wealth." Outbursts of hostilities over trade and status, which continued well into the 1830s, became a source of economic and military insecurity for Euro-Americans.53 Yet, it was the same desire for status (trade goods) among Native bands behind those conflicts that also made the lower Columbia profitable for Euro-Americans. 24
      Intertribal rivalries and conflicts, which had long predated Euro-American settlement, only intensified as more Euro-Americans and their goods arrived and as Natives struggled to maintain or gain economic and political power, favors, or trade from whites. Before the Tonquin departed in 1811, for example, Concomly warned the Astorians that "the hostile [interior] tribes were a very bad people and ill-disposed toward the whites." Not knowing otherwise, the Astorians took Concomly at his word. After learning "a few words of the language," however, the Astorians realized that Concomly was practicing a play-off strategy. "By this stratagem," as Ross and the Astorians came to realize, Concomly "kept them from coming near us," thereby maintaining his people's position as the middlemen and himself, as historian James Ronda put it, "a kind of river emperor."54 25

 
Figure 5
    Chief Casino, who was sketched by Paul Kane in 1859, capitalized on the Hudson's Bay Company's presence to broaden his authority along the Columbia River.

  
 
      Under Simpson and McLoughlin, the HBC made a concerted effort not only to take over Comcomly's position but also to become the broker of the region, mediating and preventing conflicts. In the summer of 1825, hostilities between Concomly and Casino "threatened to put a stop to nine-tenths of our trade," McLoughlin lamented. He wanted to see an immediate truce.55 That conflict was likely the outgrowth of Concomly's resentment of Governor Simpson's decision to move the HBC headquarters from Fort George, near his lands, to Fort Vancouver, on Casino's lands. When deciding whether or not to reestablish the headquarters of the Columbia Department at an upriver location, McLoughlin had to consider the impact such a move would have on his Indian relations and on intertribal politics. From a business perspective, McLoughlin had no choice but to establish headquarters upriver, but he hoped the move would not disrupt the Native fur trade, which had become the most productive yet. Concomly was essential to HBC commerce, and McLoughlin had to tread carefully to prevent his alienation and his possible turn to Americans if they returned to the region.56 Although Fort Vancouver was situated well into Multnomah territory, McLoughlin appeased Concomly with guaranteed access. Nevertheless, the move helped Casino build a trading empire to rival Concomly's, altering the regional indigenous politics.57 The "avidity with which our neighbours are desirous of Monopolizing the trade with us," wrote McLoughlin, only intensified the "Constant Broils among the tribes."58 26
      Along with threatening the economic objectives of the fur companies, intertribal conflicts also caused anxiety among missionaries and settlers and disrupted missionary work. When Methodist missionary Joseph Frost arrived at the Clatsop mission in the summer of 1840, he found himself in the middle of an inter-village war. Methodist Alvan Waller faced a similar scenario in early 1841, at the mission at modern-day Oregon City, when conflict erupted between the Clackamas and Molala Indians and the Klamath Indians of southern Oregon.59 As these episodes illustrate, the inter-tribal competition and conflict that had been present for generations before white settlement continued and intensified with the presence of Euro-Americans. In turn, those conflicts affected Euro-Americans activities and continued to threaten them economically and physically until the period of Indian removal during the 1850s. 27
THE NATIVES' RESILIENCE IN maintaining their pre-contact culture went beyond conflict to include religious beliefs, lifestyles, and a commercial mind-set, hindering missionary efforts in myriad ways through the 1840s. For Christian missionaries, historian James Axtell writes, "conversion was tantamount to a complete transformation of cultural identity," and required an ardent effort "to transmogrify their [Natives'] behavior by substituting predictable European modes of thinking and feeling for unpredictable native modes."60 Because of Chinookan and Kalapuyan cultural resiliency, Methodists in the lower Columbia encountered almost insurmountable obstacles in completing that "transformation." The continuation of Native peoples' seasonal movements, for example, proved troublesome for the Methodist missionaries. Methodist preacher W.W. Kone grumbled in 1842 that, during the spring fishing season, he and other missionaries had to "go to their lodges to have access to them, for we cannot get them to come to us unless we repay them for doing it." Daniel Lee and John Frost realized separately that they would have to alter their schedules because they found it more fruitful to approach the Chinookans when they were of "easy access" in their winter quarters.61 28

 
Figure 6
    A.T. Agate sketched this Kalapuyan man in the early 1840s, when Euro-Americans began to dominate the region's culture and economy. Still, this person had retained traditional dress and hunting practices at least enough for Agate to depict them.

