sign in sign up
<<
Home , Fort Klamath, Garfield Peak (Oregon), Klamath people, Modoc Point, Snake War, Vancouver Barracks

Fort Klamath: It’s Place as an Outpost on ’s Eastern Frontier

Presentation marking the sesquicentennial of the fort’s founding, delivered at 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 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 , 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 , 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 via the through the high-desert country of northwestern and northeastern 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 , Sprague and his men stumble upon an incredible sight: a deep blue lake cradled within a volcanic . 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 . 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 “”, that little-known series of far-flung, relentless, tough Army campaigns against the so-called “,” 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 (), Maj. Enoch Steen (), and General (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 . 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 .

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 (commanding officer of the entire ) 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 , DC -- cementing the post’s fame, if only briefly, in the nation’s consciousness.

Fort Klamath’s story essentially then comes to an end during the 1880s and early 1890s. By now a civilian, Franklin Sprague works for a time as the post’s “suttler,” and, although he eventually moves away from Oregon, Sprague remains a major booster of ongoing settlement in the upper , the place that he’d helped to map and put under U.S. control.

Ironically, during the 1870s and 1880s, as more, larger, and fancier buildings are erected here at the Fort, simultaneously, the Klamath Basin and eastern Oregon become ever more settled, fenced, and irrigated. Fort Klamath inevitably declines steadily in importance. In 1879, Army inspector Lt. J. W. Duncan is disgusted to find that the best hay for the fort’s many horses grew on what was now privately owned land, in the northwestern part of valley…not on the Fort’s 3,000-acre hay reservation. In his letter to the post’s commanding officer, Duncan complains bitterly, “Had our predecessors taken those sections…now…settled [by homesteaders], the Hay Reserve would have been the finest in the country…but now we will have to, in my opinion, be contented with [what land] we now have…the valley is small and the good land [all] taken up.”7

During its final abandonment by Army troops, the winter of 1889-90 brought a dramatic and symbolic end to the fort’s life: Various buildings -- the huge stables among them -- come crashing down from the weight of the deep, heavy snow that had piled up on their roofs.

After its official abandonment come the first stirrings of commemoration of Ft. Klamath’s place in history, at least commemoration in local, White history.

Almost immediately after the Fort’s closing, local folks become upset at the un-kempt condition of the military cemetery, complaining to their Congressman and prompting the Army in 1892 to exhume all the military burials they could find, shipping the remains by wagon to the railhead at Montague, California, and thence by railroad for re-burial at San Francisco’s Presidio.8 As late as 1914, Franklin Sprague’s son, living back East, remained so interested in Ft. Klamath that -- unaware that the soldiers’ remains had been removed to the Presidio over 30 years previous -- he wrote to the Quartermaster Department, urging the Army to be sure to put flags and special Civil-War veteran markers on their graves at Ft. Klamath for the upcoming 1914 Memorial Day.9

Shortly after the turn-of-the-century, some local people want to include the Fort within the new Crater Lake National Park, but by this time but, as with those best hay lands back in the 1870s, by now all of the fort’s site has been taken up by homesteaders. Finally, during the 1950s and 1960s comes the tireless Klamath County teacher and historian Buena Cobb Stone. (And make no mistake, she was an extreme and utterly unapologetic partisan of the Whites’ side in the region’s various conflicts.10) Stone, who died in 1972, relentlessly campaigns to get national recognition for the Fort.11

Stone’s and others’ efforts bear fruit at last with the more recent sequence of commemorative-related events: The county’s acquisition of 8 acres of land at the Fort’s site in 1966. The formal listing of this small portion of the Fort on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. Its formal dedication as a county park in 1973. Followed by construction of a “guard house” (a very loose replica), then followed by its destruction in 2001 (by fire, not by snow), allowing the far more accurate replica of today to be built by the Klamath County Museum in 2003. And thereby bringing our story to the 150th anniversary of the Fort at this very moment in time.12

So, that’s Ft. Klamath’s “basic story” – one that’s been told and re-told many times.

