Chapter III—
Material Culture:
Settling the Calapooia Foothills

When immigrants from the Midwest and the upper South came into the Oregon Country in the early 1840s, it was not an untouched wilderness. Native peoples had made it their home for millennia, shaping its environment through their cultural practices. In addition, the Oregon Country had been the scene of European and American activities for a number of years: explorers had probed its shores and interior beginning in the 1500s; trappers had exploited the fur-bearing animals by sea since the 1780s and by land since 1809; and by 1840 the British Hudson's Bay Company's properties in the Pacific Northwest included several trading posts in the western and eastern portions of the region, the Fort Vancouver headquarters, and the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company.^[1]

The timing of the earliest permanent settlement in the Willamette Valley is disputable. Some evidence suggests that retired trappers may have resided there as early as the later 1810s. But the best evidence indicates a more likely date of the mid 1820s. By 1831-32, at least three permanent farms existed in the northern Willamette Valley. In October 1838 the Willamette's Euro-American population included fifty-seven adult males: twenty-three French-Canadians, eighteen American settlers, and sixteen clergy and laymen connected with Jason Lee's Methodist Mission. The first large-scale overland emigrant party to the Willamette arrived in 1842. That group consisted of between 105 and 140 new settlers. The "Great Migration" of 1843 brought between seven hundred and one thousand more to the valley. By September 1845 the

Willamette settlement population had reached five to six thousand, with French-Canadians and other British subjects totaling no more than twelve hundred.^[2]

Until 1844, new settlers of the Oregon Country followed the pattern of their predecessors and located in the northern portion of the Willamette Valley. In that year, though, about a decade and a half after permanent settlement commenced in the northern valley and only one year after large-scale settlement began in the Willamette, immigrant John Packwood crossed the Santiam River, sixty miles south of the Willamette Falls, and became the first Euro-American to settle permanently in the southern Willamette Valley, in what became Linn County (map 1). A year later Isaac Hutchens became the first to settle on the Calapooia, though he did not remain. The lateness of settlement in the southern as compared to the northern part of the Willamette Valley is best revealed in the population distribution of 1850, the first year the United States government conducted a census there. In that year the three northern Willamette Valley counties, Clackamas, Yamhill, and Washington, had a population of 6,023. The two midvalley counties, Polk and Marion, provided homes to 3,800 settlers, while the two physically larger southern valley counties, Benton and Linn, at that time had a population of only 1,808.^[3]

The exigencies of the local landscape, along with settlers' habits from life in the Midwest and upper South, influenced settlement patterns in, and material culture responses to, the Willamette Valley environment during initial years of occupation. During settlement, the early Willamette Valley immigrants came in contact with a new land, discovered its idiosyncrasies, and learned to accommodate themselves to it, but they also changed it in significant ways in the hopes of making it better satisfy their own needs. In this process, both the settlers and the landscape worked on each other and produced a new western Oregon culture that differed subtly from the Ohio Valley culture and that also resulted in tremendous environmental change in the Willamette Valley.

Historically, culturally, and environmentally, the small tributary Calapooia Valley is in many ways a microcosm of the Willamette. This and the following chapters use that microcosm to examine in detail the collective pioneer experience on the western Oregon landscape. These chapters demonstrate that, on the level of material culture and in the realm of the mind, the relationship between the Euro-American settler and the wilderness environment can be described only as complex.^[4]

The Calapooia Landscape

The Calapooia River, little more than a stream, rises in the western Cascades and tumbles down a narrow, forested canyon in a northwesterly course for about twenty-five miles before flowing out onto the level plains of the lower Calapooia Valley. In its canyon the river winds its way around foothills that rise above the level, narrow valley—not more than a mile wide—for about six miles. One small but important stream, Brush Creek, joins the river before it cascades down a waterfall of less than ten feet in height and enters the wider—up to three miles—lower valley of the Calapooia, still surrounded by foothills reaching fifteen hundred feet in elevation. For another six miles the Calapooia hugs the foothills along the northern wall of its little canyon, and then the river finally flows out onto the floor of the Willamette Valley; trending in a north-northwesterly direction, it winds its way sluggishly through numerous oxbows for thirty-one miles to its confluence with the Willamette. Over this distance it drops only 145 feet, or roughly five feet per mile.

During the winter of 1852–53, six years after permanent settlement began in the Calapooia Valley, federally hired surveyors came to the locale to fix township, range, and section lines. Their detailed notebooks make it possible to reconstruct the early geographic and vegetative landscape of the Calapooia (map 2). The surveyor described the southern wall of the Calapooia as "high broken hills & mountains with numerous deep ravines and rocky ridges timbered principally with fir with a thick und[er]gr[owth] of hazel vine maple wild cherry fern & briars." The hills to the north of the river, with a southern exposure, he reported as drier and less densely forested. They were "covered with scattering" of oak, fir, and pine and produced "a fine quality grass."^[5] At the western terminus of the small Calapooia Valley, its prairies mingle with the Willamette's. At this point, the foothills of the Cascade mountains continue to the north until broken by the South Santiam River valley. From the south side of the Calapooia Valley's mouth, foothills, now known as the Coburg Hills, stretch southward in a high, unbroken chain to the McKenzie River.

When settlers first arrived in the Calapooia Valley, its floor, from its eastern extension to its opening onto the Willamette, consisted principally of open prairie with a scattering of ash and oak trees. The ash thrived in thickets and low-lying swales while the oaks grew either as

Map 2.
The Calapooia Valley, 1853.

solitary giants on the prairie or in the form of savanna or oak groves. The eastern portion of the Calapooia, through which Brush Creek flows, was more heavily forested with oaks than was the western portion adjoining the Willamette Valley, which the surveyor described as having a "scarcity of timber." The prairies of the Calapooia and adjoining Willamette Valley he noted as "level . . . with a rich soil of clay loam which produces an abundance of superior quality grass. The prairie being nearly level is very wet in the rainy season." Surveyors described lower Brush Creek as either marshy or simply a swamp. Courtney Creek, a slightly smaller brook in the western portion of the Calapooia, typified the valley's "several small streams that head in the mountains but sink on reaching the prairie." Along the Calapooia River, bottomland ranged from one-fourth to one-half mile in width and was "subject to inundation to the depth of 5 or 6 feet & is well timbered with fir maple ash & balm [cottonwood] undgr[owth] hazel vinemaple & briars." The river's characteristics varied from one end of the valley to the other. In the eastern portion it reached only fifty-five links (about thirty-six feet) in width and in the west one hundred links (sixty-six feet). Its current was described as rapid throughout its length in the Calapooia Valley proper.