  
 
      Missionary Alvan Waller blamed the eventual failure of the Wascopam mission partly on the Indians' unwillingness "to stop and cultivate the soil."62 Euro-American agricultural traditions were not only foreign to Chinookans and Kalapuyans but also offered them very little; living in a lush and flourishing environment, hunting (Kalapuyan), fishing (Chinookan), and gathering were typically more than enough to procure subsistence, aside from the lean period during early spring. That intransigence stymied the efforts of Methodist missionaries in the Willamette Valley during the 1830s and 1840s to save and, as they saw it, to civilize the Natives. In tune with their religious efforts, Methodist leaders Jason and Daniel Lee, among others, hoped to use agriculture as a civilizing tool. In his report of the Methodists' activities from 1837 to 1840, Daniel Lee wrote of how the Willamette Valley missionaries held meetings in Kalapuyan lodges "to induce" them "to settle down and farm and build themselves houses, but the effort failed, thro[ugh] their indifference, to do them any good."63 Natives' adherence to their gathering practices, furthermore, occasionally conflicted with the missionaries' farming. During the second year of farming at the Wascopam mission, for example, Henry Perkins recorded that some of the Wasco Indians had expanded their seasonal gathering routes to include the mission's farm, where they harvested some of the mission's corn and potatoes.64 While the declining fur trade, then increasing effects of diseases, and the general disruption wrought by the presence of whites likely led to a greater number of Chinookans to alter their view of agriculture in the mid-1830s and work the HBC farms, the Kalapuyans held onto their negative views toward it and did not adopt western agricultural practices until removal at mid-century.65 29
      The Chinookans and Northern Kalapuyans also did not view the purpose of the missions and mission schools as the Methodists did but instead incorporated those institutions into their pre-existing cultural and social frames of reference. Treating missionaries as extended family, Natives often left the mission or school after receiving what they desired. Daniel Lee expressed his disappointment, for example, when a Chinookan boy and a Kalapuyan girl who had arrived starving in the winter fled during the ensuing summer. Missionary Orpha Carter similarly complained that it was "often difficult to keep the children there when they get well clothed and begun to learn."66 30
      Thus, while Natives did frequently visit the missions, they did so in their own socio-cultural way and with defined expectations. With Chinookans and Kalapuyans, visiting and gift-giving — which missionaries and settlers saw as begging — were "expected ways of reinforcing social ties," so they frequently visited the missions. Shortly after his arrival among the Wasco Natives, Perkins anxiously recorded that "Indians from all parts of the surrounding country were every day coming and going," adding that "It would have been a strange thing for a native to pay us a visit without begging for something." At the same mission, Laura Brewer complained in the summer of 1840 that "Indians thronged" her house. "They came early and often," she continued, "and were seldom in a hurry to depart. They expected to be treated with something to eat, at any time. In the absence of presents of food they became morose and prejudiced." Perhaps taking Brewer's response of locking them out as an affront, as they likely would have if a Native had taken such a stance, they soon started to rattle the door and knock on the windows, shouting to be let in.67 As with their extended kin, it appears that, in the 1840s, the Natives viewed the missions — which had relatively many possessions — as a place to go only in times of need.68 31
      What caused the greatest concerns for missionaries, however, was the refusal of Indians to fully or properly embrace Christianity and repudiate their traditional beliefs. Exasperated by their resistance, Methodist missionary John Frost rhetorically asked: "How can they be made to feel their need of Christ?"69 To the missionaries, lower Columbian Natives who did embrace Christianity often did so in misconstrued ways. It was common for Natives to associate their material desires and needs with religious rituals and worship — such as the First Salmon Ceremony — which frustrated the missionaries to no end. In turn, Natives often expressed disappointment in Christianity when praying did not work as they envisioned it would. Daniel Lee related a case where one man offered to pray for an entire year in exchange for a capote (cloak); when Lee refused to supply him one, the man stopped praying.70 32
      Native people thus incorporated Christianity into their worldviews. After attending a sermon of Reverend Waller's, for example, an unnamed Indian returned to his village to find that his house had gone up in flames. Shortly thereafter, he returned to Waller and demanded compensation, stating that, had he not been at Waller's sermon as requested by the missionaries, he could have saved his home. Others lost faith in the Americans' religion after it did not provide benefits or fulfill their desires as they had expected:
A converted chief Cal-i-te-weet, was shot while attempting to recover his horse from another Indian ... this kindled the spirit of revenge among his kindred, and now the question came up: "of what use is praying? Our brother prayed, but he is dead! Why pray, if it will not keep us alive? If we pray we cannot avenge the death of our friend! We Cannot fight our enemies. Our friends will suffer for our neglect. And our enemies will devour us!" ... The wound to the cause was deep and was an occasion of much backsliding.71
 		33
      Further, while the missionaries found great numbers of Native people in attendance at their revivals — according to missionary accounts, well over a thousand at times — the efficacy of their conversion to Christianity was suspect. Daniel Lee noted the perceived inconsistency in Native conversions: "Some who had wandered away [from Methodism] returned, some remained stedfast [sic] while others were unstable as water ... in this sad fact is found one of the greatest trials of our faith."72 What missionaries viewed as straying or backsliding was likely Native people either continuing to practice traditional rites alongside Christian ones or appeasing missionaries while in their presence. These were common responses by Native Americans in various American frontiers as they adjusted to European demands.73 John Frost noted a specific case of supposed backsliding near his house that was merely a case of Indians continuing to act according to traditional beliefs, despite the lessons in Christianity Frost had afforded them. Frost recorded in June 1842 that, for a second time in as many years, the local Natives with whom he had been working buried alive a man "with the professed object to prevent the salmon from leaving the river." The man had apparently been unconscious, and the living burial therefore unintentional, but they had moved with haste because "according to their superstitions, if a dead body should lie above ground, the salmon would all leave," illustrating the tenacity with which Natives held to their beliefs.74 34
      The Methodist missionaries, especially those stationed near the coast, seemed to have quickly lost all hope in convincing the local Chinookans to convert. Reverends Kone and A.B. Smith left the region in 1840 after realizing they "could effect nothing as a missionary in this dark land." Frost could relate with them, and he morosely recorded that "it is acknowledged on all hands that the prospect, at present, is exceedingly gloomy." He and his family followed Kone and Smith in defeat three years later. As he explained, it was not a failure on their part but instead on that of the Indians, who were "bidden to the wedding [but] would not come." It was neither the missionaries' method nor the gospel that precluded success, Frost continued, but instead "the material [they had] to operate upon." To Frost, there was no hope for converting the Natives, as they "manifest not the least concern for the soul." When he visited one Native and asked if he wanted to know about Heaven, for example, the aged Indian simply replied "no, and soon very deliberately filled his pipe for a smoke."75 As historian Gray Whaley notes, "despite the 'clarion call' heralded by" Christian publications, Methodist missionaries "did not find a Native population clamoring for the Bible."76 Instead, most Natives seem to have retained partial or entire commitment to their traditional religious practices.

