Assessment - Southern Oregon Digital Archives

By overtly (also, it seems, covertly) regulating the beginning of the salmon fishing season, firstsalmon
rituals may have served a distinct conservational or management purpose. In allowing the
salmon to run free during the initial period of ritual restriction… riverine tribes maintained a
productive inventory of spawning salmon each spring, which ensure successful reproduction and
return of the king salmon runs in following years… The maintenance and conservation of the
salmon subsistence base on a year-to-year basis was perhaps the most important function of the
first-salmon observance, and there is no evidence that native populations ever seriously overfished
the salmon runs (Sweazey and Heizer 1993: 324).
As conflicts between new white settlers and the native people developed over land use and
territory, numerous battles ensued. Known collectively as the Rogue River Wars, these
disputes raged from 1852-1856. Captain Robert Williams (for whom Williams is named)
led skirmishes between white settlers and resident Native Americans in the Williams
Valley. Camp Spencer, built near the mouth of Williams Creek, was used as temporary
camp for Oregon Mounties who volunteered during the Rogue Indian Wars.
When it was all over, the Dakubetede that had survived the war, disease, and
displacement from their ancestral homelands were forcibly moved to the Siletz
Reservation on the Oregon coast. Later, they were permanently relocated to the Grande
Ronde Reservation in eastern Oregon. Descendants of these original Williams residents,
if any, are now members of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz and the Confederated
Tribes of Grande Ronde (McKinley and Frank 1996).
Fur and Gold
The first Euro-American people to visit the Williams area were members of Peter Skene
Ogden’s trapping expedition. Employed by the Hudson Bay Company, Ogden led his
brigade west along the Klamath River and then crossed north into the Applegate/Rogue
River basin in February of 1827. During the following year, the trappers worked to
eliminate fur-bearing animals (especially beaver) in an attempt to weaken the expansion
efforts of their British and French counterparts, and to fill the European market demand
for beaver hats. Although they did not find the abundance of beaver they were hoping for,
Ogden’s journal reports that over 1,500 pelts were taken from the Applegate area. As
trapping continued over the next decades, the decline of beaver began to alter the
streamside and aquatic environment. The result yielded more stream channelization, less
channel complexity, and reduced the quality of habitat for fish (LaLande 1987).
The discovery of gold in 1858 brought more permanent and severe changes to the Williams
Valley. Following the Gold Rush, miners came to southern Oregon and operated
small placer mines such as the Watts Mine on Horsehead Gulch. Jeff LeLande, a Rogue
Valley historian, speculates that because these operations were small, the impact on water
quality was probably minimal (Prevost et al. 1996).
Ten years later, hydraulic mining was introduced in Josephine County on Bamboo Gulch
in Williams. This method for extracting gold had more drastic effects on the land,
waterways, and water quality. Water, pressurized at hundreds of pounds per square inch,
was used to blast away hundreds of cubic yards of soil per day to expose gold deposits
and wash sediments into sluices. Quicksilver (mercury) was added to the sluice to trap
Williams Creek Watershed Assessment 29