Illumination: Part I - Early History to Removal (Pre-Contact to1850s)
Indigenous History of Springfield and rural east Lane County
Part I - Early History to Removal (Pre-Contact to1850s)
“We Are Still Here”
This presentation provides an overview of the Indigenous history of Springfield and rural east Lane County.
The slides are divided into three sections:
- Early History to Removal (Pre-Contact to 1850s)
- Assimilation Era to Termination (1860s-1950s)
- Contemporary History (1960s-2020s)
Although this first presentation begins thousands of years in the past, it opens with this 2023 photograph of the Painted Sky Northstar dance troupe to remind viewers that Native people are still a part of the present-day community.
Painted Sky Northstar dance troupe
Image Credit: Springfield Public Library
The above photograph shows members of the Painted Sky Northstar dance troupe at a 2023 performance in Day Island Park in Springfield. This collective of Native performers blends traditional music and dance with contemporary influences.
When early white settlers arrived in this area, they encountered a rich landscape that Native communities had cultivated over thousands of years.
The portion of the 1851 Gibbs-Starling map to the right shows open prairies in the places where the towns of Springfield and Eugene now stand.
Native people lived in the areas on this map long before the establishment of towns like Springfield, and they also traveled far beyond the city’s present-day bounds to hunt, trade, and gather seasonal foods
1851 Gibbs-Starling map
Image Credit: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Archives Catalog
Indigenous people have lived in the Willamette Valley since time immemorial, or for at least 18,000 years according to recent archaeological findings. The earliest known inhabitants of this area are the Kalapuya peoples, but many other groups visited regularly to trade, hunt, and gather seasonal foods.
Kalapuya people shaped the local landscapes for thousands of years, creating the fertile farmland that characterises the Willamette Valley today.
Euroamerican disease epidemics swept through the Willamette Valley in the 1800s, killing up to 95% of the Indigenous populations.
Beginning in the 1840s, Oregon became the destination of choice for thousands of American settlers moving west. Conflict over access to land and resources led to a series of Indian treaties and the forced removal of Native people to reservations beginning in the 1850s.
The Kalapuya people were sent primarily to the Grand Ronde Reservation, but Native people in western Oregon were also sent to the Coast (Siletz) Reservation and some even ended up on the Warm Springs Reservation.
Even after the removal period, Native people continued to influence the development of Springfield and neighboring towns in the region. Parts 2 and 3 of this series explore the years following removal, discussing the role of Native people in fields like agriculture, forestry, and education up through the present-day.
Kalapuya People: The Earliest Known Inhabitants
The Kalapuya people are the earliest known inhabitants of the Willamette Valley. At least nineteen culturally and linguistically-related Kalapuya tribes or bands lived in networks of villages along the major rivers and streams throughout the valley. They once occupied close to four million acres spanning from Willamette Falls near present-day Oregon City down to the northern tributaries of the Umpqua River.
The Kalapuya people maintained permanent winter village sites, typically on ground above the floodplain. They also traveled at key seasons of the year, staying at temporary camps along rivers and in nearby foothills and mountains to harvest seasonal foods and to hunt.
Image Credit: Treaty Map, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde (tribal-treaty-pamphlet_c2020_1203.png (2700×5400) (grandronde.org)
Local Bands of Kalapuya
At least three bands had permanent village sites near what is now Springfield.
- The Chafan or Chifin Kalapuya near the confluence of McKenzie and Willamette Rivers.
- The Winefully Kalapuya along the Middle Fork Willamette.
- The Mohawk or Pe-u Kalapuya along the Mohawk and McKenzie Rivers.
Other Kalapuya groups from the surrounding region, as well as several tribes not listed on this map, also visited this area seasonally.
Many Kalapuyan-speaking groups are visible on the map to the right, which shows Willamette Valley tribes who signed treaties with the U.S. government in the 1850s (map cropped to focus on the southern portion of the valley).
Image Credit: Treaty Map, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde (tribal-treaty-pamphlet_c2020_1203.png (2700×5400) (grandronde.org)
Far-Reaching Networks
Many people from Molallan, Klamath, Chinookan, Klikitat, and other nearby communities would travel through the Willamette Valley to trade, fish, and hunt throughout the year.
The Mountain Molalla, who lived in Lost Valley (near Pleasant Hill and up into Oakridge) interacted extensively with the Kalapuya people and other tribes when they traveled mountain trails, hunted, and gathered berries.
Klamath people would enter the valley on the Klamath Trail, which ran along the Cascade Mountains. They hunted elk in the valley and fished on the Row River.
Coastal groups such as the Siuslaw and Alsea people entered the valley from the west.
