Here's an excerpt:
Mining debris poured down the Illinois, Rogue, South Coquille and South Umpqua Rivers. The salmon runs diminished; the eels died. Crayfish, fresh water mussels and trout choked on the flood of mud. Starvation threatened. The claimants of Donation Lands fenced their fields with split-rail fences and built log cabins. They worked with a will to stop Indian field burning. The Indian women found it impossible to harvest tarweed seeds and the blackberries that formerly regenerated with the annual fires did not grow back. The settlers turned under the fields of camas lilies, and their cattle and horses grazed off the blue-flowering plants.
The mining districts--whether in the Rogue River country or the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon--caused major ecological disruption. The rush for quick wealth through mineral exploitation unraveled nature's ways and long-established human subsistence activities. Then came the "exterminators"--unprincipled men who believed only dead Indians were good Indians. They formed volunteer companies and perpetrated massacres against the Chetco Indians in 1853, the Lower Coquille Indians in 1854, and in wanton aggression against Takelma Indians camped near the Table Rock Reservation in 1855.See also the Bureau of Land Management "What happened to the Takelma?'
