Black Pioneers, Indigenous Turncoats, and Confederate Officers: A Microhistory of the Oregon Territory’s Rogue River War, 1855-56

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Memory, Archaeology, And The Social Experience Of Conflict and Battlefields" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The historical memory of the Oregon Territory was crafted in memoirs published in newspapers around the turn of the 20th century. These narratives minimized the complexity of the events, smoothed over the contradictions and genocidal violence of settler colonialism, and erased the diversity of the participants. Microhistory deconstructs the singularity of large historical mythopoetics by contextualizing small scale events, interactions, and relationships, and is particularly appropriate to historical archaeologies that engage the primary documentation and materiality of war and conflict. I present three stories about the Rogue River War: how two Black settlers were killed defending their fellow settlers from indigenous combatants, how a Métis person helped lead the rebellion despite being thousands of miles from his home, and how a young officer from South Carolina argued for the rights of indigenous people, despite being the son of the Governor of South Carolina and owner of over 600 slaves.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Historical Memory, Archaeology, And The Social Experience Of Conflict and Battlefields

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 110