This history of the native peoples of western Oregon is a systematic study of the formation, application and effects of United States Indian policy. Historian E. A. Schwartz tells how contacts with whites early in the nineteenth century culminated in the pork-barrel Rogue River War of 1855-56, in which the Rogue River peoples demonstrated superior tactics and repeatedly drove off more-numerous opponents.

Schwartz narrates how the Indian peoples known today as the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Reservation survived American expansion and coped with each federal Indian-policy initiative, from the new western reservation policy of the 1850s through termination and restoration in the 1970s.