The story behind a particular old Grants Pass image has stuck with me since I spent a week reporting there last spring. In it, a lumber crew is returning from a grueling harvest on the high ridges of Josephine County, their stone cold poses harder than the woods around them. It’s 1909, and the loggers are perched fiercely on their 17-ton tractor. The chief, in front, squints up from the roadside, his proportionate size to the massive engine wheel that of a hamster to a trundle. Above him, a stoic couple stands unphased by the plume of steam belching beside them, their fearless boy wedged safely in-between the jagged iron treads. It’s clear that any of these people — men, women, and tikes — would unflinchingly defend their haul by hand or hatchet.
For me this single picture’s come to represent a Josephine where there aren’t traditional good or evil, left or right, right or wrong forces at work. In my short time there, residents were staunchly split over whether to increase taxes to fund safety measures, with both sides airing seemingly reasonable arguments. Said rift is a variation of an ongoing theme in which Southwest Oregonians enjoy the perks of public services and infrastructure, but are in large part skeptical of the way in which they are delivered and reluctant to pay for them. In the case of the roughneck immigrants in the faded logging photo, they feuded with farmers who grew tired of their blocking and endangering the lone bridge over the Rogue River with weighty trailers of raw lumber.
If the old unwritten Oregon decree is “First Come, First Served,” as native author Ken Kesey writes in his iconic timberland portrait Sometimes a Great Notion, the bridge feud appears to be an anomalous early instance in which authorities saw no choice but to regulate Manifest Destiny. After the hulking steam engine snapped a critical supporting sway brace on the Sixth Street pass in 1910 and stubborn loggers still refused to stop crossing, a judge had to step in and set up reasonable rules of the road.
More than a century later, the power structure has shifted in favor of logging interests, or at least whatever’s left of them since moratoriums were placed on federal forests. On one hand, the timber business is flanked by elected county commissioners and representatives with influence at the state and federal levels. More locally and less visible, however, is the role being played by county sheriffs: in Josephine, despite not having enough funding for rural patrols, deputies are tasked with unloading foreclosed homes at auction, where private timber farmers appear to be hoarding many of the last harvestable tracks in Oregon. It all lines up with a history in which civilizations have at once clicked and clashed, cohabited and slaughtered one another, put down roots and castrated the valleys.
It’s impossible for me to see the plight of Tom Roach and Melinda Starba outside of this context. The SWAT eviction of their home on Slate Creek, with an apparently doctored warrant no less, is shocking, inexcusable. Nonetheless, they’re only the latest in a long line of settlers whose homes were seized by force, but who fought back with grit and gusto for their square of the Oregon dream.
Look: The story of the Wild West, then, now, and always, is that there ain’t ever enough. Never enough gold. Never enough trees. Never enough humanity. No matter how high the mountains, lush the forests, or bottomless the flowing rivers, for 200 years the powers bold enough to reach the Pacific have pillaged for their unfair share of the pie. Developed around early stage coach routes and later railroads, settlers in Oregon, a disputed territory claimed by both the British Empire and westward-bound America until the 1840s, took a proprietary attitude toward mines and forests, feverishly digging and swinging for profits, and at anybody threatening their unchecked prosperity.
As these stories typically, tragically proceed, indigenous Oregonians were chased from their ancestral territories and corralled on reservations, but not before a string of bloodbaths large and small. European trappers hunting in the area around the 1820s referred to the Indians they encountered as “Les Coquins,” meaning “The Rascals,” and to the watershed they lived along as “La Riviere Aux Coquins,” which translates to “River of the Rogues.” Treaties and agreements came less easily than in other parts of the country. From extensive conifer varieties to waterways teeming with salmon, the natives knew their home of 13,000 years was special, and most were wise enough to see the interlopers as oppressors from the outset.
In 1843 approximately 1,000 wagoners headed for Oregon, many healthy and ambitious people for whom Independence, Missouri, wasn’t independent enough. About 10,000 more followed over the next five years, with a fever pitch hitting after a logger named John Marshall famously struck California gold in 1848. Next came the Forty-Niners and a frenzy spurring the mass slaughter of Indians throughout the region, river to river, valley after valley. As one observer noted: “Nothing would ever be the same ever again.” Another called it the “beginning of our madness.”
Excessive mining poisoned and polluted in the immediate wake of the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, which allotted 320 acres to single men and twice that to married couples. Even after gifted lots were cut in size, homesteaders continued to arrive en masse to punish mountainsides, the resulting debris muddying surrounding rivers and literally choking the fish population. Indians of the Chetco, Lower Coquille, and Takelma tribes, among others, fought for land and lives, but were ultimately plagued by murder and starvation. When certain native factions showed that they were unwilling to compromise, they were exterminated by miners in cahoots with military forces in the territory, and in certain cases moved to reservations. Some conquerors kept Indian children as house pets.
