Grave Situations: Jacksonville Oregon Pioneer Cemetery

A small winding road just north of town takes you to The Jacksonville Cemetary ,where over 4,000 citizens of the area are buried over a span now approaching 151 years.

This is the second part of a series I began a few months back concerning Jacksonville, Oregon, the oldest American settlement in the area and one that is of major historic interest. My focus on this trip was the Jacksonville Cemetery, which was founded in 1860, th same year that the town itself was incorporated after about a decade of European-American settlements owing to the Gold Rush of 1851 and the land grant program that brought farmers westwards to seek fortunes and at least a better climate for growing food and raising cattle. The big losers in this rugged terrain were the Native Americans, almost all of whom were forced from the area after the sporadic and bloody wars that ran from 1852--1856. After the native peoples were resettled far to a more desolate area north of the Rogue Valley, their landmarks and centers of culture are mostly gone. What remains is sites like these from the next wave of settlers.

Many of the pioneers to this area had a hard time of it. Epidemics such as measles, diphtheria, smallpox and various "bilious fevers" swept away whole sections of families. Some of the earliest Jacksonville settlers were "ruffians" who had been kicked out of California cities. Some harbored sympathies with the southern rebels in the Civil War and plotted mischief or worse against the few Federal soldiers stationed in the area or their free-soil neighbors (now that the Indians were gone). Both sides in that horrible conflict likely brought guns to town, just in case.

But many who came thrived peacefully and established a community with a myriad of churches, fraternal organizations and a disparate mix of peoples whose ancestors would have been surprised to see banding together in this little corner of the American Northwest.

Reflections on The Civil War and "Dixie of the Pacific Northwest"

The American Civil War lasted four years, took an estimated 620,000 lived on both sides and crippled and maimed hundreds of thousands more. Although several southern states has already seceded by the time President Abraham Lincoln was sworn in on March 4, 1861, open hostilities did not commence until April 12 of that year.  The Federal brigade at Fort Sumter (in Charleston, South Carolina ) was bombed by rebel forces that morning as soon as there was light enough to see the place they were firing at.   The fort's island redoubts and walls were smashed to rubble by cannons.

(above, a Civil War Union Veterans Parade in Ashland, Oregon, approximately in the 1890's.)

 After thirty hours the Federal commander, Major Robert Anderson, surrendered.       

It began as a war devised in my opinion by a few southern politicians, the landed interests they represented, and the northern politicans and cohorts who either appeased or profited from slavery,  to leave the Union---and maintain the "peculiar institution" of slavery in the bargain. It only ended when it had been made clear by Mr. Lincoln that slavery could no longer exist as a protected economic vehicle inside the United States.

 Ratification of the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, ending slavery and giving citizenship rights to all citizens born in America, was the price the former rebel states paid after the war when they rejoined the Union.    

The price for the bondage of four million African souls and all those who came in chains to America prior to 1861, was borne by both sides in the conflict, North and South, white soldier and (in the Union forces) black soldiers as well.

As Abraham Lincoln put it in his great speech in his Second Inaugural Address four years after the first...

"One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

 

"Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged..."

 

"Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

 

Lincoln himself was one of the last to pay with his life in that war for this cause.

 

That was not the end of the story of course and the conflict that is so long ago still instills bitterness and revisionism in some quarters. The great myth of "The Lost Cause" began shortly afterwards to console those who had loyalties to the Dixie States that thier fight was not about oppression but somehow about tariffs or states rights or whatever--anything but the prime motive, profitting from the labor of the uncompensated and unfree.

True, as I'm sure a friendd has told me quite a few times on this matter,  many young southern men who fought did not own slaves and many union men who fought for the Grand Old Republic hated blacks.  But there was a deeper truth to the conflict, sensed by Lincoln before the war started when he said: "a nation cannot exist half slave and half free, it must be either one or the other." 

The argument will go n in some quarters as long as the country lasts.  One thing is sure: many hundreds of thousands on both sides paid dearly in those four years.   And to be ignorant of this conflict is to be ignorant of many of the political  problems America faces even today, especially the attitudes toward government power.  

Some states and their citizens were luckier than those in others. In the far Northwest, the state of Oregon had only been admitted to the Union in 1859. Its state constitution forbade slavery but also made it a criminal offense for black men and women to emigrate to the new state. This is more measure of the hatred and bigotry that some legislators of  "free soil"   states, including Lincoln's home state of Illinois, had for those who were liberated from un-remitted toil and status as little more  than chattel property.        

