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The Rogue River Wars: Southern Oregon's Gold-Rush Frontier, 1851–1856

Gold came out of the Rogue River country in the winter of 1851 and 1852, off the bars of the river and its feeder creeks in the mountains of southern Oregon. The people who had lived in that country for generations, the Takelma and the Shasta and the Athabaskan-speaking bands of the lower river, watched the miners pour in along a wagon road cut through their homeland only five years before. What followed over the next five years was a slow, grinding war of ambushes, night raids, and volunteer expeditions. It ended in 1856 with the survivors marched north to reservations on the coast and in the Willamette Valley. This was the frontier that produced the guide named Enos, and the country his story ends in.

The Rogue River Wars are usually dated from about 1851 to 1856, though the roots reach back to the first emigrant traffic through the region. In 1846 the brothers Jesse and Lindsay Applegate blazed a southern branch of the Oregon Trail through the Klamath Basin into the Rogue and Umpqua valleys, the subject of a separate piece here on the Applegate Trail through Modoc country. The first wagons crossed that autumn. Within five years the trickle of emigrants had become a flood of miners, and the Rogue Valley sat astride the main route between the California diggings and the Willamette settlements.

The people of the Rogue country

The country the miners called the Rogue was home to peoples who had lived along the river and its tributaries for a very long time. The Takelma held much of the middle and upper valley and spoke a language of their own. The Shasta ranged across the southern edge of the drainage and into the mountains toward California. Along the lower river and the coast lived Athabaskan-speaking bands, among them the Tututni near the river's mouth, whose languages were kin to those of peoples far to the north and to the south. These were separate communities with their own territories, leaders, and dialects, connected by the river system they shared.

Their year followed the salmon. The great runs came up the Rogue in season, and the fishing places along the river were among the most valuable holdings a family or a village could claim. Between the runs the people gathered acorns from the oak groves, dug camas and other roots from the prairies, and hunted deer and elk in the hills. The root prairies and fishing bars that the mining camps overran were the working heart of the local economy, and taking them struck at the foundation of Native life on the river. That loss stands at the origin of the war.

The gold rush reaches the Rogue

The California strike of 1848 pulled tens of thousands of men west and north. When gold turned up on the Rogue and at Jacksonville in the early 1850s, the same restless population spilled into southern Oregon. Mining camps went up on Native fishing grounds and root prairies, and placer operations fouled the salmon runs the river people depended on. Around each camp grew the assumption that the Indians were in the way. Volunteer companies formed and dissolved with the seasons, answerable to no regular chain of command and often to no law at all. The Army kept a thin presence in the region, and its officers frequently found themselves at odds with the territorial volunteers, who wanted the country cleared and were willing to clear it themselves.

Behind the miners came farmers, and behind the farmers came the law that rewarded them. Under the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, Congress offered free farmland in Oregon to white settlers who would live on it and work it. Settlers filed claims across the valley floor before any treaty had extinguished Native title to a single acre. The federal government was giving away land it had not yet bought, and the people who took it up understood that the presence of the original owners was a problem the government or the volunteers would eventually settle. Gold on the bars and free land in the valley pulled in the same direction, and both pointed at the removal of the people already there.

The first killings, 1851–1853

Violence flared along the road and the mining bars from the start. Emigrant parties were attacked in the passes; settlers and volunteer companies burned Native villages, often on nothing more than rumor. The coast saw its own version of the same collision in June 1851, when nine men landed under a borrowed cannon at a black sea-stack that would be called Battle Rock, at Port Orford, and the people who had held that beach for a thousand years drove them off. Inland, the summers of 1851, 1852, and 1853 brought repeated small campaigns by volunteers and dragoons. General Joseph Lane, a former territorial governor, led one such expedition and was wounded in a fight near Table Rock in 1853. By that autumn both sides were exhausted enough to talk.

