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JUNE 15, 2004
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h' I? I?T . CT it"4 - "' A search of the 1910 United States Census turned up five people of Tamel de- ,
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f' S C SwlI 2 H II 1 Z Z cited two: a Frank Barnes born in 1857 and a John Sulkey, born in 1888.
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rent locations of Dallas and West Salem and on
the east by the Willamette River. (38 The
Kalapuyans)
The Oregon county and river, both named
Yamhill, were each derived from the Yamel
Bands of Indians, according to Olson.
The "Yamels," (23 The Kalapuyans) have
been all but extinct since the mid-1800s, but ac
cording to Olson, the Yamels likely live on in
Tribal members today.
An indication of just how far from Tribal
memory the Yamels had faded, however, came
in CTGR's "Notice of Proposed Membership Roll,"
submitted to the Department of the Interior in
1955 at the time of Termination. This was the
last time the Tribe included prior Tribal affilia
tions in a list of members, and not a single name
of the 882 submitted was presented as a descen
dant of the Yamhill Tribe.
The proposed roll should not be considered com
plete, however, according to Olson, because at
the time, Indians were not asked to give a sec
ond level of Tribal affiliation, meaning that it
was enough that they were Kalapuyans; they
were not asked to specify which band of
Kalapuyans, and in fact, many names on the
list stop after citing their Kalapuyan forerun
ners. The Yamels faced far bigger challenges start
ing almost two centuries earlier.
A series of epidemics coming with white set
tlers principally explain their demise. It didn't
help that Kalapuyans also faced on-going at
tacks from both these same settlers and also from
other Tribes.
The Kalapuyans were not known to be war
like and did not partake in scalping, according
to Hartless, but war appears to have been a fact
of their lives.
For example, Hartless reported that the
Kalapuyans as a whole did not have a chief over
all the related Tribes and bands, but that each
Tribe or Band had three chiefs, with two acting
principally as "go betweens," while the third
stayed in the village. "Only in case of war did
he leave his resident village" (39 The
Kalapuyans).
Hartless also reported that Kalapuyans used
red, white and black stripes for war paint (41
The Kalapuyans), presumably to fend off attacks.
Anthropologist Albert S. Gatschet reported in
1899 in The Journal of American Folklore (based
on his 1877 interviews at the Grand Ronde Res
ervation) that the Kalapuyans "were not war
like, and are not known to have participated in
any war expeditions. The coast Tribes of the
Alsi and the other Tribes now gathered upon the
Siletz or Coast Reservation kept them in terror"
(23 The Kalapuyans).
The Kalapuyans not only feared coastal Tribes
but also the Klamaths from the south, accord
ing to a 1919 article in the Cottage Grove Senti
nel (32 The Kalapuyans).
These other Tribes made frequent drives into
Kalapuyan territory in the northern Valley. As
the Yamels died out, the Tillamooks were said to
have spent ever more winter time in the rela
tively better valley weather.
While it is not unreasonable to suggest that
appropriate federal action could have saved
threatened Native Bands, the political will of a
public wildly against Natives and frequently
embarked on efforts to exterminate them played
a dominant role following the near extinction
brought on by disease.
Even Joel Palmer, Indian Agent for the area,
talked about "reckless and evil-disposed whites."
What happened to the Yamels in the
Willamette Valley stands among countless ex
amples of what has happened to aboriginal
peoples throughout Oregon and beyond.
DEATH FROM DISEASE
Two epidemics struck Tribal members begin
ning with the small-pox epidemic which swept
into the Pacific Northwest from Missouri in 1782
83. Estimates are that it killed 2,000 of 3,000
existing Kalapuyans (21 The Kalapuyans).
In 1805, the Lewis and Clark expedition
reached the West Coast and reported some ve
nereal disease among Columbia River Tribes,
and although the Lewis and Clark report does
not regard it as an epidemic, historians and ad
venturers since have reported that it played a
role, along with "the effects of exposure to wet
weather, and for the want of food," according to
an American missionary visiting Joseph Gervais,
one of the first settlers of the Willamette Valley
(21-22 The Kalapuyans).
