It Wasn't Ever the Flowers Not the delicate jowls of the opium poppy. Not the wax goblet of the burgher-economy tulip. No more than it was the starry blue of the great camas meadows, but when the settlers plowed under the lilies, it touched off the Nez Perce War. —Vi Gale Bob Benson on the Tualatin Indians As Told to Richard Plagge A common tongue, not political organization, united the 20 or so tiny Tualatin Indian villages that were scattered about the valley: on the rare occasions when the whole linguistic group did want to discuss something they would meet on the western edge of the valley, at Gaston, next to a huge oak tree. This tree lasted until just a few years ago, when it was bulldozed to make way for Highway 26, the main route from Portland to the coast. The Tualatins knew how to hammer stone wedges into cedar logs, or even into live cedar trees, in just the right way to split off the nice planks with which they built their houses. A bride who could offer a dozen tried and true planks as a dowry was considered a real catch because her groom would have half of the great labor of building a house behind him. The Tualatins were on good terms with the Chinooks, river Indians who lived just over the Tualatin range, along the Columbia. One hears of Tualatins going across to the Portland area to fish and pick camas bulbs. Friendly, too, were the coastal Tillamooks who allowed the Tualatins a little vacation campsite near Nestucca Bay. (The campsite was not quite on the open ocean though, for these were inland people who would not have known how to predict high tides.) The Clatskanai were another story: unsociable and clannish, they would sometimes attack and kill the careless Tualatin who wandered a little too far north into their Nehalem Valley territory. Though they lived in a valley that, upon the arrival of the whites, would soon become a nexus of economic and political power, the Tualatins were a poor, unaggressive tribe, mainly worried about where the next meal might come from. In a world without agriculture a great rich- soiled valley doesn't mean very much. The power center in Indian times was a couple hundred miles northward, around Vancouver Island and coastal British Columbia, where the Nootka's and the Kwakiutls garnered a food surplus from innumerable inlets packed with easy-to- harvest protein. The Tualatins probably didn't have to pay tribute to the powerful northern tribes. Nothing formal like that. But they did have to worry about slave-raids, about being captured and sold to the middlemen who operated a complicated slave economy which served to carry inland victims to the chiefs of the coast. On rare occasions the Tualatins would cash in on the slave trade themselves. Bob tells a story of a young Tualatin chief who, just bursting with ambition, frantic to impress his Chinookan in-laws (he had just married into the Chinookan aristocracy), rounded up a gang of young rowdies and led them on an up-state slaving expedition. They managed to capture a number of victims whom they dealt to the British Columbia traders. The first major disruption of the Tualatin way of life was in the early 1830s when a Yankee trading vessel dropped anchor at various points along the Columbia. On board were several active cases of malaria. There were plenty of local mosquitoes of exactly the right type to transfer the disease to a few Chinook Indians on the shore; somehow—the Tualatins did, to a certain extent, intermingle with the Chinooks—the germs were then carried over the low mountain range into the valley. This first epidemic was devastating. Within a few weeks more than half of the Tualatins were dead. And the lucky survivors were not home-free: four out of five of them would perish later on, uncomprehending victims of other white-introduced microorganisms. The remnant Tualatins tried to maintain a going way of life, but it was hopeless. Weak with fever, confronted by greedy, vigorous white people telling them they had no rights at all that had to be respected, they retreated first to their ancestral center around Gaston, and then, finally, to a sour-soiled plot of unwanted land in the foggy valley of the South Yamhill River. In this sad environment, the Grande Ronde Indian Reservation, most of Western Oregon's inland tribes faded out of history. No one, today, speaks the Tualatin language. Thus the early settlers of northern Oregon, the farmers and the missionaries, proved themselves to be almost as skilled at the task of erasing Indians from a landscape as were the ruffians and jailbirds, the gold hunters, who first settled southern Oregon and Northern California. 20 *
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