Fort Klamath: It’S Place As an Outpost on Oregon’S Eastern Frontier

Fort Klamath: It’s Place as an Outpost on Oregon’s Eastern Frontier Presentation marking the sesquicentennial of the fort’s founding, delivered at Fort Klamath County Park, August 3, 2013 Jeff LaLande Archaeologist (R.P.A.) and Historian (Ph.D.) Ashland, Oregon; 541-778-3257 Good evening, everyone. Thank you all for coming here to Fort Klamath County Park on a smoky August evening to listen to this presentation. Having lived in the Rogue River Valley for just shy of 45 years, I have seen many changes over there during that time. There have been fewer changes to the landscape over on this side of the Cascades, especially here in the Wood River Valley, within sight of the rim of Crater Lake, amongst the groves of quaking aspen. Things, including the Wood River itself, move more slowly here. Ever since I first laid eyes on it, this beautiful Valley’s been one on my favorite places in the state. I’ve canoed the meandering river, marveled at Mares Egg Springs, swatted swarms of blood-thirsty mosquitos while adjusting my backpack or the saddle stirrups of a Forest Service horse at the Sevenmile Trailhead, consumed many a hamburger at the old Cattle- Crossing Café, and have even read all of the headstones at the Fort Klamath cemetery. Over here, a Rogue Valley resident like me feels like he’s actually in the “real West.” Being a Rogue Valley resident makes me something of an outsider here -- an outsider who is going to give you his own “take” on Fort Klamath. I start off this talk by giving an overview the Fort Klamath’s story, starting at its beginning 150 years ago. After that I will focus my remarks on a few specific issues that have occurred to me about Ft. Klamath. I’m not an “expert” on Ft. Klamath. Some of you here doubtless know far more details about its history than do I. Much of what I now do know I’ve learned during preparation for this talk. Also, any historian’s perspective reflects that person’s professional (and at times personal) biases and special interests. So, I very much hope that any or all of you, at the end of this talk, will feel free to voice your own perspectives, to add to, or even to challenge what I am about to say. That is what the practice of history is really all about, and I think it would be a fitting thing to do tonight.1 So then, from my own particular perspective as a historian, here’s a brief version of the Ft. Klamath story: Lt. Col. Charles S. Drew, a native of Jacksonville, selects this site for a military fort in late 1863 – two years into the Civil War and a few months after the massive bloodletting at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He placed his post smack in the middle of the ancestral land of the Klamath people, within hunting and fishing territory that was likely shared by two sub-groups of the Klamath: the “Gumbotkni” (the Pelican Bay/Wood River people) and the “Kowadikni” (the Agency Lake people). So far as I know, he paid no purchase price for the land.2 Drew, then the commander of the Oregon Volunteer Cavalry at newly established Camp Baker (a motley collection of log huts near present-day Phoenix), blazes a terribly impractical travel route to his new post in the Wood River Valley – the so-called “Rancheria Trail” -- over the snow-drifted north slope of Mt. McLoughlin. During its first two years of existence, Fort Klamath receives all its supplies from Jacksonville merchants and teamsters via Drew’s comparatively short but very difficult route.3 The less-than-well-trained Oregon Volunteers first stationed here, first in tents and then in a cluster of log cabins, had been organized by the state government because Regular Army troops had suddenly left the Far West – thereby leaving it unprotected -- for duty in the terrible conflict back East. Therefore Fort Klamath’s original purpose: Protect from attack those emigrant wagon trains that continue to travel to Southern Oregon via the Applegate Trail through the high-desert country of northwestern Nevada and northeastern California into Oregon. In 1864, one year after the Fort’s founding, comes the U.S. Treaty with the Klamath, Modoc, and some Northern Paiute Indians, a treaty that establishes a huge reservation, including land immediately to the south of the Fort. As a result, the stories of the Fort and the Reservation soon become intertwined -- “joined at the hip,” as it were. This linkage persists throughout the remainder of Ft. Klamath’s existence. In 1865, two years after the Fort’s founding, Capt. Franklin B. Sprague blazes a new, much- improved wagon route from Jacksonville to the Fort. This becomes the direct antecedent to today’s Highway 62. While laying out the new road high in the Cascade Range, Sprague and his men