Environmental Change

The DLCA had a paradoxical effect on the valley. On the one hand, it led to apparent economic stagnation, which troubled many residents. On the other hand, it preserved large amounts of land in what a casual observer might call "a state of wilderness," leaving the valley with an aesthetic appeal that defied economic valuation. Thus, when Frances Fuller Victor examined the Willamette Valley in 1872, she wrote: "Although most of the open or prairie land in Western Oregon is owned by donation claimants, locators, and others, comparatively little of it is cultivated. The uncultivated prairie lands, together with the half-wooded bench lands of the foot-hills, make a large extent of country still in its primeval condition." Victor declared that such a scene left her with a feeling of "romantic freedom."^[17]

Both the process of claiming the prairie and leaving parts of it "untouched" had effects not as environmentally benign as might have appeared to Victor. First, to settle on and cultivate the level prairie lands, new settlers had to drain them. Albert Waggoner, who grew up on the Calapooia, remembered, "This valley was too wet for much farming just at first. Later, when drains had been opened up and the sloughs drained wheat farming became all important." Commenting on drainage techniques of Calapooia farmers on the flat plains of the Willamette in 1877, a correspondent for Willamette Farmer wrote: "the country is flat, but the farmers have an easy-going way of ditching. . . . They plow

a few furrows in the center of the sloughs, and by just waiting the winter rains do the balance. I saw a few drains made in this way that were seven or eight feet wide and three feet deep, which were used as main drains into which were run one or two furrows at right angles, and this slow draining has enhanced the value of the land very much."^[18]

Nineteenth-century Willamette Valley inhabitants recognized that although such ditching might not necessarily be the best way to drain lands, it did remain the most popular, for the more effective underground tiling system proved too expensive and labor-intensive. Thus, when Calapooian William T. Templeton reported the progress his sons had made in ditching during the winter of 1878–79, he related the more typical story: "The boys have been Ditching a good eale this winter but are pretty near through they have Diched down the slough back of the barn and change the water from rinning by the old Tobacco house it is all Down flat." Sarah Cornett, who lived on the level plains of the Willamette along the lower Calapooia in the 1880s, also made notes about the progress her son "J" and husband John made in ditching. For five consecutive days at the end of March 1883, for instance, Cornett noted that "J ditched today," "J ditched some," "J ditched all day," "John ditched this eveneing," "J ditched," and "J ditched." Sunday, a day of rest, intervened, but on Monday, 2 April, "J ditched in afternoon."^[19]

The drainage of prairie lands had a deleterious effect on the environment. George Van Winkle staked his land claim on a series of sloughs that stretched along the Calapooia River on the plains of the Willamette, where concentrated a multitude of ducks, geese, cranes, snipes, and aquatic mammals. He and other nearby farmers opened furrows between these sloughs, and "the running water cut deeper until the sloughs and lakes became a connected stream" and drained away. Once the habitat vanished, so did the animals. At least one early resident made the connection between these two events: "The draining of the lakes and swamps have all had much to do with their [birds and animals] disappearance." Another Calapooia resident noted in later years, "The geese and ducks are almost gone from the valley. . . . It has not all been from shooting, however. The draining of the lakes and swamps have had much to do with their disappearance." And early settler John Minto noted the effect of land drainage on the Willamette, which "has largely ceased to be the home of the crane, curlew, gray plover, and even the snipe, as well as the beaver, muskrat and wild duck. These damp-

land and water fowls and animals, which once found here their breeding places, have gone forever, unless farmers in the near future construct artificial fish ponds, and reservoirs for irrigation when needed."^[20]

Although the uncultivated lands might signify a wilderness condition to some, as they did to Francis Fuller Victor, or a stagnation in the economy to others, such as L. B. Judson, the natural history of these lands continued to change. The forces of environmental succession naturally converted the untouched Willamette grasslands into forests. With cessation of Kalapuya burning, the effects of livestock grazing, and parts of the prairie lying idle, shrubs and trees quickly colonized the uncultivated lands. In some instances, shrubs and seedlings appeared very quickly after the demise of the Kalapuya and the onset of European-style agriculture. Already in the early 1840s Charles Wilkes had noted "that since the whites have had possession of the country, the undergrowth is coming up rapidly in places."^[21]

