About the reservations.
   
Click here for Superintendency correspondence 1844-1900.



    Kalama, the housekeeper of the late Alfred Carter, who died at his home on Forest Creek a short time ago, died recently at the county hospital, aged about sixty years. There is something almost pathetic about her death. When the whites took possession of this beautiful and fertile valley with its rare and richly variegated surroundings, Kalama was a little girl surrounded by a powerful tribe whose bravery and warlike spirit made them famous throughout the United States. Her once great tribe is now almost extinct. A few yet survive on the Siletz Reservation, and there is but one now living in Jackson County.
Valley Record, Ashland, June 7, 1900, page 1


    Klamath Falls, Or., Oct. 12.--The Klamath Indian Reservation embraces a large scope of the most fertile lands in the northern portion of Klamath County, and roughly estimated, a hundred square miles of equally as rich country. In the Sprague and other valleys of less note 1200 Indians make their home on these lands. In riding through the district, one would never surmise that it was inhabited by such a people, unless he met the red men. Large, commodious residences, extensive stock farms, fine hay meadows, great stacks of hay, good stock upon every hand, and in fine condition, in fact, a general air of prosperity everywhere give it the appearance of a prosperous white man's community, instead of a region inhabited by the once savage Piutes and Modocs.
    The Indians, with few exceptions, are fairly well educated, and even the women speak the English language with good accent and talk intelligently. The traveler, upon visiting an Indian abode, finds it is necessary, usually, to speak a sort of broken English to carry on an intelligent conversation. Not so on this reservation. He at once finds that the Indians understand the English language thoroughly, and speak it fluently. In passing through the reservation recently a "paleface" approached a house for information, and, seeing a young mother holding a child in her arms, spoke thus: "Which road, Yainax?" Pointing to the high way which forked near the premises: "The right hand road leads to Yainax, the left to Bonanza," came the prompt reply. At another place, the inquiry was made: "Where man?" The Indian woman replied with perfect accent: "My husband is not at home. He has gone over to Yainax to consult the reservation physician." So it is at every hand. The Indians are educated and refined to a remarkable degree.
    The greater percent of the population of the reservation are highly prosperous While they make money without any great effort, they are in no wise of the class who follow the very common practice of "come easy, go easy." Not long since, an Indian had a lawyer in Klamath Falls to do some legal business for him, for which the fee was nominal. The Indian asked the attorney if he had change to cash a check. The lawyer replied in the affirmative and drew forth a few silver pieces. His client handed him a $5000 check, the proceeds of a recent sale of cattle. The lawyer did not cash it.
    Many of the Indians do a big haying and stock business annually. They have large and well-improved ranches, in the allotments by the government, tracts of land are given to every member of the family, and care is taken that the claims adjoin. A large family may thus, and do in many instances, own large ranches together.
    Captain Oliver C. Applegate, the government agent, has been connected with the management of the Indian affairs of this section for 30 years or more, and thoroughly understands his business. He is courteous and always ready to give information concerning his work. He informed an Oregonian correspondent that in the management of his 1200 "children" the assistance of but 12 policemen was required. He has a chief, and the others are subordinates. All the officers are Indians, and absolutely trustworthy. They may be sent to any part of the state, or even California. They never sleep, and scarcely eat, riding day and night on these journeys, and carry out instructions to the letter. A policeman was sent to California recently after two horse thieves who had escaped from the reservation. He rode two days and nights without sleep, and returned with the men strapped to the stolen horses.
    Captain Applegate says that the police men are not entirely employed looking after outlaw aborigines. A few years ago the white officers were chasing these Indians, many of whom were thieves and murderers, but now his policemen have to look after white men. This is true of the stockmen who graze their herds upon the reservation, and quite often "forget" to pay the toll, and also to keep them from driving away Indian stock which they sometimes mistake for their own.
    Irrigation of the reservation lands is being looked after by the government. Speaking of this work, Captain Applegate said: "The irrigation system, which I was authorized to inaugurate last year, by the initial surveys, will make productive large areas now suitable for pasturage purposes only. If the government backs us up with the necessary funds, which it undoubtedly will, not less than 100,000 acres will be made as valuable as any lands in fertile Klamath County. The Indians are making good progress in improving their allotments. They have erected many good residences and barns, and within the past two years enclosed many thousand acres of land with substantial rail and post fences. Last year they built on the Klamath marsh about 50 miles of fence of this character. I estimate the amount of hay put up on Indian farms this year at 10,000 tons."
    The government improvements on the reservation are of a very substantial order. At Klamath Agency their worth is estimated at $6000; at the Yainax boarding school about $6000, and at the Klamath boarding school $15,000. The average attendance at the Yainax school is about 100 and at Klamath Agency the school attendance is about 125. These schools are an interesting study within themselves. Tots 5 and 6 years, to men and women 25 and 30 years of age, are among the pupils. it is the purpose of the government fully to educate the Indians. They may enter the school at 4 years of age, and remain until highly proficient in all the branches, no matter how long the time required. The majority, however, leave at the age of 18 to 20 years. After reaching a certain stage they do not seem to make further advancement.
    The schools are divided into convenient departments and are presided over by competent teachers. Work in the dining rooms and kitchens, dormitories and laundry departments is performed by the students under the supervision of whites or the more experienced Indians. The regulation uniforms are worn, and are kept clean and neat. As a rule, the children are well behaved and attentive, apparently more obedient than the average public school pupil. While modern games have been introduced, they cannot supplant the amusements which were so dear to their parents in early days of civilization. The lasso commands favor with the boy. He will bide in some convenient place, and, as companions pass, send out the rope with lightning speed. The unsuspecting victim finds himself or herself brought to the ground with the line drawn tight about the limbs or neck, while the miscreant takes flight to another part of the grounds. He will steal out and take rides on the reservation horses at night, and is not unfrequently accompanied by some of his girl friends.
    In the schoolroom, the boys wear a staid, solemn look, but the girls write on their slates, flirt and make faces and enjoy themselves generally--when the master is not looking. Farming, carpentering, stock-raising and all manner of work is taught in the industrial departments.
    The schools are for all the world like a big home, a large farm being maintained in connection. Horses and cattle are kept for the use of the pupils. There are also wagons, farming implements, tools and everything necessary to conduct all the departments of the place. There is a local physician, hospital, jail, carpenter and blacksmith shops.
    Flower culture has just been begun at the Yainax school, under the supervision of Mrs R. E. Nickerson, a teacher in the primary department, with considerable success. It is interesting to see the grandson of Paulina, the noted cutthroat chief, picking flowers with young Schonchin, whose grandfather was hanged for murdering members of the peace commission. On a recent trip to the reservation, a noted officer of the Union Army met a party of Indian stalwarts in the road, and inquired where they were going. They informed him that they were on their way to the reservation to pick flowers for Decoration Day.
    The Sabbath and all legal holidays are scrupulously observed. The Methodist Church prevails on this reservation, and a membership of 250 is claimed.
    No Indian is permitted to leave the reservation without a pass, and if he should, he is promptly brought back by the police. Children are not permitted to leave school except in cases of sickness or for a necessary rest.
    As soon as he completes his education or leaves school, the Indian goes upon the land allotted to him and begins his improvement. Stock-raising is most generally the first work taken up. The women engage in housekeeping and other pursuits peculiar to their sex.
    The cost of education is borne entirely by the government, which allows $175 per year for each Indian child in attendance. The food and clothing are substantial. There are Piutes, or Snakes, Modocs, Klamaths and Pit River Indians on this reservation. While there are 1145 of these Indians on the reservation and under government control, there are 1200 Piutes and Pit Rivers at Harney Lake, in Surprise Valley and on Pit River, who should be included in their numbers. An effort is being made to secure their admittance to the reservation.

    The Siletz Indian Reservation, or the reservation of "Beautiful River," in Western Oregon, is a dozen miles from Toledo, the county seat, picturesquely placed on the tidal river Yaquina. The reservation is among the Coast Range Mountains, and embraces many beautiful hills and dales, where the fern grows luxuriantly yet, and where the tall firs wave their fingertips across the silver skeletons of their ancient fellows as though they would fain hide them from critical view.
    As you drive on toward the hub of the reservation, the Agency, you pass Indian houses. The old tent is gradually disappearing. But although Tyee John and his fellows build themselves houses now, they pitch their tents alongside and prefer them to their shingle roof and dressed lumber habitations. Some old huts remain, too, with doors just big enough to creep through on all fours; their roofs thatched with sea grass, broken by a hole to let the smoke out. Cultivated fields surround you, with tidy vegetable rows setting off the early wheat greening above the rich earth. The valley widens out, and as if guarding it from the ocean, stands Euchre Mountain (now corrupted into "Hookey"), named for an old Indian chief whose tribe inhabited the lower part of Beautiful River. On a knoll stand the schools, hospital, church; the trading store, the agent's house and the houses of the other employees are grouped a little lower down.
    These buildings are on the site of the old blockhouse of Sheridan's day, to which he made a road right through the valley (now our ranch) from Fort Hoskins, twenty-five miles away. This was after the Rogue River war, when the warring tribes and others, about twenty tribes in all, were gathered up and placed upon this beautiful and healthful reservation. There were Okanogans, who disposed of their dead by tying them upright to a tree; Yakimas, who buried them under cairns of stones; Klickitats, who swathed their dead like mummies and laid them in low, rude huts on the . memaloose or "death islands" of the Columbia; the Chinooks, who stretched them in canoes, their fishing implements with them; Klamaths, who buried them with mad saturnalia, and numerous others.
    The reservation covers a good-sized slice out of three counties, extending away down to the coast. There were six thousand Indians here when Sheridan quartered a small troop on the knoll to keep them in check. After they quieted down and only a sullenness remained toward "Boston man," the soldiers gave place to the agent and his assistants. In less than half a century, since 1856, the six thousand have dwindled down to five hundred! It is hard to assign any one cause. Evidently civilized life, or half civilization, with their old, careless habits, does not agree with Indians. The free, open life of the woods and camp, coupled with hard exercise, suited them far better. They rush now from the hot stove room without a particle of ventilation out into the open, no matter how inclement, and suffer in consequence. A common cold develops into something serious, and they quickly succumb.
    Three of the buildings on the ridge are devoted to the children. The girls' room, with its seventy pupils, overflows its own building into that of the boys, as the rule of seven feet of ground space in the dormitory for each pupil is carefully adhered to. The arrangements in these buildings are good up to a certain point, but had the architects in Washington taken counsel with some thinking woman there would have been more conveniences without additional cost. The children look sturdy enough with their round faces, chubby red cheeks and bright black eyes. They are allowed to go home from Friday to Monday. Their parents clamor for the rights of the public schools, but it will be a sorry day when they are granted to them. The regime of the agency school is better suited to the Indian children for whom it is exclusively planned than any school can be that is modeled upon the requirements of civilized children.
    Indians have a horror of their children being treated harshly, though they have no cause to complain of their treatment in the reservation schools, where the law of kindness reigns. Indian parents, here as everywhere else, never lift a hand to their children, having ever before their eyes the vision of Hoallashee, the Good Spirit, who would take children away into his own keeping should they be hurt by their earthly mentors.
    At the Siletz Reservation school there are, beside the superintendent, two lady teachers and two nut-brown buxom maids who preside over the seven sewing machines in the sewing department. Then there is the matron, a genial soul, who not only keeps everything in apple pie order, but who has currents of fresh air sweeping through all the rooms when unoccupied, and who is proud and fond of her charges. The boys have industrial out-of-door training similar to that given in connection with Western agricultural colleges. When they are particularly bright and promising they are drafted onto the Chemawa state school, and if there is sufficient fulfillment of the promise to warrant further expectations, they go on to Carlisle.
    As the government increases its appropriations for education of the Indians it spends less proportionately for food for them, for they become increasingly able to earn their own living. Fifteen pounds of flour. and a little bacon are all that is given out now monthly, and those who can work do not draw even that.
    The school hospital, over which a trained nurse presides, under the direction of the reservation surgeon, has tiny wards, one of four beds for girls, and one of three for the boys. Sometimes the hospital is full to overflowing with the odd little people so much more curious when able to be about than even the most alert white youngsters. Here, too, the absence of a woman's head on the board of apportionment shows in the lack of conveniences. The nurse succeeded in getting some needed supplies from Washington, and improvised others, but in the matter for example of hot water treatment she must needs betake herself and her patient to the general kitchen. The superintendent of the kitchen manages the creamery for home consumption, packing in summer the butter which supplies the table in winter.
    The Siletz Indians are mostly tame Indians now. The tattoo marks are wearing off the cheeks that are withered and wrinkled, and the holes in the noses where once the nose rings hung are now empty. Superstition and credulity still hold sway to a large extent. Only recently a "siwash" got the "klootchman" (woman) of his heart to marry him against her will by persuading her that he could and would turn her into a bear if she refused. A sun dance is still indulged in upon occasions. Then the Indians rig themselves up in the old-time war paint and feathers. The sun dance of the old tribes lasted three days. In these "paternal" times it revolves round the stars and stripes. The dance is something like a schottische, and the dancers dance on and on, fasting, till one after another falls down, worn out with excitement and exhaustion, and have to be carried out of sight.
    The bead work and various other types of handiwork of the Indians in their native state are disappearing. The old hands have lost their cunning, and the young ones, practicing civilized arts, are no longer deft at making the moccasins, head bands, ornamented arrows, sheaths, etc. Baskets are still made, some of them so closely woven as to be water tight, patterning after those of the days when water was carried on the march in baskets strapped to the back. We often bought their baskets as they went through our ranch, their highway to the hop-picking and other industries of the Willamette Valley. Very picturesque groups they made with their papooses tied on amid sundry sacks to their cayuse ponies, their bright bits of color catching the eye afar off as they emerged from the green trail. They never seemed to resent our living on the wild land which had been their hunting ground when on leave. We always took care to feed them, and they always took care to come by at meal time. This feeding business at last became a tax, so one day our farm man in charge said that with my permission he would ask the next one who came through the usual price of a meal--fifty cents. He proved to be a Klamath. The Klamaths I really quite admired, they had such an artistic look--clean shaven as they all are, or rather I should say, clean plucked. They carefully pluck out each hair, thus by degrees discouraging the growth of their beards.
    This good-looking Klamath dined with us at our table, and afterwards he was asked for fifty cents. As quick as thought came his rejoinder, "I find King George man cow, away up on reservation. I charge King George man fifty cent. Quits!"
    There was one man, Coyote Jim, who looked upon our ranch as specially his. He used often to camp near us. Sometimes he would come and say, "You lend me gun, I shoot deer and bring you ham." And when he had luck he was as good as his word. Still Coyote Jim gave me rather an uncanny feeling on account of the stories clinging to his name--a coyote after lambs he was said to be. He was a Rogue River Indian, and a hideous specimen. At the time of the Rogue River war he had been a brute. He would string up children, fire their homes, commit every kind of atrocity. One day an old squaw was discovered by one of our boys apparently dying. He took her to the blacksmith's shop to dry her wet clothes, and carried her some milk. She recovered sufficiently to crawl to the house, where she stretched her clawlike hands out eagerly for the food we gave her. Our man took her part way back to the reservation with food to last her some days. But a couple of days after she was back again, and then at her last gasp. The boys made shelter over her, and we sent word to the agent. He dispatched his policeman, who in very unceremonious manner doubled up her poor emaciated body and tied it onto a horse. This policeman was Coyote Jim, and we had good reason to believe that the squaw was his mother, whom he had led away to die alone in the wilderness. Poor soul, she had her funeral after all, with the usual ceremonies.
    The present agent of the Siletz Reservation, my friend, Mr. T. J. Buford, tells me that at first he was much affected at the Indian funeral because so much grief is shown. However, after a time he was enlightened on the subject, and now his eyes remain dry. It is common for those who cannot afford money to purchase the usual mourning to bribe with trinkets those who will perform the duties of mourning the dead. If the mourners thus hired do not evince enough grief to be satisfactory they are clubbed by those who hire them until noise enough is forthcoming. A daughter will double up the dead body of her mother and thrust it into a shallow hole, barely covering it with earth, and think she has done her duty as to interment.
    A species of Turkish bath is an old-time remedy of Indians, still employed. Their sweat houses or sweat holes are frequently to be seen. The stifling atmosphere of these places, and the journey down to the nearest creek must often undo the good that the sweating process might accomplish. Certain it is that cases of pneumonia are numerous and that the patients die off like flies. Indian women are not considered to be worthy the sweat house treatment, and they follow a cold water treatment of their own that is even more dubious in its results. One of our boys found an aged squaw last winter suffering severely with the grippe, seated outside her door in the pouring rain, her black hair streaming with water which had soaked her scanty clothing through and through.
    A few years ago the lands were thrown open, not to the general public, but to the Indians to have and to hold for themselves to live on and to cultivate with certain provisos against selling the land. To many it has been a great education, and they have proved themselves industrious and thrifty. Some have money in the bank. Others remain in the old childhood stage, working well for a while, then lapsing into their former lazy habits. It was the superstition of the Indians that led to the massacre of the Siletz agent, Mr. Goodechild [Ben Wright]. Chetco Jennie, who took a leading part in the murder, cut out the victim's heart and ate it. When asked long afterward if she had really done this she said, "Yes; Goodechild good man, brave man."
    "Then why treat him so?" she was asked. "Cause we know, we eat him heart, we get brave good like him."
    Chetco Jennie was not really a bad sort, and by her own showing desired to be better still. She was a very strong woman. She would pack five deer into camp without pausing, carrying in one, and returning for another, each deer representing in addition to the heavy weight, many miles of foot travel over terribly rough country. Indians are as credulous as children. They started in by believing implicitly and literally the teachings of their chaplain that their prayers would be answered. One prayed for a new wagon, one for a horse, another for a new tent, and so on. When these things did not appear, as they confidently expected them to do, raining down from heaven, they lost all confidence in the chaplain and would attend no more of his services.
    At one time the Siletz Indians were allowed to entertain some visiting Indians and to hold the famous "Snohalla" dance. This involves a great deal of dancing and praying, the Indians believing that if they endured and prayed sufficiently all dead Indians would come to life and the white man would be banished from Indian lands. The agent argued with them as to the impossibility of the dead coming to life, and therefore the folly of wearing themselves out in the "Snohalla." Whereupon the chief spokesman answered: "Mr. Howard (the chaplain) say good man Jesus come back. That impossible?" This agent, Mr. Simpson, gave the Indians very practical lessons in civil government by modeling everything on the reservation according to the institutions of the nation. He had the various courts of justice represented, among other features. In the trial of a certain divorce case the judge ruled that the decree should be granted to the woman providing that she would marry him!
    There was once a very astute agent who drew heavily upon Washington for a population of 2,100, when the real number was 700. So adroit was he that the inspector was fooled by his own eyes. He counted 700 at the agency, [700] at the "lower farm" and again 700 at the "upper farm."
    Since the Indians have been accorded American citizenship they display a good deal of interest in local questions and party, according as they believe the results will affect them personally. At a rallying day just before the late general election they thronged the little church on the knoll, dressed in their "go-to-meeting best." One of their own number, an educated Indian named Ulysses Grant, presided. He introduced the first speaker thus: "You all know him, boys; he live long time in English Illahee," and rounds of applause expressed their knowledge and approval. The speaker was at a disadvantage on account of the assemblage being of so mixed a character, ranging from really well educated Indians to those grown-up children who comprehend only a word here and there of the "white" language. After the speeches made for both parties there was a Chinook talk by a former agent. How the old withered faces lighted up at the sound of their beloved jargon. Lastly came George Harney, a fine-looking, well--built man, once chief of his tribe, and now almost its sole representative. He is one of nature's own orators, with the most graceful and effective of gestures, which help wonderfully in translating his thought. I understand no Chinook, yet I could make out which party he favored. The chief point of interest was in whether or not Congressman Tongue should be returned to Washington. The opposing side had arranged a barbecue for the evening. but this did not tempt their opponents, who announced, "We eat no Democratic beef. Democratic beef got worms."
    There are sallies of humor at such gatherings, but also there are many faces bearing the sad look of those who pine still for the free and unfettered life of their youth, who realize that their once powerful tribes are fast going the way of those altogether extinct. A great many Indians had attended "a speaking" in Toledo on the previous evening, but outside the reservation the Indian is never safe from the white man's whiskey. It makes him noisy and quarrelsome and has a worse effect on his health than it does on the white man. One Indian sat asleep late that evening on the hotel steps. "Johnny, get up and go to bed," said the hostess, after he had had his first nap. But Johnny refused. "You'll go downtown and drink more whiskey," she went on, "and it'll cost you more in the morning than a night's lodging here, and you'd be better off tomorrow into the bargain if you stay here."
    "No, no." said Johnny, all right." And off he went. Next morning as I was talking to the city marshal on the hotel porch, Johnny appeared. Without a word from the marshal Johnny took several greenbacks from his pocket and handing them over to the marshal said, "I know you; you fish in my pocket; you fish dollars; here my five," which he cheerfully paid for the privilege of having passed the night in the "calaboose."
Catholic Northwest Progress, Seattle, Washington, July 19, 1901, page 7


