The Rogue River War and the Winter March to Siletz

The river below Gold Beach, the Rogue, has been traveled for thousands of years. The Tututni people called this stretch home. So did the Chetco, to the south. So did the Coquille, farther north. These were distinct nations with distinct languages, all tied to the same coastline, the same salmon runs, the same networks of trade that stretched from the Columbia south to California.

Between eighteen fifty-five and eighteen fifty-six, all of those nations were at war with the United States Army and with irregular volunteer forces drawn from the settler population. The conflict is called the Rogue River War. It ended in a formal surrender in the summer of eighteen fifty-six, and what followed the surrender is what historians and tribal members have compared to the Cherokee Trail of Tears.

Approximately two thousand Indigenous people, survivors of the fighting, were marched north. Two hundred miles, mostly in winter conditions, across the Coast Range and up to a newly established reservation at Siletz. The march was documented by military officers, by Indian agents, and in the accounts of tribal members passed down through generations. People died from cold, from illness, from violence along the route. The land they were marched to, the Siletz reservation, had been chosen not because it was good agricultural land or traditional territory but because it was remote enough to keep the survivors away from the growing settler communities on the coast.

A century later, in nineteen fifty-four, the federal government terminated its relationship with the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, stripping the tribe of its reservation, its legal recognition, and its tax-exempt status. The Siletz fought for twenty-three years and won restoration of federal recognition in nineteen seventy-seven. They represent twenty-seven bands today. The names of the nations that signed the eighteen fifty-six surrender are remembered. The names of everyone who did not survive the march are not fully in the record.