In the later nineteenth century, Willamette Valley inhabitants came to recognize the relationships among Euro-American settlement, livestock grazing and rooting, the problems that confronted the farmer who desired to cultivate the valley, and the role of the Kalapuya. One resident noted, "Since the advent of the whites the Indians have ceased to burn over the country every fall. . . . The fires burnt, and kept down, all young growth of every kind of timber in the Willamette." He went on to note that some groves of timber and shrubs, especially on the moist north sides of buttes, as well as large oaks, had escaped firing. Then he commented that livestock "have eaten out the native grasses, the turf or roots have died, leaving the earth mellow and in a fine condition for the reception of . . . seed" from the Douglas fir and oaks in the valley. This forestation caused difficulties for valley inhabitants, for shrubs and small tress invaded much land that was becoming more valuable for cultivation as the agricultural market expanded. The lamentable result for farmers, noted one valley inhabitant, was that "few have the time, will, strength, or means, to grub vast tracts of land, often so thick with brush that you can hardly 'stick a butcher-knife through it.'" But the value derived from productive land, assessed at $40 per acre, was well worth the estimated $22.50 per acre cost of slashing down the brush in June, burning it the following autumn, putting goats on it to eat for a year, and then plowing it twice.^[22]

Cutting and burning shrubs—what residents called brush—occupied much of the time of late nineteenth-century Calapooia farmers. A typi-

cal notation in Sarah Cornett's diary from the 1880s about daily activities on her family's farm was "John cut and burnt brush." One scholar of nineteenth-century Willamette Valley civilization found that white day laborers tended to refuse the arduous task of brush grubbing, so typically the head of a household had either to do the work himself or hire Chinese labor.^[23]

Willamette Valley farmers waged an ongoing battle against shrub and tree invasion through the nineteenth century. On some fronts they ultimately lost the war. At the turn of the century one chronicler of Calapooia Valley history, looking back onto the landscape of the past, remarked that previously the small hills and buttes rising from the floor of the valley had been "free from timber and covered with beautiful grass. . . . The Indians had kept the brush burned down, burning over the hills each year. The white man neglected to do this, and now in many places the grass has given way to moss and timber." In the 1930s a Calapooia resident remarked, "There was not so much brush in the country then as now, because the Indians came through in little bands and set fire to the range, thus keeping it down. The open country, free from brush and undergrowth made hunting and cattle herding a much easier task than it is now."^[24]

In addition to the encroachment of shrubs and trees, other problems beset farmers as well. In 1872 Frances Fuller Victor commented that "one of the pests of Oregon farming is a large, coarse fern [bracken, Pteridium aquilinum ] . . . which is common to the forests, and which encroaches on the improved lands contiguous to them. . . . It is very difficult to eradicate, the roots penetrating to a great depth, and being very tough and strong." As early as 1852 Thomas Kendall had noted that bracken covered some areas of the valley so densely "as to prevent a heavy coat of grass, rendering [these lands] far inferior, for stock, to the rich grass of the plains."^[25]

Calapooia residents resorted to various techniques of dealing with bracken. Fannie Adams Cooper's family found the best way to eradicate it. On the spot selected for their garden on the upper Calapooia, bracken grew "two and three feet high and brush everywhere." Cooper's husband rolled an immense pile of logs onto the garden and set them afire, burning the soil "deep and black far in the ground." The result was that "never a weed grew there," though Cooper had to admit that bracken "once in a while" did return. Since some Calapooia residents could not beat them, they joined them, finding ingenious ways to

use bracken. On a trip up the Calapooia Valley in 1861, George A. Waggoner and a companion had dinner and spent the night with a local settler. After the main course, Waggoner and his friend expressed surprise when their host presented them with a "fern pie." This dessert so impressed Waggoner's traveling companion that he immediately wrote to inform his wife to "experiment with [bracken] as food, in different forms."^[26]