The article below is from "The Ashland (Oregon) Daily Tidings", published on April 8 of this year and refers to a talk given by local historian Jeff  Lalande about the effect the war had on a distant Pacific-shored state.   

No battle of the Civil War was fought in Southern Oregon, but feelings on both sides ran high. Backers of the secessionist South, who concentrated in the Jacksonville-Gold Hill area, nearly came to blows many times with abolitionist Union immigrants, clustered in Ashland, Talent and Phoenix, historians say.

 Ashland tended to be the settling place of "kindred spirits" from the Oregon Trail who knew a lot of the same people back home in the Midwest, says LaLande, ticking off the family names of Beeson, Helman and Applegate, "the movers and shakers" of Ashland.

Museum director Victoria Law says immigrants from the South were engaged prosperously in gold mining here, while immigrants from the upper Midwest settled into the farming life.

"The war was far away," says Law, "but the feelings were intense and often pitted neighbor against neighbor and community against community. A lot of immigrants came from the South, including a lot of the gold miners in Jacksonville — and they were pro-slavery and pro-secessionist."

One "very ardent secessionist" was William T'Vault of Gold Hill, the first newspaper editor in Oregon and the first speaker of the Oregon House, she says.

"Northern Oregon people called Southern Oregon 'Little Dixie,' " says Law, adding that there was a riot in Roseburg in which secessionists killed nine Union sympathizers.

"There was a lot of speech-making here and threats to tear down each other's flags."

The political parties in 1861, says Law, "were the reverse of now, with the Republicans being the progressive party."

The pro-slavery South was Democratic and the abolitionist Union, home of Abraham Lincoln, was Republican.

Most of the men in Ashland were involved in the war in some way, with many joining the Ashland Mountain Rangers, "the first militia here, formed to protect Southern Oregon from secessionists," says Law.

The Union built Camp Baker in Phoenix so the militia could drill and be prepared for battle, says Law, who has located 59 Civil War burials in Jackson County — only three of them veterans of the Confederacy.

Camp Baker, says LaLande, was a small post, not a fort, and served as a military presence of volunteer cavalry and infantry after the regular army went off to war.

They protected settlers from "depredations" of the Klamath Indians, who began coming over the Cascades after original American Indians here were shipped off to the Siletz and Grande Ronde reservations on the Oregon Coast, LaLande says. A bronze plaque marks the site of the camp today.

"There was fear some locals might prove disloyal (to the Union)," he says.

John Darling is a freelance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at jdarling@jeffnet.org.

A song from the period, performed by the popular and controversial 1950's and 60s folk group The Weavers.

Coastal Rambles in Oregon--Coos Bay, Charleston, Bandon, and Cape Blanco

Lighthouses are one of the main attractions of the Oregon Coast.

Here's some recent photos from a trip we took to the southern Oregon Coast.



"Coos-Bay ,along with the town of North Bend, forms the largest urban area along the Oregon Coast. Just to the west of Coos Bay is the town of Charleston, which is an old waterfront-fishing village. Together, the three cities from Oregon's "Bay Area." With three beautiful state parks and three golf courses, a wide variety of recreation is offered to visitors at Coos Bay. Sunset Bay State Park offers swimming in it's small, picturesque, protected bay. This is unusual on the Oregon Coast - where most beaches are too rough and rugged for swimming."

Jacksonville, Oregon--Oldest Town in Southern Oregon

Along the old highway leading into town.

I took a trip up the road to Jacksonville, a town once called "Table Rock City" when it was founded in the 1850's. It still retains a good deal of its architectural past when it was rowdy and not so friendly (if you were Chinese or Native American) gold rush town. Hope you enjoy a few of the photos.



Here's a bit of video someone shot last Summer (above)

Public Education: Is One Hundred Fifty Dollars A Year Too Much to Support Learning?

 

The State of Oregon ranks 31st and falling in per capita spending on primary and secondary public education.  Just recently the major town that I live near,  Medford (population roughly 100,000) had to cut 4 million dollars out of their two year budget for schools.  The result has been shorter class days in school, teacher layoffs and courses in arts and other subjects cut out completely. Other local school districts have been cut to the bone. Another nine million might be cut soon if the voters don't approve two Measures on the January ballot. 

In an effort to shore up the schools, the Democratic controlled state legislature passed initiatives to end the ten dollar a year minimum that corporations pay to the state.  Now it will go up for most corporations to 150 dollars a year.  Incredibly some million dollar corporations have paid only ten dollars a year even today. (The original "tax" was set in 1931!)

 

In case you're wondering if businesses in Oregon are already paying lots of money to government in taxes, consider this report from the Willamette Weekly Newspaper (Salem, Oregon).

