Smoke signals., April 01, 1986, Image 8

Reservation Plan (Continued)
The prehlstroy of the peoples of the mountain valleys southward from the
Willamette Valley Is not well known. The valleys were occupied by hunting
people possibly 4,000 to 6,000 years ago. The culture of the earliest
occupants seems to have had affinities with the Great Basin cultures
across the mountains In southeastern Oregon and Nevada. Over time, people
entered this tangle of mountains and valleys from all directions and found
refuge in their Isolated pockets.
The ancestors of the Umpqua, Cow Creek, and Rogue River people must have
had a remarkable prehistory. A little over a thousand years ago, they
would have been with their sub-Arctic Dene-speaking kin In northern Canada
and Alaska. At some time after that, groups of Dene moved to the south.
Their exact routes are not known. By the time that Europeans arrived in
the northwest, some Dene had reached southwestern Oregon and northwestern
California. Two isolated groups, no longer in existence, lived in the
heavily forested hill country Just north and south of the Lower Columbia.
There are various hypotheses as to how the Pacific Dene reached their
homes. Since most of them lived in isolated heavily forested mountainous
country, it is possible that they were skilled upland hunters who
infiltrated their Oregon homelands by moving from southwest Washington
down along the Coast Range In country relatively little used by other
Indian groups.
Shasta-speaking people from the Rogue River were among the first Indians
settled on the Grand Ronde Reservation. The Rogue River Shasta were
northern representatives of the Hokan linguistic group whose members
occupied much of northeastern California, a portion of the coast north of
San Francisco, most of Central California, and desert lands around the
lower Colorado.
There is much that we do not know about prehistory in Western Oregon. The
available data reveal tantalizing glimpses of fascinating events and
mysteries. In the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, there are
descendants of people who have probably lived In the Willamette Valley for
over 8,000 years. The ancestors of others may have arrived only about a
thousand years ago. Whether of more ancient or more recent origin, all
the Indians ancestral to the present day Grand Ronde people were
established in western Oregon well before the arrival of the first white
visitors and explorers.
EARLY CONTACTS
European explorers and traders were visiting the shores and the great
rivers of the northwest by the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of
the nineteenth centuries. However, apart from the coastal people and
those on the lower Columbia, none of the ancestors of the Grand Ronde
people had direct contact in their own territories with these early
visitors. The first European known to visit the lands above the falls of
the Willamette was Stuart of Fort Astoria In 1811. In 1813 a fur trading
outpost was established near present day Salem. In these early years the