The Kalapuya and the Fire-Kept Valley
Near Dundee, Oregon
Long before the first grapevine or prune tree, this valley belonged to the Kalapuya people, and the band whose homeland lay around here were the Yamhill, whose name still marks the county. For thousands of years the Kalapuya shaped the Willamette Valley with fire. Each late summer and fall they deliberately burned the prairies, and that burning was a kind of farming.
It cleared brush, drove game into the open, and encouraged the plants they depended on, especially the camas lily, whose bulbs were a staple food, and tarweed, whose seeds they gathered. The open, park-like valley that so amazed early settlers was not wild at all. It was a landscape carefully tended by human hands for generations.
Then came catastrophe. Epidemics of introduced disease swept through, and by the eighteen forties the Kalapuya population, once many thousands, had collapsed. Between eighteen fifty-five and eighteen fifty-six the survivors were removed from their homeland to the Grand Ronde Reservation, in the hills west of here, where their descendants remain today as part of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde.
The beauty of this valley, so easy to plant and to farm, was in part a gift of the people who were forced to leave it.