 "In a 2008 national study of corporate taxes, the Ernst & Young auditing firm found that the largest chunk of taxes businesses pay is property tax, followed by sales taxes. Corporate income tax was a distant third. In Oregon, businesses pay moderate property taxes, no sales tax and a middling corporate income tax rate, all of which make their overall tax burden among the lowest in the nation. Ernst & Young found that Oregon’s tax burden on businesses is the second lowest in the country. Critics of 67 dispute the Ernst & Young study. “We think the methodology is wrong and it leaves out some things,” says Pat McCormick, a spokesman for the “no” side. It’s worth noting the Legislative Revenue Office was comfortable enough with the Ernst & Young study to have relied on it in its November analysis of the tax measures."   

Even a company making $500,000 in Oregon sales would still only pay $150 dollars a year in taxes!

The income of those making 125,000 dollars as a single person and 250,000 dollars a family will also rise slightly.  The vast majority of the extra funds will go to education, health services, and public safety.  Yet, there is a movement amongst business groups to try and defeat even these modest increases in the long-term good of the state.    On January 26, the votes in the mail-in ballot election will be counted and we will find out if their trickle-down arguments carry the day or if more teachers will be laid off and more children will do without a quality education when they need it most in a globalized economy. 

If you know of similar initiatives in your state or country, I'd like you to ad your thoughts to the matter of decent public education  funding.    Here's' the nuts and bolts of the initiatives, from "The Oregonian" Newspaper, published in Portland:    

 

Measure 66
Sets new tax brackets: 10.8 percent for taxable income between $250,000 and $500,000 for joint or household filers, and between $125,000 and $250,000 for single filers; 11 percent rate for income of more than $500,000 for joint filers and $250,000 for single filers. In 2012, top tax rate drops to 9.9 percent.

Phases out federal tax subtraction for adjusted gross income of $250,000 or more for joint filers and $125,000 for single filers.
 
Exempts first $2,400 of unemployment benefits from 2009 taxes.
 
Raises an estimated $469 million in 2009-11.

Measure 67
Sets higher corporate minimum taxes: $150 for S corporations and partnerships; sliding scale for C corporations, ranging from $150 for corporations with less than $500,000 in Oregon sales up to $100,000 for sales of more than $100 million.
 
Sets new corporate tax bracket: 7.9 percent for profits of more than $250,000 for 2009-10, 7.6 percent for 2011-12.
 
Raises an estimated $258 million in 2009-11.

Its worth noting that many states adopted a state income tax during the Great Depression, including Oregon, to try and pay for needed services.  This is not a radical move, and that that so far looks like it just might pass depending on undecided voters.  

 

Happy Holidays to All From the Beautiful Central Oregon Coast

I'm getting a chance to visit some family over here near Coos Bay, Oregon, and made it out to Bastendorf State Beach yesterday. Hadn't seen the Pacific at this part of the state.

This video captures what the area looks like very well. (It was shot near the Bandon Dunes area just south of my current locale.) Yesterday we all went out and got to see all the driftwood and shore-life and birds as well as seeing families out walking their dogs and throwing balls and sticks to them as well as frisbees. It was a bright clear day and I really enjoyed the sunshine and fifty-five degree Fahrenheit temps.

This video also features Mason Williams' hit instrumental from 1968 , "Classical Gas".

I thought this would make a nice postcard to my friends on Multiply around the sphere we all share called Earth. Best wishes and thanks for brightening my year!

A Voyage Around The Garden

They only bloom a few weeks a year.

Here's a few photos taken around the house of the garden my wife put together. Also, some shots of my two favorite dogs, Abby the friendly Flemish Schipperke, and her kennel-mate, the Ill-tempered Scottish cur, Isobel. .

Rogue River War, Part Three--Open War

This is an 1865 photograph of Chief John (or Tecumtum), a chief of Rogue River Native Americans who rallied ten years earlier to fight deportation from their ancestral lands.  The Grand Council Treaty of 1853 had given some respite from white "vigilante" groups looking to exterminate "Indians" as long as they stayed on the reservation around the Table Rocks. But the confines of reservation life had brought death to dozens of his people in the form of malaria and other diseases.   

Chief John group fought off US troopers and volunteer forces for the better part of 1855-56.  The photograph was taken shortly before his death on the tiny and rocky island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, where he had been kept prisoner by the US government.    

