Kalapuyan

The Kalapuyan are eight autonomous hunter-gatherer bands of the Willamette Valley in western Oregon, a lowland between the Cascade and Coast ranges, from the Columbia River to the Calapooya Mountains. Never a single tribe, they spoke three mutually intelligible dialects of an Oregon Penutian language; the bands included the Tualatin, also called the Atfalati, and the Yamhill.

Tradition holds that they entered the valley from the south and displaced earlier inhabitants. Extended families wintered in permanent villages and scattered in summer to gather roots, berries and nuts while the men fished and hunted, shaping obsidian from the eastern volcanic ranges into arrowheads and spear points.

Before contact they may have numbered fifteen thousand, and the fur trade also spread the Chinook Jargon among them. Epidemics of malaria and smallpox after 1805 emptied whole villages by the 1830s, leaving the valley open to the missionaries and settlers who followed.