Oregon Trail conference meets at the ‘crossroads’ of history, aiming to tell more diverse, accurate stories

The Oregon Trail may represent a pivotal moment in U.S. history, but at the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute, it’s just one of many trails.

Rather than depict a singular Oregon Trail, a map at the Umatilla Indian Reservation museum and interpretive center is a web of routes: Lines that represent the 10 incursions into Umatilla, Walla Walla and Cayuse territory and the sprawl of paths the tribes used to hunt game, gather First Foods and connect communities.

Tamastslikt calls the map “Different Ways Arrive in Our Living World” — the name tribal members attached to the pioneer trail era.

The Oregon Trail went straight through the area that now comprises the Umatilla Indian Reservation and the neighboring city of Pendleton, and is still recognized as a significant event that reshaped the West, leading to the formation of Oregon. But, the Oregon Trail and the other incursions into tribal land also led to disease, violence and displacement for the tribes that would eventually form the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

Tamastslikt director Bobbie Conner shared this map with dozens of historians and pioneer trail enthusiasts at the annual Oregon California Trail Association conference in July. Conference organizers chose the reservation’s Wildhorse Resort and Casino to host the event, not in spite of the messiness a full slate of historians and experts like Conner added to the pioneer narrative, but because of it.

OCTA chose “Shifting Legacies” for its 2024 convention theme. The conference would still tour sections of the trail and talk about pioneer life, but it would also reflect the Oregon Trail at a moment of reconsideration; a moment when scholars are not only studying all the people who walked the trail, but those who already lived along it and how the friction of those groups of people forever changed the landscape. Organizers believe that this widened lens will correct the record and offer a lifeline for future generations of pioneer trail study.

“These incursions all came right through this place. We are at a crossroads for history like very few tribes are,” Conner said. “This crossroads has been a blessing and a curse.”

Shifting legacies

Roger Blair and Susan Doyle found love on a trail.

She was a Ph.D student at the University of New Mexico studying the Bozeman Trail, a pioneer route that connected Montana to the Oregon Trail as it hooked through Wyoming. He was a worker for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management creating an inventory of the Bozeman Trail with the Idaho Historical Society.

Both had a long standing interest in pioneer history. Doyle wrote a report on the Donner Party as a grade school student while Blair’s interest was piqued after picking up his first book on the Oregon Trail during a stint in Hillsboro.

“She [Doyle] came up because of the Bozeman Trail, and we met and have been together since,” Blair said.

Blair was among the founding members when OCTA was established in 1982. He and Doyle helped lead its Northwest chapter after they moved to Pendleton in 1997.

Given Eastern Oregon’s prominent role on the Oregon Trail, OCTA is no stranger to the region. The association hosted conventions in Pendleton and Baker City in the 1990s, Blair said. But as they began planning the convention’s return to Pendleton, they wanted this year’s gathering to be different.

Doyle’s grade school history often romanticized the pioneer trails, but OCTA wanted to demonstrate an expanding field of research that takes in more perspectives.

“It still is and was an invasion into a settled area,” she said. “Historians and people who are studying this are still trying to come up with a way to describe it. We can’t change things, but we have to be able to describe it (in a way) that gives everybody’s interests a fair hearing.”

Travis Boley, a Missouri-based manager for OCTA, said “Shifting Legacies” was also a part of the organization’s ongoing effort to diversify its membership. OCTA’s members are mostly white people in their ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, with the time and resources to study and explore the trails, he said.

Modern scholarship is changing to include a wider lens, including the American Indian people who already lived there, as well as Black, Asian, Latino and LGBTQ immigrants, Boley said. The trail association’s shift in programming is already leading to some new faces at some events.

“Our audience, of course, is growing as we really endeavored to tell the most diverse and accurate story possible,” Boley said.

Broken down on the Oregon Trail

When the trail association party tried to branch out from the Oregon Trail, they didn’t expect a breakdown.

The touring group’s destination was Whitman Mission, a frequent stop for Oregon Trail immigrants near modern day Walla Walla, Washington.

But the bus came to a halt on a gravel road north of Pendleton, after making frequent stops to talk about the trail or the Cayuse who lived there. Surrounded by little more than wheat fields, the party waited for help.

Tour member Charlie Zimmerman noted the breakdown was thematically appropriate.

“On the trail, things happened, things broke down, sometimes you got stopped,” they said. “There’s no better way to kind of deal with that at an Oregon Trail convention and be like, ‘You know what, now we got a little bit of taste of what they might have gone through.’”

Zimmermann is exactly the kind of new member OCTA is hoping to draw. A recent college graduate from Southern Oregon University, the 21-year-old said their interest in this era of history stretches back to age 8, when they dressed up as a pioneer for Halloween.

They recently graduated with a degree in history. Zimmermann said they recognized that they were one of the few attendees who was not “very, very old” and applauded the effort to diversify.