In 1846 the first Euro-American settlers permanently located at the base of the hills and mountains on the banks of the Calapooia. They did so at a time in American history when, according to the landscape architect John R. Stilgoe, steam, iron, and a developed market economy, as well as new systems of organization inherent in the industrial revolution, were effectively changing the relationship between people and the land in some parts of the country.^[6] On the Calapooia, still newly settled and relatively distant from the influences of the industrial revolution, early settlers experienced a time lag of a few years during which they had few intermediaries, such as a developed market economy and industrial systems, to distance them from the land. Rather, during the initial years of contact, settlers related directly to the land and acquired an intimate understanding of its physical configuration and idiosyncrasies as they molded a midwestern and upper southern culture to it. While settlers had to contend with natural catastrophe and components of the landscape that they never could accept, they also, through their daily activities, developed a positive relationship with their new landscape.^[7]

Early Life and Culture on the Calapooia Landscape, 1846–60

After traversing the Oregon Trail during the late spring, summer, and early fall, immigrants to the Oregon Country generally arrived in the Willamette Valley just as the wet season began. Sometimes they immediately continued south to find a new home, as did Benjamin Freeland, who came to the Calapooia in 1853–54: "We was six months in Crossing the plains and after we got in the Valle we started up the Valle and to look for a home we traveled slow we would stop and look and we traveled over one hundred mieles till we Crost the Calapooya river and on the Calapooya we found A Clame and bought it which we paid fore yoak of oxen. Claims is skerse." Other settlers wintered in the north near Oregon City and then headed south in the spring to choose a claim that they could immediately begin to work. For instance, although John Courtney's family arrived in Oregon in autumn 1845, they reached the Calapooia only the following spring.^[8]

In the winter of 1852–53, after completing the first survey of the township that extends from the mouth of the Calapooia Valley out onto the Willamette's prairies, the federal surveyor wrote a brief description of the area he had just traversed. In his notes he captured the essence of the Calapooia's early settlement pattern: "township contains about 20 settlers principally along the hills on the Eastern side and on the Calapooia on the Northern side. . . . The prairie part of the township is principally vacant owing to the scarcity of timber and the wet state of the land in the winter."^[9]

Examples abound of settlers' determination to avoid the Willamette's winter-wet plains in preference for the foothills that bordered smaller valleys such as the Calapooia. Before resorting to the better-drained hills of the Calapooia, John Wigle's family attempted to make a go of it on the open prairies of the Willamette. But they soon gave up that notion when, within a few days of their arrival in the winter of 1852, they experienced, in the words of Wigle, "an Oregon rain with [a] continuous blow for three days and nights." In no time their "little log house" and "the low ground" nearby "was flooded and we were anything but jubilant." John Grath Bramwell remarked in later years that "before drainage ditches were opened the whole valley was like a swamp. The streams, many of them, had no definite channels but spread

out over the floor of the valley, wandering here and there all over the land."^[10]

Settlers were concerned not only by standing water, but also by the full-fledged floods that regularly inundated the prairies. When John McCoy looked to settle on the plains between the Willamette and Calapooia rivers, he examined first a "beautiful claim" before choosing another, for during one of his "several trips of investigation" he discovered "signs of driftwood . . . upon one of its highest point[s]." He became convinced that "at some time past, high water from the river overflowed the entire claim." Fifteen years later he began to think that at first he had been misled, but "in December 1861 a flood of the Wallamet river came that swept over the ground to a depth of several feet." The threat of high water forced Americus Savage, who claimed land along the Calapooia out on the floor of the Willamette River in the 1850s, to build his home on the top of a low butte whose summit stood almost forty feet above his prairie claim. Dissatisfied with this inconvenient location, during the great flood of 1861 he "resolved that it was time to see just where in the neighborhood it was safe to build . . . [and] he therefore took a boat and rowed across the [flooding] river inspecting the country."^[11]

In the near-subsistence agricultural community that developed on the Calapooia during the early years of settlement, settlers had neither adequate technology nor a large enough labor force to check floods and drain the prairies for cultivation. Lack of drainage simply made it impossible to put in essential crops until very late in the season. But by settling along the lower slopes of the foothills, the earliest pioneers on the Calapooia and the southern Willamette Valley found well-drained soils ready for the plow. The soil there, commented Wilson Blain in 1851, "is a deep loose, black loam, resting on a substratum of rock or blue clay. This land is adapted, in eminent degree, to all the productions of the farm."^[12]

The environmental consequences of Kalapuya burning practices also influenced settlement patterns during initial years of contact. First, settlers needed wood for construction, heating, and cooking purposes, but the 1852 surveyor noted that the open prairies had a "scarcity of timber." The absence of trees on the prairie caused another problem: persistent rains waterlogged the Willamette prairies in winter and spring, but because burning had left them essentially treeless, during the warm

summer months the flow of spring's and small streams decreased or completely vanished, leaving the plains without water. Settlers looked instead to the unburned forests and stands of timber along the well-drained foothills, which provided all the necessary resources. There they had access to timber, and the cooler, moister conditions of the forest environment, according to Thomas Kendall, also provided along "the base of the buttes and hills . . . small collection[s] of water, which after running slowly the distance of a few rods [onto the prairies], entirely disappear." Therefore, as Kendall noted in 1852, "What are now called the best claims, that is those seized upon primarily by the settlers, as combining the three great elements of convenience, good land, timber, and water, are principally held by claimants under the present law." Finally, in choosing to settle along the edge rather than in the deep forest, settlers still had access to the open prairies needed for the grazing of livestock. In later years, Calapooia resident Archie Frum recalled, "All of the first settlers to this valley chose their homes on the foot-hills of the Cascades or about the various buttes. The reason was that good springs and plentiful wood was found there and they could live conveniently and still pasture their stock all over the open valley."^[13]

Natural exigencies of the landscape, such as drainage, and Kalapuya-caused changes in the environment, such as the absence or presence of prairie, trees, and springs, influenced Euro-American settlement patterns in the southern Willamette Valley. Because the Kalapuya could move seasonally between different valley ecosystems, they could obtain the variety of resources they depended on for food, clothing, tools, and housing. By contrast, Euro-American settlers' culture of private landholding resulted in a relatively sedentary life-style, necessitating access to a great variety of resources on their individual claims. The earliest settlers, aware of the benefits and drawbacks that the single ecosystem of prairie could provide them on the open, flat plains of the southern Willamette Valley, reconciled themselves to the natural facts and headed instead for the forest-prairie edge along the foothill periphery. In balancing themselves with the Calapooia terrain, early settlers understood their natural setting and adjusted their lives accordingly.^[14]

Map 3 shows the progression of land claiming in the Calapooia Valley between the years 1846 and 1855. To 1851, settlers claimed the vast majority of the periphery of the Calapooia where wooded foothill met open prairie. A few early settlers took land on the Willamette

Map 3.
Land claiming in the Calapooia Valley and on the adjacent Willamette Valley Plains, 1846–55. The area represented in the
map is larger than the study area and thus includes more land claims than have been used for statistical purposes in this study.
Sources: Genealogical Forum of Portland,  Genealogical Materials ; surveyors' maps and Donation Land Claim maps, Land
Office, Bureau of Land Management, Portland;  Linn County, Oregon ; Manuscript Population Census Returns, Linn County, 1850.

prairie right along the banks of the Calapooia, for there, too, in addition to available fresh water, they also found the special features of the edge: timber growing in thickets along the riverbanks, plus open prairie extending beyond this narrow wooded band. These prairies close to the river, in fact, included what later proved to be some of the best agricultural lands, being fertile and well drained because they rested atop cobble. But claimants during the early years never ventured far from the foothills or the river. Early settlement throughout the southern Willamette Valley followed a similar pattern (map 4). Most settlers located claims at the base of the foothills, while a few settled in the gallery forests of larger streams. No settlers centered their claims in the midst of the valley's wide, open prairie. Only later, between 1851 and 1855, when the best claims were gone, did settlers begin to take up the initially less desirable land on the open, winter-wet, summer-dry, and timberless prairie, as well as on less desirable lands higher in the rugged foothills.

