This box is filled with raw ideas from Bob's PhD thesis ... will need lots of editing.

From Zybach thesis, page 257-61

The regularly burned oak savannah and grassy prairies of the eastern part of the southern Coast Range have not experienced catastrophic wildfires; fires move from east to west on late summer east winds; ignitions are by people and occur along regularly traveled routes or adjacent to settlements; and boundaries correlate to precontact subbasin-scale land use patterns. These findings are in contrast to other findings. For example, one common assumption, as stated by Spies and Franklin, is that Coast Range forests in 1900 were formed predominantly of old-growth conifers in excess of 300-years age: In the early part of this [20th] century most of the forested area west of the crest of the Cascade Range was covered by old-growth forests consisting of Douglas-fir, western hemlock and several other large, long-lived conifer species. Most of these forests were probably more than 300 years old and many exceeded 750 years (Spies and Franklin 1988). The presence of the Millicoma and Coos fires before 1900 in the southern subregion make this circumstance unlikely. Fire histories of the eastern and western subregions also do not support this possibility.

Indian burning and catastrophic fire pattern comparisons. The strong coincidence between precontact and early historical patterns of Indian burning and the subsequent "Great Fires'1 includes considerations of sources (and locations) of ignition, timing of fires, spatial boundaries of fires, fire intensities, human safety, and effects on wildlife habitat. Other patterns are associated with climate, topography, and land ownership. Catastrophic fires on the Coast Range seem to share the following characteristics: a) started by people, b) occur on the western slope of the range, c) occur mostly in August and September, d) move on east winds in 261 262 a south-westerly fashion, e) cover more than 100,000 acres of forestland, and f) extinguished with fall rains.

Wildlife populations. There are no long-term reductions in local wildlife populations that have been associated with either Indian burning or catastrophic forest fires. Deer, elk, berry, grass, oak, and bear populations would likely decline through time as forests expanded their range (Kay 1995), and increase in numbers as forests were burned or otherwise cleared (Kay 2002: 248-250). The development and maintenance of transportation corridors, extensive oak savannahs, prairies, berry patches, filbert groves, camas fields, lawns, and balds by Indian burning practices (Table 3.03) also resulted in beneficial habitat to a number of plant (Table 3.05) and animal (Table 3.06) species. During wildfire events, these areas could also function as "refuges" for threatened wildlife species.

Page 266: 5. SUMMARY, DISCUSSION, AND CONCLUSIONS

The "cultural legacy" of long-term Coast Range Indian burning practices is shown to have a direct effect on subsequent spatial and temporal patterns of catastrophic forest fires within the same subregion (see Chapter 4.3). This study demonstrates a high rate of coincidence between the land management practices of precontact Indian communities of the Oregon Coast Range, and the causes (see Table 4.02), timing (tables 3.04 and 266 267 4.01), boundaries (Map 4.13), severity (see Chapter 4.1) and extent (see Map 4.01) of subsequent catastrophic forest fires in the same areas. These findings differ significantly from current assumptions that Indian burning actions affected a relatively minor portion of the landscape (Vale 2002), that Coast Range lightning fires had greater influence over precontact vegetation patterns than human fires (Whitlock and Knox 2002), and that precontact western Oregon vegetation could be characterized as a "blanket of old-growth" Douglas-fir forests (FEMAT 1993; Chase 1995: 402-407). Instead, early journalists, painters, surveyors, photographers, timber cruisers, and immigrant residents (see Chapter 2.2) found a lush, thriving mosaic of managed forests, woodlands, prairies, berry patches, camas fields, and thousands of contiguous acres of oak savannah grasslands, wildflowers, "Indian oats", and "Indian peas"; all connected by a well-established and maintained network of foot trails and canoe routes (see Chapter 3.4).