 35
THE KALAPUYANS' CONTINUED manipulation of the land through burning also affected missionaries and settlers. After collecting camas, wapato, wild berries, and seeds in early- and mid-summer, the Northern Kalapuyans began a series of burnings in late summer and continued them through the autumn, leaving the landscape vastly changed. Burning aided the collection of tarweed and insects, facilitated re-growth for future harvests, and was a tool in hunting deer.77 While a vital method of Kalapuyan subsistence, burning proved to be a hindrance to Euro-Americans in their efforts to manipulate and commercialize the environment. HBC men at Fort Vancouver complained on their trips southward during the burning season that the practice inhibited their travel by eliminating grasses for their animals, and non-HBC men aired similar complaints during the 1840s. An unnamed HBC hunter had warned members of the 1841 Charles Wilkes exploring party not to linger, as the Indians were to commence burning soon, and the group would be deprived of food for their horses and threatened by small stems left after the burning that could easily make a horse lame. They apparently did not heed the advice, for one member informed Wilkes on July 31 that "the Indians were just commencing to burn the country, thereby interposing an obstacle that increases with my delay."78 36
      More significant than those annoyances, however, was the impact Kalapuyan burning made on Euro-Americans' desire to settle in the region. Most settlers who immigrated to the region during the 1840s were attracted to the lush, open character of the Willamette Valley prairies, which resulted from the Kalapuyan practices. The use of fire had been a central aspect of their seasonal hunting and gathering routine for countless generations. Regular burning also provided the valley's soil with its high fertility and maintained the landscape's open character. Thus, the practice had a significant role in frontier Oregon and the development of the American West. The settlers, however, moved to ban Indian burning practices, believing that burning was deleterious to the environment and dangerous to their crops.79 37
      Interactions with Natives proved vital for the early American settlements in the Willamette Valley and left a significant imprint on society. When they arrived in 1842 and 1843, the initial settlers of the Oregon Trail greatly depended on the hospitality of Native people and well-established mixed-race families. Gustav Hines, a missionary to the Willamette Settlement, found that interaction "carried on between the Whites and Indians in almost every part of it."80 T.M. Ramsdell, an immigrant of 1844, wrote about the mixed-blood families in the prairie and his stay with Etienne Lucier during the first winter. He described Lucier's wife as "the same as all the other settlers had ... a squaw, and his slaves and dependents were Indians." Living with such a family meant that Ramsdell "was in a measure forced to learn the Chinook Jargon."81 Similarly, settler James Miller observed that "emigrants learned the Chinook language [jargon] from the Indians," and that "it was often used in the families of white people more than their own language."82 Miller was surely exaggerating; nevertheless, his writings show that interaction was frequent and intimate enough for the continuation of the pre-contact language into the settlement period. While he noted the Native people were "not numerous," Ramsdell added that "for years after our first winter here we had constant life and intercourse with Indians ... employing and trading with them."83 In providing assistance — whether in trade, logistics, transportation, knowledge, or labor — Natives and their mixed-blood offspring proved highly important to the successful societal development in the lower Columbia.

