Portland Oregon Multnomah Hotel Syracuse China Platter

I had fun researching Chief Mult-No-Mah. There has been debated for over a century whether the chief actually existed or was he nothing more than a northwest legend. I found the following from the Portland State University website.

"For 40 years in the 1700s, Multnomah ruled from the Cascades to the Pacific Coast as chief of the Willamettes and war chief of the Wauna confederacy. This vast network included tribes from areas now known as Okanagan Valley, Puget Sound, Willamette Valley, and the Oregon Coast.

Within the Wauna confederacy, the Willamettes were the most powerful. One Native American recalled in the 1880s that "Once, long before my father's time and before his father's time, all the tribes were as one tribe and the Willamettes were tyee (chief)."

"Over sixty or seventy petty tribes stretched the wild empire," wrote Frederic Balch, and they were "welded together by the pressure of common foes and held in the grasp of the hereditary war-chief of the Willamettes."

That would be Multnomah."

Item ID: 100-7599