Euro-American settlers arrive on the Oregon Trail. Tribal people are dispossessed and Blacks excluded.

***

Settlers began coming to the Oregon Territory (which included what is now Washington state), via the Oregon Trail, starting in the 1830s.

The Black exclusion laws of 1844 and 1849 banned Blacks from settling in the Oregon Territory, discouraging them from coming. The few who did come found it easier to settle north of the Columbia river, where the laws were not enforced.

The Land Donation act of 1850 granted 320 acre plots to “every white settler or occupant of the public lands, American half-breed Indians included…being a citizen of the United States”.  It thereby dispossessed the tribal people of their land.

The act was preceded by legislation designed to remove the tribal people by forcing them into treaties extinguishing their title.