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Oxbow
Oxbow
Stretching nearly 200 miles across northwestern Oregon, the Willamette had for more than 10,000 years supported the numerous tribes who lived in this landscape. In Eugene, the Kalapuyan people comprised the majority of the population, inhabiting numerous villages where they harvested roots, grains, and bulbs from the prairies, hunted elk and deer, and constructed weirs and fish traps to catch fish in the rivers and streams. They moved seasonally throughout their territories, at times sharing land with friendly neighboring groups, setting up camps wherever fields of camas were ready to dig in early summer or oaks were dropping acorns in the fall.- By 1844, American settlers began arriving in the Willamette Valley by way of the Oregon Trail. The settlers seized plots of land, cultivating the prairies and sowing seeds in areas that the tribes relied on for food gathering. They depleted the game, fished the rivers, and destroyed various food sources, forcing many tribal peoples to work as laborers on settler farms. The fenced fields isolated them from their land, confining them to ever smaller areas the settlers permitted them to inhabit. By 1855, illness had diminished indigenous numbers by nearly ninety-five percent, and legislation had been enacted to permanently remove the Kalapuyan people from their ancestral homeland.