“I hope that I, as a younger person, can kind of help with the transition that’s going to be unfortunately kind of inevitable in the next 20 years of turning over OCTA and Oregon Trail scholarship to a new generation,” they said. “I really hope to be able to go back to my community and sort of get other people excited about the trail.”

Different ways arrive in our living world

Conner, the Tamastslikt director, said she could fill her entire speech just going over all of the various villages in tribal territories and the languages they spoke. But, by the time the U.S. was ready to open treaty talks with them in the 1850s, the federal government had condensed the various tribes into a singular confederation.

“All of these people end up in a story called the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla because it is to the convenience of the United States government, and white people dealing with us, to label us in a way that they can pronounce,” she said.

The federal government wanted to open up Eastern Oregon to industry and enterprise, and the violence that followed settler encroachment on tribal territory brought them to the table with the tribes. The result was the Treaty of 1855.

The tribes’ traditional territory was more expansive than any single trail, covering most of modern-day northeast Oregon and stretching into southeastern Washington, while their hunting and gathering land expanded through much of the West. The reservation the tribes agreed to was much smaller: 512,000 acres solely in what would later become Oregon.

The federal government immediately reneged on the agreement during the surveying process, shrinking the reservation boundaries twice until it only spanned 172,000 acres. Tribal sovereignty was further eroded through the practice of allotment: assigning tribal members their own land parcels to manage and farm while declaring the surplus could be bought by outsiders. Today, nearly half of the reservation is owned by non-Indians.

“Allotment was supposed to be a blessing to help assimilate us into capitalism, as well as to break down our communal bonds,” Conner said. “If (the U.S.) could break down the communal thinking of our people, we would be more vulnerable to taking on all of the new teachings.”

Conner said tribes lost generational wealth built up through fishing sites and horse herds. The treaty granted the tribes self-governance, but not the same kind of independence they enjoyed before the incursions.

“When the first explorers and settlers came here, this was our country. No one else could lay claim to it,” she said. “That autonomy is not something we expect to get back.”

But she wouldn’t let her talk end before reminding the trail enthusiasts and historians of what remained.

Unequivocal, irreplaceable, irrevocable

The OCTA tour wasn’t stranded for long.

After finding refuge at a nearby farm, the CTUIR dispatched two shuttles to take the tourists to a park in the small town of Adams. A replacement charter bus eventually arrived to take them to Whitman Mission at the expense of a handful of planned stops along the way.

A pair of park rangers greeted the tour in Walla Walla, and urged them to explore a mission that’s seen its story change significantly over the decades.

Marcus Whitman was a missionary who moved to Cayuse territory in 1836 with the explicit goal of converting tribal members to Christianity. Eleven years later, Cayuse people killed him. His white contemporaries eulogized him as a protestant hero, a missionary killed by the same souls he was trying to save.

That version of history would remain the dominant narrative for many years, even after the National Park Service took over stewardship of the mission in 1936.

“A nice story is a really desirable thing”, said Kate Kunkel-Patterson, a ranger at the Whitman Mission National Historic site. “A story that has clear boundaries and people who were good and people who weren’t good.”

More recent scholarship complicated the story. A measles epidemic brought by settlers hit the Cayuse hard at the time, with tensions rising as Whitman’s treatments failed to cure the disease. Over time, Whitman had grown less concerned with proselytizing to the Cayuse and more interested in running a flour and cornmeal business that served settlers on the nearby Oregon Trail.

Whitman was warned multiple times that the Cayuse and their allies could kill him over increasing settler encroachment, the measles epidemic and a belief that he was poisoning tribal members rather than attempting to help them. Whitman ignored the warnings and in 1847, tribal members killed him, his wife and 11 other men at the mission.

The aftermath would lead to years of skirmishes between Cayuse tribal members and the U.S. Army, culminating in the execution of five Cayuse men who the federal government accused of murdering Whitman. U.S. officials then forced the Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla onto a reservation.

Today, the Whitman mission includes a documentary with this more complicated history, featuring commentary from Conner.

The OCTA tour group watched that documentary and, a day later, the group would see Conner in the flesh as she told them that the tribes still have agency, despite the bloody history. If tribal members had embraced Western education or Christianity, it was because they chose to, regardless of U.S. policy, she said.

And throughout it all, the tribes have remained on the land.

“(The) relationship that is unique for our people is the relationship to this land,” she said. “It is unequivocal, it is irreplaceable, it is irrevocable. We come from this place, we have always been from this place, we will always be from this place.”

She closed her talk with a picture of the CTUIR flag. She went over the horses running through the center of it and the names of the three tribes before turning her attention to design on the bottom.

“Those symbols on that beadwork strip represent the people,” Conner said.

History has made the tribes less trusting than they used to be, but they still believe in the potential for good human beings to treat each other well. They had lost a lot, but they were proud of what they had been able to hold onto.

“This is a story, when you’re here, not only about the place and all of the beings that live here, but it’s also about the people who take care of it.”