86 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 65 



A glance at this material reveals some very interesting facts. The 

 Kalapuya Indians in former days were the most powerful and 

 numerous family inhabiting the present State of Oregon. They 

 claimed possession of the whole fertile valley of the Willamette 

 River, which extends from the Coast Range on the west to the 

 Cascade Mountains on the east. Their settlements reached as far 

 north as Portland and as far south as the middle course of the 

 Umpqua River. This territory comprises an area of approximately 



Fig. 81. — Charles Bradford and wife, Smith River (Athapascan) Indians. 

 Courtesy of Dr. Max F. Clausius, Siletz, Oregon. 



12,000 square miles ; and its topographic nature, its rich fauna and 

 flora, its streams that abound in all kinds of fish, justify the assump- 

 tion that it sustained a large number of inhabitants. These Indians 

 were brought into the Grande Ronde agency in 1857, at the close 

 of the Rogue River war. Unfortunately tribal wars and epidemics 

 of smallpox and tuberculosis have decimated the several Kalapuya 

 tribes to such an extent that Dr. Frachtenberg found a mere handful 

 of these natives, and the time is not far off when the Kalapuya 

 Indians, like so many other tribes of the Northwest, will have become 

 an extinct group. 