Between 1770 and 1840, a series of plagues decimated Indian families and town sites in the Coast Range in a matter of days and weeks. The diseases, including smallpox, measles, and malaria, were introduced largely by American, European, and African fur traders (se Chapter 3.1). Local communities and trade networks subsequently collapsed. In the 1840s another dramatic transition took place, in which the few thousand Indians who remained alive in the Coast Range were physically displaced by thousands of European American immigrants and hundreds of herds and flocks of domestic grazing animals. For the first time in millennia, the landscape was not being managed primarily with fire. Hundreds of new species of plants and animals--principally from Europe, but also from North and South America, Asia, and Africa--were being cultivated and 268 released into the environment by the new immigrants. With these new people, new plants, and new animals, a century-long series of some of the largest and most spectacular forest fires in history was initiated in 1849 with the Yaquina Fire. The fire, likely within a few hours or days time, burned 300,000 acres or more forest. It was probably started on a warm day in late August or early September, and spread rapidly with the help of an east wind (see Chapter 4.1.3; Appendix C). Its boundaries and fuels had been partly determined by the Kalapuyan and Yakonan people who had lived in the area and managed the landscape in past generations (see Map 4.13).

5.1 Indian Burning Patterns

Precontact Oregon Coast Range Indians used fire to produce landscape patterns of trails, berry patches, root and bulb fields, nut orchards, woodlands, forests, and grasslands that varied in age and composition from time to time and place to place. These variations were due in part to demographic, cultural, topographic, vegetative, and climatic differences that existed throughout the region. Local Indian families systematically managed native plants in even-aged stands, usually dominated by a single species, throughout all river basins of the Range. Oak, filberts, camas, wapato, tarweed, yampah, strawberries, blackberries, huckleberries, brackenfern, lilies, onions, nettles, and/or other plants were raised in select areas by all known tribes, over large areas and for long periods of time. These plants were thinned, pruned, planted, tilled, peeled and otherwise affected by people during harvest and other management processes. Fire was the principal tool used to maintain large tracts of these plants. Landscape patterns that resulted from these actions were 269 relatively stable and predictable. They produced large, reliable, and varied crops of food during all seasons of the year, and could be harvested and maintained with relatively little effort.

5.1.1 Cause and locations

Indian burning patterns were, by definition, purposefully created by people. Fires were started, transported, and spread for specific reasons. Cooking and heating fires were maintained constantly in and near homes, in camping spots, campgrounds, and other gathering places. These fires were concentrated within permanent settlements and communities near the mouths of rivers and streams, and at other key locations along the coastline and principal riverbanks. Seasonal cooking and heating fires were located in favored hunting and gathering spots, depending on social, food gathering, and processing activities. These fires depended on the systematic gathering, storage, and use of firewood, which was also used for other purposes, such as constructing bonfires and heating sweat lodges. Fires were also used to clear and maintain trails; rejuvenate berry patches, pea fields, root fields, and orchards; for hunting; for weed control; and to cure large fields of tarweed seeds ("Indian oats"). Patches and fields were located along trails that typically ran adjacent to rivers and streams, the coast, and along ridgelines, directly connecting communities, peaks, campgrounds, waterfalls, and other favored locations. Fires were also used to regularly burn vast areas of oak savannah and grassy prairies contained in Coast Range lands occupied by Kalapuyan people. In sum, Indian fires were caused and maintained by people in a regular and constant pattern across the landscape, in predictable locations, at predictable times of the year, and within definite topographical and political boundaries.

5.1.2 Seasonality

Coast Range Indian fires were used on a daily basis, at all hours of the day and night, every day of the year. Firewood gathering, trail maintenance fires, and patch burning were performed as needed and as circumstance and weather permitted. Brakes and balds were usually burned in winter or spring, following desiccation by seasonal freezing, and preceding the gathering of sprouts and digging of roots and bulbs. Filbert patches might also be burnt in the winter or spring, to encourage sprouts for weaving. Berry patches and fruit and nut orchards were burned following harvest and desiccation by late summer drought or fall senescence. Oak savannahs were broadcast burned in the summer and fall, beginning as early as July on the eastern slope of the Range, and continuing until September or October, ending with the arrival of steady fall rains. In sum, people used fire constantly at all times of the year, but certain landscape patterns were maintained largely through seasonal burning practices; typically occurring within a given area at regular one to five or ten year intervals.