Gold fever spread over the half-century following the 1856 end of the Rogue River Wars, bringing with it an increasingly vigorous predation. Caucasian speculators made a killing; in addition to the gold found in Josephine and Jackson counties, by the late 1800s miners were extracting hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of copper annually. Many of those riches naturally came through the exploitation of laborers, Chinese immigrants and others, who headed west to find their own wealth but wound up working like mules for poverty wages.
There were always new dreams to chase, often presented by snake oil salesmen or public officials. Or both. In 1866, Congress passed the Oregon and California Railroad Act to lure builders into the region. In order to convince businesses to lay tracks between San Francisco and Portland, the bill offered more than 10,000 acres for each mile of rail developed, with the federal government keeping an equal-size adjacent plot. Participating contractors, however, were required to sell their land to private citizens rather than commercial interests, in order to encourage homesteading. So when tycoons from the Southern Pacific Railroad found themselves unable to attract enough settlers to their rocky parcels, they did the next best thing, hiring drunks to pose as buyers who would then turn right around and sell the land back to a railroad front.
Wild terrain that it was, the ruse went on for decades before regulators caught on. By that time Southern Pacific had illegally sold millions of acres to timber companies, and their theft was emboldened by a business-friendly 1915 Supreme Court ruling that allowed them to keep, legally, much of what they’d scammed. Soon after, Congress passed an act reclaiming some of the contested ranges for the government, thus establishing the “Oregon and California Railroad Revested Lands.” Further legislation then directed revenue earned off of said swaths into the coffers of “O&C” counties, as the 18 adjoining territories came to be called.
Hardly trusting of a government that has historically colluded with thieves against the greater interest, the people of Josephine have always taken particular pride in their self-sufficiency. In many cases, as in Wilderville where Melinda and Tom live, locals dug their sustenance right out of the mountainside; according to a U.S. Department of the Interior report from 1914, mining claims by their acreage yielded lustrous greenstone, serpentine, and “numerous colors of fine gold.” Local legacy and blogger Kirby Jackson, whose family lived in Wilderville back then, writes that when his grandmother “first came to Oregon and wished to live a solitary existence, she lived on an old mining claim high up on Slate Creek and made her way with nothing but a gold pan and a rifle.”
In 1941, on account of general neglect and their mining interests not being met, residents of Josephine and several surrounding counties moved to secede from California and Oregon to form the new state of Jefferson. But while rabble rousers behind the effort caught a few national headlines, they abandoned the campaign after the bombing of Pearl Harbor shifted the national zeitgeist, and as access was increased to districts loaded with everything from logs to limestone. In the decades that followed, those natural resources provided generously. By the mid-20th century, thanks to wide-open federal forests and hydraulic shears that severed Douglas firs like butter, O&C residents were accustomed to paying little in the way of public service costs.
The wholesale clearance of forests made Oregon the biggest source of wood in the entire world at one point, and flowing profits from timber fueled everything from infrastructure to jobs maintaining forests. At least until the mid-1980s, when organized environmentalists set sights on the logging industry. The ensuing emotional struggle entangled tree-huggers, attorneys, private industry, and the Endangered Species Act, and led to the closing of all “O&C” lands to commercial interests under President Bill Clinton. Till this day there’s a popular motto among bitter logging families in Josephine: “Save a spotted owl … Stuff it!”
Clinton restored some of the timber land in 1994, while Congress under George W. Bush also moved to placate loggers, activists, and county lawmakers. Even so, and for better or worse, the arrangements, combined with the amount of old growth that has already been stripped, have resulted in painful losses of subsidies. Piggybacking the hysteria, officials have relentlessly lashed out against the Bureau of Land Management. One blistering screed by Josephine County Sheriff Gil Gilbertson, syndicated by libertarian and far-right sites galore, argues that federal authorities “lack jurisdiction over individuals.” It’s a cry similar to those made by local leaders, anointed and otherwise, since the first fur trappers and traders arrived.
In a comprehensive survey of the O&C lands, Oregon environmentalist and writer Alley Valkyrie explains why she has locked arms in blockades to fight deforestation and other threats. Of the many accounts of turmoil in Southwest Oregon I’ve read since beginning this project, hers cuts the deepest: “Never have I seen or experienced a single issue that so strongly reverberates through so many people and so deeply within a place, and never have I been at more of a loss for answers or solutions. Often I can’t help but feel that Western Oregon is a real-life version of The Lorax, complete with an equally grim and predictable ending.”
Maybe Valkyrie is right. Still, I have to believe there can also be some justice along the way. Unlike those who fell prey to deception before fax machines and file cabinets, Tom and Melinda, like other folks in Josephine who’ve been ravaged by apparent mortgage scams, have a trail of paperwork to prove their case. Wilderville is still the boondocks, its people proudly independent; it’s 2014 though, and one would imagine there are safeguards to shield families in their situation. Or not. With the apparent seizing of their home, and of upland properties just like theirs, for logging and mineral rights, Melinda and Tom’s struggle may be the quintessential Oregon tale, cold and brutal just like those written 100 years ago.
NEXT: A game-changing election, a make or break tax levy, and sheriffs with SWAT teams take on pot farmers, homeowners, and the federal government.
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