Kalapuya and the Valley They Maintained

The Willamette Valley is one of the most fertile agricultural regions in the American West. The Oregon Trail settlers who arrived in the eighteen forties called it a paradise, and they were not wrong about the land. They were wrong about why it was the way it was.

The open prairie floor of the valley, the thing that made it so immediately productive for farming, was not wilderness. It was managed landscape. The Kalapuya peoples, a group of related but linguistically distinct bands who had occupied the valley for thousands of years, maintained the open prairie through controlled burning. They burned the valley floor on a regular cycle, suppressing the encroaching Douglas fir forest, encouraging the growth of camas and tarweed and other food plants, and creating the habitat that supported the elk and deer populations they hunted.

When settlers arrived and saw those open fields, they mistook them for unimproved nature waiting to be farmed. They were looking at the result of millennia of deliberate management.

The malaria epidemic of the eighteen thirties killed an estimated eighty to ninety percent of the Kalapuya population before most American settlers arrived. The epidemic, introduced through contact with fur-trade networks, moved through Kalapuya communities with catastrophic speed. The survivors, already reduced to a fraction of their precontact numbers, were removed to the Grand Ronde Reservation beginning in eighteen fifty-six and eighteen fifty-seven.

The Willamette Valley wine country, the hazelnut orchards, the grass-seed farms that supply much of the world's supply, all of it is grown on land that the Kalapuya tended and managed for thousands of years before the settlers arrived to farm what the Kalapuya had already made farmable.