The Takelma Homeland and the Rogue River War
Near Ashland, Oregon
The valley where Ashland was built was home to the Takelma people for thousands of years before the arrival of American settlers. The Takelma lived along Bear Creek and the Rogue River and its tributaries, fishing for salmon, gathering the resources of the valley and the surrounding mountains, and managing the land through fire and cultivation across generations. The first major disruption came in eighteen forty eight when the California Gold Rush sent thousands of men north through the Rogue Valley, increasing friction with the communities whose land the emigrants crossed.
After violence between settlers and native people in the early eighteen fifties, the United States government signed a treaty in eighteen fifty three ceding most of the Bear Creek Valley in exchange for a reservation near Table Rock. The reservation proved disastrous. Lack of food, a severe winter, and disease struck the families confined there.
In October of eighteen fifty five, volunteer militia attacked a group of Takelma who had returned to their village at the mouth of Little Butte Creek, killing twenty three men, women, and children. The resulting Rogue River War lasted into eighteen fifty six. When it ended, roughly eighteen hundred Takelma and neighboring peoples were forcibly removed from their homeland and marched north to the Siletz Reservation on the Oregon coast and the Grand Ronde Reservation in the Willamette Valley, hundreds of miles from the rivers and mountains they had known.
Ashland was platted on this land in the years that followed.