 38
IN 1999, HISTORIAN JAMES RONDA gave a description of the Clatsops' experience that applies to all Native groups in the lower Columbia:
Encounters with explorers and traders at Fort Clatsop and Fort Astoria, the attack on the Point Adams village, and the cold sickness [malaria] were all signs of things to come. They pointed toward a future filled with dispossession and death. But the events themselves, no matter how tumultuous, did not mean that Clatsops of Coboway's generation had lost either their power or their place on the Columbia. Clatsops proved resilient enough to survive in an age of troubles.84
 The Indians of the lower Columbia, reduced in numbers, did survive, but their world in the mid-1840s was vastly different than it had been in 1810. Still, it was a world those Indians had been instrumental in building. The first Indian subagent in Oregon, Elijah White, had visited the region as a Methodist missionary in 1830 and returned to the lower Columbia River Valley in mid-October 1842. "Our reception," he wrote, "was such as was to be expected from a community of warm hearted ... freemen in an infant colony." Those last two words depict the change the region had experienced since 1830, and his use of the word colony suggests a growing American authority.85 Starting in 1841 and increasing exponentially after 1843, American emigrants poured into the lower Columbia region.86 Indian people continued to be active participants in frontier relationships and exchanges until the mid-1840s, but, struggling with the growing number of diseases, the loss of power, and the disruptions to their subsistence and seasonal patterns, their roles and position were decreasing in influence. "The Indians of this lower country whose national honor and dignity is laid on the dust," White wrote in 1845, "are looking upon the rapid growth and increased strength of the whites with sorrowful countenances and sad hearts."87		 39
      The withdrawal of the HBC after the Oregon Treaty of 1846, the further atrophy of Native societies, and the placement of United States territorial status over the region in 1848 all but sealed American control and Euro-American social, cultural, and economic dominance. In 1849, the first regiment of U.S. soldiers arrived, providing yet another powerful source of American control.88 By then, in the telling words of another U.S. Indian subagent, the Indians were "subject to the will of our government and depend upon the humanity of the white man to live in the country that gave them birth."89 During the first thirty years of frontier living, however, Europeans and Americans were often dependent on Natives and often had their efforts contoured by Native peoples' lifestyles. With the Chinookan and Northern Kalapuyan peoples approaching the brink of cultural atrophy, it was perhaps difficult for the new immigrants of the 1840s and 1850s to understand that the indigenes' cultural, economic, and political practices significantly contributed to the birth of the American Pacific Northwest. Lower Columbian Native cultures were never fully erased, however, and Native peoples of the lower Columbia River valley continue in their resiliency. Today, many are members of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, the Confederated Tribes of Siletz, and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon. 40


Notes

1.  On John Calapooya, see "Methodist Mission, 1834–1838," Methodist Episcopal Church Records, folder 1, MSS 1224, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland [hereafter OHS Research Library]; and Daniel Lee and Joseph Frost, Ten Years in Oregon (Fairfield, Wash.: Ye Galleon Press, 1968), 129. On Ramsey, see Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown, The Chinook Indians: Traders of the Lower Columbia (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 158. On the Methodist mission at The Dalles, see N.B. Brewer to Brother [Alvan] Waller, November 1, 1841, at Wascopam Mission, Alvan Waller Papers, MSS 1210, folder 6, OHS Research Library [hereafter Alvan Waller Papers]; and Daniel Lee to Reverend N[athaniel] Bangs, April 8, 1838, at Wascopam Mission, Daniel Lee Papers, MSS 1211, OHS Research Library [hereafter Daniel Lee Papers].

2.  Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, eds., The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 7.

3.  Yvonne P. Hajda, "Regional Social Organization in the Greater Lower Columbia, 1792–1830" (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1984), 62–63, 65. See also Michael Silverstein, "Chinookans," in The Northwest Coast, ed. Wayne Suttles, vol. 7, Handbook of North American Indians (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1990), 533. In keeping with current scholarship, I use the term Chinookan when referring to the Chinookan speakers who inhabited the region. I use the term Chinook when referring to a specific band of Chinookan speakers who lived on the northern shore of the Columbia River's mouth, primarily the Chinook and their neighbors across the river, the Clatsops.

4.  Henry B. Zenk, "Kalapuyans," in The Northwest Coast, 547–48; Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., The Indian Heritage of America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966; reprint, 1970), 73. On head flattening of the Northern Kalapuyans, see Hajda, "Regional Social Organization," 151. On intermarriage, see Silverstein, "Chinookans," 530–31; and Hajda, "Regional Social Organization," 118–19. Both Hajda and Zenk distinguish the Northern Kalapuya (Yamel and Atfalati) as being highly similar to one another and different from more southern Kalapuyan speakers.

5.  Robert Boyd, "Strategies of Indian Burning in the Willamette Valley," in Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest, ed. Robert Boyd (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1999), 99; Boyd, People of The Dalles: The Indians of the Wascopam Mission, Studies in the Anthropology of North American Indians, ed. Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), 37–38, 60; Ross Cox, The Columbia River: Or Scenes and Adventures during a Residence of Six Years on the Western Side of the Rocky Mountains among Various Tribes of Indians Hitherto Unknown, Together with A Journey Across the American Continent, ed. Edgar I. Stewart and Jane Stewart (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957), 57; Ruby and Brown, The Chinook Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 6–7; Robert Boyd and Yvonne Hajda, "Seasonal Population Movement Along the Lower Columbia River," American Ethnologist 14 (May 1987): 310; Silverstein, "Chinookans," 537; Verne F. Ray, "Lower Chinook Ethnographic Notes," University of Washington Publications in Anthropology 7 (1938): 124–26; Susan Kardas, "'The People Brought This and the Clatsop became Rich': A View of Nineteenth-Century Fur Trade Relationships on the Lower Columbia between Chinookan Speakers, Whites, and Kanakas" (Ph.D. diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1971; reprint, Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1978), 51; and Zenk, "Kalapuyans," 547.