However, it is important to note that although early settlers consciously avoided the prairies, as they initially had in the Midwest, they viewed them positively in futuristic, pastoral terms. Thomas Kendall commented in 1852 that "the best land, the most sightly locations, in the very heart of the grazing portions, and what will one day be the great agricultural spots, I mean the central portions of the prairies, are yet as the Creator left them, uncultivated, unclaimed."^[15]

The settlement pattern along the Calapooia valley demonstrates the influence that nature, cis-Appalachian precedent, and the Kalapuya had on Euro-Americans. It also shows that Euro-American settlers had an intimate understanding and closeness to the natural world—prairies, trees, hills, and plains—on which they depended. Settlers' intimacy with the Calapooia landscape also developed through the actual laying out of the boundaries of individual claims.

During the years 1846 to 1851, before federal surveyors imposed the cadastral survey on the Calapooia wilderness and before new methods and technology made it easier to mitigate certain features of its terrain, the natural landscape guided the laying out of land-claim boundaries, just as it had in the early cis-Appalachian West. However, the Oregon Donation Land Law, which went into effect on 1 December 1850, called for the imposition of the rectilinear cadastral survey on the valley and required that new claims adhere to these north-south, east-west survey lines. From 1843 to December 1850, only the basic laws of the provisional and

Map 4.
Location of southern Willamette Valley households, 1850.
Source: William A. Bowen, "Mapping an American Frontier: Oregon in 1850."

territorial governments guided the settlers' land claiming as they attempted to balance themselves, their cis-Appalachian culture, and the need for natural resources with what the landscape afforded.^[16]

The provisional and territorial governments stipulated no pattern for land claiming according to cardinal points of the compass, as did the later federal Donation Land Law. The geographer Harlow Zinser Head has concluded from this circumstance that "the objective of the federal land policy . . . was to halt further settlement in the haphazard manner" of years prior to 1851.^[17] In fact, the territorial and provisional governments did not necessarily encourage a "haphazard manner" of land claiming in the Willamette Valley, for certain rules did force a minimal regularity to land claim boundaries. On 5 July 1843, for instance, the Oregon provisional government enacted its first land law. Article 1 required that a person "holding or hereafter wishing to establish a claim to land . . . shall designate the extent of his claim by natural boundaries, or by marks at the corners, and on the lines of such claim, and have the extent and boundaries of said claim recorded in the office of territorial recorder." Article 3 stipulated that a claimant could take no more than 640 acres (one square mile). It also required that claimants take land "in a square or oblong form" but granted an exception to what "the natural situation of premises" afforded. A new comprehensive land law, passed a year later (25 June 1844), slightly revised requirements for taking out land claims. Section 2 ordered that all claims made after that date "shall be in a square form, if the nature of the ground shall permit; and in case the situation will not permit, shall be in oblong form." Section 3 excepted claims already made: where lines had already been agreed on, claims did not have to be "in a square or oblong form."^[18] Thus, the early Oregon governments at least attempted to bring regularity to the landscape and prevent the sort of problems that had arisen in the east, particularly in Kentucky.

Theoretically, then, up to June 1844 the provisional government allowed settlers to take their claims in any form they desired. Between 1844 and 1850, laws still allowed settlers to orient square or rectangular claims according to what the local landscape afforded. Calapooia settlers between 1846 and 1850 took advantage of this allowance, and although most did use cardinal points of the compass to lay out their rectangular claims, some did not. A study of the early land claims reveals that settlers used both regular and, not surprisingly, irregular claims to take advantage of the variety of lands available along the

prairie-forest edge. Those who had "regular" boundaries placed large claims in areas where they could take advantage of as many resources as possible. Since they were the earliest and first settlers, they could readily do so.

Though Jared Michael's 1847 claim (map 5) and Thomas Ward's 1850 claim (map 6) were both perfectly square claims of roughly 640 acres each, they also stretched the limit of the law that required imposing rectangular lines on a landscape that had no semblance to "rational" order. Both claims tilted away from the cardinal points of the compass in order to take into account local geographic features and the exigencies of landscape that nature and the Kalapuya had shaped. Michael's took advantage of both water that collected from springs at the base of a foothill on his claim and of timber at the top of the slope. The gently fanning prairie that made up two-thirds of his claim was readily cultivable and in fact made up the entirety of his farmland when the surveyor sketched his claim in 1852–53. Ward's claim had an even more unusual configuration. By the time Ward made his claim, earlier settlers had already taken most of the best land along the foothills. So Ward took a claim on the plains, but this claim completely surrounded a steep, conical butte that rises almost six hundred feet above the valley floor. In essence, Ward's claim is an isolated microcosm of land-claiming patterns along the foothills. Settlers like Michael and Ward worked within early land-claiming laws and still positioned their claims to take advantage of the natural topography and environmental conditions.

The Michael and Ward claims exemplify the general pattern of land claiming in the Calapooia and southern Willamette Valley as a whole: the claiming of land where the lower flanks of the foothills gently fan out onto the prairie. Calapooia settlers preferred to claim land at the base of the foothills and occasionally on the Calapooia River itself (map 2); many of these early claims, especially those tucked alongside the foothills, had "irregular" forms (map 3).

Although provisional and territorial laws proved plastic enough for settlers to mold them—through the boundaries of an actual land claim—to the special nature of the land they governed, these laws also encouraged the claimant to gain knowledge of his or her local landscape. Claim laws stipulated the claimant's responsibility for surveying his or her own property "by natural boundaries, or by marks at the corner." This process of defining land according to landscape features, and then recording it by the use of natural markers (essentially the old

Map 5.
Jared Michael's land claim.
Sources: Surveyors' maps and notes and Donation Land Claim maps, Land Office, Bureau of
Land Management, Portland; U.S. Geological Survey, topographic maps, Halsey quadrangle.

metes and bounds system from colonial and early cis-Appalachian settlement days), forced the early Calapooia settlers to gain intimate knowledge of—and therefore connection with—the landscape. For instance, on 15 July 1848 William Robnett claimed 640 acres situated "on the Calapooia river about 2 1/4 miles above Finley[']s mill . . . and bounded

Map 6.
Thomas Ward's land claim.
Source:  Illustrated Historical Atlas Map .

as follows To Wit Commencing at the SW corner an Ash tree marked on the S side of the river—Thence running N crossing the Calapooia river one mile to a stake—Thence E one mile to a stake—thence S one mile recrossing the river to a stake thence W one mile to the place of beginning." Jonathan Keeney's 640-acre claim of 26 April 1847 had an even more primitive definition, requiring great knowledge of the local landscape. The claim was located "about 5 miles above the Calapooiah river on the first branch near the foot of the mountain. Beginning at the NE corner a stake on the prairie about 100 yards W of a bunch of Ash trees,

joined at the roots, standing on the N side of the branch, marked thence running W one mile, thence S one mile crossing said branch, thence E one mile, thence N one mile to the place of beginning." Other landscape features in early claim descriptions included "a stake on a hill," "an ash swale," "a fir on the mountain," "a white oak tree," and "the falls of the Calapoiah."^[19] By relying on such features, the earliest Euro-American settlers appropriated into their minds and activities fixtures of landscape the Kalapuya had incorporated into myths and legends explaining creation and their own connection with the land. Though the new "Calapooians" had very different emphases and reasons than had their predecessors, these fixtures of landscape still played significant roles in settlement culture. This chapter examines the role these landscape features played in everyday activities, the next analyzes them on the level of the settlers' imagination.