Examining Local Landscapes
Until the 1850s, a permanent village site of Chafan or Chifin Kalapuya people was located near the base of the Coburg Hills and the McKenzie River. The 1906 photograph above shows the growing city of Springfield from the top of Willamette Heights, with a view of the flat prairie and Coburg Hills in the distance.
Image Credit: Springfield History Museum, 1989.001.203F
Local landscape features can provide insight into how the Kalapuya people and neighboring groups used these areas before white settlement
The area now called Springfield stands on a flat prairie located between the McKenzie and Middle Fork of the Willamette Rivers. The Coast Fork of the Willamette joins the Middle Fork just south of present-day Glenwood, and several other tributaries flow into the Willamette throughout the valley. In the past, many rivers flooded seasonally, creating wetland and marsh habitats.
Buttes and foothills surround the prairies, including the Coburg Hills which are visible in the photograph to the right.
For thousands of years, the Willamette Valley’s prairies, foothills, wetlands, and rivers played a significant role in the lifeways of Native people.
Above the Floodplain
Willamette Heights during flooding from the Willamette River
Image Credit: Springfield History Museum, 2021.007.104
The 1927 photograph above shows Willamette Heights during flooding from the Willamette River. The butte remains above the floodwaters although the Springfield bridge, surrounding areas of Glenwood, and sections of downtown Springfield are under water.
Before the construction of dams, many areas around Springfield flooded annually, creating abundant wetland habitats for plants such as camas, cattail, and wapato.
Elevated areas such as Willamette Heights, Kelly Butte, the Thurston Hills, Camp Creek Hills, and Coburg Hills were extremely valuable to Native people for permanent village sites and temporary encampments. These sites were above the floodplain, but still near enough to visit wetland areas for seasonal gathering. The hills could also be used for summer gathering and hunting.
In the past, regular Indigenous burns would have kept buttes like Willamette Heights open grassland except for small groves of trees, similar to what is pictured in the photograph to the right. Today, this butte is in-filled with Douglas Fir forest and residential housing.
Trails and Roads
Local tribes used well-developed trail systems for travel and trade. Many early pioneer roads followed these same routes to navigate unknown or difficult terrain.
The 1853 map to the right shows the East Side Territorial Road, described on the map as “Road from Oregon City.” The road followed historic trails through the Cascade foothills that had been used by Native people in the region for thousands of years.
In 1851, the East Side Territorial Road was extended south to Pleasant Hill, crossing the Willamette River at the Briggs Ferry. Elias Briggs established the ferry and a 640-acre homestead (visible at the very bottom of this map) along this route. The city of Springfield was platted at this site in 1856. Map Credit: Springfield History Museum
Some present-day road systems, including portions of Highways 99E and 99W (the old Territorial Highway), McKenzie Highway, Game Farm Road, Thurston Road, and Jasper-Lowell Road still loosely follow the routes that Native people first established.
1853 map of the East Side Territorial Road
Image Credit: Springfield History Museum
The Seasonal Round
Winter and Spring
Although the Kalapuya people maintained permanent village sites, they also traveled throughout the year for seasonal gathering, hunting, and fishing. These annual patterns can be described as a “seasonal round,” illustrated in the image to the right.
When the weather grew colder, the people spent more time near their permanent settlements. Winter was a time for storytelling, playing games, weaving, and repairing tools and gear.
As the winter transitioned to spring, the communities would begin seasonal harvesting that followed the life cycles of local plants and animals. These seasonal round practices had formed over countless generations.
Summer and Fall
Much of the warmer seasons were spent outdoors, gathering berries, bulbs and tubers, seeds, and weaving materials. The people would travel to the mountains to gather berries and hunt for game, often camping along the rivers where they could easily pull their canoes into the water for transportation.
People fished for trout in the rivers, and they built weirs and fish traps to catch salmon in the upper reaches of tributaries.
The autumn was an important time to collect seeds, acorns and hazelnuts, tarweed, and wapato, as well as to hold prescribed burns to prepare the grounds for the next year’s harvests.
Tending the Landscape: Prescribed Burns
Image Credit: Megan England
This photograph shows a controlled burn near the Camp Creek foothills in October 2024. The Siletz Tribe and other local partners reintroduced burns to this section of prairie to encourage camas production.
The Kalapuya people managed local prairies using controlled burning. These annual burns would clear the underbrush around hazelnut and oak trees to promote nut production, encourage the growth of new plants, and return nutrients to the soil. It prevented the prairies from growing in with forest, creating habitats for the many first foods that favor open country.