6.  Harold Mackey, The Kalapuyans: A Sourcebook on the Indians of the Willamette Valley (Salem, Ore.: Mission Mill Museum Association, 1974), 22; Silverstein, "Chinookans," 535–37; and Kardas, "'The People Brought This," 60. Both cultures also used Dentalium (or haiqua shells) for ornamentation. Hajda notes the disputed date of origin of Chinook Jargon, but argues it likely formed before contact. See "Regional Social Organization," 59. Astorian Alexander Ross also described the economic position of the Chinook as being "middlemen." See Ross, Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River, 1810–1813 (Cleveland: A.H. Clark, 1904; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 94–95.

7.  Ross, Adventures of the First Settlers, 128–30; Theodore Stern, "Columbia River Trade Network," ed. Deward E. Walker, Jr., vol. 12, Handbook of North American Indians (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1998), 641–42; Ruby and Brown, The Chinook Indians, 21; and Boyd, People of The Dalles, 27.

8.  Richard Somerset Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains: The British Fur Trade on the Pacific, 1793–1843 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997), 292.

9.  Silverstein, "Chinookans," 536–37; Boyd, People of The Dalles, 53; and Boyd and Hajda, "Seasonal Population Movement," 310.

10.  Zenk, "Kalapuyans," 547; Helen N. Norton, et al., "The Klikitat Trail of South-Central Washington: A Reconstruction of Seasonally Used Resource Sites," in Indians, Fire, and the Land, 69; and Boyd, "Strategies of Indian Burning," 95, 97–98, 103.

11.  Robert Bunting, The Pacific Raincoast: Environment and Culture in an American Eden, 1778–1900 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 5; and Robert Boyd, "Demographic History, 1774–1874," in The Northwest Coast, 135.

12.  See Kenneth Porter, "Jane Barnes, First White Woman in Oregon," Oregon Historical Quarterly 31:1 (March 1930): 130–31.

13.  See Omar C. Spencer, "Chief Cassino," Oregon Historical Quarterly 34 (1933): 26; Ruby and Brown, The Chinook Indians, 196; and Kardas, "'The People Brought This," 63–64, 152–54; and David Peterson del Mar, "Intermarriage and Agency: A Chinookan Case Study" Ethnohistory 42 (1995): 1, 6. Euro-Americans proffered various spellings of this chief's name (Casino, Cassino, Kassino, Kaisino, etc.). I use the spelling from The Handbook of North American Indians.

14.  Hajda, "Regional Social Organization," 200; and Ray, "Lower Chinook Ethnographic Notes," 57.

15.  Ruby and Brown, The Chinook Indians, 143–45, 169–70. See also Jennifer Brown, "Ultimate Respectability: Fur Trade Children in the 'Civilized World'," The Beaver (Winter 1977–Spring 1978): 48.

16.  The PFC sold out to the NWC in December 1813 out of fear of the imminent arrival of the British navy, making the calculated decision that it was better to sell than to have the royal navy confiscate the fort and the furs and goods therein.

17.  Alexander Henry, Jr., "Henry's Astoria Journal," in The Oregon Country under the Union Jack: A Reference Book of Historical Documents for Scholars and Historians, ed. B.C. Payette (Montreal: by the editor, 1961), 27–48, 61, 118–19. See also Barry M. Gough, ed. The Journal of Alexander Henry, the Younger, 1799–1814, vol. 2, The Publications of the Champlain Society (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1992), 628, 628n154, 632–35, 633n1, 640–65. See also Cox, The Columbia River, 148–49; and Ruby and Brown, The Chinook Indians, 153–54.

18.  See Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670–1870 (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1980); and Peterson del Mar, "Intermarriage and Agency."

19.  Kardas, "'The People Brought This," 63–64, 152–54; Henry, "Journal," 23, 82, 85, 107–109, 152; Gough, ed., Journal of Alexander Henry, 633, 702–703, 717–18; Samuel Parker, "Report of an Exploring Tour beyond the Rocky Mountains," June 21, 1837, Samuel Parker Papers, MSS 1206, OHS Research Library; and Ross, Adventures of the First Settlers, 107.

20.  Lewis specifically excluded Clatsop women from this description and criticism. See the entries for December 29, 1805, and January 6, 1806. Gary E. Moulton, The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 252, 258–59.

21.  Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains, 308; and Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 73, 131–36, 166–67.