During the early years on the Calapooia, 1846–51, settlers took up land through a process requiring an intimate knowledge and understanding of their new landscape. They used natural features when surveying claims, and they had great leeway (of which they readily took advantage) in positioning claims in a manner that suited their own tastes, their past experience, and the configuration of the Calapooia landscape. Essentially, the special configuration of the Calapooia and southern Willamette valleys redefined and gave new meaning to the subsistence-oriented agricultural life-style that early settlers brought with them. Virtually forced to live among the hills, settlers developed an intimate association with this fixture of the landscape at the same time that they looked onto the plains with desire. The tension between foothills and plains is essential to the cultural meaning of pioneering in the Calapooia Valley.

The cis-Appalachian experience did, in a small way, influence settlement patterns and land claiming in the Willamette. In addition, it influenced other aspects of Willamette Valley settlement culture, in particular the style of houses constructed on the new landscape. After deciding on a suitable site, immigrants constructed homes from resources the land provided—timber, clay, moss, and rocks—and thus they came into intimate contact with the Calapooia landscape; however, they fashioned these natural resources into traditional architectural styles. First homes tended to be log cabins—a form that pioneers had carried across successive American frontiers from the colonial period. When Timothy Riggs and Asa Moore settled on Brush Creek in the fall of 1847, their

first duty was to "cut logs for our cabin." In building more elaborate structures, Calapooia immigrants used traditional styles brought with them from the Midwest and upper South. John Wigle's first residence, though crude, relied on a midwestern architectural style. "Our dwelling house consisted of one room, a round log house very similar to our school house in Illinois." He described his bedroom as a "pole pen about ten feet square." John McCoy, who settled not far from the Calapooia in the late 1840s, built a house typical of the log cabins that these settlers had previously built on other American frontiers. The McCoys built their home

after the style of the usual pioneer cabin, of logs laid up in a square, notched on the corners, to make them lay properly, faced down with a broad-axe inside and out after being laid up; cracks chinked and daubed—sometimes with clay and sometimes with moss from the trees—to keep the cold out. A fireplace, the jambs and back made of baked clay with chimney, built with split stick daubed inside and out with clay. A puncheon floor, and the roof covered with clapboards held down by weight-poles to keep from blowing off, nails being out of the question at that early date. Door with wooden hinges, opened by a latch string always hung out.

Later, McCoy built a similar cabin "nine or ten feet away in line with the first" and eventually "the space between the two was enclosed." Hugh Brown of Tennessee settled in the Calapooia in 1846 and built a similar abode of two cabins connected with a breezeway. Settlers carried this particular style, a typical double-pen log house, with them in their cultural baggage from the upper South and Midwest. Settlers naturally incorporated local materials into their homes.^[20]

After selecting an appropriate claim and building their homes, settlers prepared their property for cultivation. In the process, they found that the Calapooia landscape influenced their cis-Appalachian agricultural practices. After settling on the Calapooia, Thomas Kendall wrote to an Indiana friend who had concerns about cultivation in the Willamette Valley. On the "most heavily timbered parts," Kendall confided, clearing land was

much less difficult . . . than on the heavily timbered bottoms of Ohio and Indiana. . . . A large portion . . . of the timbered country consists of open woods, with little and often no undergrowth of shrubbery, sometimes several acres bearing only a few large trees, and those not so very difficult to remove: chop or bore with an auger through the bark, and the white wood, which is not deep, then apply fire, and with little attention they will burn down.^[21]

Calapooia and Willamette settlers generally found the valley soils of their new home much easier to plow than the prairies of the Midwest, which are thousands of years older than the Willamette Valley's. Also, the Willamette's mild, wet winters cause vegetative matter to decompose relatively quickly. Thus, whereas Midwestern sod consists of years' accumulation of undecomposed, tough grass roots reaching several feet deep, the sod of the Willamette is relatively thin. Settlers commented on the ease of plowing in the Willamette and Calapooia. In 1849 Gustavus Hines suggested that Willamette prairies were "unlike those of any other country. They are naturally mellow, and appear . . . as though it had been but a year or two since they were cultivated." Hines also noted that the Willamette soils were not "swarded over with a thick strong turf, as in Western States" and that they could be "easily ploughed with one good span of horses the first time." George Atkinson found in 1848 that "a man can live with half the labor [in the Willamette] done in the States. . . . An immigrant will come during the autumn, put himself up a log house . . . [and] break eight or ten or twenty acres of prarie." In 1846 Neil M. Howison found the Willamette prairies "free from the encumbrance of trees or other heavy obstacles to the plough, stretch along, ready for the hand of the cultivator." Although settlers could cultivate midwestern prairies successfully only with steel plows, settlers in Linn County and the Calapooia Valley often found wooden plows adequate. With a plow constructed simply out of a "twisty pice oak," Robert Earl's family plowed twenty acres their first season of residence in Linn County. The Wigle family settled just south of the Calapooia Valley's mouth in 1852 and "got along with a wooden toothed harrow and brush drag," even though John Wigle admitted "those were poor tools with which to work sod ground." And John McCoy's first plow in 1847 was simply a "wooden mold-board, carved by himself out of a pice of oak wood" with a "steel lay and land-bar" and "stocked with wheels sawn from a tree." Although he needed three yoke of oxen, he did plow thirty-eight acres that spring alone.^[22]

Settlers also found that certain crops grew poorly in the soil of the Calapooia. Though corn was central to the development of the Midwest, settlers could not successfully cultivate it in western Oregon because of the cool summer nights. One late nineteenth-century traveler in the Willamette summed up the problem: "For this plant the nights are too cold. That refreshing coolness following quickly upon the retreat of the sun, hastening down from the mountains to close our eyes in well-

blanketed and undisturbed sleep, is fatal to Indian corn, which glories in the blaze of the midsummer heat, and waxes fat and succulent through the damp and sultry midnights." Of the twenty-nine farms in the Calapooia reporting cultivated land in the 1850 agricultural census, none harvested corn, while eighteen farmers produced 2,265 bushels of wheat and 70 pounds of oats. Inhabitants produced only 573 bushels of corn in the entire Willamette Valley that year, while wheat production totaled 199,558 bushels, and oats 54,524 bushels.^[23]