 

The Massacres of the Nasomahs and the Coquilles

The last battles of the war began in early 1854, near the southern Oregon coast. A group of forty white miners  atttacked three villages of Nasomah Indians.  Indian sub-agent F.M. Smith described one of the massacres in that area as follows--"the Indians were aroused from sleep to meet their deaths...fifteen men and one squaw were killed...all but one of the houses of the Indians were fired and utterly destroyed. Thus was committed a massacre too inhuman to be readily believed."(1)  The miners later justified the attack on the encampments by acts of "insolence" by the Nasomahs, including thefts of property and horses. They insisted to subagent Smith that the Indians were on the brink of a full-out attack and that the actions they took were, in effect, assertive self-defense.   Smith was not convinced and considered the white men who committed the deeds "savages" who were only looking for a provocation. (2)  It would have been useless to arrest the white savages, however, since a jury made up of white men from the local area would never have convicted a fellow "paleface" of any hostile act against a native. As if to prove the point, one leader of a similar treacherous attack and mass murder against the Coquille tribe was arrested and sent to the coastal town of Port Orford--where an army fort was nearby--to await trail.  The man was shortly freed for "want of sufficient  evidence" by a civilian justice of the peace.  

More massacres followed, again mainly along or near the Oregon Coast.  Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the territory, Joel Palmer,  a basically good man  trying to spare the native tribes while dealing with the strong prejudices of local settlers,  began to grow alarmed at the frequency of the attacks.  Palmer feared native warriors  would soon answer in kind against isolated farmers and miners, thus triggering all-out  war. Palmer informed the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, George W. Manypenny,  of the situation. Palmer painted a grim picture for any hope of maintaining peace. 

Meanwhile, on the Table Rocks Reservation, site of the Grand Council Treaty of the previous year, one quarter of the estimated 500 Indians had succumbed to malaria and pneumonia during the harsh winter of 1853-54.   More and more Umpquas, Shastas, Rouges and other Indian groups left the reservation and joined those holding out against the treaty in the  hinterlands away from the mining towns and emigrant trails, to await a time for a counter-attack.   

(above, the modern state of Oregon.  The small pink shaded in the lower left area shows the location of the Rogue River Valley. Below, an 1890 map of the Rogue River Valley area, which includes Jacksonville, center. In the mid-1850's Jacksonville was the central area of white settlement, with about 800-1200 permanent residents. It also served as a center for the mining camps  along the  Rogue/Illinois and Applegate river system.) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jacksonville and John Beeson 

(above ) One of the earliest depictions of the mining town of Jacksonville, from the mid-1850's. 

Jacksonville had a bad reputation--much deserved--as a center of anti-Indian violence.  Many of the criminal hoodlums who had terrorized San Francisco in the early Gold Rush days of that city had escaped out of California--one step ahead of the city vigilante committees set up to end the total lawlessness --and made their way to the first city north of the California border--Jacksonville.  

      Shortly before the Grand Council Treaty of 1853 put an temporary end to hostilities, a nine-year old native boy was about to be hanged in the main street of the town by a group of vigilantes.  The mob was looking to avenge a recent Native warrior attack 15 miles away near the small settlement of Ashland, that the boy had nothing to do with.  One man, James Sutton, a newspaper man also from Ashland, tried to stop the lynching by trying to convince the mob that had gathered that he would care for the boy. Someone shouted out that Sutton should be stopped, that the boy would only grow up to kill whites. 

Sutton then tried to take the boy off the street to the nearby United States Hotel to get the frighten child something to eat.  He was attacked by three miners with long knives and seriously wounded. The boy was summarily hanged. 

(left, Jacksonville mother and child, 1850's, photo by Peter Britt.)  

In other Siskiyou Mountain towns in the area (such as Yreka, California, another gold-mining settlement)  captured Indian males faced similar lynchings, in some cases even after more upstanding citizens had  found the native defendants innocent and tried to have them released from further harm. Wherever official presence of Federal soldiers was weak, such activity went unmolested. 

  An early resident of Jacksonville, John Wesley Hillman, later described the frontier town in his memoirs: "(We) had as temporary citizens some half-dozen well-known gun fighters and quite a crew of gamblers and other riff-raff.  To claim (Jacksonville) as your home town was to place yourself as an all-around gunman and fighter."     

There were white settlers being killed by outlying bands of Rogue tribes--normally after volunteer scouting parties were looking to find small tribal groups that had stolen horses or attacked farms. The punitive attacks finally did the thing that the settlers most feared--a general native-American uprising.

