What happened to the Native Americans who lived in Portland before it was Portland?

Map showing Chinook and Chinookian villages prior to the establishment of Portland.  Note, the area west of the Willamette (roughly to the left of and below the number 57) lacks a settlement or village of any sort.  This is the site of Portland.  1792 is the year the Columbia River system was discovered by Captain Robert Gray in his ship, the Columbia Redaviva.  By 1850, most of the Indians of the Columbia - Willamette system had died of disease, the few remaining were moved onto reservations, and the Oregon Trail was in full swing.  Starting in 1841 with a small group of emigrants (75 people), by 1850 an estimated 10,000 a year took the trail.  Mostly to California. 

In one sense, not much, because there were no Indians living on the West Bank of the Willamette prior to the township claim of 1843.  There was a herd of elk, and a clearing used as a camping spot by various bands of Indians passing through.  The clearing was supposed to have been around Broadway and Market (?).

There may well have been several cross-country trails through the area, most notably from the mouth of the Sandy River to the bank of the Willamette roughly where today's Morrison Bridge stands.  We know it today as Sandy Boulevard.

Now, there were lots of Indian tribes, bands, villages and other groups in the area.  A Chinookian band lived on what they called Wapato Island, our Sauvies island, at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers.  Supposed to have been a big village where they cultivated the Wapato Root.  (Sort of like a potato.)

There is evidence of a semi-permanent Chinookian village at the west end of Blue Lake (#58 above).  Indian bands in the Northwest tended to have a summer village and a winter village, so most were unused a good part of the year.  I understand doing this.  The Indians of the Northwest suffered the same "it don't rain much here" syndrome as do we.  They went barefoot year round because leather for moccasins rotted in about twenty minutes or so.  Contrary to what you may have heard, it rains a lot here.

South of the Falls of the Willamette, site of present day Oregon City were the Kalapooya Indians who reportedly went naked year round.  They made a hat of woven cedar bark that served as an umbrella for use during the occasional pineapple express, but other than that, nada.

Estimates of the Indian population were of thousands living in both permanent and portable houses up and down the Pacific Coast and along the shores of the Columbia.  Lewis and Clark in their journals noted that they were never out of sight of campfires along the banks of the Columbia during their Voyage of Discovery.

The lynch pin of the Indians living on the Columbia were the Chinook who inhabited both a summer and winter village on Cape Disappointment on the north side of the mouth of the river.  These folks were anything but warlike, preferring instead to scalp their adversaries financially.  Which they were damned good at.  It was not the Chinook who hosted Lewis and Clark - that  was the Clatsop Indians along the south bank of the river.

There were four distinct bands of Indians at the mouth of the Columbia, and dozens more up and down the coast and up the river as far as The Dalles.  Each group, tribe or band spoke a separate language, had different cultures and practices but were part of a wide-spread Chinookian trading network speaking a simplified patois or argot language.  This was a collection of words from the Chinook language as well as words from every participating group. There were Spanish words, a few Russian, and many French words as most of the trappers and traders working out here for various trading companies were French Canadian.  When "King George Men" (the English) and "Boston Men" (Americans) got involved in the trade after the discovery of the Columbia River in 1792, English words became common as well.  Also, the Chinook trading language had a lot of hand signals and signs, some of which were probably not socially acceptable.

So what happened to them?  Probably 90% died in a series of plagues that swept through the area starting in the 18th Century and lasting through the mid-nineteenth century.  About the time we were declaring independence of jolly old King George III, thousands of Pacific Northwest Indians were dying of smallpox in a plague that made Europe's Black Death look like a case of the sniffles.  Then waves of measles.  More smallpox.  Even, some medical historians think, plagues of influenza.  It was not pretty, not deliberate, and certainly tragic.

By the time we were ready to transplant our Native American hosts onto reservations in the mid-1840s, there were barely enough Indians left to move.  The all-powerful Chinook tribe of the 1790s was by 1850 obliterated, considered extinct by many anthropologists, government bureaucrats and other self-appointed experts.  Of course, no one thought to ask the Chinook, many of whom who still live near the mouth of the Columbia today.