    The Klamath Indians are among the most advanced, prosperous and best educated of the Indian tribes. For years they have dwelt in peace on their reservation, and at no time, since the settlement of the Northwest, have they been in arms against the whites. Still all these years of civilizing influences and Christian teaching have failed to eradicate the unforgiving spirit always dominant in savage man. During the Modoc war the Klamaths, owing to their close relationship to the revolting tribe, were under suspicion and in spite of the efficient aid they gave to the government were treated with severity by some of the settlers in the Klamath region. At the close of the war the remnant of the Modoc tribe was transported to Indian Territory, and now have dwindled to forty members. Recently the Modocs applied to the government for permission to return to Oregon and be allotted lands in the Klamath Reservation. The matter was referred to the Klamaths themselves. Two Modocs came from Indian Territory, and for two months they have been using every effort to secure the consent of the Klamaths, but in vain. No fear of another outbreak was feared; but deep down in the hearts of the ‘"old men" of the Klamaths is a feeling of stern resentment against their cousins, the Modocs, and they refused to allow them to return. So the emissaries must return to the prairies of the Southwest and inform the old, gray-haired warriors that never more may they return to the place of their birth, but must pass away from life far from the happy hunting grounds of their youth. Most of the old warriors are already dead, and son to the tribe of Indians, whose record for treachery and bloodthirstiness is second only to the Apaches and which with only thirty warriors stood of an army of over 1,000 men, will be but a memory.
Medford Mail, January 2, 1903, page 2


    The story of Winemah's trial for her life has already been told in the Daily Journal, as well as the story of her part at the massacre of Gen. Canby and his staff in the lava beds, in which she saved Meacham's life. But the story of her marriage to Riddle, the white miner, is no less interesting. Aged and stooped, she and her husband now live on the Klamath Indian Reservation, the object of interest to all who have heard their story.
    It was back in the days when the great mining rush was made to Yreka, Cal. Riddle, then a handsome young miner, had found his way across the continent and to Yreka and owned a cabin of his own and was doing placer mining. One day an old Indian chief rode up to Riddle's cabin, followed by a young Indian girl, who was also mounted. In those days slavery was common among many of the Indian tribes, and when Riddle was summoned to the door of his cabin by the old Indian, he was startled by the statement of the Indian, who said: "Me sell you this girl; how much you give?"
    Winemah, who was considered a beauty in those days, was just verging on womanhood, and when the miner refused the proposition flatly, he saw a look of disappointment pass over the maiden's countenance.
    "The old fool!" thought Riddle "he would barter that girl like she was so much plunder,'' and then he remembered the disappointed look on the girl's face, but another face came up in his mind and he shook his head firmly.
    The old Indian had ridden away followed by his child, and he, too, was disappointed, for he expected to realize something from the sale that day. They traveled about the mining camp from cabin to cabin, but found a purchaser. A gay-colored blanket, a few yards of calico, or a few trinkets would have purchased this beautiful girl.
    A week or more passed. Again the Indian, accompanied by the girl, appeared at Riddle's cabin. The proposition of sale was again made in the same cool manner. This time the girl looked appealingly to the miner. He caught her eye and felt a blush come over his face, and again the promise he made another back in Kentucky pressed itself in his mind. He shook his head hesitatingly this time, and the two rode away more disappointed than before. The Indian was about to despair of disposing of his property, and the girl, knowing that she would be sacrificed to someone, preferred the handsome young Kentuckian. Riddle had engaged himself to marry a young woman of his own race before leaving Kentucky, and had promised to return and redeem the pledge as soon as he should make his fortune in California.
    The Indian and his daughter returned for the third time. Whether it was from the Indian's anxiety to consummate a sale, wholly, or under the persuasion of his daughter is not known, but anyway several days passed before Riddle heard of them again. It was about 10 days after the last call when Winemah entered Riddle's cabin, bringing with her what little effects she had, giving him to understand that she had come to be his slave without cost. He knew not where she lived and could not drive her out into the world. She was a beautiful type of her race and as innocent as a child.
    She immediately took up the housework and prepared his meals always ready for him upon his arrival. She was quick in learning the civilized manner of living and also learned to speak his tongue. He, too, learned her language. Day by day the Kentucky beauty faded from Riddle's memory. He came to love Winemah. To prove this love he led her to the altar and married her under the custom of those early days.
    Early history is filled with the great work performed by this Indian woman. It was she who warned Gen. Canby against the conference with the Indians in the lava beds; it was she who was tried for her life by the tribe for high treason in giving out this information; it was she who went along as interpreter on that fatal occasion, knowing that the men would be assassinated, and probably herself, having informed them of the fact. But they heeded her not, and lost their lives as a result. Her husband, who accompanied her on this occasion, barely escaped with his life, depending upon Winemah's wonderful intelligence to take care of [himself]. When Capt. Jack fired the first shot into Gen. Canby's breast and the other assassins began to fire upon their victims, Riddle mounted a horse in the confusion and rode for his life. The white people charged Riddle with cowardice in thus abandoning his wife to the mercy of the assassins, but she took his part and commended him for the act.
    When the massacre began the men were all standing. Winemah, expecting it, had crouched low on the ground and thus escaped the shots. Then when not a man was left standing, and Scarfaced Charlie placed his revolver against Meacham's forehead to finish the work already begun, she saw the white man flinch and saw there was still life. "The soldiers are coming!'' she shouted at the top of her voice and the bloodthirsty savage, seeing that his companions had all fled, he too, ran away without firing the shot that would have ended the life of the white man.
    Winemah, then a little beautiful Indian woman, is now old and haggard. Her form has changed from the slender, shapely girl to a bulky, unsightly shape. Her weight was then a little above 100 pounds. Now it is 230. Her face, then so smooth and bright with the paint of nature, is now wrinkled and flabby. The brightness has left her eyes. She is daily returning to the Indians' ways. She has almost abandoned the white man's tongue in conversation and does not speak it nearly so well as formerly. In fact the white miner's Indian wife, and the heroine of the lava beds, once painted in prose and fiction, is now only a typical old Indian squaw.
    Riddle, too, has changed. The once erect and handsome miner, who prided himself in his dress and carriage, is now stooped and grizzled and gray. He cares not for his appearance or his manner of dress or cleanliness. Once an interesting conversationalist, he never speaks now, except when it is absolutely necessary. He would speak his native tongue while his wife speaks that of her people. Riddle is no longer a favorite of the Indians or whites. He is simply an old "squaw man."
    Thus the proud Kentuckian, after years of association with Winemah, the former slave girl, has reached his station naturally. He is below his own race and not far above Winemah's. She has returned to the traditions of her tribe. The man has not elevated the woman. The woman has not elevated the man. Perhaps he could have lifted her up to his station had she not been the stronger of the two.
    The lesson of the marriage of Winemah is a living one.--Paul De Laney in Portland Journal.


    Mrs. S. Arrasmith, her daughter and granddaughter were on Wednesday's train, en route from Quartz Valley, Cal., to Applegate to visit relatives. She and one other Indian living near Jacksonville are the only remnants of the original Rogue River Indian tribe that inhabited this valley when the white man came. She is a very spry and intelligent old lady.
"Brief Mention," Democratic Times, Jacksonville, July 1, 1903, page 3


    "July Time,'' as our great day of Independence is called among the Klamath Indians of Southern Oregon, is one of the two great events of the year to that little remnant of that once-powerful tribe of red men; and once having celebrated with them, one can very readily understand why they call it "July Time," for to them, it is not a single holiday, but a whole week, and sometimes more, of feasting, visiting and having a good time in general. To use an Indian's own words, as he once greeted the writer, he said, "July time come, now just a little while, Injuns hab big time, lots Injuns camp, hab lots fun, hoss race, gamble, lots laugh, plenty good grub, heap bully time," and he rode on with a smile on his face that told of his intense joy.
    Several days before the Fourth of July, they begin to gather and camp among the beautiful evergreen trees that fringe the banks of Wood River, a deep stream of clear, sparkling water, about thirty yards wide, whose source is a single, mammoth, cold spring, which gushes from the mountainside about three miles north of the camping grounds, and at one bound forms a fair-sized river, which is filled to the rim of its sodden bank the year round, and forms a part of the western boundary line of the reservation, emptying into upper Klamath Lake only a few miles from its source.
    Looking east from the camping ground one sees the large, white, weatherbeaten buildings of old Fort Klamath, only a mile away, standing out in bold relief against the fir-covered ridge in the background.
    The Fort was abandoned several years ago, and one of the large barracks has been torn down and now serves as a place of worship in the eastern part of the reservation, and the remaining barrack being used for a dance hall, where most every evening during "July Time" the Indian boys swing their dusky sweethearts to the time and tune of modern music.
    Some of the buildings that were occupied by the officers in charge of the Fort now shelter Indian families. The hospital is a resting place for bats and screech owls, and the stables are now a heap of ruins, while the Indians' cattle now occupy the prison, where many a dusky warrior has been made to repent of his misdeeds and promise to be good; where Captain Jack and his companions, who paid for their crimes on the gallows, once sat and looked longingly through its steel-grated windows for the liberty and freedom that never came.
    Across the river to the west is another busy throng, but of different hue; the whites of the Wood River Valley and neighboring sections are gathering and pitching camp, for they, too, have come to celebrate.
    The Indians camp in a half circle, facing the river, and also an opening in the grove, in the center of which stands a tall flag pole with the Stars and Stripes floating to the breeze. Most of the Indian families have their regular camping place, some having constructed rude tables and shelves from boards picked up at the Fort.
    "July Time" is a star occasion among the Indian women, and there is considerable rivalry in the display of table linen, queensware, amount and variety of toothsome dishes prepared, and last, but not least, is the ambition to outshine their neighbors in wearing apparel, very little taste being displayed in use of flashy colored ribbons and dress goods. A great many cook stoves are seen among the camps; sometimes two families cook on the same stove, while others camp in tepees, prepare their meals on the open fire, and spread a cloth or tule mat on the grass, squat around it at meal time in regular camp fashion.
    An Indian boy's cup of bliss is full to the brim when astride his saddle pony he is raising clouds of dust on his way to the Wood River camp, where his pony is turned out to graze with the work teams, and the boy turned loose among the stands upon both sides of the river, where he loses no chance to "blow himself" and is soon lounging in the shade, eating peanuts and cracking jokes with his chums.
    Each day has its attractions, and after the tents are all pitched there is little to distinguish the real Fourth of July from any other day during "July Time," except on that day there is a parade, consisting of mounted police, officers of the day, or rather week, the Indian school band, a liberty car, bedecked with dusky maidens, followed by several families in private conveyances, and a score or more of boys and men on horseback. The parade is formed at the old Fort and after circling around the opening in the camp ground, they land at the "grandstand," a platform from which several addresses are delivered by some of the leading men of the reservation. For example, an Indian who has been sent to Washington will tell all about what he saw and heard while on his trip. The very limited number of benches compels most of the audience to stand.
    Every morning, just after breakfast, an officer goes around the circle and calls out the list of races, games, etc., that will be the day's program, and a "July Time" day is hardly considered rounded out if there has not been a horse race. Most of the races are of the old-fashioned, go-as-you-please variety, but produce no little amount of excitement, and considerable gambling is indulged in.
    The Indian boys do not use saddles when racing, but instead a surcingle and blanket. Some of the horses show pretty good speed, considering the training and condition of the track, which is located in the large meadow between the camp ground and the old Fort, and only by courtesy could be called a track.
    Now a hat is passed and a purse made up, and soon the Indian boys and the Wood River nine are busy at base ball to decide who shall carry off the prize. While the ball game is in progress one can hear the monotonous chant of the older members of the tribe, who are squatted on the grass a few rods away playing their gambling game. Two parallel lines formed by the players--six or eight on each side--each of which is provided with a stick about two feet long, and on each side a long board or pail on which they keep up a continuous beating, at the same time making a strange, monotonous noise. I will call it "noise," for it is neither words or melody, but together with the beating on the boards it is decidedly noisy and their racket can be heard all over the camp around. A player on one aside will take two little pieces of wood, one of which has a small rawhide band, and will twist, shake and wriggle, shifting the pegs from one hand to the other, then holds up his closed hands for one on the opposite aide to guess which hand holds the banded wooden peg. Several sharp sticks are used with which to keep score; the side that finally gets all the sticks captures the prize, usually something contributed by the crowd to help the game along, for as much as they enjoy playing the game they seem to think it can't be played unless there is something at stake and sometimes that chant, and racket will be kept going for two hours to decide which side shall take the prize, which perhaps is a second-hand silk handkerchief, possibly worth twenty-five cents.
    A banistered footbridge provides a very convenient means of crossing the river between the camp grounds, and the Indians and whites mingle freely, both taking active part on both sides of the river. At dark, however, all the dusky lads and lassies are supposed to be on the reservation. The Indian police can be seen of evenings rounding up the stragglers. Some of the whites attend the dances at the old Fort, but a majority are spectators at the war dances, which are conducted by the older Indians, around a camp fire in the opening near the flag pole. These war dances are mild affairs compared with the real old-fashioned gatherings where a display of scalplocks were a leading feature in the performance. Several Indians, sometimes dressed in furs ornamented with colored feathers, form a circle facing the camp fire; joining hands they take short steps moving around the fire to the left, at the same time singing a monotonous chant over and over again for perhaps five or ten minutes, when a new tune is started.
    The writer learned from a fairly well-educated half-breed that these songs are to them what the "Star Spangled Banner" and other national tunes are to Uncle Sam's boys, though they say not a word. ''They just sing," said he, "in memory of some great deed done by their ancestors, or some battle won, each event having a certain tune to suit the occasion."
    After this monotonous performance is indulged in for a time, they seem to warm up to the occasion, and presently one, sometimes three or four, will break out of the line, begin to jump and whoop, making all manner of gestures, until they get tired, when they fall in line with the dancers and others take their turn at jumping and yelling, the dance continuing to grow more exciting until it is usually after midnight before the strange, hideous noise is hushed, and quiet reigns, and the camps can slumber in peace until morning, with the exception of an occasional wakening by the Indians' dogs chasing horses out of camp, and I will add right here that there is never a shortage of dogs around an Indian camp.
    No whites are now allowed to camp with the Indians except those having stands or employees on the reservation.
    An Indian police is usually an important personage, a blue suit trimmed in brass buttons and a big silver star has very much the same effect on an Indian as it does on a paleface.
    The stands that furnish ice cream provide freezing material by hauling snow from the mountains to the north, round trip to snow and back being made in a day, and a snow storm on the mountains in Crater Lake National Park is not an uncommon sight from the camp grounds.
    The cold water of Wood River is used without ice at the lemonade stands, and I might truthfully say sometimes with only a slice of a squeezed lemon to give it some semblance of lemonade, if however, more Wood River water and less "firewater'' were used, it would add materially to the peace and quiet of the camps, and less rowdyism and fistic encounters would be reported.
    Large numbers of horses, some broke and others fresh from the range, are brought in by the Indians to sell or trade to the whites; saddles and blankets frequently change hands.
    The haying season in the Wood River Valley begins soon after the celebration, and this is the time when contracts are made with the Indians to haul and stack hay. Toward the close of the festive period groups of Indians can be seen dickering with the Wood River cattle ranchers for a few more cents per ton on the contracts, but the races and fortune wheels having made heavy inroads on their stock of double eagles, they are now handicapped in making a haying contract, for as a rule money burns an Indian's pocket; they love to display their money and are restless until it is spent, and will buy as long as anyone will credit them, their credit being very limited as a class, still there are some on the reservation who hold long sacks, whose promise to pay is accepted by the merchants at par with gold coin.
    Now the time is drawing near when the parting words must be said; "no more good times till Christmas" said one, with a tinge of sadness in his voice. There are a few matters to be adjusted before the camp is broken up; a session of police court is called and sometimes lasts a couple of days. The young Indian that absorbed too much "firewater" and got into "fistic mixups'' at the dance hall is brought into court, witnesses on both sides examined, the jury is instructed, their verdict rendered, the wayward youth pays the fine, or on failure to produce the cash a police is appointed who takes him to the jail at the agency. A squaw boxed the ears of another squaw's papoose, and a free-for-all hair-pulling followed. A case like this took considerable time and furnished a great deal of amusement for all except those directly interested in the case. These law cases are mentioned as samples, but there are others and the wheel of justice keeps turning till the grist is ground, then the tent pins fly, and in a few hours only a few straggling camps are left behind.
    "These gatherings are a treat to the student of human nature, the vacant, silly smile of one, the small, black, snaky, revengeful-looking eyes of another,; some are as proud us the proverbial peacock, while others look crushed in spirit. The jolly carefree class are represented, and some have the smooth palaver of the accomplished confidence man, still there are several big-hearted fellows who have a fair education and look on the practical side of life, never losing a chance to copy the good he sees in the white man, and just as persistently show his evil ways.
    Some have good houses nicely furnished, while they spend a good part of the year in a tent or tepee back of the house, which to many of them is not so much a convenience or necessity as a display of wealth and a place to entertain friends on state occasions.
    The few days each your spent at the Wood River camp brings back to the older members of the tribe memories of the once free life they lived, and they make no preparations to break camp till they receive orders from the Agent to "hold court and then all go home," when their happy "July Time" must end.
    The Klamath Reservation comprised 1865 square miles of land, is which there is every variety from the low marshy lands bordering upon Big Klamath Lake which yields abundant harvests of hay, to the rugged mountains and broad, grass-grown prairies of the Sprague and Williamson River sections. The Indians living upon the reservation are composed of the Klamath, Modoc, Snake and Pit Rivers--1150 in all, and are mainly self-supporting.
    The reservation is policed by fifteen mounted police--Indians--under a white chief and Indian captain.
    The present agent is Capt. O. C Applegate, whose father, Lindsay Applegate, helped make the first treaty with the Klamaths, and who, with his brother, Jesse, led the first party of white men through the Klamath region after the visit of Fremont.
    Fort Klamath was established in 1865, as a protection to the then sparsely settled country, and to keep down the savage Modocs. Then it was the scene of much activity. Many men who have risen to high places in the armies of the nation have served there. It was abandoned in 1890, and there is now something melancholy in its windowless buildings and deserted parade ground to one who knew it in its halcyon days. Stretched for miles around it are prosperous ranches, where once the officers of the post hunted, and one realizes that while the usefulness of the old Fort has departed, still it played its part in the progress of the nation and the advancement of civilization.


