These canyon walls lean in green and wet, but climb to the foothills above and the country was once wide open: rolling oak savanna and grass prairie you could see clear across, dotted with great lone oaks. That was the country of the Kalapuya, who lived all up and down the Willamette Valley for better than ten thousand years, and who tended it not by leaving it alone but with fire, burning the prairies every fall to keep the oak country open and the camas thriving. This tale carries one thing out of the canyon with you, and it's a hard one: how a world tended across a hundred generations changed, fast, and what happened to the open valley once there was no one left to set the autumn fires. It ends with a small blue lily that still keeps the shape of a country nobody will ever see again.
Stay put a minute in this stretch of deep timber. The trail's gone quiet, the falls behind you, the canyon walls leaning in green and wet, dripping a little even when it isn't raining. Boone Merrick's the name. Now look hard at these woods around you. Douglas-fir crowded shoulder to shoulder, ferns up past your knee, vine maple tangled in between, and every living inch of this ground fighting another living inch for a thread of light. It is beautiful country. But I want you to carry one thing out of this canyon with you, and it is this: it was not always shut in like this. Climb up out of here, onto the foothills above your head, and for a stretch of time longer than you can rightly hold in your mind, that country was wide open. Rolling oak savanna and grass prairie you could see clean across, dotted with great spreading oaks standing alone, and hardly a thing between them but sunlight and tall grass moving in the wind.
That was the country of the Kalapuya. They lived all up and down this Willamette Valley, dozens of bands speaking their own tongues, and the ones closest to right here were the Santiam and the Pudding River people. They had been in this valley longer than anybody can rightly count. Better than ten thousand years, say the careful folks who dig in the dirt and study such things. Think on that number a moment. They were not passing through. They tended this whole valley the way a man tends a garden, and the tool they reached for, year on year, was fire.
Here is the turn of it. Every fall, when the grass cured dry and brittle, the people walked out and set the prairies alight on purpose. Not careless. Not wild. On purpose, and with a plan as old as the bands themselves. The burning kept the oak country open. It held back the brush and the young firs that would otherwise come creeping in and swallow the whole valley down. It cleared the ground so the camas could thrive, that blue-flowered lily whose bulb the women dug by the basketload and baked slow in earth ovens for two days and more, sweet as a roasted pear when it came up. That was the bread of this valley. The fire ripened the tarweed seed, brought on the hazel, drove the deer where the hunters wanted them. The open land you would have seen from these hills, friend, that was not nature left alone. The Kalapuya made it. One autumn fire at a time, across a hundred generations, they made the valley you would have stood in.
And then it ended, and it ended fast. In the eighteen thirties the fever came up the river. Malaria, the newcomers called it. The people called it the cold sick, the way it took a body shaking and then burning. The story goes it carried off better than nine in ten of them inside a few short years. Nine in ten. A valley tended for ten thousand years, emptied near to silence inside one man's lifetime. The few who lived through it were marched off in eighteen fifty-six to a reservation up at Grand Ronde, away over the Coast Range, and made to stay. And with the people gone from this ground, the fall fires stopped. There was no one left to set them.
So the forest did what a forest does when nothing holds it back. It came creeping in over the open prairie. The firs first, then the brush behind them, filling every gap the fire used to keep clean, closing the country down a little more each year, until on the slopes and down here in the wet it grew into woods near as thick and dark as the timber you are standing in this very minute. The garden went back to wilderness because the gardeners were gone.
So climb out onto those hills today, where a few ragged patches of prairie still hang on, and walk them in the spring. You will find the camas there, blue as it ever was, blooming on ground that does not remember why. That little blue lily is the last map left of a country that is gone. It holds the shape of the open valley in every flower — the wide grass, the lone oaks, the autumn smoke of a fire that no hand sets anymore. The gardeners are a hundred and seventy years off this ground. And the camas comes up regardless, blue against all that green, keeping the shape of a prairie nobody will ever see again, faithful to a country that forgot it was ever anything but trees.
