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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)