    KLAMATH FALLS, Or., Dec. 28.--(Special.)--Captain O. C. Applegate, for years the Indian agent here, is now under investigation. Although the investigation is being conducted behind closed doors, and the topics discussed are closely guarded, it has been learned that a woman is back of the whole trouble, and an Indian woman at that.
    The investigation is the outgrowth of the alleged conduct of Luzena Choteau, a Carlisle graduate, and at one time an employee at the Yainax School near here. At the time the trouble originally came up Knott C. Egbert, now superintendent at Siletz, was superintendent at Yainax. Miss Choteau, holding the. position of assistant matron, took her annual leave of absence, and while gone was sent word that she had better not return. If she did return charges would be preferred against her by Superintendent Egbert. As a result she resigned, but at once engaged the services of several San Francisco lawyers, who have taken her case before the department at Washington and have finally succeeded in bringing about the present investigation.
    Miss Choteau is the Indian woman who is president of the National Indian Republican Association. During the last Presidential campaign she sent letters broadcast throughout the Indian country, asking the Indians to contribute $1 each for the Republican cause. It has never been learned just what she accomplished or what disposition was made of the funds collected. Miss Choteau is a fighter, and seems determined to carry the fight against Applegate and Egbert through to the end.
    The investigation is being conducted by Supervisor M. F. Holland of the Indian Office. He has been at the Klamath Agency since the first week in December. It is not known how long he will remain.
    The Choteau matter is not the only one under investigation. There is said to be strong feeling among the Indians against Applegate. It is alleged by them that he is opposed to sending children from the Klamath Reservation to non-reservation schools, even though the children were anxious to go and the parents willing that the change be made. According to the Indian regulations, it is necessary for the pupils to secure the agent's consent before they can leave for other schools. Applegate, it is maintained, has for years stood in the way of the children, saying that the schools on the reserve were sufficient.
    Several of the prominent Indians on the reserve are greatly opposed to Applegate, and have given testimony before Holland as to his position on the school and other questions. Rev. Jessie Kirk, one of the smartest Indians on the reservation and a regularly ordained minister, said recently: "When any of the Indians desired to send their children to other schools the agent always found some pretext or other by which he put them off. I have seen him take a drive of 40 miles across the reservation, simply to escape some employee from another school sent here for children. It sometimes appeared to me that the old agent was acting out of spite, but at other times I could not understand his actions."
    Kirk represents the better element among the Indians. He has made it a point to send his children away to the large non-reservation schools in spite of Applegate's protests. He and many of the other Indians want a younger man and a man more up with the times, as agent Applegate has been at Klamath Agency for about 30 years, and has spent little of that time away from his post.
Morning Oregonian, Portland, December 29, 1904, page 7


    Should the name of the beautiful, winding stream that wends its way through Jackson and other counties to the bounding sea be changed from Rogue to its original Indian name--it would be called "Calum."
    Having come to this country in the days of "auld lang syne," when the "tecopes" (whites) and redskins were each fiercely combating for the land we now possess, I had the opportunity of learning the Indian language and in many instances having acquired their language by daily contact with them, the Indian words of speech came more naturally to one in their conversation than that of their own English language, and from the Indians' own lips I have heard the word "Calum," given by them as the name of the river that now is known as the Rogue.
Medford Mail, March 10, 1905, page 1


    Captain Oliver C. Applegate, for a long time agent of the Klamath Indians, has voluntarily resigned his charge, and will be succeeded by Horace G. Wilson, superintendent of the Winnebago Indian Agency School in Nebraska, orders for the transfer of the latter from Nebraska to Oregon having been issued from Washington.
    The news of the resignation of Capt. Applegate has occasioned considerable surprise, although the fact that there has been friction between his office and a number of the Indians prominent in influencing sentiment among government wards has been well known. Rev. Jesse Kirk, a leader among the members of the Klamath tribe, who it has been charged is really actuated more by selfish motives than the good of his people, has been energetic with his tongue and pen, and succeeded in getting inspectors sent out by the Indian Department to investigate the situation and certain charges made by Kirk.
    Reports say that the affairs of the reservation have been found in first-class shape, but that Capt. Applegate is tired of the continual turmoil that the malcontents are bound to stir up and therefore sent in his voluntary resignation.
Medford Mail, April 7, 1905, page 4


    The report of our Superintendent of Indian Schools, Miss Estelle Reel, for this year has been received, giving an outline of the work of the School Service during the past year. It deals largely with the industrial features of Indian education and is replete with photographs, showing the industrial advancement of our Indians.
    "New buildings have been erected, and this is now the largest and best-equipped Indian school in the Northwest. The general conditions at the school showed improvement over those prevailing at the time of my visit, the previous year, and the boys who have graduated from the industrial departments have done well. This school is located in a section where almost all kinds of fruit can be raised and general agricultural work carried on to advantage. It would therefore seem advisable to have these pursuits carried on more extensively than at other schools in less favored regions and pupils give move extensive training in farming, dairying, and horticulture. In order that this may be accomplished, it is recommended that additional land be purchased."
    "The average attendance for the year was practically up to the enrollment--63. The school has a good farm, well fenced, and mostly under cultivation. It is necessary here that the boys be instructed in agriculture, including stock raising and dairying, and the girls be taught cooking, the care of milk, and butter making, since the children's homes are in a section particularly well adapted to farming and grazing.
    The classroom work was good. The grounds and buildings have been improved since my previous visit. There are few facilities for giving industrial instruction, and it would seem advisable that the larger pupils should be transferred to Chemawa School as soon as they are sufficiently advanced. It is believed that this agency could with advantage be united with the Grand Ronde Agency, where the conditions are similar, and that uniting the two would result in benefit to both. The Siletz Indians are self-supporting and fairly well-to-do, and capable of looking after their own affairs. Two or three day schools could be conducted to advantage on the reservation.
Weekly Chemawa American, Chemawa, Oregon, January 19, 1906, page 1


    Allen David, one of the last two of the living signers of the solemn treaty of October 14, 1864, between the Klamath Indians and the United States, and the last chief of the tribe, was born at the east side of Klamath Marsh and was over seventy years old at the time of his death, August 2, 1906. He was the father of seven children, and only one daughter is living of the seven. His wife, sisters and nephew, Drummer David, survive him. Allen David was a man of peace from his youth up and became a head chief, succeeding Chief Lasakou during the '70s and served until the chieftainship was discontinued. During his chieftainship he succeeded in making peace twice upon this reservation, during L. S. Dyar's administration as United States Indian agent, by his wise act and judgment.
    In one instance, following after the Modoc War, was that Capt. O. C. Applegate went east, taking David Hill Tecumsche and a few other Modocs, who had taken part in the Modoc War, they lost David Hill, but he worked his way back down into the northern part of California, stole a horse and saddle, and rode back to the Klamath Reservation. When the owner of the horse and saddle found out that David Hill had stolen them he was going to arrest him. When the relatives and friends of David Hill heard that they were going to arrest him they were not going to give him up and Chief Allen David saw that danger was near and went to work and called on his people to raise enough money to cover the damage, about $75, and also returned the horse and saddle to the owner, through L. S. Dyar, United States Indian agent, and saved the trouble.
    Deceased advised the people of the reservation to forward movements, in Christianity as well as education, and wise judgment to improve their homes and ability, which will enable them to become a self-supporting people.
    In the last hours of his life he wished his people to abide by his advice and his advice will remain with them, but his spirit will be with the Lord God in Heaven.
    He was glad that he left his people farther advanced than in his time and hoped that they will move on forward as they have begun. He told his wife not to mourn over his death, that he was only going over yonder where he will be with the Lord and his loved ones who passed over some years ago. He bid them goodbye and closed his eyes, never suffering. He was greatly honored by his people. Funeral services were held at Williamson River church on August 3, 1906. Supt. H. G. Wilson, of Klamath Agency, addressed the people with sympathizing words on his life and his manhood. Funeral services were conducted by Rev. Jesse Kirk, an Indian.
Medford Mail, August 17, 1906, page 1


From [the] Klamath Falls Express:
    The Indian agent at the Klamath Reservation, assisted by Capt. O. C. Applegate, has compiled a census of the Indians and the roll shows 1050 men, women and children. The taking of the census is the preliminary step to the apportionment of the roads the Indians are to receive for about 600,000 acres of land, laying along the north and east side of the reservation, which they relinquished to the government for a cash payment. The first of this payment, $25,000, has been received and will be divided among the 1050 Klamath, Modocs, Pit Rivers and Piutes that inhabit the reservation.
    The remainder of the money, $350,000, due from the government, has been placed on interest and every year the Indians will receive the interest money amounting to about $16,000. While the per capita payments will not be large, yet when it is considered as a lump sum it is no small income to the reservation wards of Uncle Sam. The sum of $350,000 placed on interest is held up at the will of the Secretary of Interior and it may be many years before this amount is apportioned among the Indians.
    Another important matter in the Indians' affairs is the definite settlement of the Central Military Road land grant in the reservation. This matter was first taken up by Capt. O. C. Applegate during his administration as Indian agent and was brought to a successful issue by Major Wilson, the present agent, in a comparatively short time.
    The settlement was reached by exchanging a tolerably compact body of timber land lying west of the Sican Valley in the Klamath Reservation for the grant lands following the old Central Military Road, heretofore claimed by the California and Oregon Land Company. The grant lands comprised about 111,000 acres and in lieu of these they were given about 80,000 acres on the west side of Sican Valley and a deed for the same was placed on record this week. This exchange of lands was made in pursuance to a plan of settlement marked out by the representatives of the Indians and of the company claiming the lands under the authority of Congress.
    The final settlement of this land removes one of the impediments in making the land allotments to the Indians which may now be pursued and when completed the government will be in a position to purchase the tribal rights of the Indians to the remainder of the lands and is a decisive step towards the opening of the reservation.
Medford Mail, November 23, 1906, page 1


    Remnants of 12 tribes of the Indians that possessed the wilds of Southern Oregon and Northern California before "the coming of the white man," and for some struggling and eventful years thereafter, are still found upon the Grand Ronde Reservation in Yamhill County. When this agency was established in 1856 the Indians who were restricted to those lands numbered 500 and then, as now, represented 12 tribes [but] now number 362, all told. The warriors of these tribes, the most warlike of which were the Umpquas and Calapooias, had made the government much trouble and were a terror to the settlers of the Umpqua and Rogue River valleys for many anxious years. They were subdued, as far as active hostilities were concerned, before being taken to the reservation, but hatred of the whites still rankled in the bosoms of many of them. While among them were some fine specimens of physical manhood, the 500 were, in aggregate, an unpromising lot--lazy, thriftless and revengeful. A. F. Hedges, a pioneer of Clackamas County, was the reservation agent at that time. His knowledge of Indian character and his tactfulness in handling his charges served the government well in effecting the peaceable settlement of these Indians upon the reservation.
    From an old report of work done in building the first cabins for the Indians on Grand Ronde Reservation made by one of the men employed to superintend this work, but who has long since passed away, it is found that the house of "Tyee Peter," once a chief of the Umpqua tribe and still living upon the reservation, was a log structure, 17x22 feet in dimensions, lighted by one six-light window, the cost of the structure being $65.
    Many of the names of these Indians, as shown by this report of the first attempt to settle them in houses, are significant of the part that those who answered to them played in the wars of immediately preceding years. We find, for example, "Winchester Sam," and "Winchester Joe," each coming into possession of a log house 16x18 feet in dimensions, built at the cost of $50 apiece and each containing "one six-light window." "Lame Dick," "One Eye Charley" and "Cut-Eye Tom" were the disfigurement and disability thus designated, evidence of sharp encounter with the foe; "General Cass" and "James K. Polk" were names suggestive of a commanding presence, albeit the Indians who bore them were settled, the one in a "board"' house, 14 feet square, the other in a log house, 18 feet square "without windows," by the government at a cost of $35 and $65 respectively.
    So the story as given in a yellow paper in faded ink runs, showing that between September 6 and November 25, 1856, 32 homes were built for designated members of the Umpqua tribe of which "Tyee Peter," still living upon his allotment of reservation land at the great age of 90 years, was chief. The government furnished the lumber (when lumber was used), the nails and the windows and paid a carpenter to superintend construction of these houses and see that the Indians did the work.
    Thus was the beginning made, in good faith, in the betterment of the Indians located upon the Grand Ronde Reservation more than 50 years ago. The strain of half a century has told upon these Indians. They were savages of the moccasin and blanket era then, accustomed to outdoor life, to the chase and the war path. In appearance uninviting, even in many cases revolting, they still were in robust health. Withdrawn from the accidents of war and the menace of want, and domiciled in some sort of comfort from the white man's standpoint, they should have thriven and multiplied. Instead of this, the semi-centennial of their occupancy of the Grand Ronde Reservation lands finds them greatly reduced in numbers, wasted with disease and in circumstances, bordering upon poverty. Between the beginning upon this reservation and the present stage of its development, the years of a busy and fruitful half century intervene. The showing is that of a vanishing race--a race helped toward extinction by its touch with civilization, a race that long since passed its meridian and is now approaching oblivion except as it may live in tradition, or be accorded a place in the romance and history of the New World.