Prescribed burning shaped the Willamette Valley’s ecosystems for thousands of years into a healthy and resilient ecosystem. Today, there is growing recognition that the Kalapuya people and other tribes were not simple hunter-gatherers living off the land, but that they actively managed the landscapes around them.
Camas Cultivation
The June 2024 photograph to the right shows Oregon prairie habitat with camas, located between the Camp Creek Hills and the McKenzie River. The Siletz Tribe and other local partners burned this section of prairie in October 2023 and again in October 2024 to encourage camas production.
Camas production was a key reason that Kalapuya communities practiced controlled burning. The burns created open prairies where the camas plant would flourish. Into the mid-nineteenth century, camas was a dietary staple, and it was also an important trade item.
The harvest of camas in the late spring and early summer has been an important seasonal practice for the Kalapuya and Chinook people of western Oregon, Columbia River Sahaptins, Oregon coastal and southwestern tribes, Plateau peoples, and Northern Paiute.
Image Credit: Megan England
Early White Settlement of Lane County
Site of Peacehealth Riverbend Hospital and Game Farm Road.circa 1975
Image Credit: Springfield History Museum, 2003.043.006
The Stevens family filed a 640-acre land claim along the McKenzie River. Just to the west, a settlement of Chifin or Chafan Kalapuya lived near the confluence of the McKenzie and Willamette Rivers and near the Coburg Hills. To the east, the Pe-u (or Mohawk) Kalapuya had villages and fishing camps along the Mohawk and McKenzie Rivers.
By the 1840s, the Willamette Valley had become the destination of choice for thousands of Americans migrating west.
The circa 1975 aerial photograph on this slide shows farmland bordering the McKenzie River in north Springfield (today the site of Peacehealth Riverbend Hospital and Game Farm Road.) Early white settler William Stevens established a homestead here in 1847.
Although William Stevens is often named as Springfield’s “first resident” and “first ferry operator,” his arrival in what is now Springfield began in 1847 with Native people from the area ferrying him across the McKenzie River.
The Donation Land Claim Act
This 1860 survey map shows Donation Land Claims in the Eugene-Springfield area. The land claims of Eugene Skinner to the bottom left and Elias M. Briggs to the lower right became the townsites of Eugene and Springfield. Image Credit: Springfield History Museum
In 1850, Congress passed the Donation Land Claim Act, granting white men between 160 and 320 acres of free land (up to 640 acres for married couples) to promote settlement in Oregon and to strengthen the U.S. claim to the Pacific Northwest.
The law also retroactively legalized any land claims made before 1850. However, it did not address the existing Indian land rights.
The sponsors of the Donation Land Claim Act included wording in the act to prevent Native people, Blacks, Chinese, and Pacific Islanders from claiming land in Oregon.
1860 survey map of Donation Land Claims in the Eugene-Springfield area
Image Credit: Records of the Burean of Indian Affairs, National Archives Catalog, Springfield History Museum
By 1852, most land in the Willamette Valley had been claimed by settlers, creating tensions with the Indigenous populations who relied on these same areas for agriculture, hunting, and fishing. Settlers plowed camas prairies into farmland, destroying Native food sources. They also fenced in land for livestock grazing, which eliminated acreage for gathering and hunting. The 1851 survey map to the above left shows the land between the Willamette and McKenzie Rivers. The zoomed in 1860 Donation Land Claim map shows how this land was divided into individual sections and fenced off, helping explain why conflict developed between Native people and settlers beginning in the 1840s.
Kalapuya people, ineligible for Donation Land Claims and greatly outnumbered by the new settlers, were forced to live at the margins of the new homesteads. With their traditional lifeways interrupted, many became laborers on local farms. They helped white farmers get established by building fences, barns, and houses; they also planted and plowed fields.
Conflict with Settlers
Springfield 1890
Image Credit: Springfield History Museum, 1984.027.002
The photograph above shows the town of Springfield by 1890, taken from the Kelly farm at the top of Kelly Butte (notice that the butte is clear of trees). The establishment of homesteads and fencing off land for farming and grazing was one source of conflict between white settlers and Indigenous people.
Settler-Indian relations in the Eugene-Springfield area were relatively peaceful, in part because the Kalapuya populations had been severely reduced by disease epidemics. However, there had been a few nearby conflicts such as Elijah Bristow’s interactions with Klamath and Klickitat Indians in Pleasant Hill, Battle Creek near Salem, and the Battle of Abiqua near Silverton. Many white settlers in Lane County volunteered to fight in militia groups against southern Oregon tribes in 1855-1856.