stumble upon an incredible sight: a deep blue lake cradled within a volcanic caldera. Sprague names it, fittingly -- but, alas, not permanently -- “Lake Majesty.”4 Periodically thereafter, Jacksonville and Ashland newspapers crow about their region’s fabled lake as a would-be good destination for tourists. One story, appearing some years after Sprague’s 1865 visit (the story-writer mis-spelled the Captain’s name as “Scraggs”) and headlined “Strange Mountain Lake”, praises the view thus: From [Crater Lake’s] southern rim one can “view the broad marshes of Klamath and the island-dotted lakes beyond, stretching away to the lava beds of the Modoc” and thence all the way to Mt. Shasta… Carried away by his description, the writer goes on to claim that this high-elevation, 360-degree panorama goes “all [the way] around to the sea.” In all my many visits to the rim of Crater Lake, including to the summits of Garfield Peak and Mt. Scott, I don’t recall ever seeing the Pacific Ocean.5 Those “Oregon Volunteer” early days of Ft. Klamath were brief, extending from the post’s establishment in 1863 until 1867, when, with the Civil War over, Regular Army troops arrive here to relieve the Volunteers. Those four years see such memorable events as the “Great Earthquake” story. Making national “news,” it brings severe reprimand of the low-rank perpetrators by high-up, distant Army brass. The Fort Klamath soldiers involved had no idea that their outlandish story -- a tongue-in-cheek tale reporting a terrible earthquake over here in the Wood River Valley, written up and sent as an innocent prank to the Jacksonville newspaper -- would gain any credence. There was also the so-called “Bread Riot,” a near mutiny over flour supplies allegedly mis-appropriated by exhausted, hungry troopers returning from patrols of the high desert. And, in the early Spring of 1866, occurred the tragic death from hypothermia of Trooper Steven Hallock. Hallock, who, left behind by his companions, had made his way from Jacksonville alone through the deep wet snow of the Rancheria Trail, stumbling onwards to within sound of the bugle’s morning call of reveille before falling in exhaustion, and dying soon after being found not far from the fort by his fellow troopers. His is one of first burials in the post’s cemetery.6 Throughout the 1860s, under both Volunteer and Regular Army troops, Ft. Klamath serves as a main base of operations for the “Snake War”, that little-known series of far-flung, relentless, tough Army campaigns against the so-called “Snake Indians,” i.e., the Northern Paiute of eastern Oregon’s high desert. The military’s punitive winter-time operations finally exhaust the Paiutes’ food supplies, thus ending their resistance. Among the officers who served in the many skirmishes of the Snake War were Capt. Sprague (Sprague River), Maj. Enoch Steen (Steens Mountain), and General George Crook (Crook County), who went on to national fame as the “Grey Wolf” who subdued the Apaches. With the arrival of those Regular Army troops of the 1st Cavalry’s A Company in 1867, the Fort’s log cabins now begin to give way to an increasing number of milled-wood, frame structures. It was this very same company that in late November of 1872 was dispatched under Capt. James Jackson from here to the Lost River. Their orders: to bring a Modoc leader named Kientpuash and his people back here, to the confines of the Reservation. As a result, this very same Army company fights in the opening battle of the Modoc War. It’s the Modoc War of 1872-73 that gives Fort Klamath its central importance in American history. That war, a conflict that grew into a news story of nation-wide (even international) interest, brought large numbers of troops (including artillery detachments) to Ft. Klamath, as well as war correspondents, who sent their hastily scrawled dispatches to Ashland to be telegraphed to their editors in cities far away. As many of you are aware, there was originally strong pro-Modoc sentiment back East. That is, until the killing by Kientpuash (known to the Whites as “Captain Jack”) and his men – while under a flag of truce and during a peace conference -- of un-armed negotiators General Edward Canby (commanding officer of the entire Pacific Northwest) and the Reverend Eleazer Thomas. The final outcome of that regrettable episode being the execution of Captain Jack and three other captured Modocs here at Ft. Klamath. The competitive “pony express”-type race of four riders, dispatched to carry word of the actual execution via the several different routes that now connected Fort Klamath with the Rogue River Valley, resulted in the telegraphing of the news of the deaths to Washington, DC -- cementing the post’s fame, if only briefly, in the nation’s consciousness.

Load more