The Rogue River Indian Wars, 1851--56, Introduction

Below--The Oregon Territory in 1837. The lower part of the green area--governed by the British Hudson's Bay Company--would be ceded to the United States in 1846.  The coastal areas above modern British Columbia were controlled by Russia until 1867. The area below the green territory was the former  "Spanish America", under control by Mexico from its independence in 1821 until its loss to American expansionism in the Mexican War after 1848. A chart of the Rogue River area can be seen  in the lower left portion of the map, next to the "Oregon Territory" insignia.

Part One--Background to Conflict

(left) A small artifact of Native-American  craft work recovered from a site along the Rouge River in southern Oregon, near the present day town of Gold Hill (population 1,100).  In 1853, Gold Hill was home to a small military fort known as Fort Lane, named for Joseph Lane the territorial governor sent out by President Millard Fillmore in 1949 to deal with the various native tribes and supervise land claims in the newly formed American territory of Oregon. (American Oregon was carved out after a 1846 border settlement with the British and the Hudson Bay Company. The former had too much trouble with the Corn Laws back home and running much of the the rest of the world to care about holding onto all of the Pacific Northwest.)

, Fort Lane had been built by the troops of the regular Federal Army, not to keep hostile "Indians"  from white settlement, but rather as a refuge for local natives.   By 1853, most white miners and settlers viewed all "Indians", even sometimes women and children, as fair game for attack if ever one of  the whites fell victim to an attack by any small band or single native asserting a right to protect the land of his ancestors. 

This policy of settler retribution led to the flaring up of Oregon's worst war between the native peoples off the Rogue (Shastas, Modocs, Umpquas, et al) and the "strangers" from the eastern part of North America.  (below) Cow Creek Jennie , member of the Umpqua, a tribe  of the northern Rogue River area. She was photographed in the late 1850's.                  

--By  the early 1840's, European-American  settlers were beginning to cross the Continental Divide and settle in the Far West.  One of these groups of wagoneers,   came up through northern Nevada and Idaho and settled in the Willamette Valley area of the British-controlled Oregon Territory. Later many settlers came to stay in the Rogue River Area. 

  Euro-Americans back East had ingrained in their political and economic sentiments something called "Manifest  Destiny". In practical terms it meant that, come what may, the land-hungry US settlers could not rest until the Pacific and Atlantic coasts were under American control and the sparse number of original peoples were pacified. These policies were not new: by the 1830's : thousands of "civilized Indians" (Creeks, Cherokees, Chikosaws, et al ) had already been forced-marched hundreds of miles out of the South Eastern United States to the then-undesirable midwest region in present day Oklahoma.   The sadness, death and disease and wanton neglect of  "The Trail of Tears" would be played out again on the West Coast a generation later. 

   During the forced resettlement of Eastern Tribes, white settlement was sparse in the Oregon Territory, which sported only small forts, a few farmers and trading posts. The Native- American tribal population near the Rogue and Klamath Rivers could co-exist most of the time with early traders and fur trappers.  But emigrant population pressure was beginning to tip the balance. The whites came with their own ideas of land ownership and low opinions of native peoples.  Violence in northern and southern regions of Oregon was inevitable. As Jack Sutton put it in his introduction to the 1969 book "Indian Wars of the Rouge River":   

"Though many histories record the fierce savagery of the (native) people, it must be kept in mind that unfair dealing with Indians along the eastern seaboard had become common knowledge among these tribes long before the great (California) gold rush of 1849...unprovoked "attacks and massacres" were in reality often the first steps toward making a final defense against the intrusion of the white man. The "incidents" date back to the Hudson's Bay explorations (of the Rogue Area) in the 1820's"  

 The Americans and the British had been at loggerheads over a settlement between the two powers since the late 1820's.  The first Americans to come to the valleys of western Oregon were retired  fur trappers and farmers looking to  settle their with their often mixed-race families. In 1843, the Ameircans created a Provisional Government in a famous "Wolf Meeting" in Oregon City, nominally started in an attempt to coordinate the destruction of wolves and bears that were plauging livestock .  President John Tyler was slow to respond to the settlers claims for  provisional statehood from Washington--he was more concerned with annexing the Texas  Republic, because adding Texas to the union would also add a major slave state to the Southern Power bloc in Washington (Tyler was a Virginian and he later served as a legislator in the Confederate Congress in Richmond during the Civil War.)  The Presidential election of late 1844, however, brought a new President--and slaveholder, James Knox Polk, to the White House. He was more opportunistic about "opening the West" than even Tyler would have dared.

From the Oregon Blue Book website:

 "From the In 1845 President James K. Polk informed Great Britain he wanted resolution of the issue of sovereignty in the Pacific Northwest. In the agreement reached in 1828, the nations had one year in which to resolve the long-simmering "Oregon Question." Polk was an avowed expansionist. A Democrat, he sought the presidency in 1844 on a simple platform: the annexation of Texas and the occupation of Oregon. The Tyler administration took care of acquiring Texas before Polk was sworn into office, but he persisted in an aggressive agenda of American expansion. Polk campaigned under the popular slogan "54-40 or fight," a contention that the southern boundary of Russian America was the northern boundary of Oregon. He pressed through diplomatic channels and used his inaugural address to assert American rights to all of Oregon. His ambitions far exceeded the area of American activity.Resolution came on June 15, 1846, in the Oregon Treaty. Polk was already in pursuit of a greater prize--California--and had helped engineer a declaration of war against Mexico by massing troops along the Texas border until they were attacked by Mexican soldiers. Oregon became a sidebar in the unfolding story of the Mexican War."

In 1850, Gold was discovered in the Rogue River Valley.  Small settlements like Ashland and Jacksonville (named for Andrew Jackson, the President who sent the Cherokees and other tribes by force to Oklahoma) sprang up.  Conflict was inevitable with the local tribes. What happened will be put forth in select detail in the next installment.