5.1.3 Wildlife habitat

The development and maintenance of transportation corridors, extensive oak savannahs, prairies, pea fields, berry patches, filbert groves, camas fields, root fields, lawns, and balds by Indian burning practices (Table 3.03) resulted in beneficial habitats to a number of plant (Table 3.05) and 270 271 animal (Table 3.06) species. During wildfire occurrences, these areas functioned as "refuges" for threatened wildlife species; even in severe, stand-replacing events, fields of grasses, berry patches, riparian meadows, and fern prairies often remained unburned, or only slightly singed. Deep pools in rivers and streams, waterfalls, tidelands, and shorelines were other important wildlife refuges during catastrophic fire events. The openings created by Indian burning practices--in what would otherwise be a nearly unbroken blanket of conifer trees throughout nearly every acre of the Coast Range--also provided important sources of food and protein for a wide variety of animal species. Bees and butterflies, songbirds, deer, elk, black bears, gray squirrels, bobcats, wolves, and California condors all benefited by food derived from unforested lands maintained by Indian burning.

5.1.4 Cultural legacy and fuel distribution

The term "cultural legacy" has been used in this research to mean the general and local-scale patterns of managed vegetation that have persisted from precontact times to the present. Such patterns are most apparent in the fields and grasslands of the Umpqua and Willamette valleys, but are also found in the inland riparian prairies, ridgeline trails, brakes, balds, and salmonberry patches of lesser rivers and streams. Areas kept clear of conifer forest encroachment 200 years ago continue, for the most part, to be clear of conifer forests to the present time. Likewise, areas consisting of solid, even-aged stands of shorepine, Sitka spruce, Douglas-fir, western hemlock, and true fir at the present time, are fairly good markers of the locations and extent of even-aged stands of the same species from ca. 1500 until the 1840s and later, continuing--with some notable exceptions-- 272 through to the present time. In some instances, logged spruce or Douglas fir stands were followed by stands of red alder or bigleaf maple. Other areas were cleared for pasture or urban development, while abandoned fields and old meadows often began seeding to a more permanent cover of forest trees within a few years time.

In general, it can be shown that: 1) oak savannahs and large, grassy prairies that were created and maintained in precontact times by regular use of broadcast burning practices, have never developed extensive forest canopies, and therefore have not experienced catastrophic forest fires during historical time; 2) extensive areas of even-aged Douglas-fir that existed in the early 1800s indicate catastrophic stand-replacement fires in precontact time, and are currently covered with even-aged stands of Douglas-fir, typically less than 50-years of age; and 3) fogbelt stands of Sitka spruce, hemlock, and cedar tended to burn less often than Douglasfir stands to their east in precontact time, were mostly logged during the last 150 years, and are covered largely with even aged stands of similar species less than 75 years of age. In sum, current patterns of vegetation in the Oregon Coast Range (see Map 1.09) generally mirror similar patterns established by regular burning practices of precontact Indian families and communities. Differences, such as the imposition of straight lines on the landscape, sprawling urban and industrial areas, and changed grassland species, become more obvious as the scale becomes finer. These patterns also reflect precontact and historical catastrophic wildfires, which in turn indicate the dynamic spatial and temporal patterns of wildlife habitat that has characterized the Coast range for the past several centuries. Native animals have either adapted to these patterns of change or, as in the examples of condors, grizzly bears, and wolverines, been extirpated.

Page 279 ....the remainder of the Coast Range, particularly the sloping and rolling portions of the Douglas-fir forest, have been subjected to numerous and repeated catastrophic wildfires throughout historical time, and probably for thousands of years of prehistoric time as well.