James Agee 1993: 56
Between 1840 and 1850 an abrupt transformation took place in western Oregon that resulted in permanent and large-scale changes to the region's forest and grassland environments. During that decade dozens of local American Indian nations and tribes were all but replaced by a comparatively homogenous population of European American immigrants. Many wildlife species were subsequently decimated and extirpated in favor of domesticated plants and animals: California condors, grizzly bears, wolves, and whitetail deer gave way to chickens, cattle and swine; fields of camas and tarweed were transformed to corn, potatoes and wheat. Even fire was affected. Expansive grasslands that were annually fired to produce and harvest food crops were plowed and grazed instead. Interior forestland trails, prairies, meadows, brakes, and berry patches--created and maintained by fire--were abandoned and began converting to trees. Near the end of the decade, probably in 1849 or 1850, the first of a century-long series of catastrophic forest fires took place in the region. These wildfires were so large and notable they became known as the "Great Fires" and acquired individual names: the Yaquina, the Coos, the Nestucca, the Tillamook.
This thesis examines the change in vegetation patterns of the Coast Range of western Oregon (see Map 1.01) from late pre-European contact ("precontact") time: beginning in the late 15th century, in 1491 (before European diseases were introduced into North America); through early historical time, until 1951 (the year of the last significant Tillamook fire). It is the first study to place the region's precontact cultural landscape patterns in context to the fuel histories and boundaries of subsequent forest wildfires.
A certain amount of history has been written and documented about the Oregon Coast Range ("Coast Range" or "the Range") forest fires of ca. 1849 to 1951 (e.g., Gannett 1902; Morris 1934b; Pyne 1982), but--with the notable exception of the Willamette Valley and the eastern slope of the Range--very little has been written about pre-European contact ("precontact") Indian burning practices in the area. Eyewitness accounts of David Douglas from 1825 to 1827 (Douglas 1905; 1906), John Work from 1832 to 1834 (e.g., Elliot 1925), by members of the 1841 Wilkes Expedition (Wilkes 1845), and others, have described the times, locations and results of Indian burning practices along the eastern slope and floodplains of the Coast Range. Early paintings (e.g., Warre 1845; Kane 1847) and land surveys (e.g., Preston 1851; Hathorn 1855) added detail to the written descriptions of the original journalists. Drawing from these resources, subsequent writers and geographers (e.g., Morris 1934; Johannessen et al. 1971; Thilenius 1972), have been able to construct reasonably accurate maps and accounts of the burning practices and results of Kalapuyans who occupied the territory (e.g., Mackey 1974; Gilsen XX, Boyd 1986). By comparison, very little has been documented regarding the burning practices of late prehistoric and early historical people living in the northern, western, and southern parts of the region (see Map 1.01).
Map 1.01 Location of the Oregon Coast Range study area.
LaLande and Pullen (1999: 267) term Indian fires in the southern Coast Range "limited and localized" in the "mid-elevation, mixed conifer forest stands" which characterize the "vast" majority of the area. Whitlock and Knox (2002: 224) go even further, claiming the presence of early historical prairies, savannah, and oak woodlands in the Coast Range were a direct result of prehistoric climate change and lightning-caused fires ("which were probably more abundant . . . in the early Holocene": p.206), and had relatively little or nothing to do with human burning practices. Through the use of maps, tables, eyewitness accounts, drawings, and photographs, this thesis documents the use of fire by American Indian people living in the Oregon Coast Range at the time of contact with white Europeans and Americans in the late 1700s. The same methods are used to describe the subsequent Great Fire events of 1849-1951 and the roles Indian fires may have played in their timing, severity, location, and boundaries.
The hypothesis of this dissertation is that western Oregon patterns of 16th to mid-19th century Indian burning practices had a direct effect on patterns of catastrophic forest fires that took place from 1849 to 1951 in the Oregon Coast Range.