One Jacksonville resident, John Beeson, stands out as an exception.  A Methodist lay minister and family farmer, Beeson urged his fellow citizens in a Methodist Quarterly Meeting meeting in the Fall of 1854 to avert total war and come to some peaceful understanding with the native population.   His eloquent plea for tolerance  was met  by stone silence by his fellow citizens.  Beeson would not  be silenced but continued to speak out in public meetings until mid-1855.  His remarks were met with some fanatics making arguments  for the extermination of all Indians, even by using a false treaty to lure them into giving up their weapons and leaving themselves unprotected. (3)  Those who had expressed support for Beeson in other quarters stood silent when it came time to speak up with him. One man did come foreward after the meeting and offered to send a copy of his remarks to the Commisioner of Indian Affairs. (4)

    Beeson's small farm soon became a refuge for native people fearing persecution, much to the consternation of his neighbors.  Southern settlers, ofwhich there were many in the area, also were angered that Beeson had stood for the Territorial Legislature as a anti-slavery Republican.  (Slavery was forbidden in the Oregon Territory by Congress, but so was the entrance of black setlers to the region.)  Legally blacks could be whipped and forced to leave the state, although such laws were not enforced, few blacks before or after statehood and the Civil War came to Oregon, especially southern Oregon.  

 In the Summer of 1855, Beeson's son discovered a plot on his father's life. "The Father of Oregon Civil Rights"  had to flee Jacksonville to the northern section of Oregon, where white and native relations were relatively friendly.   He later wrote 'A Plea for the Indians; With Facts and Features of the Late War in Oregon" (1857).   

The Rogue River War, Final Phase  

The Rogue River War went forward, with a magnification of similar events as had characterized earlier bloodletting.  Here is a excerpt from u-shistory.com on the events:   

"Joel Palmer, Oregon Superintendent of Indian Affairs; and General John E. Wool, the U.S. Army commander on the Pacific Coast, actually opposed the new hostilities. But General Lane, the territorial delegate in Washington and a heavyweight in the ruling Democratic party, asserted himself in favor of war, and anticipated receiving swift remuneration for war claims.

"Indian people who chose to fight, led by Tecumtum (Chief John) of the Etch-ka-taw-wah band, took refuge in the Coast Range. They effectively repelled assaults, most notably in the Battle of Hungry Hill at the end of October 1855. Others chose to place themselves under the protection of regular troops at Fort Lane, commanded by Captain Andrew Smith. They were removed in January 1856, to the Grand Ronde Reservation in northwestern Oregon.

"In February 1856, the natives in the mountains brought the fight down the Rogue River to the Pacific Coast, apparently to buy time to find food following a harsh winter. They nearly cleared the coast of non-natives, but in May they came under attack from two directions.

"Regular army troops moved north along the coast from Crescent City, California, and met little opposition. Most of the combatants submitted to that unit's commander, apparently because they believed that the army would protect them from more predatory volunteer troops.

"The volunteers, meanwhile, came down the Rogue toward the coast, and at Big Meadow attacked natives who had already submitted to the regulars.

"The followers of Tecumtum put up their final resistance at Big Bend on the river, where they nearly overcame regular troops who were guarding a prisoner-of-war camp.

"In 1856, in a ghostly reminiscence of the Cherokees' Trail of Tears, between 900 and 1,000 natives were compelled to relocate to the Siletz and Grand Ronde reservations west of present-day Salem, Oregon. Some were obliged to trudge up the coast to their new domicile, the Coast Reservation, on the central coast. There was fierce resistance to the removal because people thought they would be allowed to stay at Table Rock."

In his final report about the conflict on May 30, 1856, General Wool of the Department of the Pacific, submitted the following:

"No man can have felt more keenly or grieved more sincerely than I at the sacrifice in southern Oregon of many innocent men, women and children by savage warfare.  But what was the cause?  No other than the massacre by volunteers and citizens of some 80 or more friendly Indians. As in the case of  the killing of a friendly chief (Old Jake) and his band comprising between 40 and fifty males, besides destroying their huts and provisions, and exposing their women and children to the cold of December, who, making their way to Fort Lane for protection, arrived there with their limbs frozen."

Howitzers were brought into the field of battle to dislodge the remaining bands of holdouts.  Meanwhile, angered white civilians tried to rush Fort Lane in early 1856  to exterminate the 400 natives of various tribes who sat unarmed inside the fort.  They were prevented by the Army commander. It is indeed a measure of the savagery of  this early war against Indians in the Far West that the US Army officals--who prosecuted much of the war--manage to come off a great deal more leniant than the majority of armed "citizen-volunteers".  The volunteers, in Army accounts, often come off as useless in actual battle or ambush compared to regulars and only interested in the "mopping up" phase of a battle after the enemy had been put to flight.         

