A Piece of Siletz History
by Robert Kentta, Cultural Resources Director
This is the seventh in a series of articles on our Siletz Tribal
history, with each article describing a particular phase, era, or
subject related to our history. The last article was about the Western
Oregon treaties of 1853-1855. This article will discuss a very
important process that followed the treaties and their stipulations,
creating the Coast (or Siletz) Reservation in 1855.
Part VII - Creating the Coast (Siletz)
Reservation [The Real Story]
There has been a great deal of misinterpretation about how
and why our reservation was created. These errors began shortly
after the reservation was created and they have directed our tribal
history from that point on. The misinterpretations were used to open
the majority of our lands to settlement without treaty agreement or
compensation. The incorrect history also was used to force our
people to cede another 191,000 acres of reservation lands (in 1892)
because we supposedly had nothing more than temporary “use
and occupancy rights to the lands anyway. Eventually, the question
of our hunting, fishing, and gathering rights also were judged by
this false history.
For our people to move forward in a responsible way, we must
develop a complete understanding of our history as it all relates to
our treaties and our reservation. Our ancestors signed a number of
treaties between 1851 and 1855. The earliest one to be ratified was
the Rogue River Treaty of Sept. 10, 1853. Nine days after it was
signed, a treaty was concluded with our ancestors living in the Cow
Creek drainage. The two treaties progressed side by side through
the complete process of ratification by the U.S. Senate and being
proclaimed law by the president. They were both ratified on April
12,1854, and proclaimed on Feb. 5,1855.
The Rogue River and Cow Creek treaties are fairly unique in
their provisions and language. Usually, a permanent reservation
was created within the treaty. The standard process was for a tribe
to agree to cede the majority of its lands, but permanently “reserve”
a portion of its lands for its use - always. In the ratified treaties of
Western Oregon, our tribes ceded title to all aboriginal lands. We
reserved, however, the right to exclusive use and benefit of a portion
of our lands (a temporary reservation) until the president of the
United States selected a permanent reservation. In essence, the
U.S. Senate delegated the authority to create a permanent “treaty”
reservation to the president under the Rogue River and Cow Creek
treaties. Similar language appears in the other ratified Western
Oregon treaties.
It appears as though the original intent of the government and
our tribal people, of course, was to retain the temporary reservations
and confirm them separately for the tribes who had signed treaties
for those areas. But eventually, a policy of collecting all the scattered
tribes and bands and concentrating them on one large reservation,
away from the mining settler populations, became the preferred
alternative and the policy pursued.
The treaties themselves gave liberal authority to the
government to confederate many tribes together on one reservation.
Knowing that our Western Oregon people would have to be
completely whipped in a bloody war to induce us to live east of the
Cascades, the Oregon Territory’s Superintendent of Indian Affairs,
Joel Palmer, wrote to the commissioner of Indian affairs on April
17, 1855. He informed the commissioner that he had given notice
to Oregon settlers that the area between the Siltcoos River and
Cape Lookout would not be open to settlement by non-lndians. He
stated that it was intended as the permanent reservation for the
Coast, Willamette, and Umpqua tribes. He asked for tentative
approval of his actions and asked the commissioner to follow up
with whatever appropriate official action needed to occur.
Several months went by without any official action on the plan,
although the commissioner had given approval of Palmer’s actions
to secure the area. Palmer also was vested with certain
discretionary powers usually not entrusted to a territorial
superintendent of Indian affairs, at least partially because of the
state of emergency created by lawless whites screaming for
extermination. The truth is that it also was needed simply because
of the need for quicker action by the superintendent based on the
distances and history of delayed reactions from Washington, D.C.
Delayed reaction came into play with Palmer’s original request
to establish the Coast Reservation. In the meantime, Palmer began
drafting a treaty to confederate all Oregon coast tribes and get their
permission to confederate others with them on a coastal reservation.
It is not clear why Palmer took the course that he did (probably
partly as insurance against the possibility that his original request
would be rejected). Whatever the cause, he wrote the Coast Treaty
to create a reservation within the same area described in his April
17 request, but the boundaries he described in the Coast Treaty
were markedly different from those in the April request. The Coast
Treaty described a reservation containing approximately 800,000
acres. Palmer’s original request for a reservation included about
1.1 million acres.
Finally, all of the correspondence and comments on Palmer’s
original request fell into place, and the Coast Reservation was
established when President Franklin Pierce signed the executive
order on Nov. 9,1855. One of the most frequently quoted lies about
our tribal history is that our reservation was established by executive
order as a temporary, emergency measure because the Senate
failed to ratify the Coast Treaty. A close look at the dates of actions
and the content of correspondence leading up to the creation of the
Coast Reservation, however, will quickly refute that theory.
The executive order definitely followed Palmer’s original request
for a reservation and not the Coast Treaty, because the original
reservation boundaries go from Cape Lookout to the Siltcoos River
and not from Sand Lake to the Sea Lion Caves (the reservation
was established at 1.1 million acres, not 800,000 acres). It is also
noteworthy that the Coast Treaty document did not even arrive in
Washington, D.C., until several days after the executive order
creating the Coast Reservation was already signed. Other
correspondence from the commissioner of Indian affairs dated Oct.
29, 1855, recommends the reservation be created by presidential
action and that an executive order would be supported by the treaties
already ratified in Western Oregon.
Three days after the executive order was signed (surely before
he knew that his April request had been acted upon), Palmer wrote
to the commissioner of Indian affairs that it was futile to create a
permanent reservation at Table Rock. He stated that the miners
and settlers would never allow the tribes to live peacefully in the
area. He recommended its immediate abandonment and suggested
that plans be made to also remove those tribes to the
Coast Reservation.
This is the short version of the story of how our original
reservation was established. I hope it has piqued your curiosity to
learn more. Next month’s article will focus on removal to the
reservation and establishing the Siletz Agency.
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