    Jeff C. Riddle, an intelligent half-breed Modoc, and held in high esteem by members of the two tribes by reason of his efforts to encourage their advancement along civilized lines, was outspoken in his denunciation of Agent Wilson's administration of affairs on the reservation, and in this expression of dissatisfaction he was joined by H. E. Mann, a white man now in the government service at Chemawa Indian school, who married into the Klamath tribe, besides Henry Hoover, an Indian justice of the peace on the Klamath Reservation, and Thomas. Barkley, brother to William Barkley, who was complaining that H. G. Wilson, Indian agent for the Klamath reservation, is opposed to the best interests of the Indians and has made no effort to advance the tribes educationally or otherwise. A petition has been forwarded to the Secretary of the Interior asking for his removal. It is asserted that Wilson's administration has been unusually offensive to the Indians--so much so that the tribe is said to have ceased to progress and is experiencing a retrograde movement.
    Wilson is charged with leasing the Indian lands to stockraisers without receiving permission from the owners. The claim is made that the petition is not brought from any personal reasons, and that the Modocs and Klamaths, the tribes concerned on the reservations, are in perfect agreement regarding Wilson's re- [omission]
    Among the Indians there was a desire to be represented by a float and brass band at the rose festival, and it is stated that Wilson by his prohibitory mandates prevented this red men's display.
    Illegal transfers of land and transfers made without obtaining the permission of the Indian proprietors are a further complaint made. It is said that Wilson has not made adequate attempts to enforce the liquor laws, and has permitted hunting and [is] accused of killing Sid Jacobs, in addition to others who are known to have the best interests of the two tribes at heart. In discussing the situation immediately prior to his return to the reservation yesterday, Riddle said:
    The petition claims further that Superintendent Wilson is careless in his duties, and does not look after the general welfare of the reservation, this laxness having a tendency to cause trouble among the Indians and damaging the whole reservation. Particular reference is made to his lack of alertness in enforcement of the laws regarding the sale of intoxicating liquors on the reservation, as a result of which the petitioners say there has been considerable drunkenness, and one white man was found dead near Yainax. The agent is also accused of permitting hunting, trapping and fishing on the reservation, in violation of the laws governing it.
Medford Mail, June 18, 1909, page 3




Dear Editor:--
    If you will give me space I wish to write a little about our location and work here in Southern Oregon.
    We are located in Klamath Indian Reservation, Klamath County,  Oregon, and our elevation is nearly five thousand feet We have very little rainfall here, but lots of snow during the winter. Several of the mountains are still covered with snow. From our back porch we can get a good view of Mt. Scott, the mountain on which Crater Lake is located, and is claimed by the people of this part to be the eighth wonder of the world. By walking about one and a half miles from here to the top of a neighboring hill we can get a splendid view of Mt. Shasta which, because of the thin clear atmosphere, seems very near.
    Now about game. These waters are full of fish, and thousands and thousands of wild geese and ducks are on the small rivers. I have seen more wild geese and ducks in a single day here than I ever expected to see in a lifetime.
    Before I take too much space I must tell about our work. I am teacher of Yainax Indian Day School, and Mrs. Creech teaches the girls sewing one hour each school day. We have 23 pupils on roll and the attendance is excellent. We have a nice school room well equipped. We have a number of large boys and girls but none above the fourth grade.
    Later I shall write a letter giving a full description of my school.
The Citizen, Berea, Kentucky, May 12, 1910, page 5  Apparently that descriptive letter either wasn't written or published.


    PORTLAND, Ore., July 8.--To prepare for the Smithsonian Institution a grammar of the language spoken by each tribe of Indians in the Pacific Northwest, Dr. Leo J. Frachtenburg arrived in Portland on his second journey to the wigwams of the original Americans. Dr. Frachtenburg conducts his studies while living among the Indians, if he finds it impossible to induce them to come to him, and has become an expert in several tongues used by the red men.
    He spent last year among the Coos tribe of Indians, and made the discovery that those Indians have a large claim against both Oregon and the United States, which would enrich the living members of the tribe beyond their wildest dreams of wealth--if it could be collected.
    When seen at the Hotel Portland Dr. Frachtenburg said:
    "The Smithsonian Institute has deemed it wise to gather and preserve the languages of the Indians, and has detailed several men to that work. This is my second trip to Oregon, as I spent last year with the Coos Indians.
    "We have been engaged in the work for years and probably will complete the Pacific Northwest division in 1911. I not only learn the language of the tribe with which I am working, but prepare a grammar which is to be preserved with a history of the tribe and the several events in which its members have participated. These became available to the people through members of Congress, who can obtain them as other public documents are secured.
    "This year I will begin with the Molalla tribe, which is practically extinct. I have information of only three living members. They are Molalla Kate Williams, who lives on the Siletz Reservation; Molalla Henry, at Oregon City, and Stevens Savage, residing on North River. I will endeavor to get one or more of these Indians, who speak good English, to translate for me and will prepare a report after carefully checking the information with other Indians of the tribe. After finishing with the Molalla tribe I will take up the Alsea Indians, of which there are about fifteen scattered over the Siletz Reservation, and possibly others in the state.
    "It is a curious fact that there are more than one hundred distinct languages spoken by the American Indians, derived from fifty-four linguistic stocks. Different tribes of Indians residing in the same neighborhood are unable to communicate with one another except by the use of English.
    "We always accumulate all the traditions information which can be obtained. The stories are printed in the Indian tongue and a literal translation given in English. In that way we have acquired a great deal of interesting information. Perhaps it is not generally known that the Coos tribe has a claim against Oregon and the government for forcibly removing them from their lands and failure to keep treaty agreements.
    "I was told about it by some of the old men of the tribe, who assert that they are now wanderers for that reason. That tribe formerly lived around Coos Bay. In 1852 they ceded half of their territory to the United States, the consideration being that each Indian was to receive a wagon and two cows. The government agreed, also, to build them houses and schools. It was never done, they assert, and when the Rogue River Indian War came in 172 [sic] they were removed to Fort Umpqua. In 1876 the government wanted the Coos to move to the Siletz Reservation, and the last council the Coos ever held pertained to that proposition. They decided that they would no longer be subservient to Indian agents and would return to their own country around Coos Bay. When they arrived there they found that the whites had come in and they were not allowed to occupy their own lands. Since then they have been a nomadic tribe."
Fresno Herald, July 8, 1910, page 2


    "The first fair ever held in Oregon," said W. W. Cardwell of Roseburg, "was held at Cap's Illahee on the summit of the Cascades. There is about a section of land there that is perfectly level, just about where Douglas and Klamath counties meet. It is now in the forest reserve. I don't think it has been used as a fair ground for probably 50 years, though you can still see the old race track beaten hard and the circles of stones where the old tepees were set up. I have often been up there, and my father tells me that when he came to Oregon in 1848 the Indians were using it every year.
    "The Umpquas, the Rogue River Indians and the Klamaths met there each year, and frequently the Modocs and the Warm Springs Indians came. They came in late summer and stayed until the cool weather started in, frequently staying a month. This was neutral ground and no tribal differences were allowed to interrupt the horse racing, gambling and other sports held by the Indians.
    "I was born here in Douglas County, 52 years ago. I drove on the old stage line from Jacksonville, south over the Siskiyous. Tom Burnett, Bill Carrol and myself were drivers in those days. Later I went to the University of Oregon where I was graduated in 1884.
    "In those days I couldn't have bought a farm if it had been only 40 cents an acre, but the other day I bought a farm in Cole's Valley and paid $40,000 for it, paying almost $100 an acre, so you will see that I think that Douglas County land is a pretty good investment."
Oregon Journal, Portland, May 29, 1913, page 7


    Authentic information was received here yesterday from Washington that Indian Agent Edson Watson has been removed from duty at the Klamath Indian Reservation and a man named Freed from Oklahoma division will soon arrive to take his place.
    Mr. Watson was communicated with last night and stated that he was expecting to receive notice of his removal at any time, but that he had heard nothing official yet.
    Behind the removal of Indian Agent Watson lies a story. When Professor Adolph C. Miller, new head of the federal reserve board and until recently Assistant Secretary of the Interior, was here last summer to inspect the reclamation project, he went word from Crater Lake to Watson that he wanted to meet the Indians of the reservation and talk over their affairs with them.
    When Professor Miller and his party arrived at the agency there were no Indians in night. He asked Agent Watson where the Indians were, "Oh, 1 didn't get them together," Watson is said to have replied. "I thought my official reports and I myself could give you all the information that you wanted." "That’s where you're wrong," Professor Miller retorted. "Under this Democratic administration we are not doing things that way. It may have been all right formerly for the government to get all its information from agents of bureaus, but President Wilson and Secretary Lane want their information first hand. I asked to see the Indians and I want to see them. I can learn your viewpoint any time I want to read your reports. Now go out and get the Indians."
    And Professor Miller waited while Agent Watson went out and summoned the Indians for a council with the agent of the great white father.
    It is stated that Watson was slated to go from that time, and that Secretary Lane had only been awaiting a suitable man to take his place.
Medford Mail Tribune, May 21, 1914, page 6




    A session of the United States federal court now being on at Medford occasioned the passing through Ashland Monday evening of an unusual company. The company consisted of about fifty Indians from the Klamath Reservation, conducted by Indian Agent William B. Freer, former Indian Agent Watson and James Johnson, a full-blood Indian who is reservation chief of police. An interpreter was also carried, for though many of the younger Indians talk good English there were older ones in the party who have never taken kindly to the white man's tongue.
    The pilgrimage of this company to the federal court session was occasioned by the bringing forward at this term of two murder cases in which redskin slew redskin. One case is that of an Indian named Smith who slew another known by the picturesque sobriquet of Link River Beal. The other is the case of Jim George, accused of the murder of Peter Brown.
    The Indians were an unusual sight in Ashland despite the fact that their reservation is within a day's auto drive of the city. They attracted considerable attention despite the fact that their dress was almost wholly civilized and only their dark skins and glossy black hair told their Indian blood. As a whole they were undemonstrative and unconcerned, though many of them were not at all regular travelers on the railroads. Despite federal laws and official vigilance, it was noted that at least one buck was drunk as a boiled owl.
    Agent Freer is a new man at the Klamath Reservation but has been in the service for many years elsewhere. He spoke in highly commendatory terms of Indian Commissioner Cato Sells--much to the gratification of the writer, who knew Sells personally for years as a Democrat and a force in Iowa politics.
    Mr. Freer shook his head as he looked at the one Indian who was intoxicated and remarked. "They're in a moral decline. I hope to work them out of it to some extent, but it's no easy job. Gambling, drinking, sexual excesses and fighting are distressingly prevalent on the reservation. I have established a prison camp and am working out a system to make the malefactors labor on the highways. I have about a dozen in the camp at present. We have Indian police over them and a white man to superintend the road work."
    Just at this point the train started and a very interesting conversation was broken oft as the several Indians on the platform swung aboard, followed by Agent Freer. Dr. F. M. White of Klamath Falls, who had to do with the murder cases in his capacity of physician, was also in the party.
Ashland Tidings, October 12, 1914, page 6


    A good many years ago I purchased from one of our local bookstores a dictionary of the Chinook language and brushed up on my jargon. In the old days the pioneers needed no dictionary to brush up on their jargon. The language was in constant use, and the traveler who had no knowledge of jargon was looked upon as very much of a tenderfoot.
    But jargon, like the buckskin [that] clad trappers and scouts used in the early days, has served its purpose, and its chief interest today is to the historian. The language started in the old days when Fort George, by the mouth of the Columbia, was the main trading camp in the Northwest. The jargon language was an attempt of the traders to find a language which could be used in trading with all of the tribes in the Northwest. Astor's men, the managers of the Northwest Fur Company, and the factors of the Hudson's Bay Company all helped to build the language. Many of the words are corruptions of French or English words made by the Indians in trying to pronounce the word and adopted by the white traders.
    The origin of such jargon words as bloom for broom, pus-pus for cat, tenas lope for little rope or cord, are easily traced. Other corruptions of English words are glease for fat, kal-a-hwah-tie for calico or petticoat, and also the words for salt, smoke, sick, wind and shoes. In discussing the formation of the Chinook language an authority on the subject says:
    "For nearly a century the Chinook jargon has served to foster trade, promote peace and open the way to civilization. Out of the confusion of Indian languages and dialects of the broad Northwest it brought intelligence and more friendly tribal relations. The immigration of the '40s found it ready-formed and a universal medium of communication. A quick mind, in an hour, could make progress in it, and it could be mastered in a few weeks. Even today you have only to say "Kla-howya" to a strange Indian on a city street or out on the reservation to win a smile of appreciation. It has been made to voice the Lord's Prayer and the Christian benediction. Hymns are sung in it and blessings spoken at table. And with all its petiteness as a language, yet it is broadly international and intertribal.
    "Certain of its words are onomatopoeic--coined in imitation of some associated sound--as tee-hee, for laughter, tum-tum, heart; chuk-chuk, cart; tin-tin, bell; kah-kah, crow, moos-moos, cattle.
    "Other words that enter into very general use are:
Ni-ka        Me or mine
Cultus        Worthless
Kum-tuks    To know or understand
Wake        No
Halo        None
Ikt        One
Tum-tum    Opinion
Till-i-cum    People, relatives, friends.
Skookum    Big or strong
Te-nas        Little or young
Hy-ak        Quick, hurry
Wau-Wau    Talk
    "A few simple sentences will illustrate the phrasing of this remarkable language that has been evolved out of the contact of savagery and civilization:
Kla-how-ya six        Good morning or evening
Mi-ka sick?        Are you sick?
Kahtah mika        What ails you?
Ma-mook pi-ah    Make a fire
Ik-ta mi-kah ti-ka    What do you want?
    "The following jargon words, with their English equivalents, are clearly of French derivation:
Lapome        Apple
Lahash            Axe or hatchet
Ma-sa-chie        Bad or wicked
Le-bal            Bail
Le-bis-kwee        Biscuit or cracker
La-san-jel        Belt
La-plash        Board
La-boo-tee        Bottle
La-bleed        Bridle
La-shah-del        Candle
Se-ah-po        Cap or hat
La-chase        Chair
La-pool        Chicken or grouse
Le-cock        Male bird
De-aub            Devil
La-pote        Door
Le-doo            Fingers
Le-pee            Foot
La-poo-shet        Fork
La-po-el        Frying pan
La-mah        Hand
Le-mah-to        Hammer
La-tet            Head
Co-sho            Hog   
Moo-la            Mill
La-monte        Mountain
La-boos        Mouth
La-peep        Pipe
La-gome        Pitch
Le-see-zo        Scissors
Le-moo-to        Sheep
Tenas bal        Shot
Shan-tee        Sing
La-tab            Table
    "The following words come from the Indian tongue:
Wake si-ah        Not far
Klootch-man        Woman
Al-ki            By and by
Chick-a-min        Money
Potlatch        A gift, to give
Kla-ta-wa        Go
Kla-how-ya        Goodbye, a general salutation
Ik-tas            Goods and valuables
Suk-wa-lol        Gun
Tai-a-pus        Coyote
Mem-a-loose        Dead
Mow-itsh        Deer
Lo-lo            Carry
Kaw-ook        Dog
Il-la-hee        Home or country, the earth
Mucka-muck        Eat, food
Si-ah            Far off
Whim            To fall
Whim-stick        A fallen tree
Kui-tan        Horse
O-lo            Hungry
    "Though jargon has served its place and has been relegated to the background, it will never become obsolete nor suffered to meet oblivion as long as there is a pioneer left who remembers the old days, the days of his own and Oregon's youth."
Oregon Journal, Portland, January 9, 1915, page 4


