Midden Mound at Yachats OrHi 19001

When the ancestors of today’s Indians crossed the Bering Strait land bridge around eleven thousand years ago and made their way to Oregon, the valleys of the Columbia River and its tributaries were the earliest lands to be settled. Archaeological evidence from the Willamette Valley suggests that parts of western Washington and western Oregon east of the Coast Range have been inhabited for at least five thousand to six thousand years.

Because the restless molding of land by water tends to obliterate traces of human history, there is no archaeological evidence to say how long the coastal strip has been inhabited. However, logic and linguistic evidence suggest that it may have been populated even earlier than areas inland. With its mild climate, abundant and easily gathered food and fiber, and waterways for transportation, it is a hospitable place to live. Moreover, nearly all the language families of North America are represented in the diverse tongues spoken by Northwest coast peoples, suggesting that the region was settled earlier than the rest of the continent.

At the time of contact, the Clatsop, a band of the Chinook, lived around the mouth of the Columbia and upriver as far as tidewater. South of Tillamook Head lived the Tillamooks and Nehalem Tillamooks (rendered in Lewis and Clark’s journals as “Kilamox” and “Killamuck”), whose homeland extended to the mouth of the Salmon River north of Lincoln City. Farther to the south were the lands of the Siletz, Yaquina, and Alsea peoples, who lived in villages both along the ocean and around the bays of the rivers now named after them.

Farther south, past Heceta Head down to the dunes around Reedsport, lived the Siuslaw and Lower Umpqua peoples. Around Coos Bay lived the Hanis Coos, the Miluk Coos, and the Upper Coquille. Around the mouth of the Coquille River lived the Lower Coquille, and south to the mouth of the Smith River in northern California lived the Coastal Rogue, also called Tututni, and the Chetco.

These peoples were mostly isolated from one another by the rough country between the river mouths, and they were separated from the inland peoples by the Coast Range. The differences among them were significant: they spoke more than fifteen languages and dialects belonging to several major language groups that are as different from one another as the Indo-European language family is from, say, the Finno-Ugric family.

Nevertheless, the geography of their homeland gave the Indians of the Oregon coast an important similarity: they looked primarily to the sea and the forest for their livelihood and culture. The people lived in villages of extended families clustered around the coastal rivers and estuaries, which offered shelter from the ocean’s storms and a rich variety of animals and plants to sustain them. They traveled by trail along the beaches and over the headlands. Some traveled by sea in oceangoing canoes that they carved from cedar logs. Trade routes and networks enabled them to sustain contact with neighbors.

Salmon was the staff of life, so important that the people practiced elaborate rituals to ensure that the salmon would return to the rivers year after year. They also gathered food from the beaches and salt marshes and the edges of the forest: shellfish, berries, acorns and other nuts, seeds of wild grains, roots such as the camas and wapato, and to a lesser extent deer, elk, and waterfowl.

Food was so abundant that, unlike the inhabitants of some harsher environments inland, the coastal people had enough to eat year-round. The relative lightness of the work and abundance of leisure time gave rise to an elaborate culture that included a socially stratified, wealth- and status-conscious society. Ideas and practices surrounding property, inheritance, and debt in some ways resembled those of Europe, and some of the coastal groups were among the wealthiest of pre-contact hunter-gatherer communities in America.

Slavery was common over most of the area. Slaves were captured, traded, gambled, purchased, and given away by their male or female owners, who had near-absolute power over their lives. For some slaves, servitude was permanent and hereditary. Others were enslaved by their fellow tribespeople to pay debts. These slaves could in time redeem themselves.

The Northwest coast peoples displayed artistry in crafting clothing and tools. They were particularly skilled woodworkers. Wood, especially cedar, spruce, fir, and pine, was the principal raw material for houses, canoes, hunting and fishing equipment, and other necessities. Lewis and Clark reported that the Clatsops used wedges of seasoned crabapple wood to split cedar and spruce boards, carved canoes from logs, wove baskets and hats from shredded cedar bark and beargrass, and made bows and arrows out of cedar and elk sinew.

Meriwether Lewis also remarked on the utility and beauty of the waterproof rain hats worn by the Clatsops:

they wear a hat of a conic figure without a brim confined on the head by means of a stri[n]g which passes under the chin....these hats are made of the bark of cedar and beargrass wrought with the fingers so closely that it casts the rain most effectually....on these hats they work various figures of different colours, but most commonly only black and white are employed. these figures are faint representations of whales the canoes and the harpoonneers striking them.  sometimes squares dimonds triangles &c.
 
Between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand people may have been living in Oregon when Europeans first landed at the mouth of the Columbia. The Indian population throughout the Northwest declined rapidly after the 1780s because of introduced European diseases such as smallpox, measles, malaria, and influenza. Having no prior exposure, the people had no natural immunity against the pathogens that cause them. The diseases spread first from white people to Indians with whom they came into contact, and from them, via trade networks, to Indians who had never seen a white person.

© Gail Wells, 2006.

Themes: People and the Environment,Social Relations

Regions: Oregon Coast

Date: Pre-contact

Author: Gail Wells

Summary:
People have lived on the Oregon coast for thousands of years. With its mild climate, abundant and easily gathered food and fiber, and waterways for transportation, it is a hospitable place to live.