Fort Vancouver to host photographer Rich Bergeman, talk about Rogue River War sites

The National Park Service recently announced that Rich Bergeman, a photographer based in Corvallis, Oregon, is the guest curator of an exhibit in the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site Visitor Center. The photography exhibit opened in late April and will run through Sept. 25 in the visitor center’s theater. 

Bergeman will give a public talk at 1 p.m. Saturday, May 20. Both the exhibit and talk are free, but advance reservations are recommended for the talk. After the talk on May 20, Bergeman will be available to sign copies of his book, available for purchase from the Friends of Fort Vancouver Bookstore, also located in the Visitor Center.

The exhibit features a dozen black and white infrared photographs from Bergeman’s two-year project exploring Southern Oregon in search of landscapes where the Rogue River Indian Wars took place in the 1850s. 

“My goal was to bring this largely forgotten war back into our collective consciousness by reflecting on the beauty of the landscapes that played host to those tragic events,” Bergeman said.

Called one of the least remembered and yet bloodiest of the Oregon Territory’s Indian wars, the conflicts ranged over a broad swath of rugged territory between the Rogue River Country and the South Coast between 1851 and 1856. The war traces its beginning to the passage of the Oregon Donation Land Claim Act in 1850 and the nearly simultaneous discovery of gold in the region. As settlers and miners streamed in, the Tribes who lived there suddenly found their way of life under threat. Skirmishes, murders, and atrocities on both sides inevitably followed, until the conflict erupted into all-out war involving the US Army. The conflict ended with the forced removal of the Tribes to newly created coastal reservations at Siletz and Grand Ronde in 1856 in what descendants today memorialize as Oregon’s “Trail of Tears.”

The Fort Vancouver National Historic Site Visitor Center is located at 1501 E. Evergreen Blvd., Vancouver. To reserve a spot for Bergeman’s talk, visit friendsfortvancouver.org.