I now want to continue with some thoughts on three aspects about the Fort Klamath Story that have occurred to me while preparing this talk: First, the once highly controversial and contested issue of Fort’s location. Second, the irony of this un-walled fort in a peaceful, pastoral Setting – a fort that, other than a sham one put on for show in the 1890s between a National Guard contingent from Ashland and Klamath tribal members, never witnessed a battle. And lastly, Fort Klamath’s lasting legacy to us of certain place names -- names still on our region’s map that resulted, in some fashion, from the Fort’s presence.

First, the controversy over “Location, Location, Location”: During the mid-19th Century, Oregon, unlike the nation as a whole, had an eastward-moving frontier. Oregon’s northwestern part (the ) was settled by Whites first (1830s-1840s); then new settlers flowed southward to the Umpqua and Rogue valleys during the 1850s and 1860s. Only then did Oregon’s frontier, the line between White-settled and not-yet settled land, head back over the Cascades towards the east – pushing back over those same desolate-seeming high-elevation basins and plateaus that the first emigrants had crossed on their way to the green Eden of the Willamette Valley. Ft. Klamath, because of its location, would play a central role in Oregon’s eastward-moving, settling-up process during the 1860s-1870s and even into the early 1880s. Also, it’s important to recall that what eventually became Klamath County, for much of its history after Oregon gained statehood in 1859, was not just economically, but literally, politically, a part of Jackson County. Jackson County once extended as far east as Lakeview.

Let’s focus more closely more on that question of the Fort’s location: Why was it placed right here? Was it for aesthetic reasons? After all, Fort Klamath was known far-and-wide as the “most beautiful Army post on the country.” Even Oliver Cromwell (O.C.) Applegate, an Ashlander, praised its setting “…on the margin of the splendid meadow valley....It was a primitive wilderness, abounding in fish and game, in verdure and forest, and was a delightful station...especially to the officers who had leisure for hunting and fishing.”13 But while Charles Drew, that former Jacksonville politician, picked a lovely spot to be sure, that is not what decided the issue for him. It was largely the site’s comparatively much shorter distance from Jacksonville, via his Rancheria Trail, than it was from Ashland. But O.C. Applegate and his famous father, Lindsay -- emigrant over the original Oregon Trail in 1843 and one of the locators of Oregon-bound emigrants’ Southern Route, or Applegate Trail, in 1846 -- were Ashlanders. They and other Ashland residents had major problems with Drew’s this location. Not only was Drew’s choice so far from Ashland, whose own economic fortunes they cared about deeply, but also too far from the emigrant route that the Fort was supposed to protect, the Applegate Trail route that Lindsay, his brother Jesse, Levi Scott, and others had blazed in the summer of 1846 -- a route that remained subject to attack during the 1850s and early 1860s by Northern Paiute, , and Modoc Indians. These were Native people who, after forty years since the first strangers, fur trappers of the British Hudson’s Bay Company, appeared, had by this time grown contemptuous of and angered by the every-increasing influx of Whites through their lands.

In the 1860s the two towns were locked in fierce competition for economic dominance of the Rogue Valley. Such inter-community struggles were a major part of the experience, often times becoming cut-throat, economic life-or-death matters between neighboring towns. Adding to the Ashland/Jacksonville antipathy over the Fort’s location was the fact that local members of the two political parties remained in bitter disagreement over prosecution of the Civil War. The Applegates were Republicans, and Ashland was then dominated by Republicans. Lindsay, O.C., Ivan, and Elisha Applegate would, in succession, all have strong official and semi-official connections in coming years with the Klamath Reservation and with the Fort during Republican presidential administrations. But Charles Drew was not only a Jacksonville booster; he, like most Jacksonville residents of the day, was also a deeply partisan, anti-Lincoln states-rights Democrat. The two parties were very different from what they are today; Democrats were the very conservative, small government party; Republicans were then the opposite. Furious about what they perceived as the other party’s profound wrongs during the Civil War, local Republicans and Democrats regularly taunted each other in the pages of their newspapers with insults like “tyrant” and “traitor.”14

