Oregon Before Fire Suppression
the third part in a ten-part series
Hello! Thank you so much for hanging in here with me. I’m sorry this took longer than predicted to come out, but I’ll be real: I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis a couple months ago and, well, it’s been a wild ride. I started my medication. It’s okay. But things have been taking longer than usual. I am so, so glad to have this here for you! A note: the more paying subscribers I have, the more I am able to prioritize writing and researching this newsletter. Each of these parts requires lots of research and work. So, if you can, please do. If you can’t, share. And if you really want a paid subscription but can’t afford it, please respond to this email and I’ll comp you one!
This “part” is broken into two parts, so it’s easier for you to read and gives me more time to write. The next part will come out on Thursday November 5th. Next week I’ll be sending out a full publication schedule so you know what to expect. Thanks so much for hanging in with me as I figure out the best way to make this newsletter sustainable for me and informative for you!
Oregon Before Fire Suppression (pt. 1)
My first fire in Oregon was the Quartz Fire (2001), which burned above the Rogue River Valley, outside of Ashland, Oregon. I drove a crummy down from Eugene—this was before I worked on the hotshot crew, when I worked for a contract crew. I’d grown up in Washington State and was still new to Oregon and its landscape, which was a little drier, a little less verdant green.
Ashland is located near the Oregon/California border, in the Rogue River Valley. I always forget how quickly California comes once I’m through Ashland; the white peak of Shasta appears less than an hour after leaving town. The landscape burns often— residents of Ashland have long been accustomed the smoke settling into the bowl of their valley, although in more recent years it’s gotten worse.
For thousands of years the Rogue River Valley was occupied by several indigenous tribes (Upper Coquille, Shasta Costa, Tututni, Taltushtuntede, Dakubetede, and Shasta). When trappers arrived in the area they simply called them the “Rogue River Indians.” They were referred to as Rogues, and in the mid to late 19th century, as the gold rush extended up from California into the Rogue and Klamath rivers, panhandlers and settlers violently accosted them in order to gain more access to their land, as they’d already been doing along the Oregon Trail, farther north. These settlers also failed to pay attention, as John Muir and other naturalists had, to the complex and intricate ways the tribal people related to that land, and how fire was integral to the growth of their tubers, basketry materials, herbs and roots, and materials for clothing and cooking. Indigenous tribes here used fire on a loose schedule depending on ecosystem type and elevation, with more frequent burning in grasses and shrubs and less frequent burning in the forest, where the Quartz fire was established.
Interstate 5 goes right through the valley and over the mountains, running north, from Washington State, and South, all the way through California. The freeway is aligned with the Siskiyou Trail, an indigenous trading route that had snaked from Northern California all the way up to Portland.
The Rogue River Valley is one of many landscapes in Oregon. Though folks often wax poetic about the diverse landscapes of California, Oregon is, in my mind, equally diverse for its size, containing several different types of temperate evergreen needle-leaf forest (temperate, warm, maritime, and temperate evergreen woodland) which line its coast, the subalpine forest of central and northeast Oregon, and temperate higher-elevation shrubland and grasslands of Eastern Oregon, just to name a few. According to burn scars and soil data, fires existed in Oregon long before white settlement, though their frequency and size increased with the appearance of settlers.
“David Douglas…observed extensive burned-over lands on the west side of the Willamette valley, from Fort Vancouver to the Umpqua River, in the autumn of 1826…elsewhere Douglas described open savannahs of pine and oak not unlike those in the south and Ohio Valley. After more then a week of steady travel he wrote: ‘camped on the side of a low woody stream in the center of a small plain— which, like the whole of the country I’ve passed through is burned.’” -From Stephen Pyne’s “Fire in America”.
The accounts of early explorers in the Rogue Valley describe a prairie ecosystem and “scattered black pine and stunted black and white oak” with dense brush in the foothills and even more dense brush and timber in the mountains. Observers in the early 1920’s had already noted that the presence of new woody brush and disappearance of native bunchgrass indicated decades of grazing, which has been known to transform healthy prairie into choked, almost impassible brush and woodland. As early as 1871, the GLO (General Land Office) described the land as having “been extensively used for grazing for many years.” Multiple explorers and settlers said it was adapted to indigenous fires, although some noted that, due to the immense variety and ages of trees, indigenous people burned less frequently than the settlers. This is likely because indigenous tribes allowed the forest time to regenerate and develop new stands of trees before burning the undergrowth, while settlers were more interested in range burning in order to create new growth for their livestock. It should also be noted that Indigenous Oregonians lived more frequently in the valleys and foothills and tended not to take up residence high in the mountains year-round.
“How many times has the eye not been saddened…by the traces of immense forest fires stretching for several miles; he (the savage) has destroyed them (the forests) exclusively to drive out game or his horses that he believed took refuge there, or in order to open up access for himself, when he will go there and harvest his grain (seeds). At summer’s end, he sets fire with even greater ease to the entire prairies…several weeks afterward a new, green, tasty grass has regrown, richer in nutritional value and preferred by livestock.” -Saint-Amant, 1854 (referring to the Umatilla River region in northeastern Oregon)
Currently, the majority of Oregon’s landscape is by far temperate evergreen needle-leaf woodland (composed of pine, cedar, and fir trees). Much of this was transformed from majority pine forests through logging and replanting, and before that, it was transformed from grasslands and pine and oak savannah through the removal of fire.