22.  Kardas, "'The People Brought This," 152–54; and Ruby and Brown, The Chinook Indians, 170.

23.  Lee and Frost, Ten Years in Oregon, 125; Kardas, "'The People Brought This," 63–64, 152–54. See also Melinda Marie Jetté, "'We Have Allmost Every Religion but Our Own': French-Indian Community Initiatives and Social Relations in French Prairie, Oregon, 1834–1837" Oregon Historical Quarterly 108:2 (Summer 2007): 222–45.

24.  Cox, The Columbia River, 166–67; Henry, "Journal," 129, 79, 110; and Gough, ed., Journal of Alexander Henry, 704, 718. On the introduction and effects of European diseases in the Northwest, see Robert Boyd, The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774–1874 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999).

25.  Lee and Frost, Ten Years in Oregon, 108; John Dunn, The Oregon Territory and the British North American Fur Trade, with an Account of the Habits and Customs of the Principal Native Tribes on the Northern Continent (Philadelphia: G.B. Zieber, 1845), 85. Lee and Frost asserted that "not even a single case" of malaria had struck this region prior to 1830.

26.  William G. Robbins, Landscapes of Promise: the Oregon Story, 1800–1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 60; Boyd, "Demographic History," 139–41; Bunting, The Pacific Raincoast, 30–31; and Boyd, Coming of the Spirit, 84, 232, 261–63. Robbins argues that Indians around Fort Vancouver sustained a 75 percent fatality rate. Robert Boyd ("Demographic") and Robert Bunting argue that there was a 92 percent fatality rate among Indians of the lower Columbia and Willamette valleys. Boyd argues that it was probable that the Indians near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers faced a 98 percent fatality rate. See Boyd, Coming of the Spirit, 232, 263.

27.  Cox, The Columbia River, 158n6.

28.  See Ruby and Brown, The Chinook Indians, 128, 133; James P. Ronda, Astoria and Empire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 113–15; Gabriel Franchére, Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the Years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First Settlement on the Pacific, translated and edited by J.V. Huntington, 2d ed. (New York: Redfield, 1854), 100–101; and Porter, "Jane Barnes," 130–31.

29.  Gough, ed., Journal of Alexander Henry, 640; Ruby and Brown, The Chinook Indians, 158; and Dunn, The Oregon Territory, 88.

30.  See Henry, "Journal," 128, 133, 136–37; and Gough, ed., Journal of Alexander Henry, 629 (Indian delivering letter), 708–09 (Indians as informants), 718, 721; Ross, Adventures of the First Settlers, 247; Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains, 297; and Ruby and Brown, The Chinook Indians, 130–32.

31.  Boyd, The Coming of The Spirit, 46.

32.  Cox, The Columbia River, 72; and Ross, Adventures of the First Settlers, 92.

33.  Payette, The Oregon Country under the Union Jack, 118–19.

34.  Ronda, Astoria and Empire, 207.

35.  Ross, Adventures of the First Settlers, 111; Cox, The Columbia River, 171–72; and Ronda, Astoria and Empire, 204, 220–21.

36.  Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains, 289. See also Dunn, The Oregon Territory, 87; Hajda, "Regional Social Organization," 269; and Ruby and Brown, The Chinook Indians, 167–68.

37.  John Stuart, "Oregon or River of the West," box 1, folder 4, Hudson's Bay Company Documents, MSS 1502, OHS Research Library.

38.  John Kirk Townsend, Across the Rockies to the Columbia (Fairfield, Wash.: Ye Galleon Press, 1970; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 115; and Hajda, "Regional Social Organization," 269.

39.  Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains, 286–89, 294.

40.  George Simpson to the Governor, Deputy Governor, and Committee of the Honorable Hudson's Bay Company, November 25, 1841, at Fort Vancouver, in Documents, "Letters of Sir George Simpson, 1841–1843," American Historical Review 14 (1908): 80; and Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains, 295.

41.  Boyd, People of The Dalles, 68–69.

42.  Marcella Hillgen, "Wascopam Mission," Oregon Historical Quarterly 39:3 (September 1938): 223; N.B. Brewer to Brother [Alvin] Waller, November 1, 1841, at Wascopam Mission, Alvan Waller Papers, folder 6; Daniel Lee to Reverend N[athaniel] Bangs, April 8, 1838, Daniel Lee Papers; Nellie B. Pipes, ed., "Journal of John H. Frost, 1840–43: Part IV," Oregon Historical Quarterly 35:4 (December 1934): 352–53.

43.  For the Willamette Valley see "Methodist Mission 1834–1838," in Methodist Episcopal Church Records, folder 1, MSS 1224, OHS Research Library; Lee and Frost, Ten Years in Oregon, 129; Asa Lovejoy, "Lovejoy's Pioneer Narrative, 1842–48," ed. Henry Reed, Oregon Historical Quarterly 31:3 (September 1930): 252; and Horace S. Lyman, "Reminiscences of F.X. Matthieu," Oregon Historical Quarterly 1:1 (March 1900): 101. For the coastal region see Pipes, ed., "Journal of John Frost," 350, 353–55.

44.  George Simpson to the Governor, Deputy Governor, and Committee of the Honorable Hudson's Bay Company, November 25, 1841, at Fort Vancouver, in Documents, "Letters of Sir George Simpson," 80, 82.