Volunteers, the Army, and the war of reprisal

Two very different armed forces operated in the Rogue country, and they did not want the same things. The regular Army kept only a scattering of troops in southern Oregon, and its officers were bound by orders, by the slow machinery of federal policy, and by a wariness of open-ended Indian wars. General John E. Wool, who commanded the Army's Department of the Pacific, openly blamed the settlers and their volunteer companies for provoking the fighting, and he resisted turning the regular soldiers into an instrument of the settlers' will. The volunteer companies raised by the territory answered to no such caution. Men enlisted for a season, elected their own officers, drew pay and rations, and expected the cost of their service to be billed afterward to the government. For miners whose claims had not paid, a paid campaign against the Native people was steady work, and it carried the approval of much of the settler population.

The result was a war fought largely against villages rather than against warriors. A killing on the road, by whoever's hand, could bring a volunteer company down on the nearest encampment, and the people who died in reprisal were often those least able to flee: women, children, and the old. Native war parties answered in kind, striking at isolated cabins, ferries, and pack trains along the mining routes. Each side's violence confirmed the other's worst account of it, and the settler press and the territorial politicians had every reason to keep that account inflamed. The regular officers who tried to tell hostile bands from peaceful ones were working against the current of a population that had already decided the distinction did not matter.

The Table Rock treaty of 1853

In September 1853 Joel Palmer, the Oregon superintendent of Indian affairs, and Joseph Lane met the Rogue River headmen beneath the great basalt mesa of Table Rock and negotiated a treaty. The Native leaders, among them the man the settlers called Chief Sam, were pressed after defeat into ceding most of their lands for a small reserve near Table Rock, along with promises of goods and protection. The Table Rock Reservation was the result, a small tract meant to hold peoples who had ranged across the whole Rogue drainage. The treaty bought roughly two years of uneasy quiet. It did nothing to stop the miners from encroaching on the reserve itself, and it left the volunteer companies armed, organized, and convinced that the Native people would be cleared out one way or another; some settlers and volunteer companies called openly for extermination. The peace held on paper while the pressure underneath it built.

The treaty was a settlement between unequal parties, signed by leaders who had just been beaten in the field and who understood that continued war meant the destruction of their people. Joel Palmer's larger design was to move the Native peoples of western Oregon onto reservations, partly to open their lands to settlement and partly to place the survivors beyond the reach of the volunteer companies that wanted them dead. It was removal offered as protection, and it carried a contradiction that would shape federal policy in the region for years. Palmer paid a political price for it. Settlers who thought him too friendly to the Native people pressed against him, and he was driven from his post.

The war of 1855 and 1856

The quiet broke in October 1855. A party of volunteers under James Lupton attacked a Native encampment near the reservation at dawn, killing a large number of people, including women, children, and the elderly. Lupton himself was mortally wounded in the fight. The massacre touched off a general uprising up and down the Rogue. Bands left the reserve; war parties struck at cabins, ferries, and pack trains. The Army and the volunteers gave chase into the rugged canyon country of the lower Rogue, where the terrain favored the defenders. Engagements at Hungry Hill in the late autumn of 1855 and, the following spring, at the Big Bend of the Rogue in late May 1856 were among the hardest fought. Leaders such as the man the whites called Chief John held out in the mountains long after the reservation bands had given up. By the middle of 1856 the last of the fighting groups had come in, worn down by winter, hunger, and the sheer weight of numbers arrayed against them.

The Lupton attack set the pattern for what followed. It fell at dawn on people living near the reservation under a treaty that promised them protection, and it showed how little that promise was worth. Bands that might have stayed on the reserve now had no reason to trust it. The war that came after was fought in the country that favored them most: the lower Rogue runs through a deep, timbered canyon, hard to enter and easy to hold, and the bands that took to it kept far larger forces at bay for months. The fights at Hungry Hill and at the Big Bend of the Rogue cost the soldiers and volunteers dearly because the ground gave every advantage to the people who knew it.

Removal to the coast and the valley

The war ended in removal. Through the summer of 1856 the survivors, several thousand people drawn from many bands and languages, were gathered up and marched north, some overland and some by boat along the coast, to the newly created Coast Reservation later centered at Siletz and to the Grand Ronde Reservation in the Willamette Valley. The journeys were brutal, and many died on the way or in the first hard seasons on ground that was not their own. Peoples who had lived along a single river for countless generations were resettled hundreds of miles from home. Their descendants are today enrolled in the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, and the memory of what happened on the Rogue is carried in those communities still.

