As Long as the World Goes On: The Land and People of Southwest Oregon
by Kay Atwood and Dennis J. Gray
As Long as the World Goes On explores the geography of southwestern Oregon, the Native cultures of the region, the history of Euro-American contact and settlement, important regional themes, including mining, agriculture, logging, community growth, and the environment. This narrative reviews significant and often contentious political issues and examines the region’s growing interest in recreation, the arts, and heritage tourism. For centuries, the southwest Oregon landscape has shaped human life by sheltering its people and providing natural resources to support life. Historian Kay Atwood (1943-2014), author of Illahe: The Story of Settlement in the Rogue River Canyon, Mill Creek Journal, and Chaining Oregon: Surveying the Public Lands of the Pacific Northwest, 1851-1855, lived in Ashland. Archaeologist Dennis Gray, the owner of Cascade Research, specializes in the study of Native American groups in the Upper Rogue River. He wrote his graduate thesis on the ethnography of Native American groups in the upper Rogue River region and has completed many cultural resource projects in southwestern Oregon.
Introduction
Southwestern Oregon stretches from the high Cascades west to the Pacific Ocean, and from the California state line north to the Coquille River. Two principal mountain ranges mark the region: the relatively young volcanic Cascades …
California Street, Jacksonville
Then Coyote said, People shall spear salmon, they will go to get food, to one another will they go to get food; one another they will feed, and they shall not kill one another. In …
Last Meeting at White Point
In 1848, two years after Lindsay Applegate traveled through the Rogue River Valley, the discovery of gold in Sutter’s Mill, California, brought prospectors through southwest Oregon. In 1850 and 1851, miners found gold on Josephine …
Southwestern Oregon’s economy worsened after 1893, when the nation plunged into a deep financial depression. Local tensions were intensified during those difficult times, fueling the rise of the People’s (Populist) Party.
Oregon Myrtle
By the late 1960s, societal upheavals—associated in part with the Vietnam War—encouraged individuals to go back to the land, as the saying went. Some people decided to stake out mining claims in the Rogue and …
Bibliography
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