45.  Lyman, "Reminiscences of F.X. Matthieu," 101; and George Wilkes, "History of Oregon, Geographic, Geological, and Political," Washington Historical Quarterly 4 (1913): 208–209.

46.  See, for example, one Wasco Native's comments regarding the importance of slavery in Eugene S. Hunn, Nch'I-Wána "The Big River": Mid-Columbian Indians and Their Land (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990), 225.

47.  Elsie Frances Dennis, "Indian Slavery in the Pacific Northwest," Oregon Historical Quarterly 31:1 (March 1930): 194–95.

48.  Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains, 307–308. See also Lee and Frost, Ten Years in Oregon, 132–35; Peterson del Mar, "Intermarriage and Agency," 8; and Daniel Lee, "The Oregon Mission from September 1837 to March 1846," in Daniel Lee Papers, folder "Articles on the Oregon Mission."

49.  Herbert Beaver, "Letter of Herbert Beaver, Relating to the Indians on the North-west Coast of America, to the Committee of the Aborigines' Protection Society of London, 1842," in Herbert Beaver Papers, MSS 372, OHS Research Library.

50.  Frederick Merk, ed., Fur Trade and Empire: George Simpson's Journal, rev. ed. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1968), 94–95; Samuel Parker, "Report of an Exploring Tour beyond the Rocky Mountains" [1837], vol. 71, Letters 177–195, 81–2, in Samuel Parker Papers, MSS 1206, OHS Research Library; and for McLoughlin's report, see George Simpson, Simpson's 1828 Journey to the Columbia, ed. E.E. Rich, The Publications of the Hudson's Bay Record Society (London: The Hudson's Bay Record Society, 1947), 235–36. The Chinooks would offer interior tribes the use of Chinookan fishing sites along the Columbia in return for pelts. See Ruby and Brown, The Chinook Indians, 133.

51.  Ruby and Brown, The Chinook Indians, 137, 207.

52.  Village or band leadership seems to have been based on consensus, and Euro-Americans described them as non-hereditary positions. According to Hajda, however, the position of "chief" passed through lineage lines. See Hajda, "Regional Social Organization," 183.

53.  Gough, ed., Journal of Alexander Henry," entries for March 18, 1811, and April 10, 1814; Ruby and Brown, The Chinook Indians, 136, 156–57, 175; Cox, The Columbia River, 173; Dennis, "Indian Slavery," 181; Mackey, The Kalapuyans, 8; Zenk, "Kalapuyans," 549–50; Ray, "Ethnographic Notes," 58; and Josephy, The Indian Heritage, 74.

54.  Ross, Adventures of the First Settlers, 94–95; Ronda, Astoria and Empire, 222, 224; and Ruby and Brown, The Chinook Indians, 133–36.

55.  John McLoughlin to the Gov., Chief Factors, and Chief Traders, August 10, 1825, at Fort Vancouver, in Merk, Fur Trade and Empire, 253–54; Ruby and Brown, Chinook, 179; Spencer, "Chief Cassino," 21; and Simpson, 1828 Journey to the Columbia, 235–36.

56.  Ruby and Brown, The Chinook Indians, 168–69. According to the 1818 Treaty of Ghent, which concluded the War of 1812, all possessions acquired in war were to be returned their ante bellum possessors. Fort George, despite having been sold in 1813, was considered a British war prize and was ceded back to the United States. From 1818 to 1846, the United States allowed the British to occupy it, meaning that Americans could come at any time to reclaim their possession and begin trading again.

57.  Ibid., 170; Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains, 287–88; Simpson, 1828 Journey to the Columbia, 235–36; and Ruby and Brown, The Chinook Indians, 176–77.

58.  George Simpson, 1828 Journey to the Columbia, 235–36; George Simpson to H.U. Addington, January 5, 1826, at the Hudson's Bay House in London, in Merk, ed., Fur Trade and Empire, 262; and Hajda, "Regional Social Organization," 200, 226. Hajda argues that the presence of whites "magnified" the power, and hence rivalries, of Native leaders in the region before 1820, but McLoughlin's statement about the "constant broils" indicates such influence persisted well into the 1820s.

59.  Ruby and Brown, The Chinook Indians, 204; and Alvan Waller, diary entries February 1–7, 1841, in Alvan Waller Papers, folder 2 "1841 Diary." See also Pipes, ed., "Journal of John H. Frost," 349.

60.  James Axtell, Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 146. See also the remainder of this chapter and James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

61.  Robert Moulton Gatke, ed. ,"A Document of Mission History, 1833–1843," Oregon Historical Quarterly 36:1 (March 1935): 87; Daniel Lee, "To Clatsop and Return to the Dalls [sic]—etc.," in Daniel Lee Papers, folder "Articles on the Oregon Mission"; and Pipes, ed., "Journal of John H. Frost," 357–58.

