Roberta McKern
We are considering some of our earliest history in the East Linn Museum vicinity thanks in part to a 2021 edition of Oregon Archeology compiled by archeologists C. Melvin Aikins, Thomas Connolly and Dennis L. Jenkins published by the Oregon State University Press. The archeological information is literally rock solid, but we are liable to throw in remembered information, conjecture and even speculation.
We start by pondering what the Sweet Home valley was like when some of the first settlers arrived here the Ames, Pickens, Gilliland and Wiley families. The Ames, Gilliland, and Wiley families have given their names to Ames Creek, Wiley Creek and to three cemeteries, primarily the Gilliland at the east end of the valley and the smaller Ames Cemetery at the west end. The even smaller Wiley Cemetery is located up Wiley Creek further east of the valley.
At the beginning of the 1850s the four families journeyed up the Calapooia River valley and across the hills separating that valley from the Santiam River valley. Once they were over the watershed they came upon the Sweet Home meadow surrounded by the wooded foothills of the Cascades. The Santiam floodplains lay to the north but the meadow exerted its own charm.
Looking to settle according to the 1850 Homestead Act giving men over twenty-one 320 acres if single and 640 acres if married, the families went their separate ways. Of the Ames family, the father and several sons were eligible to file and the beauty of the west end of the meadow exerted its influence. The family called their first camp Paradise Camp.
Did they, we wonder, come upon swaths of blue flowered camas lilies or was the air scented with the sweet smell of ripening wild strawberries? Many early pioneers here commented on how profuse and big the wild berries were. Did the land seem vacant with no sign of earlier habitation?
Bands of Kalapuya speaking people known as “Santiam” supplied their name to the river just as other Kalapuyan bands had done to such Willamette tributaries like the Tualatin River to the north, the Luckiamute to the west and the Umpqua in the south. Contact with missionaries, trappers and traders coming from the north followed the course of the Willamette River, but when settlers came in the 1840s and 1850s, by way of the Oregon Trail, the native population had been disastrously reduced in number by as much as 95%, it has been concluded.
We know what catastrophes struck. Diseases, including malaria, smallpox, measles and dysentery flourished among a people who had never encountered them and had no reservoir of immunity. White traders on the Columbia likely introduced some of the diseases without traveling further than the mouth of that river. Infected natives spread them as bands of Kalapuya contacted those further south and a hopscotch of contagion ensued.
The Indians’ lifestyle of living near marshes and in communal winter lodges contributed to their vulnerability. In the 1830s malaria spread by the bite of a female mosquito proved to be a real killer and mosquitoes love marshlands. Smallpox and measles thrive when people lacking immunity provide a pool of handy victims.
Over thousands of years the Kalapuya bands had adapted well to their environment, taking advantage of what the animal and plant life had to offer. The women, for example, were prodigious weavers, making hats, mats and other types of basketry needed from grass, reeds and roots.
Thanks in a large part to the camas lily bulb they had become semi sedentary. Divided into bands, each band controlled a recognized area which included camas fields, berry patches and hunting grounds that stretched into the foothills. Some areas were guarded more zealously than others and a trespasser on hunting grounds could in turn be considered fair game, the death of an interloper acting as discouragement to other outsiders.
We don’t know how badly the Santiam people suffered from the illnesses introduced, but when they named their camp “Paradise,’’ the Ames family did not have in mind its former inhabitants. On the other hand, Andrew Wiley would take advantage of contact with the Santiam people. As a trapper he traded in his skins at the same small trading post near Waterloo. He had an interest in Indian trails, including those leading into the Cascade forests. The Indians may have been going to upland summer berry patches, but Wiley and a group of men went further and discovered the Santiam Pass. Wiley was the first to run cattle across the pass.
When we turn to the 1930s Works Project Association’s collection of pioneer reminiscences, not much is said about the Santiam and Calapooa tribes living here. A band with a pet rooster visits a homestead. A skinned ground squirrel is brought as a gift and graciously accepted by a homesteader’s wife and quietly disposed of. R.C. Finley, the miller on the Calapooia, whose grist mill was the first one built south of Oregon City, and a few other men followed the trail of a stolen fat ox, found a couple of Indian men processing it and beat them.
In general, the Indians are viewed as bedraggled and weak in number. We can wonder how much the settlers understood about the tragic eclipse the native population had undergone even though many of the settlers came from southern and midwestern areas where malaria and smallpox had a long history. Smallpox vaccinations were available but how many settlers had gotten them is debatable.
At any rate, by the mid 1850s the remnants of native American bands were faced with yet another tragedy. Gathered up, they were placed on reservations at Siletz and Grande Ronde. Not only did the people lose their familiar lands, but they were moved among other bands of people they did not know, some of whom they had called enemies. Communication would be difficult. Among the Kalapuyan, three languages and 13 dialects have been recognized.
After their periods of great mortality, those relocated to the reservation had to rebuild their culture, traditions and skills that were lost with the death of so many who had kept the memories.
Not all the native people went to the reservations however. Eliza Young, generally referred to as Indian Lize, remained at Brownsville, and Black Hawk, who kept leaving the reservation, was allowed to remain in the Fern Ridge vicinity. Eliza Young lies in the Brownsville Pioneer Cemetery along with her son and daughter, both of whom died of tuberculosis in adolescence. Sy Barr, who once lived on Fern Ridge, remembered that Black Hawk was put to rest in an Indian burial ground near the Liberty Cemetery.
Yet the marks of the Calapooia and Santiam bands live on in the form of oak groves and stone artifacts. The study of archeology attempts to rediscover the past according to physical evidence. The East Linn Museum does have some of this evidence on display in the form of mortars and pestles, point and other assorted objects. There are some baskets, and although they aren’t local, they do show how adept the native women were at weaving.
We’re not certain as to the sources of some artifacts. We know the ones found upstream on the Calapooia River came from the old Philpot place because Justin Philpot collected them. A nice set of mortars and pestles are claimed to be from the area near Foster.
As we turn to Oregon Archeology, we must admit the archeological record can tell us much more than randomly collected artifacts. For one thing, with a controlled archeological dig what came at the top of the dig is more recent than what lies underneath: last before first. Better yet, there are carbon fourteen dating and other dating methods which give closely approximate dates on organic materials such as charred wood or burnt camas bulbs. Also, it is a matter of checking every piece screened out of scrapings carefully made layer by layer from a site area so even little flakes of stone or the remainder of seeds or a scrap of bone can be saved for identification. Archeology has gotten a lot more complicated than most of us are aware of but we are looking for simplicity.
We are not through with the East Linn archeology….and part 2 will be coming up!