    Some time ago I spent an afternoon with a pioneer, a veteran of the Yakima Indian war. "Did you ever kill any Indians?" I asked. "Well, sir, now you have come to a question I do not care to discuss," he answered. "If I have killed any Indians--mind I don't acknowledge I have--but if I have, why, I thought in a different light. I wouldn't be so keen nowadays to go out and kill Indians as I was when a boy. I suppose this will sound strange from an Indian war veteran, but I believe that if I had been in the Indian's place I would have acted worse than they did. The Indians were trustful as children and hospitable to the white men when the whites first came to this country. See how the Nez Perce helped Lewis and Clark and later Captain Bonneville, and still later Spalding. The bad whites stirred up most of our Indian trouble. Look up the history of any of our Indian troubles and see for yourself.
    "Who was it that kept their promises, the white men or the Indians? Who was it who broke the treaties? The white men or the Indians? Oh, yes, I can tell you of a score of instances of Indian treachery and cruelty. But what caused it? Look back from the result to the original cause. Take just one or two instances.
    "In 1855 some of the settlers on Grave Creek, in Southern Oregon, invited a small band of friendly Indians to come in and have a peace talk. In good faith the Indians left their arms and entered the newly built log barn. The door was closed and all of the Indians were shot. [Search "Bates" here.] A party of Indians on Applegate Creek were induced to lay down their arms and a man called Williams and others with him killed 18 of them. After getting the heads of the Cow Creek band assembled, the soldiers with their 'hyas' rifles, as the Indians called our howitzers, helped make a treaty with them by which the Indians sold to the whites 800 square miles of land, most of it good farming land, for $12,000 and two log cabins and some seed wheat. We paid them two cents an acre for their homes. Do you wonder why they felt they had been treated unjustly?
    "We wonder why we can never get along with the Indians. We never yet have tried the plan of treating them with justice and good faith. If an Indian never forgives an injury, by the same token he never forgets a kindness. We talk about the golden rule and wanting to do unto others as we would be done by; I hope no one will ever do to us what we have done to the Indians. Our whole record is one of violated treaties and broken faith. I don't much blame 'Spotted Tail,' the Sioux chief, for saying, 'All men at Washington are liars,' nor Chief Joseph the Elder, the father of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, who was pursued in his flight from Wallowa Lake by General O. O. Howard and later by General Crook and General Nelson A. Miles, saying shortly before his death, 'I and my people have befriended the whites always. No, we do not want your schools because they teach us to have churches. We do not want your churches because they teach us to quarrel about God.'
    "I am considerable of a reader as you can see by my bookshelves. I have been doing a lot of reading about our relations with the Indians. Here is a piece marked in this book--copy it in your notebook, young man. It is by Major Eben Swift of the Twelfth United States Cavalry. He was graduated from West Point the year Custer was killed by the Indians. Here is what he says:
    " 'It is not a pleasant task to tell the history of our Indian wars. Civilization approaches the Indian with a Bible in one hand, a treaty in the other, a bludgeon in her sleeve and a barrel of whiskey in her wagon and the blight that goeth unto the third and fourth generation. The right or wrong must be lightly touched upon. The task of the soldier was to punish the Indian when he applied his crude ideas of justice or revenge and to force him to obey.'
    "Look up the history of the Black Hawk War, or the Florida war. The Florida war lasted several years and it was not until 1842 we heard it was ended by killing of most of the Indians. The Indians had only 1600 warriors and 250 negro slaves, yet it cost us our $20,000,000 in money and we used over 20,000 volunteers and 4000 regulars to lick the Indians. We had 77 officers and 1381 men in the regular army killed or wounded. How many volunteers were killed I don't know.
    "Here is another place in this book I have marked. Let me read it to you. This is in the official report of General Philip Sheridan for 1868. He saw his first Indian fighting here in Oregon near The Dalles when he was a young lieutenant. He says:
    " 'The present system of dealing with the Indians, I think, is in error. There are too many fingers in the pie, too many ends to be subserved, too much money to be made. It is in the interest of the nation and humanity to put an end to this inhuman farce. The peace commission, the Indian department, the military and the Indian make a balky team. The public treasury is depleted and innocent people are plundered in this quadrangular arrangement in which the United States treasury and unarmed settlers are the greatest sufferers.
    " 'The army has nothing to gain by war with the Indians; on the contrary, it has everything to lose. In such a war it suffers all the hardships and privations exposed, as it is, to the charge of assassination if the Indians are killed, to the charge of inefficiency if they are not, to misrepresentation by agents who fatten on the plunder of Indians and misunderstanding by worthy people at a distance who are deceived by these agents.'
    "You can look up all these Indian fighters, Crook and Miles, Wool and all the rest of them, and you will see they had no heart in the work of killing or cheating Indians, but they were army men and they obeyed orders. No, sir, I am afraid you have come to the wrong one for a story of killing and scalping Indians. If I knew then what I know now, I would have had no joy in my job of killing Indians so that greedy and unscrupulous white men could steal their land from them."
Oregon Journal, Portland, March 7, 1915, page C4


    On the Siletz agency there are the remnants of 12 tribes, including Snakes, Shastas, Rogue Rivers, Klamaths, Alseas and smaller bands. You can't live for years with the Indians without realizing that their side of the story is never told. For a good many years past, in fact up to the past year, a mistaken policy has allowed liquor on the reservation. That is, to be more exact, no very strenuous efforts have been made to prevent vicious whites from taking it there and selling it to the Indians. No one can tell the harm that has been done by the exploitation of the Indians by low whites. Speaking of the Indians' viewpoint, I don't suppose you ever think that the Indians look with pity and horror on the whites. They do, though. I have often heard them say they could not understand how white people would allow their friends to go hungry when they had food to spare. They say, "Our people will eat as long as any of us have food. We stick together."
    We sometimes laugh at the Indians because they put things on the graves of their dead. I used to sell large quantities of dishes to put on the graves of the dead. Each spring they would put new dishes on the graves just as we celebrate Memorial Day by putting flowers on the graves of our dead. Back in the eighties you could see clocks, sewing machines, dishes and other treasured articles of the Indians put on their graves. I remember two Indians dug a grave for a dead Indian on the upper farm at Siletz agency. They dug the grave on the Kitty Evans place at the bend in the river. They came upon an old Indian grave so old that none knew when it was made. The Indian digging the grave found a handful of very old gold coins in the grave. A white man would have kept them, but to an Indian that is the worst form of desecration to steal from the dead, so when the burial occurred Jack Williams, an old Indian, called on all to witness that he was returning to the dead that which belonged to him and he scattered the coins in the grave. They bury their dead with rare old ornaments, elk teeth, coins, abalone shells and silver thimbles. White men come and dig open the graves, take the Indian skulls and the arrowheads and beads and put them in museums. Old "Halo Grease" asked me one day, "What would the white man think if we dug up their dead and took the skulls and carried away their tombstones?"
    Near the head of tide on the Siletz there used to be a rock called Medicine Rock. No Indian would think of rowing past it without making an offering to the Great Mystery. There was a little pine tree on the rock that used to look like a Christmas tree. The Indians would tie silk handkerchiefs to the limbs and at the foot of the tree they would put pipes, tobacco, pocket knives, money and other articles. No Indian would think of taking anything put on the rock, but the whites were less reverent. We would change our viewpoint if we could see our actions through the eyes of an Indian. We would not feel so self-satisfied nor superior, either.
Clarinda Kiser Chambers Copeland, quoted by Fred Lockley, "Oregon: In Early Days," Oregon Journal, Portland, June 8, 1915, page 8

    Marshfield, Ore.--George Wasson, a descendant of a former chief of the Coos Bay Indians, and Arthur P. Fenton, former examiner of inheritance for the Indian Service, will lay before the President and Congress a claim to 1,792,000 acres of land embraced in a strip along this section of the coast, 40 by 70 miles in extent and including a number of flourishing cities and industries.
    This land the Coos Bay, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians claim as their own by original right of possession and by treaty made with Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Territory of Oregon, Joel Palmer, at Empire, in the year 1855.
    There are a number of Indians alive who were present when the treaty was signed at a big conclave following the Rogue River Indian war and disturbances on the Coquille River. Those who remember the great gathering of Indians and the signing of the treaty were children of from eight to fourteen years, and their knowledge of the conditions of the treaty is only that which was talked about by the firesides among their elders at that time.
    There were present representing the several Indian tribes at Empire when the treaty of peace was signed and the agreements concluded and given into the hands of Superintendent Palmer, Chief Taylor of the Lower Coos Bay tribe; Chief Jim Tyee and Chief Jack Rogers of the other Coos Bay tribes; Chiefs Supina, Joe Scott and Umpqua Dick of the Lower Umpqua tribes.
    The oldest Indian now living who remembers the agreement and was in Empire during the council is Jeff Harney, now resident on the Siuslaw River. He tells many interesting things about the gathering and says that Doctor Drew, an Indian agent, was also a participant in the meeting.
    Senator Lane and Representative Hawley of Oregon already have made research in the affair and found a letter from President Buchanan addressed to Congress when submitting the treaty to that body for ratification in 1857, two years after its being signed. Senator Lane is reported also to have in his possession a true copy of the treaty as preserved in some history written shortly after the Empire gathering.
    It has been established that the treaty was never ratified, nor has the government's copy been found as yet, but the Indians consider the treaty was made in good faith and therefore feel the government should keep faith with them.
    The exact demands which the representatives of the Indians expect to make upon the government have not been outlined, but it was learned they hold themselves entitled to between $6,000,000 and $10,000,000.
Fredonia Weekly Herald, Fredonia, Kansas, July 28, 1916, page 5


    Next to the Osages of Oklahoma, the Klamath Indian Reservation Indians are the richest in the United States. As a community the Indians rank much higher in wealth than most white communities, the average wealth of each being $25,000. Some interesting information regarding the Indians on the Klamath Reservation, which is so near to Ashland and yet of which but little is generally known in Ashland, is contained in an article prepared by Agent B. W. Freer of the Klamath Reserve and published in the Klamath Falls Herald.
    Among the interesting statements are the following:
    "The Klamath Indian Reservation, lying in the central part of Klamath County, is bordered on the west by Upper Klamath Lake and Wood River and is on the direct route from Klamath Falls to Crater Lake National Park. The reservation is 51 miles long and 45 miles wide, and contains over one and a quarter million acres, being about the size of the state of Delaware.…
    "The reservation timber, the property of the tribe, covers an area of about 800,000 acres, and has been roughly estimated at 8,000,000,000 feet. It is of good quality and is practically all pine. Stumpage is offered for sale from time to time to the highest bidder, with a minimum price stated. The Sprague River and the lower reaches of the Williamson River, which empty into Upper Lake, have recently been opened for logging purposes.…
    "The Indians, who number 1,116, belong to the Klamath, Modoc and Piute tribes. There are also a few Pit Rivers, who were slaves, or the offspring of slaves, captured in former years by the Klamaths.
    "The Indians are unusually intelligent and progressive. They speak English, dress in 'citizens' clothing, occupy modern dwellings and live in a civilized manner.
    "The government maintains a boarding school and five day schools for the children. Farmers and stockmen are employed to instruct and assist the men in farming and the care of stock; field matrons teach and help the housewives, and physicians attend the sick."
Ashland Tidings, October 2, 1916, page 6


    Klamath Falls Herald: A plan for selling from the Klamath Indian Reservation each year enough timber to yield approximately $200,000 is announced by Superintendent William B. Freer. The announcement comes following the visit here recently of J. P. Kinney, assistant forester, and really the biggest man in the forestry department of the United States Indian Service.
    It is expected that within two months advertisements will be published asking for bids on several units of Indian timber.
    The timber is to be sold to provide money for the Indians to use in buying breeding stock and implements and generally improving their homes. The Klamath Indians now potentially are very wealthy, but their wealth consists of land and timber. It is the scheme of the Indian service to sell some of this timber for wealth that can be used now by the Indians.
    There is no intention of selling any large portion of the timber at once, but enough annually to bring in about $200,000.
Ashland Tidings, October 23, 1916, page 4


    Music of the first Americans, the Indians, more particularly the Rogue River and the Cheyenne tribes, had first place in attractiveness on the eighth popular program of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra at the Odeon Sunday afternoon.
    This music was transcribed from data given to the composer, Dean Charles Sanford Skilton of Kansas State University, by R. R. De Poe, chief of the Rogue River Indians, and, in the war dance of the Cheyennes, the outline came from a similar native source.
    The first number, the deer dance, is a memorial service for the dead of the tribe who passed away in the preceding year, and the war dance typifies the Cheyennes' preparation for battle. It is in this latter number that Dean Skilton's genuine war drum was employed by conductor Zach's percussional section with aboriginally weird effect, so well liked by the audience, too, that the whole thing had to be played over again.
    The composer's transcriptional score was effectively given in both selections. After what we heard in these two pieces, let no one say that the truly original Americans, the red Indians of the plains and the mountains, were not musical. At least they understood rhythm thoroughly and as for the drum, it was their chief instrument, and by these presents they must have known how to play it very well.
    The afternoon's soloist, Miss Elsa Diemer, soprano, after singing an aria from Massenet's "Herodiade" and a group of songs written after approved texts by Cyril Scott, Alexander Russel, Humphrey Mitchell and Linn Seiler, gave as an encore a very pretty little French song entitled "Bonjour, Suzon!" words by the celebrated Alfred de Musset, music by Francois L. Thome. The song has style and distinction, is well within the singer's range and temperament and its presentation made a really fine impression. The wish was current among the dispersing audience that Miss Diemer might have offered more numbers of similar caliber.
    Dr. Van der Stucken, former conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and one of America's leading musicians, was represented on the program by his "Louisiana" March, which he wrote as the official march of the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904. The composer treats our national airs in the grand manner and the work revealed itself as very thankful for the grand concert orchestra.
    Verdi's "Sicilian Vespers" overture, a forgotten work, followed. It showed the great Italian maestro while still remote from the influences that were to turn awry the currents of his later tonalities. The orchestra gave it a worthy rendition. Selections from Puccini's "Mme. Butterfly" were performed in concert style as distinguished from the operatic formalism heard when the story of Capt. Pinkerton and Cho-Cho-San is lyrically enacted.
    Two of Glazounoff's "Scenes de Ballet," Marionettes and Pas d'Action, brighten the program considerably. The last mentioned is easily the most attractive, with the limpid runs on the woodwinds and general airs of refined jollity. The Pas d'Action, like the War Dance of the Cheyennes, caught the fancy of the house and had to be repeated. Another always welcome encore selection was the Intermezzo from Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana." The violins were in good alignment during the larger part of the rendition and thus did full justice to a number from which the young Italian composer derived the principal portion of his evanescent fame.
St. Louis Globe-Democrat, St. Louis, Missouri, January 6, 1919, page 16


    Governor and Mrs. Olcott and I were guests a few days ago of Mr. and Mrs. Harwood Hall at Chemawa. Mr. Hall is superintendent of the Indian vocational school at that place. While we were at dinner the Chemawa band played selections on the lawn in front of Mr. Hall's house. The dinner was prepared and served by students of the course in domestic economy. I tried my best to have Superintendent Hall arrange a contest as to which group of girls could cook the best, arranging the students in groups of four, each group to serve one meal. I volunteered to act as one of the judges. This would mean that I would have the felicity of eating about 25 wonderful dinners.
    The decorations of the room as well as of the table were arranged by the Indian girls and exhibited harmony and restraint. A fruit punch was followed by clear soup of wonderful flavor. This was followed by ripe tomato stuffed with piccalilli. Fish with tartar sauce came next, followed with a sherbet with mayonnaise dressing. Then came fried spring chicken and green peas, then ice cream and strawberries, followed with after-dinner coffee. I don't know where the ripe olives and salted almonds came in, but I remember they formed a most enjoyable part of our dinner. The service was as perfect as the dinner, so is it any wonder that I would like to be officially designated judge of a dinner contest given by the girls of the domestic economy course of the Chemawa school? Julia Fratis, who presided in the dining room, is from St. Pauls Island, Alaska, one of the Pribilof group, where we maintain a breeding ground for the fur seal. She was awarded the gold medal for the past year for being the most efficient and dependable girl student of Chemawa. Wallace Beebe won the same honor among the boy students.
    It is a delight to inspect the work being done at Chemawa. We have so many state institutions at or in the vicinity of Salem that we take the government training school more or less as a matter of course. We do not stop to realize that students from all over the United States are in attendance and that this school is one of the "big six" Indian schools of the country and is said by inspectors and other employees of the Indian Bureau to be the best in the entire country. We have good cause to be proud of it. No one can examine the work of the more than 700 students without a thrill of pride.
    The moment you enter the home of Mr. and Mrs. Hall you begin to appreciate the infinite possibilities of the development of our original Americans. The floors are covered with the rarest and finest examples of the Navajo's art in rug weaving. Zuni pottery decorates the mantelpiece and plate rail. Indian baskets of wonderful workmanship are everywhere in evidence. Ollas from New Mexico and Arizona, skinning knives of flint and ivory from Alaska, parkas of reindeer skin and innumerable other examples of native art are artistically arranged in the reception room and living room.
    Mr. and Mrs. Hall gave a reception after the graduating exercises to the class of 1920. In addition to the 19 graduates there were a number of visitors from Salem and Portland. During the evening I circulated around and chatted with everyone there, and not only spent a delightful evening but ran across a score of good stories. For example, an old-time Salem girl, Josie Lunalilo Parrish, told me her father, the Rev. J. L. Parrish, had given the name "Chemawa" to the Indian school. Her father came to Oregon in 1840 aboard the Lausanne and was one of the "Great Reinforcement" to Jason Lee and the Methodist missionaries. She was born when her father was more than 70 years old, so if she lives to the age her father did their two lives will link the period when the airplane will be as common as the canoe and the ox team.
    I asked one of the Indian girls about her plans and received the surprise of my life. I said, "I suppose some white man will come along some of these days soon and adopt you into his tribe, and your descendants will be as proud of their Indian blood as President Wilson's wife is of hers." The Indian girl smiled and said, ''No, Mr. Lockley; no white man with my consent will marry me--not as long as there are any Indian boys left. We are proud of our Indian blood. Before a girl marries she should look forward. She should not be flattered by the attention of a white man. She should think, 'I am picking a father for my children as well as a man to live with as a husband.' We are far more proud of our Indian blood than of our white blood, because our people of red blood believe in the sacredness of a promise, in loyalty to their kinsmen, in paying their debts, in showing gratitude for favors, in being charitable and sharing with those in need, in never breaking a treaty, nor violating a promise. The white blood has a different standard. The type of white man that marries an Indian woman is rarely of as high a type as the woman he marries. She will go through fire and water, and cheerfully die for him. Will he do as much for her? How will his people treat his wife? Oh, yes; there are good white men who have married Indian women, but how many of the other kind do you find--white men who drink and beat their wives, who have no sense of honor, who take their property and gamble it away, who treat them and their relatives with contempt? It's a long story, but you can see why I am not eager to be 'adopted' by some white man. My chance of happiness will be much greater if I marry a man of my own people."
    This was but one of the several mental jolts I received during the evening. I had mentioned in my address to the students that I had met Chief Joseph while he was a prisoner of war in Indian Territory, and that to my mind he was an able statesman, a wise leader, a great warrior and an orator of ability. A bright lad said, "I was greatly touched and pleased by what you said about Chief Joseph, or Black Eagle, as our people called him. My Indian name is also Black Eagle, though my white name its Frank Corbett. My grandmother, who, by the way, is still living, is a sister of Chief Joseph. She is at Kamiah, Idaho, and could tell you many interesting things about Chief Joseph as well as about their father, Chief Joseph the elder. I am studying law in the legal department of Willamette University. No, I do not expect to practice, but I feel it my duty to protect my people from unscrupulous white men, who are ever seeking to take advantage of the trust and confidence of the Indians. They secure their land under misrepresentation and, lacking integrity, they defraud them in the competitive affairs of life."
    After that I decided not to go around feeling sorry for the Indian students because they had not absorbed all of the white man's civilization. I began wondering, after all, whose standards were higher, ours or theirs.
Oregon Journal, Portland, June 8, 1920, page 10