 By the time it was over, perhaps 180 whites and 450 natives were dead in what was the bloodiest Indian War west of the Mississppi for many decades.   

sources (1) and (2) "Uncertain Encounters"--Nathan Douthit, 20004, OSU Press

(3) and (4) "Indian Wars of the Rogue River", 1969, editors Dorothy and Jack Sutton, Josephine County Press   

Vestiges of the Past: Rogue River War (1851--56)

Some recent pictures and older prints and photos of the conflict that engulfed soutrhern Oregon a century and a half ago and set the standard in many ways for further mistreatment of native Americans in the Pacific Northwest.

Rogue River War, Part Two , Joseph Lane

  Joseph Lane (1801-1881) was the first territorial governor of Oregon, appointed in 1848 by President James K Polk.  (Not by President Milllard Fillmore, as I misstated in the first part of the series.)  

Lane was from Indiana, a former legislator and a high-ranking military officier from the Mexican War. By all acccounts he was a brave and capable administrator. But by the Summer of  1850 he anticipated he was to be replaced  as governor of the Territory by the new Whig President,former General Zachery Taylor.(see note below this article.) 

Gold had been discovered near the Rogue in the Spring of 1850. Miners began to come into the region and with them the first female settlers.  Native peoples began to  attack miners in the Rogue River area (and those whites passing through to get to the Willamette Valley region to the north from California) and that brought Lane to southern Oregon.  Although out of official office, his reputation made many settlers clamor for his presence in the region. 

IN 1850, in an act of typical highhandedness, Congress passed an act in effect ordering the removal of the "Indians" of the from the entire Western Cascade Mountain region.  The plan was to send all Indians east of the Cascades into the drier and harsher eastern of the territory.   A Donation Land Claims Act was set up to lure settlers into the region.  (Of course, with the coming gold strike, such incentives were unnesessary, hundreds of  whites quickly began to settle in the Rogue Area.) The natives tribe were to be paid for their land, naturally,  but the whole of the pay out was totake the form of "agricultural and mechanical and educational articles of use"(1).  As little money as possible was to actually go to the tribes and they would face relocation to boot.

The Indians were not immediately removed from  the area, if only because the US military lacked the firepower to do so, but also some native groups had been willing to interact peacefully with whites (including the intermarriage of miners and valley farmers with native women.)  The Rogue Area remained relativley untroubled for long periods overthe next few years, but there was bloodshed on both sides and gradually more and more white "volunteer" groupss were "avenging" attacks on white travellers with fulll-scale assaults and exterminations on any "Indians" that were within reach.  Some white deplored this brutal conduct, but they were a minority in the region.    

By 1853, the Donation Acts and violence between the new arrivals and the native peoples had spilled over to a point where the Taklema, Shasta, and other Rogue Area tribes were more and more united and about to engage in an all-out war. An appeal was made to the Indian leader  "Chief Joe" who had gone with his followers to Fort Lane (named for the ex-governor) near the Table Rocks area as a defacto reservation to forestall any more attacks by packs of white vigilantes.

 In the book "50 Years in Oregon" by the frontier historian and soldier T.T. Geer devotes a portion of his personal story to a dramatic meeting between the natives and a party of military officals led by Lane near the Table Rocks, located  just west of a portion of the Rogue River near present day Gold Hill, a suburb of Medford. 

above, a farm near the Table Rocks of Oregon, circa 1850's. 

         

On the morning  of that day, General Lane sent for me and desired me to go with him to the Council ground, inside the Indian encampment, to act as interpreter, as I was master of the Chinook jargon. I asked the General upon what terms and where we were to meet the Indians. He replied that the agreement was that the meeting was to take place within the encampment of the enemy, and that we should be accompanied by ten other men of his own selection, unarmed. Against those terms I protested, telling the General that I had traversed that country five years before and had fought those same Indians; that they were notoriously treacherous, and in early times had earned the name of “Rogues” by never permitting a white man to escape with his scalp when once within their power; that I knew them better than he did, and that it was criminal folly for eleven unarmed white men to place themselves voluntarily within the power of seven hundred well-armed hostile Indians, within their own encampment.

I reminded him that I was a soldier in command of a company of cavalry, and was ready to obey his orders to lead my men into action or to discharge any soldierly duty, no part of which, however, was to go into the enemy’s camp as an unarmed interpreter.

The General listened to my protest and replied that he had fixed the terms of meeting the Indians and would keep his word, and that if I was afraid to go I could remain behind. When he put it upon that ground I replied that I thought I was as little acquainted with fear as he was, and that I would accompany him to what I feared would be our slaughter.