In 1865, Ashlander Capt. John McCall led his Troop A of the Oregon Volunteer Cavalry, a number of whose members apparently came from Ashland area, to supplement (balance?) Drew’s Jacksonville-dominated Company C Cavalry and Company I of the Oregon Volunteer Infantry -- whose members are said to have been forced to use ill-trained mules to get about the country. Perhaps this reinforcement acted in some fashion to balance out the divided hometown loyalties of the fort’s troopers. And in 1870 Indian agent O. C. Applegate’s “Dead Indian Road,” built by men from the Klamath Reservation, helped put Ashland back in the saddle in terms of a new short, viable commercial link over the mountains to the army post.

Ironically, the announcement of final closure of Ft. Klamath in the late 1880s brought outraged protests from Klamath County residents and representatives, especially the merchants of the young town of Klamath Falls. What about Jacksonville and Ashland? Comparatively speaking, there was hardly a peep out of them. By that time these two towns had more important things to consider than Ft. Klamath. Why? The railroad had just come through the RRV in the 1880s; as a result Ashland prospered, and Jacksonville -- well off the rail-line and soon to become rapidly eclipsed by the new RR town of Medford -- had already begun its steady decline. So, in that respect, Ft. Klamath, the first outpost of Euro-American development on the upper Klamath Basin, did succeed; as Klamath County Museum Director Todd Kepple has observed, in opening “the way for a few adventurous farmers and ranchers to establish themselves here”; it did so by hastening the drastic changes to the Native culture that had been here for thousands of years.15

The Second Issue: The Curious Case of the Un-Walled, Un-Scarred Fort: Now let us consider the seeming irony of the fact -- aside from Capt. John Charles Fremont’s brief, bloody visit to in 1846 – the fact that no actual battles were ever fought anywhere close to the site of Fort Klamath. Although situated on the “frontier,” it was no besieged “Ft. Apache” with flaming arrows shot into a log palisade. Like most Western Army posts, it had no palisade whatsoever. However, some battle-hardened generals did spend short period at Fort Klamath. Among them were General O. O. Howard, made famous by the Civil War, as well as General Jefferson C. Davis, who brought the Modoc War to a close, and Nelson Miles, who would accept the surrender of after the Battle of Bear Paw Mountain in Montana Territory in 1877.16

Even though no real battles occurred, some violence did take place here. Soon after its opening, the Fort witnessed the shooting of a Klamath headman for his alleged part in the Ledford Massacre (at Rancheria Prairie, near present-day town of Butte Falls) of 1859. In the mid-1860s, as O.C. Applegate later recalled, a band of hostile Paiutes had ridden all the way west to the shores of Upper Klamath Lake before they retreated back to the desert. Was the proximity of Fort Klamath a factor in their decision to turn around?17

The Modoc War, although it was fought miles away, caused wounded and dead soldiers to be returned to the hospital and cemetery here. Army records indicate that serving as Army scouts against Captain Jack’s band -- in addition to the Wasco and other Indians who had come down here from the Warm Springs Reservation -- were a number of Klamath men. It is documented that some Native men were killed at the Lava Beds while in Army service. Klamaths rendered other forms of assistance to the military as well. One Army voucher, for June 21, 1873, tallies the payment of $12 to an apparently elderly Klamath man, known simply as “Old Joe,” for ferrying a number of sick and wounded soldiers, who were being returned to the fort, in his dug-out canoe around on Upper Klamath Lake.18

On October 3, 1873, the hanging of Captain Jack, Huka (or Hooker) Jim, Boston Charley, and John Schonchin -- over by that grove of pines -- indeed brought those four lives to a violent end. It was an end witnessed by hundreds of people, Native and white alike. As the fort’s soldiers stood at attention in a “hollow-square” formation surrounding the scaffold, the traps suddenly open and four men’s necks snap as the nooses pull tight -- the view of this beautiful valley the last thing they ever saw. And then, after the hanging, the decapitation of the corpses – supposedly for “scientific” reasons, but an absolutely appalling story to us today -- their headless bodies still buried right over there.

