Smoke Signals'
JUNE 15, 2004
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A Story of Tragedy
The Kalapuyans by Harold Mackey,
Ph.D. is the 1974 Indian history classic
for the northern Willamette Valley and
particularly for The Confederated
Tribes of Grand Ronde (CTGR), which
honor the Kalapuyans as one of main
Tribes of the Confederation.
With the reissue of the book last
month, Smoke Signals is spotlighting
one unheralded, almost lost, group of
Kalapuyans called the Yamels, an an
cient Indian name that has long since
morphed into the "Yamhills."
The new edition of the book, just re
leased last month at the Mission Mill
Museum in Salem, has been updated
with a new afterword and appendices
from CTGR. It comes courtesy of the
Mission Mill Museum and the Tribe's
Cultural Resources Department.
For this report, I am grateful to Tribal
member and Tribal Cultural Resources
Director June Olson, as well as Cultural
Collections Specialist Lindy Trolan,
Tribal member and Cultural Protection
Specialist Connie Schultz and local his
torian Dennis Werth for their direction,
advice and efforts, and to recently de
ceased Tribal Elder Merle Holmes, a
lifelong student of the Tribe's history,
for his willingness to share what he had
learned over the years as well as pro
viding valuable historical material.
The history, part of an on-going occa
sional series of historical pieces, refers
frequently to a number of texts and
cites page numbers to encourage read
ers to head back to the sources for
more.
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; ' CAUAPUOYA TRIBE i
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A page from 77ie Kalapuyans shows the terrotory of the Yamel Bands. As you can tell from the map, their name
had already been changed to the Yamhills.
Til McMyUtoJAotUeik
By Ron Kartell
ike a river fed by many streams, the
Confederated Tribes of Grand
Ronde (CTGR) look to five Tribes as
I J their cultural and historical fore
mmmtO runners. Of these Tribes, the
Kalapuyans included more than a dozen Bands
related by geography and language (including
one that kept the same name as the umbrella
organization) and another called, the Yamels.
The territory of the Yamels included what is to
day the Reservation of the CTGR.
Seventy-year-old William Hartless, a Mary's
River Indian, described three Bands of Yamels.
(Mary's River Indians were another Band of the
Kalapuyans.) In fact, according to June Olson,
"There were a lot of little bands here. They were
fragmented, and that's why we could be termi
nated so easy."
In a 1913 interview, Hartless said that the
Yamels lived on both sides of what is today the
Yamhill River, and that their territory was bor
dered on the north by the current locations of
McMinnville and Dayton, on the west by the
Coast Mountain Range, on the south by the cur-