Early on the morning of September 10, 1853, we mounted our horses and set out in the direction of the Indian encampment. Our party consisted of General Joseph Lane, Joel Palmer, superintendent of Indian affairs, Samuel P. Culver, Indian agent, Captain A. J. Smith, and several others. After riding a couple of miles across the level valley we came to the foot of the mountains, where it was too steep for horses to ascend. We dismounted, hitched our horses, and after scrambling up for a half a mile over huge rocks and through brush, found ourselves within the Indian stronghold, just under the perpendicular cliff of Table Rock, surrounded by seven hundred fierce and well-armed hostile savages, arrayed in all their gorgeous war-paint and feathers.

Captain Smith had drawn out his company of dragoons and left them in line on the plain below. It was a bright, beautiful morning and the Rogue River valley lay at our feet like a panorama; the exact line of dragoons, sitting statue-like on their horses, with their white belts and burnished scabbards and carbines, looked as if engraved upon a picture, while a few paces in our rear the huge perpendicular wall of Table Rock towered frowningly many hundred feet above.

 

(left) The Table  Rock area today.   

 

"The business of the treaty commenced at once. Long speeches were made by General Lane and Superintendent Palmer, which had to be translated twice. When an Indian spoke the Rogue River tongue it was translated by an Indian interpreter into Chinook for me, when I translated it into English. When Lane or Palmer spoke, the process was reversed. This double translation of long speeches made the labor tedious and it was late in the afternoon when the treaty was completed and signed.

"In the meantime, an episode occurred which came near terminating the treaty, as well as the representation of one of the “high contracting” parties in a sudden and tragic manner. About the middle of the afternoon a young Indian came running into camp stark naked and with the perspiration running from every pore. After making a brief harangue he threw himself upon the ground, apparently exhausted. As his speech had created a great tumult amongst his tribe, General Lane told me to inquire of the Indian interpreter the cause of the commotion. The Indian responded that a company of white men on Applegate Creek, under the command of Captain Owen, had that morning captured an Indian known as Jim Taylor, tied him to a tree and shot him to death. The hubbub and confusion among the Indians at once became intense and murder gleamed from each savage eye. The Indian interpreter told me that the Indians were threatening to tie us up to trees and serve us as Owen’s men had served Jim Taylor. I saw some Indians gathering up lasso ropes, while others drew the skin covers from their guns and wiping-sticks from their muzzles. There appeared to be a strong probability that our party would be subjected to a sudden volley.

"I explained as briefly as I could what the interpreter had communicated to me, and in order to keep our people from huddling together and thus making a better target for the savages, I used a few English words not likely to be understood by the Indian interpreter, such as “disperse” and “segregate.” In fact, we kept so close to the savages and so far separated from one another that any firing must have been nearly as fatal to the Indians as to the whites.

"While I admit I thought my time had come and hurriedly thought of wife and children, I noticed nothing but coolness among my companions. General Lane sat on a log with one arm bandaged in a sling, the lines about his mouth rigidly compressing his lips, while his eyes flashed fire. He asked brief questions and gave sententious answers to what little the Indians said to us. Captain Smith, who was prematurely gray-haired and was afflicted with snappy eyes, leaned upon his cavalry saber and looked anxiously down upon his well-formed line of dragoons in the valley below. His eyes snapped more vigorously than usual and muttered words escaped from under the white mustache of the old dragoon that did not sound like prayers. His squadron looked beautiful, but, alas! they could render us no service.

"I sat down on a log close by old Chief Joe, and having a sharp hunting knife under my shirt kept one hand near the handle, determined that there should be one Indian made “good” about the time the firing commenced.

"But in a few moments General Lane stood up and began to speak very slowly and distinctly. He said: “Owens, who has violated the armistice and killed Jim Taylor, is a bad man. He is not one of my soldiers. When I catch him, he shall be punished. I promised in good faith to come into your camp with ten other unarmed men to secure peace. Myself and my men are placed within your power; I do not believe you are such cowardly dogs as to take advantage of our unarmed condition. I know that you have the power to murder us and can do so as quickly as you please; but what good will our blood do you? Our murder will anger our friends and your tribe will be hunted from the earth. Let us proceed with out treaty, and instead of having war have lasting peace.” Much more was said in this strain by the General, all rather defiant and nothing of a begging character. The excitement gradually subsided after Lane promised to give a fair compensation for the defunct Jim Taylor in shirts and blankets.