A later act of violence at Ft. Klamath is hinted at by the remains exhumed from the post cemetery here of one Private Daniel Kavanagh, who died July 21, 1883. His skull had a bullet entry hole in the back of the head, and an exit hole in the forehead. Was Private Kavanagh’s death the result of accident?, or of murder? If the latter, what precipitated this apparent foul deed?, and by whom was it committed? None of the records that I’ve seen answer those questions; quite possibly the circumstances are explained in a newspaper article of the day.19

Third and lastly, I want to share some parting thoughts on place-names – those local geographic names that are somehow related to Fort Klamath: There is, of course, the name of the little town just down the road from us. And there’s Fort Creek, meandering right over there, another name whose origin is far too obvious to discuss.

Unlike Captain Sprague’s “Lake Majesty,” some other Ft. Klamath-related names are still on the map. Among them is Farewell Bend, located right on Sprague’s road where it bends away from the Rogue River, proceeding out-of-sight of that river on the road’s way eastward towards the fort. The U.S. Forest Service’s Farewell Bend Campground, situated at that very same site along Highway 62 just north of Union Creek, preserves the historic name. Drew’s Valley and Drew’s Gap, named for the fort’s founder, are traversed by Highway 140 in Lake County. Munson Point and Munson Valley, up in the Park, were named by O. C. Applegate for the Reservation’s elderly doctor, who died of over-exertion while climbing to the Lake’s rim in 1871; Munson was buried in the Fort cemetery. Bybee Creek, which flows into the uppermost Rogue River, was named for Jacksonville-area settler William Bybee, a rancher who later ranged sheep along the upper Rogue-Umpqua Divide. In 1865, it was Bybee who, upon learning of the work of Sprague’s team of road-building soldiers, brought a welcome load of potatoes and fresh vegetables to their distant camp. And there is Whiskey Creek, supposedly named in about 1883 after a Jacksonville-bound squad of soldiers discovered a cache of whiskey bottles along the stream that had been stashed there the autumn before due to heavy snows on the road. The cheerful beverage is said to have been consumed without delay. I’m sure there are others; for one, Sevenmile Creek comes to mind.20

In closing, there is my own favorite – and, for my money, by far the most historically revealing and intriguing – of the Fort Klamath-related place-names, that of McKie Camp… McKie Camp, rhymes with “sky.” Currently, we tend to pronounce the Scottish named spelled as McKay to rhyme with “hay.” Originally, and well into the early 20th century, McKay was more correctly pronounced as “McKie,” rhyming with “sky.” That was especially the case with those people who carried that proud Scottish name. (When reading the narrative below, please try to “hear” the name McKay pronounced throughout as “McKie.”)

McKie Camp Meadow is a small, little-known meadow within what is now the Rogue River NF- side of ; it is still used each year as a camping spot by backpackers, equestrians, elk hunters. A post-World War II Forest Service grazing report summarized what little was then known about the origins of various old place names on the Prospect Ranger District. It related that McKie Camp got its name as a sheepherder’s camp, one dating from well before Forest Service days, and further stated that the name derived from a person he described as a Klamath “renegade” [Indian] and sheepman named Tom McKie.21

The records of the 1892 exhumation of the burials from the Fort cemetery are quite thorough. They list one “David Mc[Kie], child, died May 1878…son of Thomas Mc[Kie], an Indian Scout in the service of the during the Modoc War, and who is now living at Fort Klamath with his family.” The Army report concludes by stating that “Mr. [Tom] Mc[Kie] desires that the remains [of his son, David] be left in the cemetery in his care. Remains were left.”22