Much like California, and maybe even more, because of its climate (or, better put, similarly to Northern California), Oregon was transformed from grasslands and oak/pine savannah to dense temperate evergreen needle-leaf woodland.
White settlers arrived in 1811, several years after Lewis and Clark, with the establishment of the Pacific Fur Company trading post in Astoria, OR, but it was thousands of years before (around 15,000 B.C.E. as suggested by archeological evidence) that the first Oregon peoples first entered the state from the east (there is no clear evidence of a western entrance due to climactic conditions).1
Oregon tribes were divided by the Cascade Range (similarly to Washington and California tribes). There were more than 60 tribes and bands living in what is now the state of Oregon, speaking at least 18 languages (probably more, because much of this is based on written accounts of settlers and “explorers”). It’s important to remember that there was no Oregon/California border, and many Northern California tribes were also Southern Oregon tribes.
(I want to acknowledge that I am writing in the past tense but that many people descended from those whom I’m writing about exist today and are continuing to fight for access to their cultural lands and practices)
Oregon tribes lived (and continue to live) lives dictated by the natural landscapes surrounding them, which can be grouped into five categories: the Columbia River, the Plateau, the Willamette Valley, Southwestern Oregon, and the Coastal Zone. Of course, each category had subcategories within it, and tribal members were intimately connected to their land, its microclimates and flora and fauna, in a way white settlers never would be. Food and game were abundant and salmon ran all the way to the Malheur River in Eastern Oregon (an unheard of event now).
“I remember as a little girl, listening to my grand-uncle and grand-aunt talking about the salmon runs in the Malheur River. How shallow the water was, and that the fish were coming up so thick that you could walk across them.” -Charlotte Roderique, Burns Paiute Tribe.
Northwest Indigenous people lived life in the round. Their lives moved cyclically with the seasons, following berries, roots and tubers, and game, yet all of these cycles were centered by the salmon, a precious, vital, and abundant resource. Indigenous people who didn’t live in close proximity to abundant salmon traded for it. Many tribes acquired horses, and the Cayuse (who lived in both Washington and Oregon) were the largest livestock producing tribe in the U.S. by the late 1800’s.
Food was especially abundant in Western Oregon, where rain was plentiful. Throughout the region, fire was used with purpose. Prairies and meadows were kept abundantly green by burning off after each year’s elk or game hunt, incinerating grasses and shrubs. A byproduct of this was also new growth of basketry materials (read about the importance of basketry in Part II of my California history). Berries were abundant and each berry type was burned on a cycle (some yearly, some every four years, etc.) that encouraged new green growth and abundant berries and seeds. Huckleberries were particularly important in the Northwest.
Wapato, a tuber similar to potatoes, were an important part of Oregon Indigenous agriculture, and grew abundantly in marshy areas, not only feeding the Indigenous people but also muskrats, beavers, and other animals.
Lewis and Clark bought this tuber, along with berries and other foods, from tribes as they navigated the Columbia River. Lewis and Clark considered Oregon to be poor farmland, remarking that it burned too much and seemed inhospitable to agriculture.
In the early 1840’s, many white settlers began to arriving in Oregon, taking the direct route of the Oregon Trail. The federal government promised settlers land and essentially sanctioned the removal of Indigenous people from their homelands. Because many Indigenous people travelled cyclically throughout Oregon, their homes were left vulnerable to white settlers, who would remove their dwellings and shoot Native Americans when they returned home. These actions were encouraged by Manifest Destiny, a belief that western land inherently belonged to whites, and that white people’s rights overrode those of Indigenous groups because it was God’s will.
Arriving whites deemed Indigenous people incapable of using the land as it was intended: for European-style agriculture. That many Indigenous people couldn’t read or write (and yet many were multi-lingual, with complex histories and storytelling cultures) was used as an excuse to remove Indigenous people from their rightful land. Similarly to California, many Indigenous people were killed by disease and outright murdered.
It is impossible to extricate the history of fire suppression in the United States from the history of stolen Indigenous lands and lives. The moment Indigenous people were taken from their land, their cultural and agricultural burning practices were stolen from the plants and animals who depended on them and ecological degradation began. Though some whites brought their own burning practices with them (at that point called" “Paiute forestry”), they were ignorant to the complex ways in which Indigenous Oregonians cared for their land and practiced their own agriculture which was, in my opinion, superior to European agriculture.
This will be continued in two weeks.
https://ndnhistoryresearch.com/2018/08/09/a-short-history-of-oregon-tribes-in-the-contemporary-era/
Thanks. The indigenous people today have today's science to use in doing a better job of controlled, restorative burning. They are ignored by leftist politicians but they keep voting for them anyway. That is where things could improve but it takes courage to break from tradition.
Hi Stacy - great research and writing, I am VERY interested in your series. Nancy