Indian burning practices are defined as those uses of fire in pre-European American contact time ("precontact time") and early historical time that resulted in changed or stabilized landscape-scale vegetation patterns. Three principal categories of these practices are recognized: firewood gathering and burning, patch burning, and broadcast burning (Zybach and Lake 2003). Firewood burning involves the movement of fuels to specific locations before burning, resulting in areas that contained relatively little (or stockpiled) large, woody debris and designated spots of intense, repeated and prolonged heat. Patch burning is defined as having a specific purpose and involving fuels within a bounded area, such as burning an older huckleberry patch, a segment of trail, or a field of weeds. Broadcast burning is the practice of setting fire to the landscape for multiple purposes and with general boundaries, such as burning a prairie to cure tarweed seeds, eliminate Douglas-fir seedlings, expose reptiles and burrowing mammals, and to harvest insects.
Maps, tables, and figures are used to show differences in cultural landscape patterns resulting from Indian burning practices. Cultural landscape patterns are landscape-scale designs created and maintained by systematic human burning (and/or by other land management processes), due to their origin and appearance (Bailey and Winkler 2001). Landscape patterns, for purposes of this dissertation, are considered at regional (hundreds of thousands or millions of acres), basin (thousands or tens of thousands of acres), and local (dozens or hundreds of acres) scales. These patterns are shown to vary between northern, eastern, western, and southern parts of the Coast Range due to differences in national and tribal traditions, topography, climate, vegetation, and distance from the ocean. The "cultural legacy" of combined burning actions is shown to have a direct effect on subsequent patterns of catastrophic forest fires in the same region. Cultural legacy is defined as the evidence of trails, savannah, prairies, fields, berry patches, brakes, balds and other environmental indications of human land uses that persist through time. Catastrophic fires are defined as wildfire events that are greater than 100,000 acres in size. Patterns of burning and wildfire include similarities and differences in sources and locations of ignition; locations and extent of fire boundaries; timing, frequency, seasonality, and intensity of fires; and effects of fire on local human and wildlife populations.
The terms "Indian" and "American Indian" will be used interchangeably to denote people who lived in the Oregon Coast Range in precontact and early historical time, in accordance with current and accepted use of these terms by the peers and descendents of these people. "Tribes" will be used in the same manner as currently used by the Confederated Tribes of Siletz, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Coquille Indian Tribe, and the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw. "Nation" will be used to designate adjacent Indian tribes associated by proximity and a shared language, such as the Chinook Nation of the 1940s that became Chinook Indian Tribe, Inc. in 1953: specifically the Chinook and Athapaskan nations on the Columbia, the Kalapuya and Athapaskan nations of the Willamette, south Umpqua, and upper Coquille valleys, and the Koos, Siuslaw, Yakona, and Salish nations of the coast. Tribes and nation names will attempt to use the earliest accepted historical spellings, rather than modernized spellings or European terms. "White" will be used to denote predominantly European and American Caucasian immigrants to the Coast Range in early historical time, with the acknowledgement that many of these people were of Iroquois, Hawaiian, Chinese, or African ancestry. In this instance, the term "white" is intended to represent people of western European culture, rather than a particular race or skin color.
Plants and animals are considered "native" to the Oregon Coast Range if they were present in the environment before 1770. Species are referenced by accepted local names, rather than "common" names (e.g., "boomer" vs. "mountain beaver"; "chittam" vs. "Cascara buckthorn"), and are identified by their current scientific latin names in Appendix A.
This dissertation concerns people, fire, and the use of fire by people in a particular region of western North America. People first entered the Oregon Coast Range more than 10,000 years ago, probably by foot or watercraft. The use of fire by people in the region was coincidental with their arrival; if people didn't arrive with fire, they probably manufactured it within a few hours or days. The environment began to be transformed immediately. For the first time ever, firewood was gathered, forests were purposefully fired, and grasslands burned. As human settlements became more permanent, so did patterns of human use upon the land. This section briefly describes the history of the land these people found, where they settled and why, and how the shape of the land helped to shape the patterns of people and their fires across the landscape.