So, who was Tom McKay (i.e., pronounced as McKie]? Please brace yourselves for a bit of genealogy. At this point, I am over 95-percent certain that he was the son William McKay [definitely pronounced as “McKie”] and the nephew of Donald McKay. William and Donald were half-brothers and both of them were well-known, part-Indian/part-Scot U.S. Army scouts and interpreters. Born in Oregon in the 1830s, both settled on the Warm Springs Reservation and both served the Army during the Snake Wars, both of them earning distinction in that endeavor. Donald McKay subsequently came down from Warm Springs to Ft. Klamath as chief of Scouts during the Modoc War. Donald -- who later went on to star in a Buffalo-Bill-like “Wild West Show” as “Daring Donald McKay,” scourge of the Modocs -- stayed on here for a time after the War. William McKay, Donald’s older brother and fellow Army scout, indeed had a son named Tom: Thomas Cameron McKay, born in 1859 and died in 1932). Was this the Tom “McKie” who lived here in the 1890s, the Tom McKay of “McKie Camp”? I think so. That Tom McKay, Donald McKay’s nephew, stayed at Fort Klamath much longer than did his uncle.23

Both William and Donald, in turn, were sons of an even more famous Tom McKay, the part-Cree Indian/part-Scot stepson of Dr. John McLoughlin – the namesake of that mountain over there and the chief of all Hudson’s Bay Company’s operations in the during the early 1800s. That Tom McKay went on to become an HBC fur trader, and earned fame during the 1830s and 1840s as a guide for American emigrants travelling through the Oregon Country, This same Tom McKay, who had scouted the Klamath Basin in 1826-1827 for Hudson’s Bay Co. fur-trader Peter Ogden, the first White to explore the Basin as well as much of the rest of southwestern Oregon and northern-most California, was in turn the biological son of Alexander McKay.24

Bear with me a few moments longer: Most Americans have never of Alexander McKay, but I guarantee you that most Canadians have. He’s the very same Alexander McKay who in the 1790s, with fellow Scottish-born fur-trader Alexander Mackenzie, became the first to cross the full width of the North American continent all the way to the Pacific Ocean. (No, it wasn’t Lewis and Clark in 1805 who achieved that honor; it was Mackenzie and McKay, in 1793). Alexander McKay (pronounced “McKie”) went on to establish in 1810, John Jacob Astor’s American fur post at the mouth of the Columbia. He was killed by Indians at a remote harbor of Vancouver Island soon thereafter, during the disastrous end of Astor’s ill-starred fur-trading ship, the Tonquin. Only by last-minute decision did Alexander McKay leave his young son, Tom, behind at Astoria, young tom McKay thereby avoided almost certain death alongside his father aboard the Tonquin.

Believe me, this is quite an Oregon historical pedigree! Although my case currently may be a bit circumstantial, I believe there is a very strong likelihood of a direct link between young David McKay’s long-unmarked grave, over there in the Ft. Klamath cemetery, and all those earlier, famous McKays. The McKays were an exceptionally prominent, important family in the very beginnings of the Oregon Country’s written history -- a family whose lineage goes dates far back into Oregon’s earliest fur-trade period of the 1790s and early 1800s. They were also a family, through at least four generations in the Oregon Country, that derived and thrived throughout the 19th century from the inter-marrying of White men with Native women.

Thank you.

1 I thank Todd Kepple and the Klamath county Historical society for inviting me to give this talk. I am also grateful to Kevin Fields, for sharing some of his personal stories as a staff member at the Ft. Klamath Museum, and to Steve Mark, park historian at Crater Lake National Park, who, during my preparation for this talk, kindly provided photocopies of a number of source materials, both primary and secondary materials, from the Park’s Ft. Klamath reference file. These items ranged from ca. 1870-1914 U.S. Army documents, copied from original records the National Archives, as well as such general works as Buena Cobb Stone’s published history of Ft. Klamath and Devere Helfrich’s several essays in the 1968 issue of Klamath Echoes.

2 See: Leslie Spier, Klamath Ethnography, University of California Press, Berkeley.

3 Early in my career with the U.S. Forest Service I prepared the National Register of Historic Places nomination for several relatively intact segments of the Rancheria Trail on the Rogue River and Winema National Forests, most of which had been obliterated by past logging and road buildings; the longest segment of the route listed on the NRHP is the portion that passes over the north base of Mt. McLoughlin, today the Twin Ponds trail within the Sky Lakes Wilderness.