Although settlers could not successfully transplant corn, the key animal fodder in the Midwest, to the landscape of the Calapooia, they still had a predilection for raising livestock during the early years. As had been the case in the cis-Appalachian region, the exigencies of economy and transportation in large degree determined the hog and cattle culture of settlers on the Calapooia, but it was especially the unique configuration of the Calapooia and southern Willamette that encouraged age-old husbandry practices. The nature of the local prairies and prairie-forest edges made the southern Willamette and Calapooia valleys an excellent place to run both cattle and swine. Calapooia settlers chose claims along edges in order to have access to the prairies as well as the forests, as they had in the Midwest. They could then simply turn their livestock out onto the unclaimed, unfenced, open prairies during early years. Thomas Bird Sprenger remarked that each "farmer had a few acres broke up and some fenced to protect the crops from ranging cattle. . . . Stock raising was a most important part of our work. Cattle ran at large everywhere." In 1850 Wilson Blain wrote, "Here cattle roam at large, summer and winter, asking nothing from the care of man, and are always in the finest condition. One portion of the country is known as the land of Bashan." Swine also ranged about the countryside, feeding on oak mast and various roots growing on the prairie-woodland edges of the valley. One of the primary foods for hogs proved to be the bulb of the camas plant, the staple of the Kalapuya diet. John Minto noted that swine "lived on the grasses and oak mast . . . [and] the roots which were the chief foods of the natives." In the summer of 1846, Thomas Kendall "procured one full grown sow and two others about half grown." Because of the abundant provender, especially the camas, which when in bloom gave the valley the appearance of "a big blue lake . . . at least a thousand acres of it," by just turning his three hogs out onto the prairie "without any feeding . . . except a handful of something now and again, . . . to keep them domesticated," Kendall had in "nine months . . . more than 50 head."^[24]

Because of mild conditions and the only recently ceased Kalapuya burning, livestock found adequate forage in the valley year-round, something different from experience in the Midwest. In an 1856 petition to the territorial government to force cattle owners to confine animals running at large and ravaging the petitioners' own "grass claims," citizens of Linn County even regarded the "grass claim of each settler as being to him here what his Corn-Crib was in the States." Kendall summed it up best:

For rearing cattle and horses, I have no doubt that Oregon is one of the best countries in the world. During the crop season you labour hard to lay up [corn and hay] for your stock in the winter. Amid its storms your cattle and horses look to you for food and shelter, ours, "like the wild deer and wolf," look to the wide canopy of heaven as their stall, and to the vast fields which God of nature has spread before them, for their food. Through the wet season through dry, they never call at your barn for a meal.^[25]

Southern Willamette settlers depended on livestock raising in early years. The 1850 census reveals that in the Calapooia community, twenty-four people owned 247 cattle, with Hugh Fields having 75, Isaac Hutchens 40, and William Cochran 57. In addition, the census taker found 153 milk cows and 122 oxen on the Calapooia. Thirty people owned a total of 709 hogs. William R. Kirk alone maintained a herd of 100, Hugh Fields claimed 60, and three others owned 50 apiece. The 1852 tax assessment rolls show Calapooia residents owning 972 cattle, while Linn County as a whole had 5,784. The number of hogs equaled 900 for the Calapooia, and 4,970 for the county. Calapooian Jonathan Keeney alone owned a herd of 224 swine.^[26]

The interplay between nature and the Kalapuya created a landscape in the Willamette that proved in many ways beneficent to the subsistence agricultural community that developed on the Calapooia during the first few years of settlement. Foothill slopes, grasslands, trees, prairie-forest edges, springs, and camas meadows provided for the needs of Euro-American settlers and their livestock. This same landscape also supported an abundance of wild game that proved to be a blessed addition to the diet. Albert Waggoner recalled that other than livestock, what his family "could bring in with their guns was their living for a number of years."^[27]

The natural and Kalapuya-created landscape influenced the quantity of deer and other types of game and animals inhabiting the valley.

Deer—especially white-tailed, which are attracted to grasslands rather than forests—abounded year-round in the southern Willamette. Silas V. Barr recalled that deer ran "freely over all of these hills, especially in winter. There were some black-tailed deer but perhaps more white-tails. The black-tails would come down from the mountains in winter. The white-tails were permanent residents here." Redman Pearl recalled, "The white-tailed deer were then common all through the valley." A.J. Shank remembered that "deer could be seen daily, grazing in the pastures with the cows," on his father's land claim. Although undoubtedly an exaggeration, during the first year John McCoy lived in the southern Willamette Valley, 1846–47, he reportedly "killed one hundred and sixty two deer without drawing the blood on one that he did not get." Lewis Tycer stated simply, "The hills were full of deer . . . and it was never any trouble to get plenty of meat."^[28]

The grasslands of the southern Willamette Valley, which innumerable ponds and marshes inundated during winter months, also provided perfect feeding ground and habitat for wintering and migrating geese, ducks, swans, cranes, and other fowl. The annual number of geese alone flocking through the Willamette was so great that a Linn County newspaper humorously reported in 1876, "The number of wild geese that have passed . . . going northward, during the past two weeks, is placed at 3,713,811." Extant diaries and memoirs indicate that early settlers spent much of their time during the fall and winter months hunting fowl. For instance, in November 1866 Jasper Cranfill went goose hunting almost every day; by the twenty-sixth of that month, he could muster only enough energy to confide to his journal, "Remained at Home tired of Hunting etc." Calapooian Andrew Kirk remembered that one year he shot four hundred ducks just for family use, once getting thirteen in a single shot.^[29]

Geese also caused serious problems for Calapooia and other Willamette Valley farmers. As soon as grain crops like wheat began to grow, flocks of geese invaded the fields. According to one Calapooian, they would "clean two or three acres off in a single night" so that a field that looked "green and thrifty one day" might the next morning "look as bare and black as though it had never been sown." Some farmers spent nights walking up and down their fields shooting guns to scare birds, while others hired boys to do the patrolling or even resorted to "twining." As Redman Pearl recalled:

[Twining] a field was done by driving stakes, perhaps twelve or fifteen feet tall, in rows all across the field. These rows of stakes were in squares or "checks," perhaps one hundred feet, or one hundred and fifty feet apart each way. Across the tops of these stakes twine was stretched. When the birds attempted to alight on the grain fields their wings would strike the stretched twine and it would scare them away. . . . [Or] it was very likely to become twisted in the cord and hang helpless and trapped.

This practice also made it easy for settlers to gather even more fowl for the table.^[30]

Settlers had mixed reactions to wildfowl, but they roundly condemned wolves, bear, and cougar. Linn County resident Robert Earl reminisced about his brother William, who one night in the late 1840s heard hogs squealing near their house. William jumped out of bed and ran to the scene, but with neither pants nor gun. "[When] he got there he found a cogar hold of a hog he scared him loose [The cougar] acted like [it] wanted a man for super [William] started home there was another man had got up and Started down ther to See what was the mater and he meet William coming with his Shirt tail standing out Strait."^[31]

Grizzly bears, though not as numerous as cougars, proved just as troublesome. Although they naturally ate camas bulbs, tubers, roots, berries, acorns, fish, and carrion, they occasionally attacked settlers' livestock. In the 1840s a grizzly took a swipe at one of John McCoy's calves, nipping its tail. But the lost "tail was the only damage done. . . . The steer was ever after known as Bob." Albert Waggoner, probably exaggerating a bit, recalled the extermination of the last grizzly in Linn County, which had been marauding the settlement.

