The Chetco people have lived on the Oregon coast for thousands of years, with Chit-xu village dating approximately from 50 BCE to 240 CE. After Spanish exploration of the Pacific Northwest in the 1500s and increasing European contact in the 1700s and 1800s, Oregon coastal tribes faced trade, disease, and new settlement, and in less than a century Pacific Northwest tribes lost roughly 92% of their people to smallpox, measles, malaria, and other diseases. In the 1800s, U.S. expansion, the Donation Land Act, the Oregon Indian Treaty Act, and the mining boom intensified conflicts over land and resources. In 1854, miners clashed with the Chetco over access to resources, and A.F. Miller attacked and burned both villages at the mouth of the Chetco River to expand his ferry business; people were shot as they came out of their houses, two were burned alive, and twenty-three men and several women were massacred. That year J.L. Parrish reported that whites had burned four Chetco villages in six months, that many Chetco had been killed, and that in no single instance had the Indians been the first aggressors, while Ben Wright found them scattered, living in great fear, and driven from their fisheries. In 1855, Chetco representatives signed the Coast Treaty with Joel Palmer in exchange for promises of a permanent homeland and compensation, but Congress never ratified it. In 1856, during the end of the Rogue River Wars, the U.S. Army forcibly removed the Chetco to the Coast Reservation, later divided into the Siletz and Alsea Reservations, transporting some in tightly packed ships and marching most two hundred miles or more over rough terrain; some were abused by soldiers, many died, and families were forced onward without stopping to bury their dead. After removal, the Chetco and twenty-six other western Oregon tribes became known as the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. Later federal and state actions repeatedly reduced reservation lands, including the removal of Yaquina Bay in 1865, the 1875 removal of 700,000 acres from the Siletz Reservation, the Dawes Act in 1887, and the opening of more than 191,000 acres of surplus reservation land in 1892. Lucy Dick, born about 1840, received permission in 1876 to return to her Chetco homestead; she died in 1940 in Harbor, Oregon, was buried at Oceanview Cemetery, and her Chetco name was forgotten. In 1954, federal recognition of many Oregon tribes was ended, severing treaty relationships and removing the final remaining parcels of reservation land from tribal members, but in 1977 the Siletz people regained federal recognition through the Siletz Restoration Act, and in 1980 a small scattered land base was returned as an initial reestablished reservation. In the 2000s, language and traditional arts programs, the uncovering of Chit-xu villages after a 2011 tsunami, and continuing educational support reflected survival and renewal. By 2018, the Chetco people and the other western Oregon bands forming the Confederated Tribes of Siletz were a self-governing people who had survived devastating losses and remained proud of who they are, with thousands of people of Chetco ancestry in Oregon and around the world.