Medford Mail Tribune, January 24, 1927, page 1


    "I was the first white woman to make her home on Yaquina Bay," said Mrs. Royal A. Bensell when I visited her recently at her home in Newport. "My maiden name was Mary Elizabeth Hall. I was born in Pennsylvania, November 30, 1846. My father, Hiram H. Hall, died at the age of 90. I was married when I was 17 to Clark M. Sturtevant. We left Illinois in December, 1864, immediately after our marriage, to come to Oregon by way of Nicaragua. Our trip from New York to Victoria, B.C., took two months. From Victoria we came to Portland and thence to Corvallis. My husband worked for the oyster company at Oysterville. We came here in the spring of 1865 and for two years I was the only white woman living on Yaquina Bay. The Indians culled the oysters, throwing back the small ones. There was a store at Oysterville and a barracks where the 25 employees of the oyster company lived. It took three days to make the trip from Corvallis to Newport by the trail. I came here as a bride, and my trunk, with all my wedding finery, didn't arrive here till three months after I had come.
    "In 1868 I married Royal A. Bensell. My husband, Mr. Bensell, learned his trade as a printer on the Clayton County Herald, in Clayton County, Iowa. He came to California in 1854. When the Civil War broke out he enlisted in Company B, 4th California Infantry. The regiment to which he belonged was stationed in Oregon during the Civil War. He received his discharge in 1864 and immediately started in the milling business here on the bay. He and several others took up land and built a mill between Toledo and Siletz. They shipped their lumber to San Francisco.
    "Do I talk Chinook jargon? I certainly do. The first two years I was here the only women companions I had were two Indian girls, and it didn't take me long to pick up their jargon. In 1871 my husband was appointed inspector of customs for Yaquina Bay. He had served in the state legislature in 1868. He also served in 1876. Ben Simpson, Indian agent at Siletz, was a member of the company that built the Elnorah Simpson and also the Laura Simpson. One of these was built at Newport, the other in the schooner yard above Oysterville. Both these vessels were named for Ben Simpson's daughters. My husband was mayor of Newport for some time. He died in 1921."
    Captain William Tichenor, founder of Port Orford, brought the first boat into Yaquina Bay. This was the Calumet, and it came in over Yaquina Bar in 1856 with supplies for Lieutenant Philip H. Sheridan and for the troops at the Siletz blockhouse. Robert Metcalfe was the Indian agent at Siletz, and the Calumet made a subsequent voyage for Mr. Metcalfe. Dr. T. J. Right was appointed surgeon for the newly established Indian agency, and in 1856 he, with E. Hartless, M. Mosee and E. A. Abbey, came in overland from Corvallis to Yaquina Bay. They came in by the old Indian trail. Captain Spencer, who had come over from Shoalwater Bay, where he was engaged in the oyster business, found there were plenty of oysters in Yaquina Bay. In 1864 the schooner Cornelia Terry came into the bay to get a load of oysters to be shipped to Ludlow & Co. of San Francisco. Later Captain J. J. Winant came into the bay with the schooner Anna G. Doyle.
    Under the treaty made with the Indians when their land in Southern Oregon was taken and they were placed on the Siletz Reservation, they were to own the natural products within their reservation, which, of course, included the oysters. Ben Simpson was authorized by the government to lease the oyster beds for the benefit of the Indians. J. J. Winant leased the entire oyster beds and agreed to pay 15 cents a bushel for all oysters taken from the beds. Ludlow & Co. were advised by their lawyers that, as American citizens, they had the right to take fish in all American waters, so they began shipping oysters to San Francisco. General Alvord sent a detail of soldiers, who arrested the employees and forcibly removed them from the reservation. Soldiers were also stationed there to protect the interests of Winant & Co.
    In 1860 United States Senator J. W. Nesmith succeeded in having the Indian Department throw open to settlement all of the Indian reservation between Cape Foulweather on the north and Alsea River on the south. The first claim was located on the night of January 8, 1866, by Royal A. Bensell, J. S. Copeland and G. R. Megginson. On this claim they built a steam sawmill. The first schooner built on Yaquina Bay was the Flora Maybell. Kellogg Brothers built the first steamer, which was christened the Oneatta. Dr. George Kellogg, with the tiny steamer Pioneer, which had been a scow and was fitted up with a sidewheel, was the first to operate a steamer on the bay. Captain Spencer was the first actual settler in Yaquina Bay precinct, having come there in 1861. Captain Solomon Dodge located Oysterville in 1863. Shortly after R. A. Bensell had taken up his claim on Depot Slough, Rocky P. Earhart, who later became secretary of state, Samuel Case and Captain Hill took claims. Newport is located on the claims of Samuel Case and Captain Hill. Captain Kellogg located the claim on which the town of Pioneer is built. Peter Abbey, with his family, came to Newport in 1867. The Abbey hotel was long famous as one of the best hotels on the coast.
    On May 19, 1866, a stage line was started between Corvallis and Yaquina, E. A. Abbey being the driver. Ten cents additional to the regular government charge was paid for all letters taken in by stage, but in 1868 a mail route was established and the extra charge was removed. Post offices were established at that time at Philomath, Heptonstalls, now called Summit; the Tollgate, now known as Little Elk; Pioneer, now called Yaquina; Mackey's Point, now Toledo; Newton, now known as EIk City, and at Newport. In 1868 Hillyer & Monroe built the Louisa Simpson, launched on January 17, 1869. In 1870 Ben Simpson and his associates built a three-masted schooner named the Elnorah. He sold this schooner in San Francisco for $10,000. Captain Dodge, one of the best known and best liked oyster men of the early days on Yaquina Bay, was drowned in the spring of 1870 when the Champion was wrecked while entering Shoalwater Bay, Washington Territory. The first hotel in Newport was built by Dr. J. L. Bayley and Samuel Case. Newport was incorporated on October 23, 1882.
Oregon Journal, Portland, June 11, 1927, page 4


