The Kalapuya, the First People of the Yamhill
Near Mcminnville, Oregon
Long before wagon trains or vineyards, this valley belonged to the Kalapuya people, the earliest known inhabitants of the Willamette Valley. Many related bands lived here, and the band whose home stretched along this river gave the Yamhill its name. The Kalapuya were not simple wanderers.
They kept permanent winter villages on high ground above the floodplain, and in the warmer months they traveled to gather camas roots, tarweed seeds, berries, and game. They also shaped the land itself. Each autumn the Kalapuya deliberately set fire to the valley floor, burning back the brush to keep the prairies open, drive game, and encourage the food plants they depended on.
The rolling oak savanna that so delighted the first American settlers was in large part a garden the Kalapuya had tended with fire for countless generations. That world ended with terrible speed. Introduced diseases swept through the villages, and in the treaty signed at nearby Dayton in eighteen fifty five, the Kalapuya and neighboring peoples ceded the entire Willamette Valley.
During the winter that followed they were forced west to the Grand Ronde reservation. Their descendants endure today as citizens of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, and the name Yamhill still marks the river, the county, and the land.