An 1814 diary by a fur trader, Alexander
Henry, recounted in the Mackey book, described
the Yamhills as an ugly, ill-formed race, and
four of them had some defect of the eyes... Those
we met were wretchedly clothed in deerskins;
their quivers were of deer's heads and necks.
Their women had petticoats of fringed leather,
like the Chinook women's cedar petticoats, but
reaching only halfway down the thighs. They
wore small round bonnets of wattap Probably
a reed and I or grass combination, similar to the
hats worn by coastal tribes. with a peak three
inches high. They were of short stature, and
altogether the most miserable, wild, and rascally
looking Tribe I have seen on this side of the Rocky
Mountains (2 The Kalapuyans).
The eye problems referred to are "consistent
with inbreeding," said Merle Holmes, in his last
interview. "You're not looking at the cream of
the crop (among those left after the succession
of epidemics)," he added.
From 1830-33, a second epidemic variously
called "intermittent fever" or "ague," "viral in
fluenza" or "malaria" took out 75-95 percent of
those villages it hit, often wiping out everyone
in a village. One observer wrote, "Their habit
was, when the fever came on, to plunge them
selves into the water; which proved fatal to them"
(22 The Kalapuyans).
As much as 90 percent of the Tribe is thought
to have been wiped out by these diseases (22
The Kalapuyans).
An 1849 report by Oregon Territory Governor
Joseph Lane quoted in Mackey's book said, "The
Yam Hill Indians are a small Tribe who claim
the country drained by a river of that name,
which is mostly taken up by the whites; they
are poor; have a few horses; are poorly armed,
and are well disposed. They number about 90;
of whom 19 are warriors" (92 The
Kalapuyans).
Local historian Dennis Werth, from his read
ings, believes the Yamel Band was "just about
wiped out by the 1840s." He cites the story in
J.C. Cooper's fictional book, The Yamhills, to
suggest the poor state the Yamels were in by
then by noting that Tillamook Indians were liv
ing in the valley by the 1850s in a "well-established,
huge, urban complex, with living for 400."
"You don't go to another's territory unless
they're sick or frightened," said Werth.
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Cooper lived in McMinnville when he pub
lished his book in 1904. Werth called him a
"mover and shaker" for the period who pulled
together a lot of reliable information for the book.
The Yamhills, subtitled, "an Indian Romance,"
suggests that the Tillamooks returned to the
valley seasonally, "when the weather on the
coast got bad in winter."
A 1955 analysis by S.F. Cook said that what
ever the number or percentage of fatalities from
disease, "The Indians as an effective social and
biological organism were destroyed in the lower
valleys of the Columbia and Willamette rivers"
(22 The Kalapuyans).
LANGUAGE
Historians often group the Yamels among the
Kalapuyans not only because geographically,
they lived within the territory occupied by other
Kalapuyans, but because linguists also suggest
that the Yamel languages fit within the same
language family.
On the other hand, according to an 1884 state
ment by Oregon physician W.W. Oglesby, who
reported what he had learned from
"Cheoneisheon," a Chief of the Kalapuyans:
"The language of some ten or thirteen Tribes or
families of Indians in Oregon is all different
they all speak a different language. There are
not two Tribes or families of Indians that speak
the same language... Even those who lived very
near each other within a short distance from
each other within a day's ride of each other
their town would have a different language"
(28-29 The Kalapuyans).
THE YAMELS' LIVES,
DAY TO DAY
On a great variety of subjects, Mackey's book
provides a wealth of information about the
Kalapuyans:
Doctors, in those days, had a useful way of
charging patients: "No cure, no fee," said
Hartless (40 The Kalapuyans).
Marriage was in part a business deal, accord
ing to both Gatschet and Hartless. The price,
however, was "an indemnity given by the bride
groom to her relations for the daily work or other
services which the bride will henceforth no longer
render to her family," reported Gatschet (24
The Kalapuyans).
