Culture & History
Natural resources shape our human relationships with the land, and we shape the landscape.

A fishing boat docks at the mouth of South Slough in Charleston.

Human culture often anchors along the water’s edge and floats on the rivers, estuaries, and sea-water. On the South Coast, our human relationship with this place can be measured by rainfall and the flow of the tides.

Remains of stone tools document that humans have been part of this landscape for at least 10,000 years, and it’s likely that people have lived here longer. Discovery of offshore archeological sites indicate that early peoples traveled and lived along a shoreline that has since been flooded by rising seas.

The First People lived in clusters of related community groups: Coos, Lower Umpqua, Siuslaw, Coquille. Euroamericans later gave the names of these people to the rivers they lived along.

The people traveled, traded, and married primarily within a single major watershed. In fact, the people in each watershed had their own language, sometimes quite different from the language of their neighbors. Each community usually maintained several village sites within the watershed, moving with the seasons to take advantage of the cyclic abundance. From ­salmon to mussels, water provided the dietary mainstays, as well as tools and other implements. The First People also managed the landscape, using fire to encourage food plants and weaving materials.

The first European explorers came by sea, visiting the Pacific Northwest in the 1700s. The sea-farers gathered information, traded for valuable furs, and left in their wake smallpox, measles, and other diseases. Many native communities were decimated by the introduced diseases even before Euroamerican settlers arrived in the 1800s.

The Euroamericans were drawn to this stretch of the Oregon Coast primarily by the promise of gold. However, most soon found greater fortune in the area's timber. Coal and agricultural products were soon added to the list of exports, all shipped via the rivers and sea. Virtually all human travel and trade in this region was conducted on water before the completion of the Roosevelt Highway (US 101) in the 1940s.

Today, the landscape is even more intensely managed by people. The region's major industries-timber, agriculture, fishing, and tourism-all require some alteration and management of the landscape. And tomorrow's landscape will exhibit the efforts of today's planners, land use managers, and land users-from farmers to recreationists. From changing timber harvest practices to removing dikes to establishing new protected areas, our current practices seek to preserve and restore watershed values.