[Father] took an old musket and loaded it heavily . . . [and] tied it to a big crooked rail in the fence near his home and set a bait nearby so that taking the bait would discharge the gun. That night the grizzly came and took the bait. The recoil of the gun broke the big rail, and the charge blew a hole in the grizzly's side and lungs large enough so that my father could run his arm into it up to the elbow, nevertheless that grizzly walked for a full mile before he dropped.^[32]

Although accounts of wolves in the Calapooia are few—Kendall briefly mentioned them in an 1852 letter—they inhabited the Willamette Valley in large numbers at the time of settlement. In 1846 Neil M. Howison reported, "Wolves are numerous, and prey upon other animals, so that the plains are entirely in their possession." When Charles

Wilkes traversed the valley in 1841, he reported that "bands of wolves were met with, and heard throughout the night in various parts of the valley." Wolves did cause serious depredation. In response, northern Willamette Valley settlers called the first "wolf meeting" in early 1843 to work out some type of defense against wolves and other fearsome wildlife. At subsequent wolf meetings, settlers considered other problems the youthful Willamette settlement faced. Eventually, these meetings developed into the provisional government. The first resolution of the wolf meeting held in March 1843 was for the community "to take immediate measure for the destruction of all wolves, bears and panthers, and such other animals as are known to be destructive to cattle, horses, sheep, and hogs." Bounties of $3 for large wolves, $.50 for small wolves, $5 for "panthers," $2 for bears, and $1.50 for lynx were approved. Over the next decade and a half the provisional and territorial governments would continually revise bounties paid for "noxious" animals. Linn County itself provided bounties on wolves, bear, and cougars during the nineteenth century.^[33]

Euro-American settlers responded to the wild animals of the Willamette paradoxically. On the one hand, they appreciated the bounty of game; on the other hand, they feared the grizzly, cougar, and wolf. Euro-American settlers also encountered other inhabitants of the landscape: a few surviving Kalapuya. The settlers held racist attitudes toward their predecessors. Linn County resident Mrs. James Miller wrote in 1852, "They are dying here as elsewhere, where they are in contact with civilization. . . . I used to be sorry that there was so much prospect of their annihilation. . . . Now I do not think it is to be much regretted. If they all die, their place will be occupied by a superior race." Part of this racist attitude can be explained by the fact that the Kalapuya, as Miller noted in her letter, had just undergone demographic collapse. Their culture was in a shambles, their villages destroyed, and communal food-gathering activities no longer existent. To Euro-Americans, these starving people must have appeared as little more than, as Miller wrote, "heathens."^[34]

The half-starved Kalapuya, never posing a real threat to those who replaced them, only looked to the settlers for food. One evening soon after settling on the Calapooia, Clarissa Brown "had just a little flour and decided to make . . . bread to surprise" her husband, Hugh. As she was baking in her Dutch oven before the fire,

a shadow fell across the open door and looking up a big buck Indian was seen advancing into the room and muttering something she could not understand, whatever he may have been saying . . . he meant to have the bread. [Clarissa, who] never weighed over 100 pounds, was just as determined that he should not have the bread intended for the Brown family. She grabbed the tea kettle of boiling water . . . and started for the Indian. This was a foot race . . . but he beat. . . . He never came again.

Folklorists will note that this tale is strikingly similar to other tales told on other frontiers. It relates important information about the settler-Native American relationship in the West as the former replaced the latter, but it is also rooted in factual basis. Documents reveal that numerous similar incidents actually occurred on the Calapooia. In the fall of 1847, for example, Calapooia settler Timothy Riggs occasionally fed a Kalapuya who showed up at mealtime. Soon a number of Kalapuya began consistently to show up for supper. Fearing he "would run out of provisions before spring," Riggs was obliged to "quit feeding them." In another instance, shortly after Richard Finley settled on the Calapooia in 1847, Kalapuya "stole" one of his oxen. Finley and neighbor Riggs tracked the "thieves" to the Santiam River, where they found them "camped and . . . drying the beef." In retaliation, Finley opened fire and wounded one of the Kalapuya. When Timothy riggs and Asa Moore began building a cabin on Brush Creek in the autumn of 1847, "Indians appeared on the scene and inquired what [they] were doing there." After Riggs told them that he and Moore were settling, the Kalapuya demanded payment. Riggs and Moore "made a bargain with them agreeing to pay them wheat and pease after the next harvest."^[35]

Although a few remaining Kalapuya caused occasional consternation among the new Euro-American residents, the only serious threat they posed to settlers was in the settlers' minds, made fertile by experiences in cis-Appalachia. For example, after the Keeney family arrived in the region, local Kalapuya entered their living quarters: "The children, having heard so many stories of Indian scalping parties, thought they were doomed." Also, Finley's shooting of one of the Kalapuya who had stolen his ox "caused quite an excitement in the settlement." Many settlers feared that it would "cause an outbreak among the Indians." And finally, in the 1850s reports of rampaging tribes in other parts of the West and Northwest brought tensions to a high point in the Willamette and Calapooia valleys. Wilson Blain noted in a letter dated 30 October 1855 that "the panic was universal, and such another time of

alarm and excitement, I have no wish ever to witness. One might have supposed on last Thursday, that the Willamette Valley was full of bristling, and savage warriors." Blain went on to point out that in fact "there was not a hostile Indian in the whole valley."^[36]

In retrospect, it is easy to see that the settler-Kalapuya relationship was a painful moment in history. The Kalapuya and Euro-American civilizations converged for a few years in the Willamette Valley. This period of overlap occurred at the worst time for the possibility of humane settler-native relations. The few remaining Kalapuya, having suffered the loss of tradition, wandered about the land in a starving, dying condition, while the Euro-Americans, fresh from cis-Appalachia, harbored militant attitudes toward all Native Americans. A treaty of 4 January 1855 forced the remnant Kalapuya officially to cede the Willamette Valley to the United States.^[37]

When the Euro-Americans replaced the Kalapuya, new attitudes toward landscape and environment invaded the Willamette. Chapter 1 presented two passages from the Kalapuya's perspective concerning their loss of the Willamette to the Euro-Americans. One passage referred to a shaman who long ago had seen the earth all black in his dream. Later on, the Kalapuya saw the dream come true as the whites plowed up the land. The other passage went further and noted that "this countryside is not good now. Long, long ago it was good country (had better hunting and food gathering)." These and the following few excerpts from the Euro-American perspective highlight the differences in the conception of land and property between the Kalapuya and the settlers, and thus offer much for understanding the environmental change the Euro-American's wrought in the Willamette during the nineteenth century. As an example, for the payment of land to the Kalapuya, Timothy Riggs resorted to "wheat and pease," fruits of Euro-American cultivation from the very land he was taking from the Indians. Interestingly, he believed that the natives demanded payment for the land he claimed as his own, when in fact natives had no concept of private property. And Richard Finley bore arms to recover the private property (in the form of an ox) that natives "stole" from him. By contrast, the natives told no tales of begging and "stealing" from whites for food. The Kalapuya's view of their interaction with the white settlers at this time directly concerned their altering relationship with the landscape. The whites "plough[ed] up the ground," and thus the Kalapuya's own relationship with it. The plowing rendered the environment "not good."

The land was good only when Kalapuya occupied it and men hunted and women gathered. The Kalapuya viewed themselves as living in symbiosis with nature, a symbiosis destroyed by the arrival of Euro-Americans. The Euro-Americans viewed the settlement process, in part, as one of the advancement of their environmental conception, which included private property and deriving money from the land. As the next chapter demonstrates, however, Euro-Americans did not necessarily see themselves totally separated from the land.

