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161 Chapter six The Colonization of Illahee, 1843–1851 The Euro-American emigrants of the 1840s who survived the Oregon Trail were not plagued by the subtleties of balancing Christian mission and colony. Indeed, the missionaries’ reports of “vanishing Indians” encouraged their colonial migration, as did faith that the United States would achieve sovereignty over Oregon and grant them the lands of the “doomed race.” More than 10,000 migratory Euro-Americans left their homes in the Northeast, Midwest, and Southeast to speculate and cultivate the famed “open” land of the Willamette Valley between 1843 and 1851, quickly claiming full sections of 640 acres, or one square mile, of Indian land in the lower Oregon Country. Too large for individual farms, the mammoth land claims, some as large as 1,920 acres (three square miles), were speculative ventures in which ordinary citizens stood to profit from future land sales to the expected hordes of future emigrants. Earlier eastern colonization had featured the exploits of moneyed land speculators and corporate enterprise, as these veteran settlers and survivors of the Panic of 1837 well knew and feared. They fled their mortgages and property taxes imposed by revenue-starved governments during the depression and headed west to the supposed Jeffersonian promised land. If the colonists achieved their goal, western Oregon would feature settler-speculators with claims based on physical occupation rather than capital. Before 1846, the Oregon Question was still unresolved—both the United States and Great Britain continued to share imperial sovereignty, creating a vacuum in which the growing body of Euro-American colonists shaped their desired system of land tenure. In 1845, the colonists established an idiosyncratic , provisional land office in Oregon City to record claims and sales, as well as sundry property-related business deals, marriage contracts, and wills. Officially, the colonists adopted the United States’ formal position of “utmost good faith” toward the Native population and pledged not to seize Indian lands without consent and compensation. In practice, however, they 162 The Colonization of Illahee ignored the legal notion of “Indian Country,” which recognized Native sovereignty over aboriginal lands until “extinguished” by treaty with the U.S. Senate. To Euro-American colonists, the Oregon Country was “unsurveyed public domain,” not “Indian Country.” In fact, colonists sometimes used Native villages and resource sites to mark their private claims in the absence of the formal surveys for which they lacked the equipment and expertise; or, at least, most refused to pay for such functions that were deemed the responsibility of the central government. Others simply included Native villages within their land claims, figuring that a combination of violence, threats, and official “Indian removal” would eventually clear away the Indians. Rarely did Native peoples appear in the provisional claims records, other than having their villages and fishing sites serve as boundary markers. One Klikitat man did manage to have his claim to a lower Willamette prairie recognized in name at least—“Clickita Indian Jacque Prairie”—although it is unclear from the land office records whether the colonists who settled on his land paid him. Historical precedent in the East strongly suggested that the colonists would eventually gain title to their land claims, and there was little in western Oregon to suggest otherwise except for the limited British presence, widely considered temporary. Vicious disease epidemics, primarily malaria, smallpox, and measles, had decimated the several autonomous bands of Kalapuyas, Molalas, Clackamas, and Chinooks between 1830 and the mid-1840s, reducing their numbers from conservatively 15,000 to fewer than 2,000 in the Willamette Valley. Meanwhile, the Euro-American population grew from approximately 160 men in 1843 to 2,100 men and women in 1844. It continued to explode annually, reaching between 9,000 and 12,000 by 1848 and over 23,000 by 1850. Demographically, there was no question as to the balance of power by the late 1840s. Ecologically, pigs and tilling quickly destroyed camas fields, and wild game diminished from the pressures of overhunting and lost habitat. The environmental changes noted earlier by fur traders increased in pace with demographics. The Euro-Americans commonly referred to the lower Willamette domain as “the settlements,” and, indeed, they were transforming the environment of Illahee into a colonial landscape of Oregon. Indian People in Oregon Although the fur traders had been employing Native people for decades, Indians of the lower Columbia and the Willamette Valley soon came to depend on wage work to supplement their seasonal food procurement by the late [3.16.47...

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