Medford Mail Tribune, October 6, 1927, page 3


Medford Mail Tribune, October 6, 1927, page 5


Medford Mail Tribune, October 10, 1927, page 1


    (Note--Since this article was written there have been before Congress several bills relating to Indian affairs in Oregon, which when passed and put into effect will change many of the conditions mentioned.)
    We have in Oregon three Indian reservations and what is listed as a subagency. There are the Klamath, Umatilla and Warm Springs reservations and the Siletz subagency.
    The Umatilla Reservation of 167,916 acres is located in Umatilla County, along the Umatilla River, in Eastern Oregon. There are 1101 Indians located there. They have no government schools. The children attend the public schools of the county and they have Catholic mission schools, while a few attend government boarding schools on other reservations. They have good market roads covering most of the reservation.
    Warm Springs Reservation lies on the east slope of the Cascade Mountains in Washington and Jefferson counties. It includes 500,000 acres valued at $10,000,000. One thousand Indians live there. The Warm Springs Agency has under its jurisdiction the public domain allotments along the Columbia River between Hood River and Arlington, the John Day River in Gilliam and Sherman counties and the allotments in Harney County near Burns. There are allotted on public domain, subject to this jurisdiction, approximately 190 Indians.
    The government maintains a boarding school at Warm Springs with a capacity of 125 pupils and a day school at Burns with a capacity of 25 pupils.
    Near Salem we find the Chemawa Indian school. There is a faculty of 90 teachers and a student body of 750. They have a four-year vocational course offered for 30 trades. Students are enrolled from Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon.
    The Siletz, Grand Ronde and fourth section allottees are under the jurisdiction of this office. Allotments of land were made to the individual Indians of the Siletz and Grand Ronde reservations, under the act of February 8, 1887, and amendments. Fee patents have been issued for most of these allotments, either to the Indians or to purchasers of the land, but there are still a few held in trust by the government.
    The fourth section allottees are scattered all through Southern Oregon.
    At the Siletz Reservation there are about 450 Indians while Grand Ronde has about 340.
    On the public domain west of the Cascades there are somewhere near 350 Indians, No government schools are conducted on these reservations, but the children attend public schools.
    Klamath Reservation lies about 33 miles north of Klamath Falls in Klamath and Lake counties. It contains 1,106,285 acres with a value of over $30,000,000. These Indians rank second in tribal wealth in the United States. There are 1280 Indians on the payroll. These are Klamath, Modoc, Piute, Pit River and Yahooskin band of Snake Indians.
    All together we have about 4723 Indians in Oregon and from reports from the Department of the Interior we find that the Indians are increasing and not decreasing as we have believed. The average Indian family consists of about five, father, mother and three children.
    The wealth of the tribal lands of the Klamaths consists chiefly of ponderosa pines and grazing lands. The valleys have good hay fields for winter feeding, making it an ideal stock country.
    The Indians live much as they did a hundred years ago in tents and tepees. Some have houses, but as a rule they prefer the open camping life they have always known.
    I find that most people regard the Indians as a dirty, shiftless group leading a miserable existence. No thought is given as [to] why he is as he is. Our pioneer mothers hated and feared the Indian. We neither hate nor fear him; we despise him because he seems so backward and slow and so willing to be imposed upon.
    When Columbus discovered America the Indian was living in the stone age. Science tells us that we emerged from the stone age some 150,000 years ago. Think of our progress in that 150,000 years. We crept slowly upward. People learned to read and write. Machinery was invented, gunpowder discovered; books were printed. How slowly we crept along, taking our own leisurely time to this development. Consider the Indian. It is some 300 years since he came in direct contact with the white man and his ways. We expect him to cover our period of development with a hop, skip and a jump of 300 years. Think of the difference between 150,000 years and a mere 300 years. Take a small child from kindergarten and place it in the senior class in the university and expect it to do the work and you have a situation that is about as fair as the progress we expect of the Indian.
    We say he is lazy. Haven't we white people that we can make the same charge against? Is he shiftless? Is he ignorant? Can't we make the same complaint of a large class of white people? The bright senior in the university will make the same complaint of the kindergarten child. The kindergartner needs training and teaching and time in which to make the grade. The Indian granted training and teaching and time makes a citizen comparable to any white. Neither the kindergarten child nor the Indian is lacking in mentality nor native ability but must have the right environment, the right encouragement and good teaching or they never arrive.
    Four years ago I was in the Emanuel Hospital in Portland. My nurse was a Klamath Indian girl who had graduated from Chemawa and was training to be a nurse. She told me she planned to specialize in the care of tuberculosis and go back to her people to help fight tuberculosis among them. She was neat, as alert and efficient as any American girl in training. There was a tenseness about her that told of the strain and intenseness of her life. She is not an exception among the Indians, but one of many who is fitting into our mode of life and becoming one of us.
    Judge A. L. Leavitt of Klamath Falls says that he regards the Klamath Indians as a competent race, that they have developed a good deal of business ability and are as well qualified to handle their property as the average white man.
    This being so, why does the Indian not do it? The answer is found in the way he has been managed by the Indian bureau and its agents. He has been lied to and cheated and exploited and is the excuse for huge appropriations from Congress which are used to maintain an expensive army of civil service men for which there is no excuse.
    In Klamath the per capita wealth of the Indians ranges around $500. This is paid in two installments of $250 each. In 1930 the expense of the entire supervision of Klamath Agency business was $213 for every man, woman and child in the tribe, and the per capita payments were paid from capital and not income. What would your reaction be toward a government that taxed you approximately 20 percent of your income to maintain itself and when that income is $500 or less what standard of living could you maintain?
    The Klamath's income has not been from the sale of ponderosa pine. Eighteen mills have been eating into the reservation forests. Col. Ahern in testifying before the Senate investigating committee stated: "In the face of the coming world's softwood shortage, you are getting rid of the Indians' timber as fast as possible. It is perfectly absurd to do anything of the kind.
    "The Indians object to selling their timber. If they are willing to starve or go hungry because they cannot get this money, it is their lookout. They are pretty wise. I will take their judgment every time. Ten or fifteen years from now their timber is going to be worth more and every year from that time on it is going to bring them a handsome profit if they have anything left. If you let these companies go in there now and destroy it they will have nothing left but a devastated country."
    Mr. Wade Crawford, a Klamath Indian, makes this statement concerning Klamath Reservation: "I want to make a brief statement to give a clear picture of our reservation. We have a reservation 60 miles long and 40 miles wide, consisting of 1,110,000 acres of land of which area 800,000 acres is timberland. There are approximately 7,000 white people on the reservation and 1,000 Indians. Therefore it is not more an Indian reservation; it is really a white man's reservation. There is valuable yellow pine timber there and we have 18 companies operating on the reservation."
    Here is the situation we are up against: We are up against the timberman's organization and the wool growers' association; the Indian is pitted against those two organizations; we take the matter up with the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and the Commissioner has always made a decision in favor of those two organizations. We don't any more have an Indian problem; it is an Indian bureau problem and if something is not done about it in the near future the lumbermen and the wool growers are going to ruin that reservation.
    The Indian's testimony also brought out the fact that enormous sums of tribal funds were used in building roads throughout the reservation for the direct benefit of these lumber companies. Roads that were not beneficial to the Indians and were not wanted, yet were paid for out of Indian funds.
    Another waste of tribal funds is shown in this paragraph written by John Collier, executive secretary of American Indian Defense Association. Mr. Collier writes: "Another of Mr. Scattergood's 'direct assistance to Indians' item is the whole cost of irrigation. Your committee knows what that irrigation is. It is the Modoc Point project, almost more notorious than any other in the Indian bureau system for its extravagance and unproductiveness. It represents a capital investment of nearly $1,000 on acre for land actually irrigated, not worth $80 an acre. It is partially waterlogged through the omission of drainage from the project. It has been utterly condemned by the irrigation advisors of the Secretary of the Interior. Its whole accumulated cost has been made a charge against the Klamath Indian tribal funds. Mr. Scattergood is indulging in humor when he lists the continued throwaway of money on this project as a "direct assistance to Indians."
    There are several other irrigation projects on the reservation, very expensive and of very little value to the Indians.
    On both the Warm Springs and Klamath reservations there is much discontent and dissatisfaction concerning the tribal range and the grazing leases. Under the permissions issued by the superintendent, the white sheep men have crowded the Indian cattleman out. Certain sections are leased to the sheepmen for summer range. These are all taken up, and the Indians have no feed for their cattle. They must sell or see their cattle starve. Once sold out they have no money to begin again and with no range to begin [omission] them a foothold.
    The act of 1891 gives to the tribal council authority to lease the lands. The Indian bureau defeats this by issuing grazing permits and lease the land without the consent of the tribal council. When complaints are made the superintendent is evasive and says there is no available range.
    Wade Crawford says: "In the past few years the Indians saw that it was quite profitable to raise sheep and some of them are going into the sheep industry." He told about a girl of the Klamath tribe who bought sheep to run there. The superintendent made her show a bill of sale and then refused to grant her a grazing permit. After much correspondence concerning this they decided to allow her to graze 500 head and granted her a strip of land along the highway--range that was absolutely useless.
    The white men are permitted to run from 2500 to 4500 sheep under their permits; 500 could only be run at a loss. The Indian is outwitted and ruled against at every turn. Through building up a successful cattle industry, we are building all the qualities in the Indian that will make him independent of the white man. His independence means his own salvation as well as a vast saving in our taxes. However, as soon as the Indian manages his own affairs a vast army of bureau employees are thrown out of a job. Are they helping the Indian stand on his feet? They kick the props out from under him at the first sign of awakening independence.
    In 1928 when a delegation of Klamath Indians went to Washington, D.C., to protest about the management of their affairs they hired a lawyer to obtain legal advice and to prosecute the Indian bureau. They were forced to sign a contract with their lawyer to the effect that the lawyer could not make a decision unless approved by the Secretary of the Interior. In other words, the Indian bureau insists on controlling the attorney the Indians want to prosecute the Indian bureau. The idea seems to  be that since the Indian is a ward of the government he has no legal rights. Yet he is a citizen with full voting power. His hands are tied. He is helpless.
    At Klamath there is a 24-bed hospital for the Indians and from money taken from the tribal funds. The Indians opposed the building of this building because they all had their own doctors and did not like the agency doctor, maintained by the government and paid for out of tribal funds. He did not seem to like them. He said "they were dirty, lazy, ignorant and liars, and were worse than negroes and Mexicans." It is not to be wondered at that they refuse to be treated by him and resent his being on their payroll. An average of two Indians a month are treated at this hospital and yet we find on government records that there were 3000 hospital days in 1930. This means that the hospital is used by whites--the regiment of whites maintained by the Klamath Indians as Indian bureau employees.
    One Klamath Indian testified that "the prohibition laws on our reservation are terrible; there is no law on the reservation. There every man is for himself. It seems as though they hire men who don't enforce the laws. We are in favor of law and order. They are taking about $4500 of our tribal funds for law enforcement and the fines of these men they catch handling liquor, or in any crime, go to the town of Chiloquin and to our county and state and the tribal fund is not reimbursed by any fines or does not get a proportion of the fines.
    "We find that the Klamath Indian goes to the public schools at the expense of the tribal fund."
    Joseph Bell, a member of the council of the Klamath Indians, stated that he favored public schools for Indian children, "because you get to mix with a better class of people; and the history of the Indian child which has been reared on the reservation is that he is timid, especially when you put him out in the public, and he is kind of bashful and does not pick up as he would and he has no accent to his voice. But if you put him out in white society--in my experience, you have to associate with somebody who knows more than you do or else you are not going to learn anything either, and the same thing applies to the child. It has been proven that given the same opportunities and advantages the Indian will compete with his white brother."
    The Indians have stressed the fact that where tribal funds are used to maintain a school they would like to have the education equal to the best institution of learning in existence.
    Employees are not allowed to become sympathetic or friendly with the Indians. Mr. Wade Crawford states that Mr. Simmons was transferred from Klamath because he was friendly with the Indians. "He was the best friend the Indians had there among the employees." Mr. Simmons was helping the Indians build houses.
    Henry D. Dillstrom, one-eighth Modoc, who was employed at the agency, said that machinery that the Indians could use and was a lot better than what they had, was condemned and destroyed rather than let the Indians have it. Dillstrom was discharged from the service because he thought that the Indian blacksmith at the agency should shoe a team of horses for $2 which was the regular wage rather than send them--an all-day trip at $4.50 a day--to Chiloquin where the blacksmith charged $14 for the horses from the agency, making the job cost $18.50. All this because the agency blacksmith was an Indian.
    A few years ago some Indian girls from Klamath were attending St. Mary's Academy. They had dental work done in an office here. A statement of the cost was sent to the agency and a check received. No voucher was signed. Some time after, the father of one of the girls visited the dental office and in talking about the work asked if it would be possible to find out the price of his girl's work. The price was given him. He shook his head and said, "They said it was about five times that amount. They cheat us all the time and we can't help ourselves."
    The Indians are discussing three plans whereby they can rid themselves of the Indian bureau. First is the Carter plan. Second the corporation plan. Third the plan whereby they sell out "lock, stock and barrel," put their money into government bonds and receive the interest. In that way the capital would not be dissipated."
    I quote this from a letter from Ida Crawford, a Klamath Indian who has taken an active part in the Klamaths' fight for property rights. She writes: "The political situation entirely responsible for the condition is exactly as it was 100 years ago. Persons of Indian descent, and the Indians themselves, now know that reservations are maintained for graft and exploitation, with terrible wrongs to the Indians.
    "If the people of the U.S. would only move against the huge appropriations made by Congress for the maintenance of the parasitic civil service employees of the Indian bureau a great saving would be made to the taxpayers of the nation and great and lasting good done to the American Indian."
    She has also sent me a copy of the letter written to the Senate committee. I quote from it: "We are in receipt of the information that the interior bill, for the fiscal year 1933, has been reported to the house with a reduction of $45,000 for Klamath. The Klamath Indians, according to the records, will have the sum of $398,967 in the Treasury of the United States for the fiscal year 1933. The bureau's request was for $212,000--the reduction of $45,000 reduces the appropriation to $167,000. There are 1230 enrolled Klamath Indians, which brings the per capita tax to $130, and a per capita credit in the Treasury of approximately $180. Thus it is readily ascertained that the statement of J. Henry Scattergood, Assistant Commissioner of Indian Affairs, to the subcommittee on appropriations, 1933 house hearings, that only eight percent of the revenue of the reservation is expended for administration is erroneous and entirely misleading."
    You will readily see from the above and from the evidence submitted by Wade Crawford, chairman of the Klamath business committee, to the subcommittee in the house hearings 1933--that it will be impossible for the Klamath Indians to retain upon their payrolls 22 forestry employees with a salary scale from $1560 to $3000--with no one single camp or mill operating upon the reservation at the present time. Many of the wives of the forestry employees are in the agency office on the regular payroll at a salary of no less than $1800.
    We have read with much disgust the justification in the house hearings, 1933, of Mr. J. P. Kinney, chief forester in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, for the retention of the forestry personnel at Klamath. Surely the Congress will never accept such a justification. There is not a corporation, bank or any industrial institution on the Pacific Coast--and we doubt any other place--that is retaining their former personnel, waiting for better times to happen; expending approximately 80 percent of the liquidated capital assets to do so; it is positively unheard of during the present crisis in the nation's affairs, and any other time, for that matter.
    We know for a positive fact that the twenty-two forestry employees on the payroll at Klamath are doing odd jobs, repairing bridges, signs, machinery, etc. That so unjust and extravagant a situation will be tolerated by the Congress is entirely inconceivable to us.
    The scaler and ranger positions should be abolished. The contention of Mr. J. P. Kinney that the men are retained to look after the obsolete right-of-ways on the reservation is a flimsy excuse to keep the civil service employees on the Klamath payroll.
    The per capita distribution to these Indians, numbering 1280, cannot possibly exceed $150 for the fiscal year 1933; and as stated above the Bureau is requesting a per capita tax of approximately $130. The majority of the people are children dependent upon the per capita payments for food, clothing and education--many are old, infirm people entirely dependent upon the per capita payments for the casual necessities of life. The industrial condition, for which the Bureau is largely responsible, has created this. situation. Surely the humane relation of the government of the United States to the Indians, together with the economic and industrial conditions obtaining, will be considered during these grave times.
    We respectfully request that the opinion of Mr. Levi Walker, purporting to be the opinion of the Klamath Indians, be not considered. Admittedly, in the House hearings, 1933, he is not familiar with the conditions on our reservation.
    We beg of you to give this matter your most earnest and careful consideration and to lend your support to a reduction in the appropriation for Klamath equal in amount to the grave situation there obtaining. The trust funds of the Klamath Indians in the Treasury of the United States are liquidated capital assets and not income; and an appropriation of $167,000 from a capital of $398,967--part of which is to be expended for salaries and wages of scalers and rangers in a forest where no lumber activities are being conducted--is the height of injustice and extravagance."
    When an appropriation is made by Congress for the Klamath Indians, that amount is taken from the tribal funds. Klamath pays for what she gets. The amount left is what they have to live upon. In 1933 that amount will be $50 apiece while the appropriation goes to maintain clerks, rangers, scalers, forestry employees in idleness on a salary that allows them to look down upon the Indian. The parasite despises its host.
    I have purposely dwelt on Klamath. Because the Klamath Indians have had a few dollars the graft has smelled to heaven and we have the hearings of the Senate subcommittee as a record of this graft. The same conditions exist at Warm Springs.
    Robert Smith, a Warm Springs Indian, told the Senate committee: "There were 52 Indians turned into citizenship as taxpayers. But I tell you gentlemen, these clothes you see are all that I have. I have no clothes and I am not fit for a citizen. On the other hand, I was reading in the papers at one time that the government said whenever any half-breed or Indian got turned into citizenship he got his full right to the reservation. Then I leave it to you. I thought I would tell you this so that you would have it on your hands. Our Indians at Warm Springs are good workers and are willing to work and help themselves.
    "Well, we asked Mr. Mortsolf to help us out with farm implements and harness and so on, so that the boys could go ahead and work. Now I thought I would leave this in your hands. We would like to have help in farm implements and things like that. That is all."
    The Indians at Warm Springs are struggling for existence. They want to do for themselves. They wish to raise cattle. An effort has been made to force them to raise sheep. They like cattle and succeed with them. They do not like sheep--are not sheep men--they fail and are an easy victim to cheat and prey upon.
     Klamath is asking for property rights, a voice in the government, legal standing. Can you women of the Daughters of the American Revolution turn an ear to the past and hear the same complaints and requests of your forefathers to Mother England that Klamath is demanding now of the U.S. Congress? We fought for our rights. The Oregon Indian is fighting to the best of his ability. He can do nothing until the people of Oregon--the people of the nation--demand a complete revolution in the management of Indian affairs. We have had hopes that the two Indian commissioners under the Secretary of the Interior would bring about a new order. Commissioner Scattergood's testimony before the Senate's subcommittee leads me to believe that no improvement for the better has been made. When superintendents and employees are found inefficient and incompetent on a reservation, are they dismissed? No. They are transferred to another reservation where the vicious circle goes on.
    What is to be done?
    Edward M. Stanton, President Lincoln's Secretary of War, in answer to a bishop and a band of Sioux who had come to ask a hearing, said:
    "If he has come here to tell us of the corruption of our Indian system, the dishonesty of Indian agents, tell him that we know it. But the government never reforms an evil until the people demand it. Tell him that when he reaches the heart of the American people, the Indian will be saved."
    There you have your answer. When you and I become enough concerned about the present day conditions of our Oregon Indians that we rise up in righteous indignation and demand of our congressmen that they wipe out this obsolete method of caring for our Indians, then our Indians will become citizens that we, as Daughters of the American Revolution may well be proud.
    Bibliography:
1--Hearings before the Committee on Indian Affairs, U.S. Senate, 71st Congress, 3rd session on H.R. 15498
2--Hearings before a subcommittee of the Committee on Indian Affairs, U.S. Senate, 70th Congress; 2nd session, S. Res. 79.
3--Hearings before a subcommittee on Indian affairs, U.S. Senate, 71st Congress, 3rd session, S. Res. 79; S. Res. 308; S. Res. 23.
4--Oregon Blue Book.
5--Hand Book on Chemawa.
Medford Mail Tribune, serialized June 13 through September 11, 1932


    ROSEBURG, Ore., June 20.--(AP)--Mish Tipton--Chief Mish--last of the once-famous Umpqua tribe of Indians, is dead, called to the happy hunting grounds by the Great Spirit.
    There will be no squaws to blacken their faces and wail away the long night hours; no braves to keep their tepees in dignified silence and no papooses huddled in darkest corners uncomprehending and mute, for all those of Mish's tribe have gone on before and only he was left to carry on the traditions of his once-mighty band of warriors. He was brought to Roseburg from his mountain home for hospital care a week ago and died today.
    Nobody knows Mish's age, but it is certain that the waters of the Umpqua have rolled on to the sea for nearly a century since he first saw them. Orphaned when his father failed to return from a hunting trip, and only a few moons later when his mother was killed by a falling snag while the Indians were burning timber, Mish was cared for by another squaw, who later sold him to Mishac Tipton, an early white settler on the East Umpqua River. From this settler Mish secured his name. His tribal name was Palouse.
    From Tipton the young buck secured his first pony and gun. As he grew older he married a comely young squaw. They lived with Tipton in winter and in the summer reverted to the mountains to dig camas root and kill and dry deer and salmon, living like free and untrammeled redskins.
    When in 1856 the Umpqua Indians were marched off to the reservation, Mish and his wife escaped from the soldiers with a small remnant of the tribe and remained in hiding for several years.
    In 1914 Mish's wife died and was buried in the Indian graveyard at Rock Creek, east of Roseburg. Mish adopted the white man's custom and erected a marble shaft above his squaw's grave, the only marker in this little-known home of the Indian dead.
    Mish was recognized by the federal government with an allotment of land near Mount Scott, and there until recent years he lived alone, with an occasional visit to neighbors or to Roseburg. During the last few years, however, failing eyesight, coupled with infirmities of old age, forced him to accept the care of neighbors.
Medford Mail Tribune, June 29, 1932, page 1


    PORTLAND, July 14.--(AP)--A special dispatch to the Journal today from Washington said objections during the calendar call in the House Wednesday prevented passage of Senator McNary's bill to provide final enrollment of Indians of the Klamath reservation.
    Similarly blocked was Senator Steiwer's bill to authorize purchase by the government of the old Kiser photographic studio in Crater Lake National Park.
Medford Mail Tribune, July 14, 1932, page 7


    Lieut. Phil Sheridan often stopped at our house, and many times spent the night with us on his trips from Grand Ronde to Fort Hoskins. It was a day's ride from Grand Ronde to our home, and seven miles farther on to Fort Hoskins.
    Later he was stationed at Fort Hoskins.…
    I knew Sheridan's squaw wife, who was the daughter of Chief Harney of the Rogue River tribe, and who has been at our home a number of times. She was a bright little woman, very good looking, and quite likable. Sheridan was always good and kind to her and taught her to read and do many things. They had no children. But when he went back to Washington and left her, it almost broke her heart.
    We all liked Phil Sheridan. One day she came to our home, pretending to be looking for a horse, but she really came to tell us that she was going on a trip to Washington, D.C.
    Her father had died and her brother was now Chief Harney, and he and she, along with several other Indians, influential among the tribes, had been invited to go to Washington, at the expense of the government.
    She was all fitted out in clothes and trunks and ready for the trip. I told her she would see many wonderful things and probably see Phil Sheridan, and asked her to come and tell me about her trip when she came back.
    It was wonderful, the things she told me afterwards about her trip and what she saw. And she did see Phil Sheridan. He came and shook hands with them all and took her hand and asked about her welfare and then took them all upon the rostrum and introduced them. After that she never saw him again.
Mrs. Elizabeth Collins, "Phil Sheridan's Rogue River Wife Never Forgot," in Alfred Powers, History of Oregon Literature, Portland 1935, pages 147-148


    KLAMATH FALLS, Dec. 3.--(AP)--Mary Lalakes, the last survivor of a prominent Klamath Indian family, was buried in the Wilson cemetery near Williamson River on the reservation Monday afternoon.
    She was 107 years old. Her entire life was spent on the reservation.
    Mrs. Lalakes was present when the treaty with the United States government was signed at old Fort Klamath in 1868. She and her husband, who died many years ago, were active in establishing the first Methodist missions in the Klamath territory.
    Indians from many tribes in Oregon attended her funeral.
Medford Mail Tribune, December 3, 1935, page 1


    WASHINGTON, Dec. 10.--(AP)--The Klamath and Modoc Indian tribes of Oregon lost their $2,800,000 claim against the federal government today.
    The reservation tribesmen argued that in 1908 the government took 87,000 acres of valuable timber land from them.
    The United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that in 1909 the Indians accepted $108,750 from Congress to settle the controversy. The opinion by Justice Butler upheld the decision of the United States court of claims last April 8.
Medford Mail Tribune, December 10, 1935, page 2