62.  Hillgen, "Wascopam Mission," 232. John H. Frost, working at the other end of the Columbia, noted the same among the Lower Chinook. See Pipes, ed., "Journal of John H. Frost," 361.

63.  Daniel Lee, "The Mission from September 1837 to March 1840," in Daniel Lee Papers, folder 6. For using agriculture as a civilizing tool, see Letter from Jason Lee to the Secretary of the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, February 6, 1835, in Jason Lee Papers, MSS 1212, OHS Research Library.

64.  Townsend, Across the Rockies to the Columbia, 211; and Dennis, "Indian Slavery," 288.

65.  Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains, 293, 303.

66.  Read Bain, "Educational Plans and Efforts by Methodists in Oregon to 1860," Oregon Historical Quarterly 21:2 (June 1920): 67; Daniel Lee, "Breaking Ground for the Mission," in Daniel Lee Papers, folder 6; Orpha Carter to Eliza Burr, October 31, 1841–November 5, 1841, at both Wascopam and Fort Vancouver, in Protestant Missionaries Collection, folder "Carter," box 2, MSS 1225, OHS Research Library. See also entries for April 26, and October 18, 1835, and July 16, 1836, "Methodist Mission, 1834–1838," in Methodist Episcopal Church Records, folder 1, MSS 1224, OHS Research Library.

67.  Boyd, People of the Dalles, 75, also includes Perkins and Brewer quotes. See also January 21, 1841, entry in Alvan Waller, "Diary, 1841," folder 2, Alvan Waller Papers.

68.  See entry dated January 19, 1841, in Alvan Waller, "Diary, 1841"; Gray H. Whaley, "'Trophies' for God: Native Mortality, Racial Ideology, and the Methodist Mission of Lower Oregon, 1834 – 1844," Oregon Historical Quarterly 101:1 (Spring 2006): 6–35.

69.  Pipes, ed., "Journal of John H. Frost," 360.

70.  Hillgen, "Wascopam Mission," 224, 234.

71.  Daniel Lee, "To Clatsop and Return to the Dalls [sic]—etc.," in Daniel Lee Papers, "Articles on the Oregon Mission," folder 6.

72.  Daniel Lee, "[Account of the Missions] from February 29, 1842 to August 23, 1843," in Daniel Lee Papers, folder 6.

73.  Axtell, Natives and Newcomers, 172.

74.  Pipes, ed., "Journal of John H. Frost," 366–67.

75.  Ibid., 356–57, 359–60, 362–64.

76.  Whaley, "'Trophies for God'," 7–8.

77.  Robert Boyd describes this seasonal practice in "Strategies of Indian Burning," 101–103, 123–27.

78.  Quoted in Boyd, "Strategies of Indian Burning," 101–103.

79.  Bunting, The Pacific Raincoast, 48, 81–83; Boyd, "Strategies of Indian Burning," 95–98, 103; and Norton, et al., "The Klikitat Trail of South-Central Washington," 69.

80.  Gustavus Hines to the Secretary of War/Commissioner of Indian Affairs J.C. Spencer, April 5, 1843, at Willamette, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–1880, Oregon Superintendency, 1842–52, [LR], M-234, Roll 607, No. 1, Correspondence of the Office of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75, National Archives [hereafter Correspondence of OIA, NARA].

81.  T.M. Ramsdell, "Indians of Oregon," in T.M. Ramsdell Papers, MSS 852, OHS Research Library. Ramsdell only mentions Lucier's last name; see also Documents, "Astorians Who Became Permanent Settlers," Washington Historical Quarterly 24 (1933): 221; and Payette, The Oregon Country, 189.

82.  James Miller, "Early Oregon," Oregon Historical Quarterly 31:1 (March 1930): 67. See also Virginia Crooks to George Himes, the Secretary of the Oregon Pioneer Association, April 23, 1896, at The Dalles, in Miscellaneous Correspondence Collection, MSS 1500, OHS Research Library.

83.  T.M. Ramsdell, "Indians of Oregon," in T.M. Ramsdell Papers, MSS 852, OHS Research Library.

84.  James P. Ronda, "Coboway's Tale: A Story of Power and Place along the Columbia," in Power and Place in the North American West, Emil and Kathleen Sick Lecture Book Series in Western History, ed. Richard White and John M. Findlay (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 13.

85.  Elijah White to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, October 15, 1842, M-234, Roll 607, No. 1, Correspondence of OIA, NARA.

86.  William Bowen, The Willamette Valley: Migration and Settlement on the Oregon Frontier (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1978), 25; and John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 6, 30.

87.  Elijah White, "Report on Indian Affairs of Oregon April 4, 1845," M–234, Roll 607, No. 1, Correspondence of OIA, NARA.

88.  Lulu D. Crandall, "Indian Fighters, Settlers in Wasco County," Oregon Historical Quarterly 31:4 (December 1930): 382–83.

89.  Subagent 1st District South of the Columbia to Superior [Joseph Lane] [typescript], August 10, 1849, in Dorothy O. Johansen Papers, "Notes on Indian Affairs," folder 1, box 4, MSS 1652, OHS Research Library.

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