|
|
|
|
|
The Portland Oregonian – November 9, 1980
Chief Mi-wa-leta, an impressive man known to counsel peace, signed the Cow Creek Treaty in 1853 before he died in a fever epidemic.
After Mi-wa-leta died, the Cow Creeks elected a new chief, Quentlousau, and made his son Tom, deputy chief.
After the Rogue Indian Wars of 1855-56, the Cow Creeks were disbanded and went for decades without being a cohesive community.
The last known full-blooded Cow Creeks had scattered into the mountains of Southern Oregon rather than settle on the Grand Ronde reservation hundreds of miles away.
Chuck Jackson and his cousin, Sue Shaffer, the great grandchildren of Susan Nonta Thomason, a full blooded Cow Creek medicine woman, worked with handful of other dedicated Cow Creek Band members to re-establish the Cow Creek Band as a federally recognized band and to have the Cow Creek Bill signed into law in 1980.By Barry Siegel
LA Times---Washington Post ServiceOne morning about 25 years ago, Chuck Jackson found himself trying to explain to a Bureau of Indian Affairs employee why his small Cow Creek band of Umpqua Indians should qualify for various federal assistance and land compensation programs.
Jackson, one-eighth Cow Creek, talked about the three-room cabin he had lived in all his life.
Built by Jackson's parents on 40 acres of homestead land in southwestern Oregon, the cabin was just a stone's throw from Elk Creek, the birthplace of his great-grandmother, Susan Nonta, a full-blooded Cow Creek medicine woman.
He described the pits and depressions along the mountain ridges, full of old bits of broken stone, that his grandmother said marked ancient Cow Creek villages.
He described Huckleberry Patch, deep in the woods, where his family and others gathered every spring to hunt, pick ripening berries and gamble.
He told of the time his grandmother, on a rocky plateau overlooking the patch, pointed to where their ancestors had buried cookware, tools, arrowheads and weapons, and of how, years later, a pothunter named Moore found this cache and now had 1,200 Indian artifacts at his museum in Central Point.
Finally, Jackson grew irritated and told the bureau employee that his people "were on Elk Creek long before there ever was a Bureau of Indian Affairs…." They have been there, he said, since "before the big mountain burned high into the sky."
Jackson referred to the eruption of Mount Mazama that formed Crater Lake 8,000 years ago. He had heard of the demon mountain many times because it had caused much trouble for the Indians, covering their rivers, lakes and land with ash and lava.
When Jackson was finished, the bureau employee had a question: Where was the proof? How did Jackson really know all this was true?
Jackson had stared at him, "Because my grandmother told me," was all he could say.
That was not good enough.
Once again, the Cow Creeks were ruled ineligible to make land claims or collect benefits because they were not listed on any federal register of Indian tribes.
So it has gone for Cow Creek descendants during most of the last 50 years. In the annals of American Indian History, theirs is a classic example of a vanished culture.
It was not only the federal government that forgot them; they themselves did not know their history.
Legend, for example, told of a treaty signed with the white man, but no one, not the government, not the Indians could find a copy or knew its terms.
The last known full-blooded Cow Creeks had scattered into the Umpqua and Cascade mountains of Southern Oregon in the mid-19th century rather than settle on reservations.
No reservation meant no recognition by the government.
After years of intermarriage, often with French-Canadian fur trappers, the Cow Creeks' modern-day descendants could claim only fractions of Indian blood.
What they knew of their ancestors had been passed on orally, in bits and pieces, by their elders.
But as the years passed, the elders had grown reluctant to talk of their Indian ways. The younger folk took well-paying jobs as loggers and stopped living off the land.
The Cow Creek story might have ended there, except that Chuck Jackson, 46, and his cousin, Susan Shaffer, 58, and a handful of others decided they did not want it to end.
Affidavits and oral histories were taken from surviving elders.
Letters were written to professors and government officials. Boxes of old correspondence were pored over, meetings held and lawyers hired.
In June 1979, Jackson, Shaffer, five other Cow Creek descendents and an Oregon history professor, Stephen Beckham, packed up 30,104 pieces of evidence and flew to Washington, D.C., to testify before a joint hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs and the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs.
The first fruit of their effort came in May, when President Carter, calling it "a unique case," signed the Cow Creek Bill, which suspends the statute of limitations and allows the Cow Creeks to seek compensation in the Courts of Claims for land taken in the 19th century.
By then, using the Freedom of Information Act, the 1853 treaty had been found, along with tribal records, payment sheets, census reports and the remarkably vivid memoirs of George Riddle, a white settler who, as a boy in the 1850's played with Cow Creek Indian children.
Jackson, Shaffer and the others had quite a story to tell the legislators about the treatment of Indians then and now, and about one band's struggle to reestablish its identity.
The history that follows is drawn from several sources, including interviews with Cow Creek descendants, their congressional testimony and supporting documents, George Riddle's "Early Days in Oregon" and Stephen Beckman's "Indians of Western Oregon."
The Cow Creeks' difficulty at being officially recognized began with the fact that the Indians of Western Oregon valleys organized not into large tribes but into small villages, each with several families.
In the valley of the south fork of the Umpqua River lived a group of 200 Indians, divided into five bands, who came generally to be called the Upper Umpqua Indians.
They later acquired the name Cow Creeks because their 1853 treaty was signed at Cow Creek.
In a valley of rich bottom land, heavily wooded with fir, pine, oak and madrone, and well populated by deer, cougar, beaver, grouse, salmon and steelhead, the Indians ate well.
George Riddle was 11 when he first encountered these Indians. His family arrived in the valley one afternoon in October 1851 and as Riddle's mother began to cook the evening meal, about 100 Indians circled their camp.