4 See: Stephen R. Mark, “Captain Sprague’s Big Adventure,” Journal of the Shaw Historical Library. Vol. 26, 2012: 3- 15.

5 Unidentified/undated newspaper clipping: “As Clear As Crystal: A Strange Mountain Lake in Southern Oregon – Very Deep” (opening paragraph cites the San Francisco Bulletin as origin of the story), Crater Lake NP, Ft. Klamath history file.

6 Many of the events mentioned in this brief narrative are detailed in: Buena Cobb Stone, Old Fort Klamath: An Oregon Frontier Post, 1863-1890. Bert Webber (ed.), Webb Research Group and Klamath County Historical Society: Medford, 1990. Historical researcher Ken Hartell, while at the Library of Congress, found clear evidence that the

“earthquake” story was re-printed in such distant newspapers as the New Orleans Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

7 “Report of 1st Lt. J. W. Duncan, 21st Inf., relative to Hay Reserve, to Commanding Officer, Fort Klamath, June 3, 1879.z’ National Archives record group 92, box 517, envelope #5659; Crater Lake NP, Ft. Klamath history file.

8 E.g., “Apr. 18, 1892 letter from Solon Shattuck, Fort Klamath to Hon. Binger Hermann [U.S. Congressman from Oregon] and Hermann’s resulting Apr.30 letter to the Secretary of War, calling attention to the state of affairs at the cemetery and requesting action.

9 U.S. Army general index card #504307, May 19, 1914, regarding F. B. Sprague’s request for flags and G.A.R. markers on Memorial Day, National Archives record group 92, Entry 84 28:12:1, box 466; Crater Lake NP, Ft. Klamath history file.

10 For a second but similar opinion about Stone’s personal biases, see the book review by Bill Varble “Frontier Troopers: Sympathy for volunteer cavalry dominates Fort Klamath history,” Medford Mail Tribune (undated [1990?] clipping), Crater Lake NP, Ft. Klamath history file.

11 See Stone’s March 8, 1962 letter, typed on Klamath Union High School letterhead, to the ’s San Francisco Regional Office, urging that the Park Service formally recognize Fort Klamath as being of national significance was met with a negative reply by regional director Lawrence Merriam. However, Merriam’s reply offered encouragement that would turn out of be prescient by 1966: “We…hope that your community…will undertake steps locally to preserve this site.” Correspondence in: Crater Lake NP, Ft. Klamath history file.

12 The 8-acre parcel came to the county through purchase and grant from the Zumbrum family, ranchers in the Wood River Valley.

13 Captain O. C. Applegate, “History of Fort Klamath” (typescript of a [ca. 1910?] reminiscence by Oliver Cromwell Applegate), Crater Lake NP, Ft. Klamath history file.

14 For an accounting of Southern Oregon’s political divisions over the Civil War, see: Jeff LaLande, “ ‘Dixie’ of the Northwest: Southern Oregon’s Civil War,” Oregon Historical Quarterly (100):1, 32-81.

15 Todd Kepple, “Fort Klamath Celebrates 150 years,” The Trumpeter. No. 103, Spring 2013, Klamath County Historical Society, p.2.

16 Due to several near-defeats in which he and his command found themselves during the Civil War, Oliver O. Howard’s initials, O.O., led some colleagues and observers to refer to him as “Uh-Oh!” Howard. Davis fought for the Union during the Civil War and was no relation to the ex-president of the former Confederacy. Miles later went on to become Commanding General of the U.S. Army.

