History Minutes: Treaty with the Tribes of Middle Oregon, 1855

Wasco (Warm Springs) Reservation Map, 1855 // OrHi 103694

While Willamette Valley settlers were putting together provisional and territorial governments, Native Americans saw their complex political systems challenged and finally undone through forced relocation and treaty negotiation.

Foreign disease and war had left Oregon's Native people vastly outnumbered by the settlers moving into their homeland.  To avoid annihilation, tribes reluctantly entered into treaty negotiations.  In 1855, Nez Perce Indian chief Hallalhotsoot, called "Lawyer" by whites, signed a treaty that established a reservation on a small part of his people’s original territory.

The 1855 treaty council also created the Umatilla Indian Reservation, which required the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla nations to relinquish more than 90 percent of their six-million-acre homeland.

In June 1855, Oregon Superintendent of Indian Affairs Joel Palmer met at The Dalles

with representatives of the Upper Chinookan and Sahaptin peoples of the mid-C olumbia River. The agreement he crafted, titled the Treaty with the Tribes of Middle Oregon, ceded to the U.S. government 10 million acres of land south of the Columbia River.  The treaty removed most of the Upper Chinookan and Sahaptin peoples from the Columbia River corridor, which was destined to become a major east-west transportation route.

About 580,000 acres south of the Columbia was also reserved for the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation.  One Wasco elder told Palmer: "The place you have mentioned, I have not seen.  There [are] no Indians or Whites there yet, and that is the reason I say I know nothing about that country.  If there were Whites and Indians there then I would think it was a good country."