In 1872, according to June Olson, the federal
government banned traditional Indian mar
riages and required they be held in dominant
culture churches.
,No marriage was allowed within families, ac
cording to Hartless, except that men were obli
gated to marry their wife's sister. "A good man
was given that sister free of charge. He could
not refuse her." And men could have many
wives both within and outside of their Tribe. (40
The Kalapuyans).
"Not all marriages were necessarily sexual in
nature," said Olson. "The Chief is protector of
the family or village." Sometimes, she added,
Chiefs would marry to keep a young woman
within the community, or to confer status upon
her.
Tribes or Bands communicated with interpret
ers who learned other Tribal languages through
inter-marriage or during a time they were held
captive by another Tribe, said Oglesby (28-29
The Kalapuyans).
The Indians considered "a falsehood or lie or
to deceive each other as the greatest crime they
could be guilty of," according to Oglesby. "It was
very seldom that an Indian ever told anything
but the truth, he said, until the whites came
among them and they became acquainted with
them" (28 The Kalapuyans).
They made their canoes out of whole trees,
using cedar, white-fir or cottonwood varieties,
according to Hartless. The canoes were between
14-30 feet long, and either dug out by flint or
burned out providing seating capacities for 4
30 people (42 The Kalapuyans).
Drums, gongs, rattles and bells were used as
musical instruments (42-43 The
Kalapuyans).
Tobacco was the only crop they planted. They
burned rotten logs as a base and placed the seeds
in "without spading" (44 The Kalapuyans).
Camas was a favored food," according to
Stephen Dow Beckham's book, The Indians of
Western Oregon. "This blue lily grew in great
meadows along the edges of small streams and
in clearings in the forests throughout the region.
For many hours each year the women and girls
labored in the camas fields with their digging
sticks. Prying back on the antler handles, they
twisted the stick into the earth to lay bare the
prized bulbs. The placed the camas in earthen
ovens lined with fire-heated rocks. They cov
of information about
the Yamel Bands.
ered the bulbs with layers of leaves and closed
the oven with a mat and earth and allowed the
camas to bake two or three days. When they
removed the cooked bulbs, they were ready to
eat immediately or to dry in the sun and be
packed into large loaves to be stored until later
in the year" (48-49 The Indians of Western
Oregon).
A YAMEL MYTH
The place about as close as one gets to the end
of a people came in 1914 when Mrs. Louisa
Selky, "the last of the native speakers of
Yamhill," (199 Kalapuya Texts) dictated a
Yamhill myth to Dr. Leo J. Frachtenberg, a U.S.
government linguist, at Grand Ronde. The myth
was printed in a 1945 University of Washing
ton Anthropology book called, Kalapuya Texts.
The myth, "Coyote follows his (entrails) daugh
ter to the land of the dead," seems particularly
apt in light of the fate faced by Yamels and so
many Natives across America. In Native myths,
coyote represented "Trickster, transformer, cul
ture hero, traitor to own kind." And cougar was
defined as "hero yet treacherous" (80 The
Kalapuyans).
In this apparently unfinished myth, Coyote
hunted and killed Gopher, and wished a daugh
ter to life from Gopher's entrails. Cougar wanted
the daughter, and brought her home, but the
daughter did not want anything from Cougar.
Cougar turned some marrow bones, a delicacy
offered to and declined by the daughter, into
wildcherry, but Coyote insisted she have it.
When the daughter ate the wildcherry, it choked
her and she died. Coyote followed her to the
land of the dead, requiring a canoe over the
water to the land of the dead. Once there, Coy
ote killed and skinned five dead people's elks,
threw away the meat and kept the bones for the
rest of the journey. And the narrative breaks
off here: "Then it became dark, and now the dead
people danced again..." (203 Kalapuya Texts).
HOW THE LAND
WAS LOST
The 1851 Treaties with Kalapuyan Bands were
signed in what is today Champoeg Park. In the
case of the Yamels, they brought together the
remnants of "the Yamhill Band of the Callapooya