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Lane County at 150
While anchored offshore in 1778, British explorer James Cook named Cape Perpetua while searching for the Northwest Passage. From the grassy bluffs onshore, native Alsi indians likely watched his arrival. Today, their 1,500 year-old middens--layers of cast-off shells from centuries of mussel harvests--remain as the only evidence the Alsi once called northwest Lane County home, perhaps as early as 6,000 years ago. A mere 50 years later, most native tribes in the west were decimated by European diseases, like small pox and tuberculosis. "A mortality has carried off to a man it's inhabitants and there is nothing to attest that ythey ever existed except their decaying houses, their graves and their unburied bones, of which they are in heaps." --American merchant Nathaniel Wyeth, 1832
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