Throughout the 1850s, Native peoples of the inland Northwest actively resisted white encroachments into their traditional territories. Tensions exploded in 1858 when nearly one thousand Palouses, Spokanes, and Coeur d?Alenes routed an invading force commanded by Colonel Edward Steptoe. In response, Colonel George Wright mounted a large expedition into the heart of the Columbia Plateau to punish and subdue its Native peoples. Opposing Wright?s force was a loose confederacy of tribes led by the famous warrior Kamiakin. ø Indian War in the Pacific Northwest is a vivid and valuable first-person account of that aggressive and bloody military campaign. Related by Lawrence Kip, a young lieutenant serving under Wright, it provides a rare glimpse of military operations and campaign life along the far western frontier before the Civil War. Replete with colorful prose and acute observations, his journal is also notable for its dramatic descriptions of clashes with Kamiakin?s men and compelling portraits of leading figures on both sides of the Plateau Indian War. ø The new introduction provides the historical and cultural background and aftermath of the conflict, explores its effects on present-day Native peoples of the Columbia Plateau, and critically assesses Kip?s observations and interpretations. Also included in this Bison Books edition are two Native accounts of the conflict by Kamiakin and Mary Moses.

Beginning with the earliest recorded accounts of wars among the American Indians, Nelson describes early European contact, including British trappers of the Hudson Bay Company, whose fur trading led to the Pig War, and the long bitter battles between whites and American Indians.

Col. George Wright’s campaign against the Yakima, Spokane, Coeur d’Alene, Palouse, and other Indian peoples of eastern Washington Territory was intended to punish them for a recent attack on another U.S. Army force. Wright had once appeared to respect the Indians of the Upper Columbia Plateau, but in 1858 he led a brief war noted for its violence, bloodshed, and summary trials and executions. Today, many critics view his actions as war crimes, but among white settlers and politicians of the time, Wright was a patriotic hero who helped open the Inland Northwest to settlement. “Hang Them All” offers a comprehensive account of Wright’s campaigns and explores the controversy surrounding his legacy. Over thirty days, Wright’s forces defeated a confederation of Plateau warriors in two battles, destroyed their food supplies, slaughtered animals, burned villages, took hostages, and ordered the hanging of sixteen prisoners. Seeking the reasons for Wright’s turn toward mercilessness, Cutler asks hard questions: If Wright believed he was limiting further bloodshed, why were his executions so gruesomely theatrical and cruel? How did he justify destroying food supplies and villages and killing hundreds of horses? Was Wright more violent than his contemporaries, or did his actions reflect a broader policy of taking Indian lands and destroying Native cultures? Stripped of most of their territory, the Plateau tribes nonetheless survived and preserved their cultures. With Wright’s reputation called into doubt, some northwesterners question whether an army fort and other places in the region should be named for him. Do historically based names honor an undeserving murderer, or prompt a valuable history lesson? In examining contemporary and present-day treatments of Wright and the incident, “Hang Them All” adds an important, informed voice to this continuing debate.

This collection of more than one hundred tribal tales, culled from the oral tradition of the Indians of Washington and Oregon, presents the Indians' own stories, told for generations around their fires, of the mountains, lakes, and rivers, and of the creation of the world and the heavens above. Each group of stories is prefaced by a brief factual account of Indian beliefs and of storytelling customs. Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest is a treasure, still in print after fifty years.

The Pacific Northwest was one of the most populated and prosperous regions for Native Americans before the coming of the white man. By the mid-1800s, measles and smallpox decimated the Indian population, and the remaining tribes were forced to give up their ancestral lands. Vine Deloria Jr. tells the story of these tribes’ fight for survival, one that continues today.

The Indian tribes of the Pacific Northwest, both on the Coast and the inland Plateau, were the last to encounter white traders and settlers. When contact occured in the late 18th century the explorers and traders found two distinct cultures. The fairly recent adoption of the horse had opened the Plateau tribes to influences from the peoples of the Plains; but the tribes of the Coast presented a sharply different picture, involving rigid class hierarchies, an economy based on fishing and hunting marine animals, and frequent intertribal warfare which involved slave raiding and head hunting. This fascinating text describes the ways of life, in peace and war, of the coastal and inland peoples of this region.

From 1855 to 1856 in western Oregon, the Native peoples along the Rogue River outmaneuvered and repeatedly drove off white opponents. In The Rogue River Indian War and Its Aftermath, 1850–1980, historian E. A. Schwartz explores the tribal groups' resilience not only during this war but also in every period of federal Indian policy that followed. Schwartz's work examines Oregon Indian people's survival during American expansion as they coped with each federal initiative, from reservation policies in the nineteenth century through termination and restoration in the twentieth. While their resilience facilitated their success in adjusting to white society, it also made the people known today as the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians susceptible to federal termination programs in the 1970s—efforts that would have dissolved their communities and given their resources to non-Indians. Drawing on a range of federal documents and anthropological sources, Schwartz explores both the history of Native peoples of western Oregon and U.S. Indian policy and its effects.

On September 27, 1975, activist Bernie Whitebear (Sin Aikst) and Seattle Mayor Wes Uhlman broke ground on former Fort Lawton lands, just outside Seattle Washington, for the construction of the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center. The groundbreaking was the culmination of years of negotiations and legal wrangling between several government entities and the United Indians of All Tribes, the group that occupied the Fort lands in 1970. The peaceful event and sense of co-operation stood in marked contrast to the turbulent and sometimes violent occupation of the lands years before. Native Americans who joined the UIAT came from all parts of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Inspired by the Civil Rights and protest era of the 1960s and 1970s, they squared off with local and federal government to demand the protection of civil and political rights and better social services. Both the scope and the purpose of this book are manifold. The first purpose is to challenge the predominant narrative of Anglo American colonization in the region and re-assert self-determination by re-defining the relationship between Pacific Northwest Native Americans, the larger population of Washington State, and government itself. The second purpose is to illustrate the growth in Pan-Indian/Pan-Tribal activism in the second half of the twentieth century in an attempt to place the Pacific Northwest Native American protests into a broader context and to amend the scholarly and popular trope which characterizes the Red Power movement of the 1960s as the creation of the American Indian Movement (AIM). In this book, casual students of history as well as academics will find that Fort Lawton represents the zone of conflict and compromise occupied by Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest in their ongoing struggle with colonial society.