Early settlers looked at the few remaining Native Americans with a combination of skepticism, fear, and occasional regret. They viewed the wildlife and climate of the Calapooia with mixed emotions, too. Settlers could at least defend against the worst of the marauding wolves, cougar, and bear and the perceived threats from their human predecessors. However, the weather and climate of the Willamette posed greater problems. Winters caused great concern, primarily because of persistent rains and flooding. When Charles Wilkes visited the northern Willamette settlement in 1841, he interviewed a Mr. Walker, who had come to the country with his family the previous year. According to Wilkes, Walker "did not like the country, and wished to go to California by the first opportunity. His principal objection was to the climate, which was too wet for business." Wilkes's British counterparts Henry J. Warre and Mervyn Vavasour found in 1845–46 that "notwithstanding the advantages to be found in this valley, many of the American emigrants become dissatisfied, and remove to California, where the climate is more salubrious." During the winter of 1852–53, Wilson Blain remarked in a letter, "Heavy rains, deep snows, high waters—perfect floods, great destruction of property along streams, a considerable amount of live stock perished, poor homeless emigrants badly discouraged, these and some other matters of a like nature were 'wafted' on 'Chill November's surly blasts.'"^[38]

Rainfall in winter months usually resulted in flooding and high water. Lewis Tycer recalled that the school term at the McHargue school "usually lasted only a few months in the spring when the rivers and creeks had gone down enough to make it safe for the children to cross." On 18 January 1866, Jasper Cranfill dramatically stated that "Muddy [Creek] nearly as high as yesterday. Sharp cold wind blowing—all communications with the outside world cut off by high water. About four hundred yards of fence gone." Three days later he recorded that "over one hundred & sixty of J.L. Coons sheep—were drowned by high water" and that he had found "a fish in the Prairie some six inches long

in the Puddles." But the weather in 1866 was not particularly atypical. In 1861, though, the largest flood in postsettlement history occurred in the Willamette Valley. During November of that year, precipitation fell in amounts more than twice the normal for the Willamette basin. The heaviest rainfall occurred between 30 November and 2 December. Added to this precipitation was heavy snowfall in the mountains; moderating temperatures at the end of November resulted in snowmelt, which compounded the problem. Settler Michael Plaster kept a weather log at his home on Diamond Creek, just south of the Calapooia. In it he noted that from 15 November to 9 December rain fell every day, and on "December the 1 the big fresh on Calapooya all the bridges & Rigg's mill went off." The flood also destroyed Richard Finley's gristmill on the Calapooia, and settlers soon ran out of flour and were forced to use cornmeal. Two other major floods, one in January 1881 and the other in February 1890, occurred in the Willamette Valley before the end of the nineteenth century.^[39]

Flooding and poor drainage, most apparent in winter, influenced settlement patterns and movements on the land and also determined where settlers developed roads. The earliest route to the Calapooia, which twisted and turned along the base of the eastern Willamette Valley foothills, was formed through wagon use, the drivers desiring to stay off the winter-wet prairie. In 1848 the territorial government commissioned a survey of this path, officially designating it the east-side Territorial Road and appointing Calapooia settler Alexander Kirk as commissioner of the survey. After viewing the route, Kirk described it in a passage full of natural features of the landscape: the road touched "a point of timber," went "through a field" and "to an ash tree," and was often "meandering along the hills"; and it ended simply by "crossing the Calapooa."^[40]

Settlers developed other roads through the valley proper in much the same fashion that they had developed the Territorial Road. Thomas Bird Sprenger, who grew up along the Calapooia, recalled in later years, "When we wished to start for town . . . we just headed off across the country in the general direction . . . avoiding low places in winter as best we could." Early settlers also developed a road, actually a succession of interconnected farm lanes, that followed the base of the foothills on the south side of the Calapooia Valley (map 7). The road began on the west at Wilson Blain's claim and continued east several miles to Richard Finley's claim on the Calapooia.

Map 7.
Early roads in the Calapooia Valley.
Source: Surveyors' map, Land Office, Bureau of Land Management, Portland.

Despite attempts to locate roads in well-drained areas, routes remained notoriously bad throughout the nineteenth century. When the Oregon and California Stage Company tried to raise rates to fifteen cents a mile on the Territorial Road in the early 1860s, a local newspaper chided, "We suppose the advance [in rates] is caused by bad roads. The more the passengers have to walk and the harder they work to pry the vehicles of that company out of the mud, the more they are charged for the privilege." In later years, residents of the Calapooia Valley desired a connection with the railroad, remarking that it was "impossible to make a wagon road that is passable over six months of the year." Sarah Jane (Savage) Cornett recorded in her diary on Sunday, 7 January 1883, a trip to visit nearby friends: "we come back around the lane whew it was muddy the water was pretty high today." Three weeks later, on 29 January, after her husband had returned home from a local funeral, Cornett noted that the weather that day was "foggy heavy mist and rain most all day" and "the roads were terrible terrible." Two and a half months later, Cornett noted a common occurrence when she wrote that her son "got stuck in the mud" while hauling wood.^[41]

The rains and floods of winter months influenced settlement patterns and road construction in the Willamette and the Calapooia valleys. They also destroyed homes and livestock herds. But while winter months often provided stormy, rainy, and unpleasant weather, they also proved generally mild, something that pleased settlers. On 16 January 1865, for instance, Jasper Cranfill noted in his diary that the day was a "cloudy gloomy day characteristic of the Oregon winters." A year later, he commented, "As Oregonians may expect continuers rain for about two weeks then fine weather." And in February 1853, Wilson Blain remarked, "The sun is bright—the grass is green—the birds are singing gaily, and all hands are vigorously prosecuting their agricultural and horticultural operations."^[42]

If harsh weather occasionally occurred in the winter, summer months were "sufficiently delightful to counter balance all this," according to Gustavus Hines. In the Willamette Valley during the summer, "the howl of the storm and roar of the southern winds" of winter "are hushed to silence" by the gently fanning "western zephyr." Inhabitants described the occasional summer showers as "angels' visits, few and far between." Although summer evenings required "two quilts and a flannel blanket" to keep warm, temperatures during the day ranged from "sixty-five to eighty degrees at noon."^[43]

Though these descriptions tended to put the best face on the situation, settlers genuinely noted an agreeable difference between summers in the Willamette Valley and the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. As a late nineteenth-century Linn County Immigration Agent declared, "When the thermometer here marks 90 degrees, the heat is not so oppressive as the same degree in the Mississippi Valley." He further commented that in "the east, when in summer the thermometer gets to 80, people seek the shade—in this state they seek the sunshine from choice; there is a tonic in it at this temperature." Blain noted in 1851, "Those sweating and sweltering nights you suffer in the [cis-Appalachian] West are to us forgotten, or remembered only as unpleasant dreams of the past." It is true that the Willamette Valley experiences markedly less humidity in the summer than do the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, but it still occasionally gets quite warm. Thus, one Linn County resident frankly described one summer day as "hot enough to make a fellow throw stones at his grandmother."^[44]

Early residents and travelers in the Willamette and Calapooia also noted the lack of thunderstorms there as compared to the midwestern states. Kendall remarked in 1852, "Thunder and lightning are of rare occurance." One 1846 observer declared this a "consoling circumstance to our countrywomen, who had been previously subject to its terrifying effects, on the banks of the Illinois and Mississippi."^[45]

