As far back into the mists of prehistory as we can see, the wetlands and uplands of what is now the Willamette Valley and Central Coast Range of Oregon were used for food gathering by the women and children of the Cha Pinafu band of Kalapuya.  I have personally found stone tools on a site along a local stream, which they probably used for mashing camas, their main food.  

Camas Gathering  
Camas, a lily whose starchy bulb has a taste much like potato, once grew in damp areas of the valley so plentifully that whole fields would be bright blue in spring with camas blossoms.  It was widely depleted by the impacts of farming but it can still be found in meadows along wetlands, down among the trees and especially near  a  creek or stream  near the trunks of oak trees where mowers cannot reach.  

Camas can be gathered in the spring when it is easy to locate by its grass-like leaves and knee-high stalk of blue to violet blossoms.  Each blossom is 3-5 cm. across, with six narrow petals radiating out like a star.  If you gather it you should do so only where it is plentiful and only when it is in bloom, for that is the only time when it can be told apart from the rare but deadly poisonous white camas, which has white blossoms.  

While the camas bloomed there were long hard days of very important work to do.  Even small children were asked to help, because if the band did not store away enough food, they might starve in the winter when other sources of food became scarce.  

Following the Water  
Kalapuya settlements and travel routes were often along the banks of waterways.  Each band moved from one favorite spot or settlement to another along with the seasons.  The Cha Pinafu summer settlement was at the mouth of the Mary's River where Pioneer Park, Avery Park, and the Evanite plant are today (so Corvallis as a settlement is older than anyone knows, and far older than most people think).  

In the winter months when flooding was a concern, the Cha Pinafu moved up the Mary's River to one or more winter settlements on higher ground.  One is believed to be near today's Philomath High School grounds, based upon artifacts found there.  

Who Were the Cha Pinafu?   
Of the many tribes in this region, the Kalapuya were relatively peaceful and appear to have been here a very long time, longer than most.  At the coming of whites the Kalapuya occupied the Willamette Valley south of Willamette Falls.  Although there is some evidence that they were not the valley’s first inhabitants, there are hints that their ancestors may have arrived early enough to learn stories from those who were.  One possible such story is the flood myth of Mary’s Peak, which describes a sudden cataclysmic flood in the valley.  This flood has a fascinating similarity to the great Bretz floods that swept the Columbia and Willamette valleys at the end of the Ice Age, when such a torrent flooded the Columbia that for a few days it carried more water than all the rivers of the world today combined!  

The Cha Pinafu band, also called the St. Mary’s River or Mary's River band, occupied from Mary's Peak to the Willamette River, and from Lewisburg on the north to Alsea and Junction City on the south. They were very closely related to the large Kalapuya band that lived along the Callapooia River and extended past Eugene into the Cascades.  (The Kalapuya band gave its name to the entire tribe.) The Cha Pinafu may have included the small Long Tom group near Monroe, and were also closely related to the Luckiamute band of Kings Valley.  All these bands belonged to the central or Santiam dialect region of Kalapuya, which covered the east valley from Aurora south to Eugene and the drainages of the McKenzie River and middle and western forks of the Willamette, plus the west valley from south of Salem to Eugene.  

The name of the Cha Pinafu band was recorded as tca Pinafu (very hard 'ch' as in Tchaikovsky, accent on the ‘Pi’) by a 19th century linguistic anthropologist who directly interviewed native Kalapuya speakers.  Historically, however, the white settlers referred to this band as the Chepenefa (soft 'ch').  While it is possible that this difference’ is due to some dimly understood variation between Kalapuya dialects, it is most likely due to the accent of the French trappers, whose language had no soft ‘ch’. The French often married native women and tended to learn more about native language and customs than did the American or British.  Most of the Kalapuya names came down to us through the French.  

Recently this name has been revived as Cha Pinafu (hard 'ch' and accent on ‘Pi’) or Tcha Peenafu through the efforts of the Benton County Historical Society, myself, and others.  Though its meaning is not certain, the name may mean “place of gathering elderberries.”  

We don't know for sure what the Kalapuya called the Mary's River, but if indeed they gave it a name at all, it was most likely Cha Pinafu.  Note that the Kalapuya used an altogether different name for Mary’s Peak, which they called Cha Timanwi (again, very hard ‘ch’ and accent on ‘Ti’).  This may have meant “place of spirit power,” and was apparently a sacred name to be avoided in normal speech.  It first became generally known in 1900 in the form ‘Chintimini’ which also shows alteration due likely to the accent of French trappers.  

What Became of the Cha Pinafu?   
Today over two and a half million people live in the lovely Willamette Valley, but hardly any of them know how tragic a price the Kalapuya paid for this to become possible.  It wasn’t guns that opened these lands to whites, but sickness and death from imported diseases such as smallpox to which the Kalapuya had no immunity. The impact of white settlement then depleted the traditional Kalapuya sources of food, causing starvation and massive cultural disruption.  

The Kalapuya, who once inhabited the bountiful Willamette Valley and may have numbered as much as 13,000 before the coming of whites, suffered a loss of life and culture so sudden and so severe – a decline in population of over 90% between 1780 and 1855, with rapid cultural eradication thereafter – that the pain of this loss still whispers longingly in the winds of the Willamette Valley today.  It is sensed by anyone who knows the history of Oregon’s native tribes, most of whom suffered a similar fate.  

One mysterious disease, which scholars have still not identified with certainty today, was described as “fever and ague” and killed up to 90% of the Kalapuya in 1830-33.  This epidemic was especially hard on the Cha Pinafu. The trapper Joseph Gervais, one of the first white settlers in the valley, was quoted by a visiting missionary at the time as follows:  

"A few nights… I stayed with old Mr. Jervais, a Frenchman.  He gave me a detailed account of the Indians, who, he said, were rapidly diminishing in number, and wasting away…  He says more of the Indians have died within ten or fifteen years past, than formerly, and that he has known three thousand to die in two years on the Sacramento and Maries Rivers, and in other places in Oregon, mostly with ague and fever and venereal diseases; together with the effects of exposure to wet weather, and for the want of food.  Some times, he says, he has seen whole lodges of them lying dead, the little infants sucking the breasts of their dead mothers, with no one to do anything for them…" (Mackey 1974, pp. 20-21)  
  

In 1855 most of the few hundred Kalapuya survivors were moved onto reservations at Grand Ronde (northwest of Salem) and Siletz (northeast of Newport), along with the remnants of many other Oregon tribes.  On the reservations tribes intermarried and a pan-tribal culture evolved that increasingly adopted white ways under pressure from white authorities. Missionaries taught that tribal culture was pagan and wrong.  Children were punished for speaking native language in school.  Chinook jargon, once used as a trading language among tribes in the region, became the only native tongue commonly spoken, but even its use declined steadily in favor of English.  Kalapuya fell into disuse, for example, and although one or two elderly people could still speak it in 1930, no one can speak or understand it now.  

Today there may be more Kalapuya descendants than at any time in the past.  They have joined with the other tribes to form what are now the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz.  It is a tragic irony, after the unimaginable suffering the Kalapuya endured, that today the Kalapuya descendants in the Willamette Valley must also encounter a common false belief that they “died out.” Instead, they should encounter profound respect and admiration that they survived at all!  

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