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Reviews
BIOGRAPHY OF A PLACE: PASSAGES THROUGH A CENTRAL OREGON MEADOW
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by Martin Winch
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| Deschutes County Historical Society, Bend, Oregon, 2006. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 294 pages. $24.95 paper. |
| Martin Winch has written a most interesting study of Whychus Creek and Camp Polk meadow, a small oasis at the edge of the forest and high desert plains of central Oregon. Beautifully illustrated with 139 photographs as well as numerous maps and illustrations, thoroughly researched, fully referenced, highly readable, and enlivened with apt quotations, Biography of a Place is largely a story about human values and how changing values have shaped and affected the nature of Whychus Creek and Camp Polk meadow over time. |
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Drawing from contemporary Native American oral history traditions and archival literature, Winch vividly describes tribal groups, the first Euro-American explorers to visit the location, expectant capitalists who built roads to connect fledgling communities to outside markets, and immigrants who settled central Oregon in general and the meadow at Camp Polk in particular. Each of those groups brought collective ideas and attitudes about resource exploitation. Indian people visited Whychus Creek to fish for salmon and steelhead but also employed fire to "check the growth of less valued and unused species" and to promote the meadow's "yield of tubers, berries, grass, and game" (p. 26). Soldiers at the short-lived Camp Polk cut down surrounding pine trees to construct their winter quarters and "killed over a hundred deer" for consumption during their first three months of occupation (p. 87). Road companies constructed rights-of-ways around and across the meadow. Immigrants, and later arrivals who settled at the meadow and surrounding area, created channels in the stream and drew water from it for irrigation, grazed their livestock on the meadow grasses, dammed the meadow for use as a sawmill log pond, and largely stripped away the complex native vegetation in order "to establish a new monoculture" (p. 186). |
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But Biography of a Place is more than a story about environmental decline and degradation due to past human behavior. Ultimately, it is a story about renewal, redemption, and restoration. In his final chapter, Winch writes about efforts currently underway to manage Whychus Creek and the meadow at Camp Polk in a proactive and sustainable manner. The outcome of that management strategy would be future desired conditions that support an environment conducive to "a restored fishery, improved water quality, and healthy meadow habitat" (p. 229). In support of that vision, various federal and state agencies, watershed councils, land trusts, tribal governments, irrigation districts, private landowners, and interested individuals have formed a collaborative partnership. |
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This is a meticulously researched book but not one without some shortcomings. It likely would have benefited from the copy editor's more careful attention to the author's occasional tendency to overwrite. |
4
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It is clear that the author consulted with the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs while writing this book, and that is how it should be. Consultation with the Burns Paiute Tribe, however, would certainly have added an additional, if opposing, voice to the story, particularly in light of the many references to the Paiute people. Similarly, chapter 2 would have benefited from a closer examination of anthropological, archaeological, and ethnographic literature. The book contains such an abundance of place-names that the addition of some contemporary maps to identify locations would have greatly benefited readers. Finally, and by the author's own admission, keeping track of all the players' names, where they came from and when, to whom they were related, and where they settled is sometimes a daunting task. But these are minor objections about a very good book that should be of particular value to social and environmental historians, individuals interested in regional history, and natural resource specialists. |
5
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| Ron Gregory
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Bureau of Land Management,
Prineville District |
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