"At that time we heard the ‘Miwaleta, Miwaleta," Riddle wrote many years later. "A hush fell upon the crowd and an Indian appeared who presence an appearance showed that he was one in authority. He was a man between 60 and 70 years old, about 6 feet tall, of heavy build."
Encounter peaceful
The encounter was peaceful, with Chief Miwaleta sitting at the Riddle camp, his hands resting on grandson's head as the boy lay at his feet.
Riddle recalled that Miwaleta always counseled peace with the whites.
In the fall of 1852, when the Rogue River Indians came to ask the Cow Creeks to join them in battle against the whites, Riddle remembered sitting with the Indian boys and listening to Miwaleta, before a great council of Indians, talk for two straight days, recounting the full history of their tribal wars as reason for avoiding more fighting. The chief prevailed, and the Cow Creeks remained peaceful.
But after the discovery of gold in Jackson Creek in January 1852, white settlers and gold miners began pouring in.
According to Beckman, the settlers' hogs ate the acorns and rooted out camas bulbs, which were staples of the Indians' diet. The mining debris filled the streams and disrupted the salmon runs. Most damaging of all, the settlers brought in new diseases, and in 1852-53, an epidemic swept through the valley.
At least half of the Cow Creeks quickly died of fever, including Miwaleta.
Treaty signed
These events led to remaining Cow Creeks to sign a treaty in September 1853 with Joel Palmer, superintendent of Indian Affairs in the Oregon Territory, in which they exchanged 800 square miles of land for a small reservation and $12,000 to be made in 20 annual payments.
This sales price came to 2 1/3 cents an acre at a time when the government land office was selling Oregon land for $1.25 and acre.
Two happy years followed. Riddle wrote that the Cow Creeks elected a new chief, Quentlousau, and made his son Tom, deputy chief passing over Miwaleta's son Jackson.The peace was disrupted when some Rogue River Indians were massacred by gold miners at Table Rock Oct. 8, 1855, and the bloody Rogue River war of l855-56 broke out.
The Cow Creeks held a council, but now Miwaleta was dead. The Indians, believing that the white people meant to exterminate them whether they remained at peace or not, told Riddle's family they had decided to join the war and die fighting.
That is exactly what they did. Riddle finished his account"
"They were never seen again in the Cow Creek valley. It was reported that out of all the able-bodied young men of the Cow Creek Indians, but one boy, about my age, survived the war."
History murky
At this point the Cow Creek history becomes murky. Apparently, when the Indians went to war, they left their old men, squaws and children hidden in the mountain canyons.
Some were rounded up and marched by soldiers in early 1856 to the Grande Ronde reservation 200 miles north.
But not all the Cow Creeks went to Grande Ronde.
Letters and documents indicate that a small band of perhaps no more than 20 fled into the Umpqua and Cascade mountains and never lived on a reservation.
The last sighting of any full-blooded Cow Creeks came during the Civil War.
In the summer of 1861, George Riddle by then a Union soldier and member of Company C, First Oregon Cavalry passed through the Willamette Valley with his company and camped near Corvallis.
A group of Indians was camped nearby, and when some Indian boys visited one day, Riddle discovered they spoke the language of the Cow Creeks.
They were too young to know Riddle, but they brought back squaws from their camp whom Riddle immediately recognized.
"One of them fell on her knees in front of me, crying. This one proved to be the widow of Chief Tom, who was killed in Olalla battle, and one of the boys was Tom's son who was about 3 years old when they went into the war five years before, and we had named him "Shiner."
These squaws begged to be taken back to their old home. They were homesick. I questioned them about the Indian men. Their answer would be a ‘Mem-a-aloos kon-a-way mem-a-loos.' Dead, all dead. That was the last I saw of the Cow Creeks."
The efforts of the 20th century Cow Creek descendants to trace their history began in the 1920s, but it made no progress until, in 1978, their lawyers decided to make use of the 1974 Freedom of Information Act.
In the National Archives, the Cow Creeks found a copy of the 1853 treaty, as well as tribal rolls, censuses, and records of payment.
From these documents, they pieced together individual records of descendency, confirmed tribal legends, and concluded that the government had paid most of the $12,000 called for in the 1853 treaty to the Grande Ronde reservation Indians, which, records indicate, never included more than 45 Cow Creeks.
The Cow Creeks involved in the present action claim to be descendants of those who fled to the mountains.
The Cow Creeks convinced Oregon legislators to introduce the 1979 Cow Creek bill, which gives them the right to pursue their case against the government in court.
This time the bill passed, 119 years after George Riddle law saw Cow Creek squaws on their knees, crying for their homeland.
The Cow Creek intended later this year to ask for a payment representing "reasonable value" for their 800 square miles, as of 1853, plus interest.
They also intend to seek restoration as a recognized tribe eligible for bureau benefits, but this is a separate matter requiring further congressional action.
The Cow Creeks will not ask for the land itself, as some Indian groups have done; they are content to leave it in the hands of the U.S. Forest Service.
Chuck Jackson's particular passion is not to own but preserve the region where Miwaleta once roamed.
Jackson spends much of his time touring Forest Service lands, on an unpaid volunteer basis, keeping loggers and pothunters from ancestral Indian sites and complaining loudly about those who scar or spoil the mountains and rivers.
Rather than being bitter and angry about the fate of the Cow Creek people and land, however, Jackson is a deeply patriotic man.
Some may find it ironic that he flies an American flag on his land and erected a bell in 1976 to ring in celebration of nation's bicentennial, but he does not. "My loyalty is to the physical country," he explained recently, "regardless of who heads the government."