Klamath

Culturally similar to the Modoc and other northern California tribes, the Klamath people lived in Oregon, around the region of Upper Klamath Lake, Klamath Marsh, and the Williamson River. The richness of their environment provided them with food, clothing, and shelter, and their seclusion protected them from raids by larger tribes. The first white men who reached Klamath villages were traders and explorers. Within a few decades, settlers, missionaries, and ranchers followed, disrupting the peaceful lifestyle of the Klamath.

In 1864, the Klamath ceded to the U. S. government more than 20 million acres of land, reserving for themselves the rights to hunt, fish, and gather in safety on the lands. Even in the reservation age, the Klamath prospered, but termination of the reservation and the tribe's tribal recognition in 1954 was devastating. With their land lost and their cultural identity disintegrating, the Klamath almost disappeared as a people. It was the battle to protect the land and the water that preserved some sense of identity, a battle that continues into the second decade of the 21st century.

Before the first European contact, the Klamath depended on the land to provide their food, clothing, and shelter. The villages near Klamath Lake consisted of earthen houses; those at the lower end of Klamath Marsh were log houses, built on the water atop stone and gravel foundations. In summer, the Klameth ate antelope and gathered wocus, the seed of a water lily, which they used in soups or mixed with flour. They lived mostly secluded from other Indians.

In 1825, mountain men Finan McDonald and Thomas McKay arrived in the Klamath Basin with a party of 32 men. The Klamath warned the party against the Modocs. McKay returned a year later in a party led by Peter Skene Ogden, famed as a beaver trapper. Ogden's party consisted of two dozen mountain men, who did the hunting and trapping, and their Indian wives, who prepared game and cured hides.

Ogden described the tribe as a “happy race” and regretted the coming intrusions that he predicted would destroy the unique quality of the Klamath. The next recorded contact between the Klamath and Europeans came in 1843, when explorer and map surveyor John Charles Fremont and his party of 25 men, including the famous Kit Carson, met a band of Klamath north of Upper Klamath Lake. Frémont returned in 1846 with a larger party.

Ogden's concern about the intrusions proved well founded. The decades after Fremont's exploration brought a steadily increasing stream of military personnel and civilians into the Klamath's world. Conflicts, some of them violent, became common. In 1864, the Klamath, the Modocs, and the Yahooskin (a band of Northern Paiutes) ceded more than 20 million acres of Native American land to the U.S. government, with 2 million set aside for a reservation. The treaty merged the three tribes into the Klamath Tribes and brought them together on what had been exclusively Klamath territory. The reservation boundaries were redrawn a number of times; the land area was ultimately just over half of what had originally been designated. The Dawes Act of 1887 divided reservation land into allotments, which could be sold. Many were, some of them to non-Indians.

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