Reservation Plan (Continued)
homes and non-Indians who coveted Indian farms and village sites and who
demanded that the Indians be removed. By 1855 lawless frontier elements
were advocating extermination of the Indians. Land cession treaties were
hurriedly concluded with a view to clearing the legal Impediment to white
settlement.
TREATIES AND THE EXECUTIVE ORDER OP 1857
The Indians of the lower Columbia and the Willamette Valley negotiated
treaties with Federal representatives beginning in 1851 which would have
secured to them small reservations in their own territories. The Senate
declined to ratify these treaties. Finally, in the years 1853 through
1855 the United State negotiated seven ratified treaties with Indian
tribes and bands of the Willamette, Umpqua and Rogue River valleys in
western Oregon. These treaties provided for the extinguishment of Indian
title to lands lying between the Coast and Cascade ranges in western
Oregon. The seven treaties and the bands who were parties to each are
shown in the accompanying table.
The treaties provided that the separate bands would confederate and remove
to land that would be reserved as a permanent home for them. The Indians
wer? insistent that they would not leave the Willamette Valley. Beginning
in 1856 and for the next several years the United States removed over
twenty Indian bands from their traditional homes and lands in these
valleys and adjacent areas and relocated them on the Grand Ronde Indian
Reservation. In the 1870s these people were Joined by some Indians from
the Salmon and Nestucca rivers.
The reservation was established pursuant to treaty arrangements in 1855
and an Executive Order of June 30, 1857. The text of the Executive Order
does not clearly set out the exact boundaries of the Reservation. This,
combined with other problems, has created some confusion as to the exact
acreage contained in the original Reservation.
The Grand Ronde Reservation was located on the eastern side of the Coast
Range of Mountains on the headwaters of the Yamhill River in the
Willamette Valley. The center of the Reservation was about sixty miles
southwest of Portland and about twenty-five miles from the ocean.