Oregon History: Great Basin

The high desert region is majestic and harsh. It is an
unforgiving landscape where, at times, life is a scramble.
For the Northern Paiute, Western Shoshoni, Bannock, Klamath,
and Modoc, survival demanded unremitting labor and almost
constant movement. While the Klamath and Modoc possessed
staple foods such as suckers, trout, wocus (water lily
seed), and huckleberries, the tribes to the east had a more
marginal existence. Their resilience in coping with high
elevation, extreme temperatures, arid conditions, and
isolation spoke to their time-tested survival skills in a
challenging environment. The Klamath Basin peoples actually
lived at a point of transition between Plateau, Basin, Coast
and California lifeways, whereas the Northern Paiute, who
held vast stretches of central and southeastern Oregon, were
more closely tied to the basin environment.

Oregon's Great Basin peoples engaged in a seasonal round
that often required 200 or more miles of travel per year. In
winter they resided on the margins of lakes and rivers,
seeking the lowest elevation and most moderate temperatures
in harsh conditions. Their homes included rock shelters as
well as lodges covered with brush and tule mats. In winters,
confinement and the months of the long moons encouraged
storytelling and necessitated tapping the food resources
carefully stored in the previous seasons. When spring became
summer, these people were on the move. They hunted
waterfowl, antelope, and deer; gathered roots, berries,
seeds, and nuts; fished; and traveled. They moved to higher
and higher elevations, following food sources, until the
aspen leaves turned to bright gold, telling them it was time
to leave the high country and return to the winter
encampments.

The peoples of the Great Basin traveled in extended
family groups but sometimes gathered as bands for communal
hunts. Women and children fanned out through the countryside
and, moving slowly toward a ravine and making great noise,
drove all creatures before them. Far down the trace, etched
eons ago by erosion through basalt, the men stretched fiber
nets. Here they clubbed frightened rabbits or, when lucky,
killed deer and antelope with bow and arrow. Paddling
carefully in the predawn cold onto the waters of the lakes
in the middle of the High Desert, the men silently stretched
nets between poles and, with a great noise, spooked the
unsuspecting water birds. The birds rose to flee in the
mist, only to become entangled in the mesh of netting, which
the men then collapsed into the water, harvesting a
bountiful supply of food for their families.

Great Basin residents practiced a mixed economy. They
hunted, fished, trapped, dug, and picked food resources.
They moved with the seasons in an almost continuous quest
for subsistence. They covered a vast, open country, leaving
their petroglyphs at sacred sites, caching foods, camping in
rock shelters used by the ancient inhabitants of the region.
Their finely developed survival skills enabled them to
endure and prosper in a land that held them, at times, at
the edge of existence.

The first inhabitants occupied three distinct biotic
provinces or geographical areas. Their adaptation and
mastery of the environment reached from the margins of the
fog-shrouded and wet Pacific shoreline to the arid reaches
of sagebrush and bunchgrass of the interior. Their
subsistence activities took them from sea level to tree line
in the Wallowas and on Steens Mountain. They were at home in
the desert and in the grasslands of the Columbia Plateau. In
the fall they set fire to the meadows to keep open the
western Oregon valleys as well as to maintain the bald
headlands along the Oregon coast. At the south-facing bases
of the headlands they often erected their plank houses
facing into the sun. They plied the rivers with dugout
canoes; they hunted for ducks and geese on the lakes with
balsa rafts made of dried tules.

The first inhabitants knew this land. They gave it names.
They explained its features in their oral traditions,
through experienced storytellers reciting the literature.
They told of the myth age when only animals and no humans
were in the land. They recounted tales of transition, when
animals and humans interacted on a personal basis, a time
when humans were not quite fully formed. They told of the
historic past, of things remembered and partly remembered.
They did this with gesture, eye contact, voice modulation,
and sometimes by musical interlude wherein they or someone
in the crowd sang a song relevant to the story. Their
techniques varied. The Tillamook, for example, repeated
stories line-by-line as they listened to the teller, thereby
memorizing over a period of years the literature and history
of their tribe. The challenge to the storyteller was thus to
deliver with talent and stay true to the story elements, yet
build the drama and unleash creativity.

The first inhabitants held a rich land. Its resources far
exceeded their needs and their wants. They lived fully.
While there is some evidence of migration and population
dynamics, those tales of prehistory are lost in the mists of
time. What is known is that Oregon was fully occupied by the
18th century. Indians of more than 30 different
languages lived throughout the state. They knew and loved
the land. It was their home.