None of these conflicts directly involved Kalapuya people, but these regional events caused settlers to increasingly treat all Native people as troublemakers and potential threats.
The City of Springfield was platted in 1856, the same year that the Kalapuya people and other western Oregon tribes were forcibly removed to reservations to clear the land for further settlement and to stop the wars and conflicts that were occuring in the region.
Indian Treaties
Image Credit: Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution. Bureau of American Ethnology. Eighteenth annual report ... 1896-'97. pt. 2, p. 521-997, 67 maps (part double)
In 1850, Congress passed the Oregon Indian Treaty Act. This authorized commissioners to negotiate treaties with local tribes, end their land claims to the area, and remove them to reservations.
The 1899 map to the right shows Indian land cessions across the state of Oregon between 1853 and 1865.
On January 22, 1855, the Kalapuya peoples ceded their ancestral claims over most of the Willamette Valley (section #352) to the U.S. government with the Willamette Valley Treaty at Dayton, Oregon.
Establishment of Reservations
The tribal leaders who signed the 1855 Willamette Treaty agreed to cede their claims to the Willamette Valley in exchange for a permanent reservation, supplies and services, and protection from violence at the hands of American settlers.
Because land claiming had begun in Oregon before treaties with tribes were negotiated or finalized, Kalapuya people had already become displaced from their lands by this time. Their choice was to accept the treaty terms, or lose everything without getting any payment.
Beginning in March of 1855, the Kalapuya people were forcibly moved onto temporary reservations throughout the Willamette Valley until they could be sent to a permanent reservation.
Image Credit: Oregon History Project, Oregon Historical Society
The map above shows Indian reservations in Oregon by 1864. Kalapuya people were sent primarily to the Grand Ronde Reservation, but Native people in western Oregon were also removed to the Coast (Siletz) Reservation, and some even ended up on the Warm Springs Reservation.
Temporary Reservations
Image Credit: Springfield History Museum
Kalapuya people from the Eugene-Springfield area were held locally in temporary reservations from 1855 until the Grand Ronde Reservation was established in 1856 (it was made permanent in 1857). Local farmers were recruited in the interim period to act as Indian agents and oversee the temporary reservations.
Jacob Spores managed a temporary encampment on his Donation Land Claim across the McKenzie River from present-day Armitage Park by Interstate-5 (his farm is highlighted on the 1860 map to the right).
Another temporary reservation was located in the Mohawk Valley, on the Donation Land Claims of William Simmons and James A. Scott. It stood near the present-day intersection of McKenzie View Drive and Hill Road.
Aftermath
The above photograph shows Indigenous workers at the Seavey hopyard in 1914. Between the 1860s and 1930s, people from all the nearby reservations traveled to Springfield annually for seasonal farm work. Image Credit: Springfield History Museum, 1979.006.056
The removal of Native people from their homelands to reservations was a major turning point in the history of Oregon tribes. It also played a key role in establishing towns like Springfield as successful agricultural districts.
However, Native people continued to influence Springfield’s history after their removal to reservations.
The next presentation will explore the role of Indigenous people in Oregon industries like agriculture and forestry, as well as how people tried to maintain ties with their homelands and traditions while navigating a changing world.
Image Credit: Jennifer Eisele.
The above mural is one contemporary example of how people in the Eugene-Springfield area are trying to honor the legacy of the Kalapuya people. “Willamette Wetlands of the Kalapuya” highlights Kalapuya seasonal round practices, traditional foods, language, and the cultural importance of local plants and habitats. Today, many Native people are trying to study and remember their families’ traditions so they can carry them forward.
Local artist Susan Applegate painted this 2022 mural on the Coleman Community Center in Eugene in partnership with Beyond Toxics, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, the Stutzman family (Yoncalla Kalapuya descendants), and other community partners.
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Dr. David G. Lewis for his extensive work documenting the history of the Willamette Valley tribes and for serving as an advisor for this presentation.
His book, Tribal Histories of the Willamette Valley, goes into greater detail about the history of Oregon through the eyes of Indigenous people. It is available to purchase at most large and independent book retailers.
It is also available to check out at the Springfield Public Library and can be viewed in the reading corner of the Springfield History Museum.
Dr. Lewis also writes about Oregon Indigenous history in the Quartux Journal of Critical Indigenous Perspectives.
Contemporary Tribes in Oregon
Today, there are nine federally recognized tribes in Oregon.
People from all of these tribes live, work, and attend school in Springfield today. People with ancestry from many other tribes across the Pacific Northwest and nation also call Springfield home.
Springfield Public Library | 225 5th Street [Inside City Hall] | Springfield, OR 97477-4636 | (541) 726-3766