Thus, although settlers of the Calapooia and Willamette valleys sometimes grumbled over the persistent winter rains, they also appreciated some of the ways in which the climate of the Willamette Valley differed from that of the Midwest and upper South. In comparing the negative and positive aspects, settlers in the Willamette and Calapooia were essentially coming to terms with a new land. Nineteenth-century Calapooia residents even went so far as to suggest that the climate and configuration of the Calapooia landscape actually resulted in a healthier atmosphere than that of the Midwest. Kendall commented to a correspondent in Indiana:

You can no doubt trace on your rich Wabash bottoms the elements which impregnate your atmosphere with the miasma from which pestilence and death are shot through society. . . . Apply the same principles to the land of my adoption. During the rainy season our winds and rains are directly from off the Pacific . . . in passing over the vast expanse of water, the miasma, containing elements of disease and death have principally at least been absorbed. . . . Through the dry season, though from another direction, we still

have the pure ocean breeze. Neither have we the extremes of heat and cold to which the Atlantic countries are subjected.

Kendall argued further that vegetation decomposes slowly in the Willamette Valley, keeping the air purer: "From this source [i.e., rotting vegetation], therefore, our atmosphere cannot be vitiated."^[46] In fact, in western Oregon organic matter actually decomposes very rapidly, and although the relation to illness in this case is questionable, Kendall obviously felt that this difference explained why the Calapooia landscape was healthier than the Midwest.

Kendall and other residents of the Calapooia and the Willamette also noted the relationship between the landscape—such as "pure water dashing from the mountains" in brooks, creeks, and rivers—and health. Blain remarked that "where pure water prevails, we have one of the best guarantees of healthfulness." Blain also recognized that the valley's standing waters and swamps sometimes "engender even ague in Oregon," but this illness was limited—at least among the Euro-American population. In fact, settlers' draining of land and confining of rivers and streams to narrower channels eliminated malaria from the Willamette Valley by the end of the nineteenth century.^[47]

Whether referring to atmospheric conditions, decomposition of organic material, or pure water, Calapooia settlers attempted to understand, through environmental explanations, why the Willamette, according to Blain, had "restorative power for all kinds of invalids." Sick and "broken-down" miners coming in from California, for instance, "soon experience the bracing and healthfulness of our climate, and are restored to health." The thousands of persons in the Midwest states "whose constitutions are worn out with the various forms of bilious disease," Blain further noted, "would in a few months be restored to health by a residence in Oregon." After emigrating to the Calapooia from the Midwest, Fielding Lewis wrote home in 1853, "I am in better health than I have bin in fifteen years."^[48]

Sickness on the Calapooia frontier was not unknown. Blain occasionally commented on "ague" or malaria. He further declared that "a man knowing that he lives in a world of sin , would simply be insane to suppose that he would never be sick here." A diphtheria epidemic ravaged the banks of the Calapooia in 1876–77, and the same disease continued to crop up throughout the nineteenth century. In 1885, Herman Gragg wrote to his sister from the Calapooia town of Brownsville about diphthe-

ria. And, scarlet fever, smallpox, cholera, and other diseases commonly occurred in Oregon in the nineteenth century. During the earlier years, however, with a small population on the Calapooia, illness seemed to be limited. Blain commented in 1854 that "only some four adult persons have died in the bounds of my congregation since we came here four years since." W. B. Mealey, doctor in Linn County, had stated in 1852 that "most physicians are complaining of the want of business [and] are obliged to go at some other business for a lively-hood."^[49]

Although the evidence is subjective, and therefore only suggestive at best, a number of Calapooia settlers did believe that the climate, weather, and configuration of the Willamette landscape rendered Ohio and Mississippi valley diseases less potent. This belief is one example of how living in a new land differed significantly from living on the older landscape of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys.

Settlers' experiences in the western Oregon environment, as this and the next chapter suggest, shed light on the ways in which the frontier both affirmed and challenged cis-Appalachian culture as it was brought West. As settlers attempted to replicate that culture in the Willamette environment, they had to impose it on an unfamiliar landscape, one whose central components were foothills and plains. This landscape made the settlement culture on the Pacific Northwest frontier of the Willamette and Calapooia slightly different from the culture of cis-Appalachia.

Living in a new land included shaping old habits to new environmental conditions, often with agreeable results. Settlers continued the age-old practice of plowing the soil, though they found it an easier task in the Willamette. They continued to plant most of the crops that they had before, though because of lack of humidity and cooler weather (something they found most agreeable), they grew more wheat than corn. They continued to build the same style of houses, but with new materials. And they continued to favor the raising of livestock, though the mild climate of the Willamette allowed a greater reliance on nature than had been possible on the Ohio. Kalapuya burning presented settlers with unparalleled livestock forage, the grasses and camas of the Willamette supplanting midwestern corncribs. Nature and the Kalapuya had rendered in the Willamette a landscape filled with an abundance of wild animals, which both had benefits and drawbacks. Wolves, cougar, and bear created numerous problems and Native Americans were feared, though without real reason; nevertheless, settlers on the Calapooia appreciated the abundance of game the landscape of the Willamette provided.

The Willamette landscape that Euro-American settlers came on was not simply "natural," though nature had played a role in its definition. The Kalapuya had also helped create the landscape. Natives needed various ecosystems from which to gather plants and hunt game. To ensure these commodities, they consciously manipulated the environment and moved from place to place. By contrast, Euro-American culture prized private property and a sedentary existence. Under such a system, to gain access to as many resources as possible, settlers had to choose carefully from a large geographic area a single piece of property that could offer them various necessities for daily living. Euro-American settlers needed wood and water, which they obtained from the forests of the valley. They also needed land for grazing, which they obtained from the extensive prairies. In addition, settlers sought out well-drained lands for early planting. Wood, water, grasslands, and well-drained soil influenced settlement in the Willamette as they had in the Midwest. All these qualities of landscape, the variety of ecosystems necessary for comfort in a new land, came together along the base of the foothills, where the Kalapuya-created forest-prairie edges also existed. There the earliest arrivals took the first claims. In choosing carefully, earliest settlers showed an understanding of the unique exigencies of the southern Willamette landscape. Through land-claiming procedures, furthermore, settlers came into intimate contact with contour and vegetation. This intimacy is demonstrated in their land-claim descriptions and in contemporary maps showing painstaking positioning of claims. In daily activities, then, earliest settlers developed an intimate connection with the foothills, though they also looked to the plains as the future.

Material evidence from the early settlements on the Calapooia shows that the westering process can be described only as complex. It was not a story of settlers simply desiring to and then actively forcing an objective will on the land. The landscape, partly natural and partly artificial, influenced settlers, too. And settlers' responses to the land also included a large degree of the positive. In the process of coming to terms with the new physical circumstances of the Willamette, settlers attempted to define a harmonious relationship with the environment, which is seen most effectively—at least on the level of material culture—in the way they physically placed themselves on and in that landscape. With limited technology to permit a change in the natural exigencies of the environment, settlers related to it, especially to the terrain of the valley, in an intimate way. Intimacy formed the linchpin of settlers' relationship to the wilderness.