History
The various tribal groups of the Kalapuya people were historically hunter-gatherers. They made use of obsidian obtained from the volcanic ranges to the east to fashion sharp and effective projectile points, including arrowheads and spear tips.
Prior to contact with white explorers, traders, and missionaries, the Kalapuya population is estimated to have stood between 4,000 and 20,000. The introduction of the diseases of the whites were catastrophic to the Kalapuya people. Pre-contact epidemics of unknown quantity and effect and the smallpox epidemic that raged through the Pacific Northwest in 1782-83 may have caused the death of half the bands' population. Malaria likewise swept the region between 1830 and 1833. It is estimated that as many as ninety percent of the Kalapuya population died during this period. The Kalapuya were greatly weakened by the time whites began to show up in numbers in the Willamette Valley in the middle of the nineteenth century. Explorers stated that villages were found in the Willamette Valley devoid of inhabitants, standing as testament the incredible devastation by diseases.
Read more about this topic: Kalapuya People
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“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
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—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)