He first negotiated individual treaties with Willamette Valley tribes in an effort to remove the tribes from the American settlements and move them to eastern Oregon. Dart was charged with clearing the land titles for American settlement. In 1850, President Zachary Taylor appointed Anson Dart as Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Oregon Territory. The government had yet to initiate a transfer of the aboriginal land claims of Native peoples. The new law allowed settlers to keep their land claim made under the provisional government's land ordinance law and gave new settlers 320-acre (640-acre for married couples) claims once they entered Oregon Territory. In 1850, Congress passed the Oregon Donation Land Act. In 1846, the United States and Great Britain signed the Oregon Treaty, which gave the United States full claim to the lower Oregon Territory. The valley was an “Eden,” they reported, and beginning in the 1840s tens of thousands of Americans left the East and Midwest to travel west on the Oregon Trail. White settlers considered the lush Willamette Valley a prize, and the earliest immigrants sent word to friends and family and newspapers in the East that the rich soils and park-like settings were ideal for agriculture. That all changed when EuroAmerican explorers, traders, settlers, and miners ventured into the region. These peoples owned their lands and had defined homelands that had secured for them resources for gathering, hunting, and fishing for at least fourteen thousand years. In the mid-nineteenth century, at least twenty tribes lived in the Willamette Valley, including the many tribes and bands of the Kalapuya peoples, several tribes of the Molala, and several tribes of the Chinook peoples. This policy of removal helped create one of the most productive agricultural regions in the West. Those treaties cleared the way for increased settlement by Americans and other immigrants into the Willamette Valley, as Native people were removed to reservations to eliminate conflicts and competition. From 1848 to 1855, the United States made several treaties with the tribes of western Oregon.
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