Old Myths, Turned on Their Heads: Settler Agency, Federal Authority, and the Colonization of Oregon

Abstract

The modern historiography of Oregon’s settler colonization distances itself radically from the euphemistic accounts that were common into the mid-twentieth century. Some assumptions, however, are rarely challenged. In his article, author Julius Wilm addresses three areas where local agency continues to be overemphasized in modern historiography at the expense of national forces or it is misunderstood in its effects. The article covers the negotiation of the “Oregon Question” in the U.S. Congress during the late 1830s and early 1840s, the passage of the Donation Land Claim Act in 1850, and the extreme violence of settler militias against Indigenous people in the war of 1855–1856. As Wilm argues, “re-introducing the U.S. government as an important agent of Oregon’s colonization…provides crucial context for the colonial push into the Pacific Northwest and the violence it unleashed.”

Biographical Note

Julius Wilm (SFB 1199, Leipzig University, Germany)

Julius Wilm is a postdoctoral researcher at Leipzig University’s Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1199 “Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition.” He obtained his PhD in Anglo-American History from the University of Cologne with a dissertation on free land colonization schemes in the antebellum United States and has taught at the universities of Copenhagen and Lucerne. In 2019–2020 he was the Gerda Henkel Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital History at the German Historical Institute Washington and George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, where he began work on a digital mapping project on the Homestead Act with a particular emphasis on the law’s impact on Native nations throughout the US West between 1863 and 1912.