17 In different sources, the “Ledford Massacre” is mentioned as having either occurred in 1856 or in 1859. The latter date seems more probable, and some focused research would likely easily resolve the discrepancy. Five settlers from the Rogue River Valley, among them Eli Ledford, failed to return from a trip taken towards the upper Klamath Basin (possibly to scout for a route over the Cascades and to investigate the stock-raising potential of the Wood River Valley vicinity). Their bodies were found at Rancheria Prairie with evidence of having been murdered by Natives, believed to have been a particular group of Klamaths. Rancheria Prairie was a favorite upland camping

spot for Klamath people, used after crossing the mountains to the Rogue River side of the Cascades’ crest. What actually transpired there between the two groups was never determined.

Applegate, “History of Ft. Klamath,” p.3. Apparently there is some recent lore regarding an alleged battle taking place relatively close to Ft. Klamath between Northern Paiutes and Ft. Klamath soldiers. No such event is documented by any of the primary or secondary sources that I’m familiar with. It seems doubtful to me that such an episode would have escaped their notice; if it had occurred, certainly O. C. Applegate would have known of and commented upon it in his memoir about the fort..

18 “Voucher for transportation services rendered by ‘ ”Old Joe” Klamath’; June 19, 1873 [paid June 21, 1873, Ft. Klamath, Oregon.” Crater Lake NP, Ft. Klamath history file. There is a sizeable literature on the Modoc War; for a solid if somewhat dated overview of the Modoc War, see: Keith A. Murray, The Modocs and Their War, University of Oklahoma press, Norman, 1959.

19 Notes on Exhumation #47; Kavanagh, Pvt. Daniel, [Co]. K., 1 US Cavalry in; “Report of Oct. 1892 by Lt. W. K. Jones, 14th Infantry, of the removal of remains from Ft. Klamath Reservation” (transmitted by Oct. 26, 1892 letter from Office of Chief Quartermaster, Dept. of the Columbia, , Wash. to Quartermaster General of the Army, Washington, DC). Crater Lake NP, ft. Klamath history file.

20 Historical background on these and other Ft. Klamath-related place-names are given in: Lewis A. McArthur and Lewis L. McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 7th edition, Oregon Historical Society Press, Portland, 2003. William Bybee’s contribution of fresh vegetables to the soldier’ food larder is mentioned in the Oregon Sentinel, Aug. 19, 1865.

21 Jeff LaLande, from Abbott Butte to Zimmerman Burn: A Place-Name History and Gazetteer of the Rogue River National Forest, U.S. Forest Service, Medford, 2001.

22 Notes on Exhumation #40; McKay, David, Child in; “Report of Oct. 1892 by Lt. W. K. Jones, 14th Infantry, of the removal of remains from Ft. Klamath Reservation” (transmitted by Oct. 26, 1892 letter from Office of Chief Quartermaster, Dept. of the Columbia, Vancouver Barracks, Wash. to Quartermaster General of the Army, Washington, DC). Crater Lake NP, ft. Klamath history file.

23 For background on both William and Donald McKay, see (especially the footnotes): Keith and Donna Clark, “William McKay’s Journal 1866-67: Indian Scouts, Parts I and II,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. LXXiX, No 2 and No. 3, Summer and Fall issues, 1978. For a heavily romanticized version of Donald McKay’s Army life, see: T. A. Edwards, Daring Donald McKay, or The Last Trail of the Modocs, 3rd Edition, Herald Printing and Publishing Company, Erie, PA, 1884. Donald McKay, “Scout and Interpreter and Chief Packer at Fort Klamath,” was also dispatched to the Lava Beds in August 1873 to assist in the interment of “the remains of soldiers left unburied south of . Upon return from this service Donald will be discharged.” See: Devere Helfrich, “Fort Klamath Cemetery and the Modoc Graves.” Klamath Echoes, 1968, p. 8.

24 For an accounting of Peter Ogden’s and Tom McKay’s joint travels through the upper Klamath Basin in 1826, see: Jeff LaLande, First Over the Siskiyous: ’s 1826-1827 Journey Through the Oregon-California Borderlands, Oregon Historical Society Press, Portland, 1987, as well as: Jeff LaLande, “Through a ‘Strange Country…Covered with Lakes’,” The Journal of the Shaw Historical Library, Vol. 8, 1994.