"The treaty of September 10, 1853, was completed and signed, and peace restored for the next two years. Our party wended its way down the rocks to where our horses were tied and mounted. Old A. J. Smith gal­loped up to his squadron and gave a brief order. The bugle sounded a note or two and the squadron wheeled and trotted off to camp. As General Lane and party rode across the valley, we looked up and saw the rays of the setting sun gilding the summit of Table Rock. I drew a long breath and remarked to the General that the next time he wanted to go into a hostile camp unarmed he must hunt up some one besides myself to act as his interpreter. With a benignant smile he remarked: “Bless you, sir, luck is better than science.”

T. T. Geer: 50 Years in Oregon - Chapter 27 (Gen. Joseph Lane) 

(1) In an interesting sidenote, Taylor's first choice for the post had been Abraham Lincoln, then a former Congressman from Illinois.  Lincoln turned down the post, however, perhaps at the urging of his socialite wife,  Mary Todd Lincoln, and the post instead went to a Kentucky politico, Joseph Gaines. Lincoln at this time was a less than successful one-term Whig Party  Congressman. Nevertheless, the future President had  campaigned hard  for Genral Taylor's election.    Had Lincoln taken the Oregon Territorial Governorship, it is certain he never would have served as the  President of the United States during the Civil War.

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.    

 

Racism in Oregon During the Second World War

(This is not a sign from the American South during the mid-20th Century.  It a picture in the window of an "all-white" restaurant in north Portland, circa 1943)

 

.  During the war, a lot of African-Americans settled in the Pacific Northwest and parts of California for the first time due to the heavy demand for labor in the defense plants and shipyards.  Here's some info on this from the Oregon History Project.           

"Signs similar to this one across the street from the Kenton Theater in north Portland popped up around the town during World War II. Acute labor shortages and a booming wartime industrial job market expanded Portland’s African American population from 2,565 in 1940 to 25,000 in 1944. The demand for labor, along with the wartime Fair Employment Practices Commission, buffered to some extent the racism that permeated Portland’s private industry and local unions. In her memoirs, Kathryn Hall Bogle, recalled her wartime experience working as one of the first black women to hold an office position in government at the U.S. Employment Office. There, Hall witnessed wartime racism as well as new opportunities offered blacks in the public sector. For instance, Hall recalled blacks being turned down for specialized jobs they had worked all their lives including stevedores, truck drivers, and laundry workers because of union laws that did not allow blacks to join their ranks. At the same time, blacks were hired freely for common labor and in all shipyards except the Albina Shipyard, which was privately owned. Training programs for shipyard skills and shipyard crafts were also offered to blacks and whites alike.

I mentioned the hostility towards Japanese-Americans and the decision by FDR to dislocate by force all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast. This program was not carried out Hawaii.  The recent Ken Burns/PBS Documentary "The War" explains this on the official website for the film:

At first, plans had been drawn up in Washington for the wholesale internment of all 158,000 people of Japanese descent living in Hawaii,too – nearly 40 percent of the total population of the islands. But wealthy landowners in Hawaii opposed the plan; they depended on Japanese field workers to tend their sugar and pineapple plantations. And the presence of a massive American military force on the islands made the danger of an internal threat seem less and less plausible. In the end, Japanese Americans in Hawaii would be allowed to go about their lives more or less as they always had.

 Odd that Americans fought against  racist regimes and yet so many people practiced racism at home.  Oddly, though, the war I believe helped lay the ground work for the end to Jim Crow in whatever of the four corners of the USA it cropped up in. Once men and women of color had fought and worked to kill fascism, it became more hypocritical to keep up the injustice of segregation at home.  Of course, as my friend Frank points out in the last blog, the racism continues but the institutional levers of white supremacy are pretty much routed in the legal codes.  Of course, it took a full two decades before the Civil Rights Bill was passed, but I would say much of the groundwork for that law was jump-started during the shared experiences of whites and black Americans at risk in battles and  working in some cases side by side during World War II.

 

The Oregon History Project article continues:

"Racism against blacks continued through the wartime era in the job market and in urban housing standards. Blacks did not sit by idly, however. Several agencies, including the Portland branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Urban League, the Office of Vocational Opportunity, and the Committee on Inter-Racial Principles and Practices, established and continued to operate already established institutions in Portland that sought to provide a voice for Portland’s black residents. Through today these groups continue to represent Portland’s black community through education, employment programs, legal representation, and the promotion of equality and civil rights.

Written by Trudy Flores, Sarah Griffith, © Oregon Historical Society, 2003.

Some More Oregon Photos

This horse posed wonderfully for me--too bad I had no apples.

Here are some photos of Ashland and environs I forgot to post a while back, plus some newer ones I took in the last couple of weeks.