The reservations the survivors were sent to were themselves new. The Coast Reservation had been set aside by the federal government along a long stretch of the central Oregon coast, and Grand Ronde lay inland at the edge of the Willamette Valley. Onto this ground the government gathered peoples who had been rivals as often as neighbors, who spoke mutually unintelligible languages, and who now had to build a common life under a single agency far from the rivers that had defined them. The salmon economy that had ordered the year on the Rogue could not be carried to a new coast. Rations replaced the fishery, disease moved through the crowded camps, and the first years on the reservations were, for many, a continuation of the dying the war had begun. That the descendant communities endured at all, and hold their history today, is a measure of their own resilience.

The coast, and a guide named Enos

The war did not stay inland. In February 1856 the fighting reached the mouth of the Rogue on the coast, where a number of settlers and the Indian sub-agent Benjamin Wright were killed in a coordinated uprising. In the aftermath the name Enos surfaced in the settler record, charged as a leader in Wright's death. Enos was the sort of mobile, multilingual go-between the whole frontier ran on, and the coast was where his story closed. He was arrested, tried, acquitted for lack of testimony, and then taken by a mob out onto the same Battle Rock at Port Orford and hanged. The fuller account of that contested life is told in who was Enos. The Rogue River Wars are the ground beneath it, five years of gold, treaty, and removal that turned southern Oregon into the country where a witness could be used up and then erased.

Benjamin Wright was no bystander to the region's violence. He was already notorious among Native people of the interior for having led a deadly attack on the Modocs some years before, an act remembered as treachery because it fell on people who had come to parley. To the settlers he was an officer of the government; to many Native people he was a killer who held office. His death at the mouth of the Rogue belonged, in that light, to the same long reckoning as the war upriver.

The go-between and the record of blame

The Rogue River Wars, like every frontier war, ran on intermediaries. Armies and mining camps needed men who could speak across languages, read the country, carry messages, and guide parties through terrain that could kill the unprepared. Guides, packers, and interpreters of Native, mixed, or uncertain heritage moved through this world constantly, useful to everyone and safe with no one. Enos was one of these men, and the coast at the mouth of the Rogue was where his usefulness ran out.

When the killing came, the settler record needed someone to hold responsible, and a war fought against whole peoples is hard to set down as a story with a single villain. A named go-between is simple by comparison. He can be pointed to, arrested, and hanged, and his death can be made to stand in for a violence that had far larger authors. Enos was charged as a leader in Benjamin Wright's death, tried, and acquitted when no testimony would hold. The acquittal did not save him. A mob took him out onto Battle Rock at Port Orford, the same beach where the coastal war had opened five years before, and hanged him there. The court could find no proof; the crowd did not require any.

This is the deeper ground the novel works from. The documents that survive were written by the winning side, and they record what that side needed to believe: that the violence had discrete causes and punishable culprits, and that a hanging could close the account. The forces that actually drove the war, the gold economy, the land law, the paid volunteer companies, the federal policy of removal, lay beyond the reach of any court. A single go-between standing on a beach lay within it. The record gave Enos a guilt sized to the crowd's need for one, and that record is part of what a novel about him has to reckon with.

That history is the spine of the novel The Renegade Enos: Witness to the American West, which follows its narrator from Frémont's crossings down to the gallows on the coast. Where the record speaks, the book listens; where it falls silent, it imagines. The history underneath is worth knowing plainly, on its own terms.

Sources & further reading

• "Rogue River War," The Oregon Encyclopedia. Overview of the 1855–56 conflict and its causes.
• "Rogue River Wars," Wikipedia. Broad summary of the campaigns, treaties, and removal, with sources.
• "Table Rock Reservation," The Oregon Encyclopedia. The 1853 treaty and the reserve it created.
• Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, tribal history. The removal and its aftermath told from the descendant community.
• "Battle Rock (Oregon)," Wikipedia. The 1851 landing at Port Orford and the coastal end of the story.