    Miss Ellen Chamberlin, whose home is at 2736 S.E. 62nd Avenue, became a student in Willamette University in 1864 and graduated in 1868. She was a member of the faculty of Willamette from 1869 to 1878, during most of that time being dean of women. In 1880 she came to Portland as a teacher in Central school, at the corner of what was then 7th Street (now Broadway) and Yamhill, where the Hotel Portland now stands. Still later she taught under Dr. T. M. Gatch in Wasco Academy, at The Dalles, and among her students in the early '80s were Judge Fred Wilson and Nick Sinnott, the former now a circuit judge and the latter having served in Congress. From The Dalles she went to Seattle and for 10 years taught in the University of Washington. Her next position was as member of the faculty of the state normal school at Monmouth. From there she went to Corvallis, where she was a member of the faculty of Oregon Agricultural College four years. Later she had charge of the four branch libraries at Spokane. When I interviewed her recently she said:
    "I was born at Romeo, Mich., on July 5, 1849. My father, Joseph C. Chamberlin, was born in New York in 1816. My mother, whose maiden name was Olive Warren, was a daughter of the Rev. Abel Warren, who moved to Michigan in 1824. Father and Mother taught school at Albion, Mich. Father graduated from the Dickinson School, at Romeo, Mich. He was not a teacher when he was a young man but was engaged in industrial work. For some years he operated a sawmill and a tannery at Almont, Mich. Later he operated a farm near Dryden, Mich.
    "Father crossed the plains to Oregon in 1855 with the intention of starting an industrial and mission school for Indians. He stopped at the site of the old Whitman mission to visit the graves of Dr. and Mrs. Whitman. General Joel Palmer employed Father to help bring the Indians from Southern Oregon to the Grand Ronde Reservation. This was at the close of the Rogue River Indian war of 1855-56. General Palmer told Father he would be much more effective as a teacher if he had his family here, so Father went back to our home, at Dryden, Mich., to get the family. He arrived in November, 1856. In February, 1857, we went to New York to take passage aboard the Golden Age. The weather was bad, and our train was delayed, so we missed the Golden Age and had to wait 15 days. It was fortunate, however, that we missed the boat, for we would probably have been lost, as were those who were passengers.
    "We caught the steamer Illinois, went to the Isthmus of Panama, which we crossed on the railroad, and embarked on the John L. Stephens for San Francisco. This vessel was a sidewheeler and had three decks. It was 275 feet long, which was considered at that time extremely large. At San Francisco they put on board two Indians who had been chiefs in the Rogue River war. These were Old Sam and his son, John. Father took me down in the hold to see them. They were put off at Port Orford.
    "We arrived in Portland on April 9, 1857. We took passage on a small boat that plied on the Yamhill River and went to Dayton, where we were entertained at the home of General Joel Palmer. From there we moved to the McClure house, near Sheridan, later moving to the Grand Ronde Reservation.
    "Captain Russell and Lieutenant Philip L. Sheridan were frequent visitors at our home. The Sunday before Sheridan left for the East to take part in the Civil War he ate dinner at our house. He said to my mother, "Mrs. Chamberlin, I don't know of anyone else who can cook as well as you do. I have never eaten better fried chicken.'
    "My brother, Martin L., was a great admirer of Sheridan. Sheridan was very friendly and kind to the boys at the agency. Sam L. Simpson, later known as the poet of Oregon, worked in his father's sutler store, and Sheridan was fond of Sam as well as of my brother Martin. When Sheridan left for the front at the outbreak of the Civil War he gave Martin a chest and an old-fashioned coverlet; and, by the way, we still have them. When Sheridan came to Salem, some years after the Civil War, a reception was held for him at the Chemeketa Hotel. He inquired for Martin and left his regards for him.
    "I think my father was the first teacher of the Indian school at the Grand Ronde Agency. The school was held in one of the large rooms in our house. We lived at the agency five years. Ben Simpson's house was near ours. My mother taught in Sunday school, and Sam Simpson and his sisters, Elnore, Isadora and Louise, attended Sunday school regularly. My mother had a fine voice, and Sam Simpson seemed to love music and loved to hear Mother sing. The children finally quit the Sunday school. Father and Mother couldn't understand why they didn't come, so Father said to Ben Simpson, 'Why have your children quit coming to Sunday school?' Mr. Simpson said, 'I am a Baptist, and my children are becoming altogether too fond of your Sunday school. I don't want them to go anymore, for fear they will become Methodists, like you folks.'"
Oregon Journal, Portland, December 19, 1935, page 14


    An Oregon legislature about which little is known is the Grand Ronde Indian Reservation legislature, organized in 1879. Colonel J. W. Nesmith, who was a United States Senator from March 4, 1861, to March 3, 1867, reported on Oregon Indians that there were on the Siletz Reservation 2000, at Grand Ronde
Agency 1064, at Warm Springs Agency 1070 and at Umatilla 759. Shortly after the Rogue River Indian war of 1855-56, 2600 Indians were brought from Southern Oregon to the Siletz Reservation. Later the Clackamas and Santiam Indians were removed to the Grand Ronde and the Yamhills to the Siletz Reservation. In April, 1857, Lieutenant Phil Sheridan was assigned to the Grand Ronde Reservation, with headquarters at Fort Hoskins. He was in charge from the spring of 1857 till the summer of 1861.
    General Joel Palmer was appointed Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Oregon in 1853, and was succeeded by Colonel Nesmith in 1857. E. R. Geary was appointed in 1860, W. H. Rector in 1861, J. W. P. Huntington in 1864, A. B. Meacham in 1870 and T. B. Odeneal in 1875. Among early Siletz agents were Metcalfe, Newsome, Biddle, Palmer, Fairchild, Bagley, Swain and Wadsworth.
    Present Grand Ronde-Siletz superintendent is Earl Wooldridge. In a recent report he tells of the Grand Ronde Indian legislature, of 12 members, and acting as a governing body and a court. It also passed laws. This legislature was organized in the '70s. Among its ordinances are these:
    "Nov, 12, 1877. If any man talk Saucey and abuse another person without cause and provoke him so that he whip him, the person that commenced the dispute or was the cause of the quarrel if convicted shall be fined from $2.50 to $5 and Cost of Court.
    "Any doctor who doctors any Person and think he cant cure the person he must tell the person he cant cure him so that he dont rob him of all his property, he is to receive $2.50 for his cervices, but if the Doctor keeps on doctoring him and dont cure after he is to be fined $10 and Cost of Court if proven.
    "November 4, 1879. If any woman promise to marry a man and he shall expend any money for preparing for marriage and the woman brake her promise and refuse to marry, the man shall recover from the woman the amount so expended, and cost court if he have to bring law suit.
    "If a man promise to marry a woman and afterwards refuse to marry her he shall pay all expenses fees and be fined $10 and Cost of Court.
    "February 28, 1881. Any Indian who own land and dont build on it and live on another mans land when he is notefied by the person who own land that he lives on, and dont leave, he is to be fined if found guilty in the sum of $10 and cost.
    "November 12, 1877. When the amount of money in the treasury exceeds $50 it shall be loaned at the rate of ten percent per annum to some good man who shall give security. If any wheat or oats is on hand it shall be loaned to some good man and for every ten bushel loaned he shall return 12 bushel after harvest."
Oregon Journal, Portland, January 26, 1939, page 10

    Fort Yamhill, most important of four posts established during the spring and summer of 1856 as military supports to the Oregon Coast Indian Reservation, has during the past century acquired a patina of historical legend.¹ So thickly have the fables obscured the facts that even the published location of the fort is consistently wrong. The origin of its one surviving structure, the identification of its garrison personnel, and the recital of its military annals are all encrusted by nostalgic recollections of pioneers, or the faulty enthusiasm of local historians.
    Established on March 25, 1856 by Second Lieutenant William B. Hazen, commanding a detachment of Co. B, 4th Infantry, and named in September by Captain Andrew Jackson Smith ("the post is on the south fork of Yamhill River"), Fort Yamhill was in Polk County. A plan of the fort transmitted to the Assistant Adjutant General in Benicia, California, December 5, 1856, and the only census which enumerated the garrison, 1860, support this view.
    A letter written by Captain Smith furnishes other evidence. "The Post is located," he explained in 1856, "just within the Ind. Reservation on the road from the settlements at the only point of ingress & egress on this portion of the reservation for teams & horsemen." The route of this road from the Grand Ronde Agency to Willamina has changed. It is now State Highway 22 through the gorge of Cosper Creek to the Yamhill River. When Fort Yamhill flourished, the road crossed the range of hills between the Grand Ronde and the Yamhill Valley one-half mile northeast of Valley Junction. General Oliver O. Howard traveled the road in 1876 from Willamina to the Agency. His "strong, high, two-seated wagon" reached the site of Fort Yamhill "by a mile of ascent at the close of a long and hard road," as he described his journey in the Chicago Advance. The map of the Grand Ronde Agency in the 1879 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs shows this old route. Remnants of it are preserved in the Spirit Mountain quadrangle map of 1941.
    The old route of the road logically establishes the site of Fort Yamhill. A place marker on Highway 22 was intended to achieve the same result for the benefit of modern traffic. Nothing is left of this effort by the Yamhill Chapter, D.A.R. except "Kissin' Rock," a local name attached to a seven-ton boulder half a mile north of Valley Junction. The monument once bore a bronze tablet with the inscription: "Fort Yamhill and the home of General Phil Sheridan from 1855 to 1861, 300 yards east. Erected by Yamhill Chapter, D.A.R., McMinnville, October 20, 1926." The disappearance of the tablet may be a blessing in disguise. Philip H. Sheridan did not arrive at Fort Yamhill before April 25, 1856.
    The old Fort Yamhill road enters Highway 22 twelve hundred yards north of Valley Junction. Two hundred yards east-southeast on this dry-weather road two houses and several farm buildings occupy the approximate area where the sutler's store stood. The "gentle western slope" which the fort commanded has not changed. The old road, roughly the northern boundary of the camp, is a cow path over the ridge of hills. The highest point offers a magnificent view into "a small, somewhat circular valley, called the Grand Ronde,"² and into the Yamhill Valley toward Willamina and Sheridan. Philip Sheridan might have stood here when he went "out early in the morning to a commanding point above the post," from which he "could see a long distance down the road as it ran through the valley of the Yamhill."³
    The plan of 1856 makes possible the present identification of the various building sites. Placed in a dominant position, the officers' quarters occupied the most desirable location, far from the noise of the blacksmith shop, the smell of the stables, or the annoyance of the barracks. Hospital, guardhouse, laundress' quarters, bakery, and granary were scattered over an area of about thirteen hundred feet square. Three hundred and fifty feet below the officers' quarters the barracks of the men stood appropriately on the edge of the parade ground. This area is now a grain field. The rim above the grain field is still "thickly timbered." Maple, wild cherry, alder and white oak are "to be found at a few points."⁴
    Eyewitness accounts of Fort Yamhill are inadequate. Perhaps the best description combines imagination with reality. It is part of a saccharine love tale of the 'nineties by Samuel L. Simpson, and testifies to the "antebellum gaiety and folly"⁵ that pervaded the fort. The son of sutler Benjamin Simpson, Sam clerked in his father's store at the post. "The fort," Sam recalled, "occupied the sloping top of a great hill which, standing at the gateway of the Grand Ronde Valley, was naturally adapted for military occupation. The crest of the hill made a semicircular sweep in the east and south, the ground falling away abruptly from its clearcut rim to the winding course of the Yamhill River, far below. On the east, too, a phalanx of firs, scaling the rugged heights, waved their green plumes over the row of neat white cottages occupied by the officers, and threw their morning shadows across the smooth plateau of the parade ground. The other buildings of the post, soldiers' quarters, mess room, hospital, commissary, guardroom, etc., occupied the remaining sides of the quadrangle, all marvelously white in their constantly refreshed coats of whitewash. On the western side of the quadrangle, with fine oaks flanking it on the north, stood the regulation blockhouse, strong, dark, menacing. A stately flagstaff, supported by two gleaming field pieces, stood in the center of the parade ground."
    Simpson's "regulation blockhouse," now an ornament in the Dayton city park, is the only survivor of the buildings that comprised Fort Yamhill. Barnacled with legend, it possesses all the requisites of a historic relic. Its structure is unusual among the blockhouses of the Pacific Coast. "The upper block is of the same size as the lower, but turned on a true diagonal," Jamieson Parker of the historic buildings survey explained, "with small hipped roofs on three corners of the lower part and the entrance platform ... on the fourth."⁶
    "Little Phil" Sheridan once received exclusive credit for construction of the blockhouse. He lost ground subsequently to pioneers and settlers who supposedly built "Fort Hill" as protection against the Tillamook Indians in the winter of 1855. Both versions of the story are suggestive, but not persuasive.
    There is no evidence to support the old view; Sheridan himself never claimed any credit for a blockhouse at Grand Ronde. There is no evidence to support the new view; settlers built blockhouses in 1855, but hardly at Grand Ronde. The Agency employees at Grand Ronde in 1855-56 do not refer to a blockhouse in their reports, and the settlers of Yamhill County mentioned no blockhouse when they protested against the location of Indians at Grand Ronde. When the government property at Fort Yamhill was auctioned, the blockhouse was sold with it. Thrifty settlers would have recalled that once it might have belonged to them.
    Lieutenant Hazen and his detachment probably erected the structure. "I shall proceed at once to built [sic] a blockhouse," he informed the Adjutant General in Washington on March 31, 1856, six days after establishing camp at Grand Ronde, "as cases are now of frequent occasion showing the treachery of the Indian character and the necessity of such works of defense." Hazen had observed the advantages of blockhouses at Star Gulch on Applegate Creek in Southern Oregon when a mountain howitzer failed to subdue "three heavy log houses" defended by Indians.
    The accounts of Fort Yamhill in the recollections of Sheridan and Rodney Glisan ignore the blockhouse. Had its origins been unusual the officers would have commented on the fact. Even Sam Simpson with his vested interest in the pioneer saw no historic relic in the blockhouse. A place name, Fort Hill Junction, remains on the map less than a mile east of Valley Junction, but it seems to direct the traveler to the hill leading to Fort Yamhill rather than to the site of a "Fort Hill" blockhouse.
    For ten years the dark, hand-hewn logs of the bulwark presented a striking contrast to the whitewashed cottages of the army post. At noon, August 20, 1866, seven weeks after the last man of Captain Charles LaFollett's company of First Oregon Infantry had left Fort Yamhill, Gilbert Litchfield, the last post sutler, auctioned the government property, netting $1,260 in greenbacks. He personally "bid in the old blockhouse, paying $2.50 for it."⁷ A few years later he "passed the
building on" to the Indian agency at Grand Ronde. The blockhouse was taken apart, transported in pieces to the Agency, and assembled there. It was first used as a jail for unruly Indians, and later as a storage house. It was occasionally mentioned in the reports of the agent. Carpenters replaced rotten logs, and over the years this propugnaculum acquired its patina.
    In December 1910 the Secretary of the Interior disposed of the property to the city of Dayton, whose nostalgic interest in it was supported by the influence of Senator George E. Chamberlain. Once the residual was awarded to Dayton, the townsfolk of Willamina and Sheridan and the Indians at Grand Ronde became concerned about the "treasure." They were too late. A procession of teamsters carried the dismantled relic into Dayton on June 9, 1911, unmolested even by that portion of Sheridan's citizens who a few weeks earlier was determined to prevent the disgrace.⁸
    The mythology of the Fort Yamhill garrison is dominated by Philip Sheridan. His brilliant military career serves as the impulse to connect the post almost exclusively with his name. Ellen J. Chamberlain, who as a young girl lived near the fort, had a "picture in her mind" fifty years later, a picture delineated for the McMinnville Telephone Register June 12, 1914. She remembered Sheridan riding from Yamhill to the Civil War at the head of a column of soldiers: "flags were flying, drums beating, bands playing." Sheridan's Memoirs (1888), hardly diffident, tell another story, though his Coast Range reminiscences sound modest when compared with Joseph Faulkner's Life of Philip Henry Sheridan (1888). This eulogy suggests that while in Oregon Sheridan fitted himself for later cavalry raids by "living on grasshoppers for days together," a species of training unique in military annals.
    Sheridan is the most illustrious of a group of "shavetails" who through their service at the Polk County post nurtured the gestation of the Yamhill County slogan, "Where all great men get their start." As Jacob Calvin Cooper in his Military History [of] Yamhill County (1899) boasted, "The saying that Yamhill County is the place 'where all great men get their start' is of more than ordinary significance. Gens. Phil H. Sheridan, David A. Russell, A. J. Smith, Fighting Joe Hooker, Wm. B. Hazen, Joe Wheeler ... make it very plain that the fighting fame of the heroes of the county also justifies the common saying, 'Yamhill against the world.'"
    Cooper's list of heroes includes a pair who never served at Fort Yamhill, the two "Fighting Joes," Hooker and Wheeler. Hooker resigned his commission on February 21, 1853, and did not return to the army until May 17, 1861. Joseph Hooker was superintendent of military roads in Oregon from 1858 to 1859, but Joseph Wheeler certainly never saw Fort Yamhill. He is evidently a replacement in the Yamhill pantheon for Lt. James Wheeler, Co. C, First Dragoons, who served from August 1856 to June 1857, the last three months as Yamhill post adjutant. He is not heroic material, having been cashiered May 20, 1862.
    The military annals of Fort Yamhill's heroes, based on official records, are largely a recital of familiar soldiers' gripes, drills, and an occasional chase after truant Indians. During the Civil War the post was garrisoned by California volunteers. Among them was Corporal Royal A. Bensell, whose diary, now in the University of Oregon library, provides a contemporary account unembellished by hindsight or nostalgia. Edited and annotated, the diary is to be published by the University of Oregon Press.
Gunter Barth, The Call Number, published by the Library of the University of Oregon, Spring 1958, pages 18-23



Last revised May 19, 2025