Soap Creek Valley · Place
Willamette Valley
Everything the Soap Creek narrators said about Willamette Valley: 72 transcript mentions across 8 records, grouped by who was speaking.
valley
Coordinate: derived — matched by name against a public place-name list
- Index references (printed indexes)
- 11
- Transcript mentions
- 72
The map could not load. The list below carries the same places.
Provenance
- Coordinates
- 45.50012, -122.50148
- How they were found
- coordinate from USGS GNIS; name match verified
- How far to trust it
- derived — matched by name against a public place-name list
- Accessioned
- From Bob Zybach’s upload, 23 August 2026
Who speaks of it
- Auto Tour, 1989 p. 1, p. 5, p. 7, p. 8, p. 9, p. 11, p. 13, p. 19, p. 21, p. 30
- Bessie Murphy p. 25, p. 93, p. 94
- Charlie Olson and Mrs. Olson p. 22
- Eugene Glender p. 16, p. 101, p. 109
- James Hanish p. 30
- Lorna Grabe p. 58
- Velma Carter Rawie p. 97, p. 98, p. 115
- Zybach 1999 thesis p. 12, p. 54, p. 62, p. 71, p. 72, p. 73, p. 74, p. 75, p. 77, p. 78, p. 79, p. 83, p. 84, p. 87, p. 88, p. 89, p. 91, p. 92, p. 95, p. 97, p. 105, p. 107, p. 119, p. 136, p. 137, p. 143, p. 164, p. 165, p. 168, p. 170, p. 177, p. 185, p. 190, p. 191, p. 194, p. 196, p. 204, p. 211, p. 212, p. 213, p. 214, p. 217, p. 218, p. 220, p. 222, p. 225, p. 227, p. 228, p. 230, p. 231
In their words
The Willamette Valley of that time was largely inhabited by a few hundred Kalapuyan-speaking people that regularly burned the areas in which they lived.
During his first visit to the Willamette Valley in August, 1825, he noted that most of it had been trapped clean of beaver.
Dated statements about this place
- 1806 — It is unknown how long Kalapuyan families lived in the Willamette Valley before their discovery by European Americans in 1806 (Thwaites 1959).
- 1825-08 — During his first visit to the Willamette Valley in August, 1825, he noted that most of it had been trapped clean of beaver.
- 1826 — In the fall of 1826, while David Douglas and HBC brigade leader Alexander McLeod were blazing the first horse trail from the Columbia River to southwest Oregon, Kalapuyans were burning most of the prairies throughout the Willamette Valley.
- 1826 — Documentation of their travels described miles of barren plains burned clear of living vegetation by Kalapuyans, and occasional groves of oak and scattered “pine” (Douglas-fir) three and four feet in diameter on east slope Oregon Coast Range hills.
- 1826 — The first historical account of the Soap Creek Valley area was provided by the 1826 Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) beaver hunting expedition led by Alexander Roderick McLeod (Douglas 1905; Davies 1961) that passed southward, up the west side of the Willamette Valley.
- 1826 — The HBC expedition is the first known to horse trail traversing the length of the Willamette Valley, along a route that approximately follows the course of Highway 99W today (see Maps 13 and 18).
- 1826 — Douglas and McLeod noted an almost total lack of grass and unburned vegetation along the entire length of the Willamette, a result of “Indian burning.”
- 1832-1834 — He had also noted widespread sudden sickness and subsequent death among hundreds of Indian families during his journey through western Oregon and northern California during the previous two years (Scott 1928; Maloney 1942; Cook 1955; Boyd 1986).
- 1834 — In 1834, HBC Chief Trader John Work and his beaver hunting brigade followed the same route blazed by McLeod’s 1826 expedition.
- 1837 — The first cattle brought into the Willamette Valley were a wild and untamed herd imported from Mexican California by Ewing Young in 1837.
- 1841 — Wilkes (1845) remarked that the oak groves of the Willamette Valley in 1841 were so regularly spaced as to “appear to have been planted by the hands of man,” and Kalapuyans of that time were known to cultivate tobacco from seed in isolated openings (Douglas 1905).
- 1841 — By 1841, Charles Wilkes noted that only 400 or so Kalapuyans survived in the entire Willamette Valley (Wilkes 1845)—the remnants of at least a half dozen nations estimated to have numbered 10,000 to 12,000 or more individuals prior to the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1805-1806 (Boyd 1986; 1990).
- 1845-1846 — Construction of the Applegate and Barlow Trails during 1845 and 1846 avoided these dangerous rapids and provided American emigrants with a safer and cheaper passage to their new homes in the Willamette Valley.
- 1846 — Morgan Savage and Tolbert Carter ... helped construct the Applegate Trail from Fort Hall in Idaho to the Willamette Valley in 1846.
- 1846 — When the first American emigrants settled in Soap Creek Valley in 1846, Klickitat Indians (who had owned horses for several decades and had associated with white trappers for nearly 40 years) were claiming ownership of the Willamette Valley, having “conquered” the decimated Kalapuyans (Fagan 1885; Minto 1903; Rawie 1994).
- 1861 — The snowstorm of 1861 likely killed a majority of the livestock in the Willamette Valley (Oliphant 1932), including herds based in Soap Creek Valley.
- 1861 — Catastrophic snowstorm kills thousands of livestock in Willamette Valley
- 1862 — Thilenius (1968) traces general Willamette Valley oak woodland development to 1862, but relates forestation process only to cessation of Indian burning and doesn’t factor in potential effects of livestock-killing snows, floods, and freezes of 1861-1862 (Tables 10 and 11).
- 1881 — Major snowstorm kills livestock, crushes buildings in Willamette Valley
- 1916 — Instead of finding an uninterrupted forest carrying 100,000 feet or more per acre reaching from the Cascades to the Pacific, the first settlers seventy-five years ago [1840] found in The Valleys great areas of “prairie” land covered with grass, brakes, or brush which were burned and kept treeless by the Indians,
- 1933 — This countryside is not good now. Long, long ago it was good country. They were all Indians who lived in this countryside. Everything was good. No one labored. Only a man went hunting, he hunted all the time. Women always used to dig camas, and they gathered tarweed seeds.
How to cite this item
The first line is the citation as it is printed in the original. Use it when you cite the work itself. Use the second when you cite this page.
- As printed
- The Zybach Collection, Soap Creek Valley series: Willamette Valley (place record).
- This page
- Soap Creek Valley: Willamette Valley. America's School Trust Library, The Zybach Collection. https://schooltrusts.org/collections/zybach/soap-creek/places/willamette-valley/
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