When they attempted to engage in agriculture, settlers found they also had to contend with the invasion of a number of other native and exotic plants, such as "blue pod" (a native vetch, Vicia sp.), thistles (Cirisium spp.), and dog fennel (Foeniculum vulgare , an exotic), all of which readily colonize disturbed sites, particularly tilled soil. Calapooia settler John Wigle recalled that geese and ducks grazed on young wheat, stunting it, so that "the blue pod and thistles would come on and hinder the growth of the wheat." Several early valley residents noted the inability of mill screens to separate blue pod from the wheat, and thus much of it ended up in flour and "women complained of it bitterly." Sarah Cornett's diary reveals problems with thistles and dog fennel. For instance, on 4 July 1885, her husband John "finished mowing in the Orchard and then some in the field," while the hired hand, Hunter, "killed thistles." Cornett also mentioned that another hired hand "pulled dog fennell the rest of the day" on 21 August 1885. Later that month, he spent two more days on the pesky weed, finishing up on the twenty-ninth by "pulling and mowing" it.^[27]

Market agriculture in the Calapooia and the southern Willamette Valley in the late nineteenth century caused other changes in the ecosystem. In addition to the draining of the plains, which reduced fowl and aquatic animal populations, enclosing open lands and the invasion of shrubs resulted in the decrease on the prairies of certain other animal species, such as the white-tailed deer. One Calapooia pioneer descendant declared, "Deer seldom came out on the valley floor much after the settlement was well started, but earlier settlers say that they formerly roamed in herds all over the valley." Another noted, "White tailed deer are more an animal of the open valley than the smaller black-tailed deer. . . . Now I presume they are all gone, though it may be possible that there are still a very few of them in the woods and among the small wooded islands there."^[28]

Beginning in the 1850s, Calapooia settlers set out to fulfill Kendall's dream that the "central portions of the prairies" would "one day be the

great agricultural spots." In some ways they achieved this pastoral dream. The Donation Land Claim Act placed virtually all of the Willamette Valley's cultivable land into private hands by the mid 1850s.^[29] Through drainage, settlers converted much of this land into farmland. Between 1850 and 1890, depending on location in the Calapooia, Linn County, or the Willamette Valley at large, improved acres of farmland equaled between 50 and 80 percent of total claimed land (table 5).

Agricultural development in the Willamette, however, did not necessarily spiral continuously upward. Large segments of claimed land remained unimproved through the end of the century. In part, responsibility for this situation lay with the original generosity of the Donation Land Claim Act. One geographer found that in the four middle and southern counties of the Willamette Valley—Marion, Benton, Linn, and Lane—the ratio and absolute amount of improved land declined after 1880. Also, although the amount of wheat harvested in the Calapooia, Linn County, and the Willamette between 1850 and 1890 increased, the total amount of acres of wheat declined in Linn County and the Willamette between 1880 and 1890 (table 3). Reasons for abandonment of cultivable lands include exhaustion of soil, a shift in the center of wheat industry in the Pacific Northwest to the Inland Empire after 1880, and the shift in husbandry and agriculture to dairying and orchards in the later nineteenth century.^[30]

But the central agricultural district in the southern Willamette Valley, Linn County in particular, remained the plains rather than the foothills through the end of the century. The plains were no more fertile than the land cultivated along the foothills, but there were more cultivable acres and more cultivable acres per claim. And on the plains, farmers improved more land than they did in the hills.^[31] In the narrower Calapooia Valley, forest and foothills became obstacles to cultivation on a large scale. Farms along the foothills had more acres of woodland and fewer acres in cultivated fields than did their counterparts on the prairies (table 6).

In a sense, farmers relatively though not absolutely fulfilled Kendall's 1852 expectation. The open prairies west of the Calapooia foothills definitely became the center of agriculture in the region. But development proceeded in a halting fashion. Important changes in residents' attitudes and perceptions of land accompanied the claiming of the prairies. Claiming and cultivating the prairie had severe repercussions for the environment as well. Some of these changes that Calapooia and

other Willamette residents unwittingly initiated also came back to bedevil them. The invasion of blue pod, thistles, bracken, dog fennel, and brush was a natural reaction to changes in the environment that humans had initiated. Despite these and other impediments to cultivation and success—such as loss of soil fertility and even abandonment—agriculture on the plains continued to dominate the economy of Linn County and the Calapooia Valley.

At the same time, locals also saw the utility of the landscape in terms of industrial potential and thus established manufactories around which grew up towns. As with the extension of husbandry and agriculture in the Calapooia, we can see changes in human attitudes toward the environment by analyzing early industry and town development.