Ya-Po-Ah: The Valley the Kalapuya Made
Near Eugene, Oregon
For thousands of years before the first wagon wheel cut into this valley, the Willamette was Kalapuya country. They called the low butte above the river bend Ya-Po-Ah, and they managed the entire valley floor with fire.
Every summer's end, the Kalapuya burned the grasslands. The fires were not accidents and not warfare. They were agriculture of a kind: controlled burns that knocked back the brush, enriched the soil, and kept the open prairies where they needed them. Those prairies were camas fields, vast seasonal meadows of blue-flowering bulbs whose starchy roots the Kalapuya roasted in earth ovens and dried for winter. Estimates place the Kalapuya population across the valley at around sixteen thousand people in the early nineteenth century, organized into several bands, each tied to a particular river drainage.
Then the fevers came.
Between eighteen thirty and eighteen thirty-three, an epidemic of what early settlers called fever and ague swept the Willamette Valley. Modern researchers believe it was malaria, carried by mosquitoes from arriving trading vessels and spreading through a population with no prior exposure. Within three years, as many as ninety percent of the Kalapuya may have died. One missionary who traveled the valley in the mid-eighteen thirties described the land as nearly empty, the villages silent, the camas prairies no longer being burned and already beginning to fill with fir.
The survivors were relocated in the eighteen fifties. In January of eighteen fifty-five, Superintendent of Indian Affairs Joel Palmer negotiated the Treaty with the Confederated Bands of the Kalapuya at Dayton, Oregon. The Kalapuya ceded the entire Willamette River drainage. By eighteen fifty-six, the remaining people, fewer than four hundred, were resettled at the Grand Ronde Reservation west of the Coast Range.
The open prairies the Kalapuya maintained for millennia are now mostly farmland and suburb. The Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde continue to hold treaties, cultural programs, and language revitalization efforts today. The butte above the river bend still carries the name Eugene Skinner gave it, but the earlier name, Ya-Po-Ah, is the one the city eventually chose for a housing complex on its slope.
