Since ancient times, the Rogue Valley has been the traditional homeland of three distinct language-based tribal groups: Takelma, Dakubetede/Taltushtuntude, and Shasta, whose societies shared similar cultural and social practices, subsistence patterns, house styles, and belief systems, with multiple villages and recognized territorial boundaries for each group. Before 1849, their contacts with American, French Canadian, and British traders and trappers were mostly limited and fleeting, though sometimes violent, but in the early 1850s miners and settlers poured into the valley, bringing a land-owning, plowing, logging, and grazing way of life that sharply conflicted with Native lifeways rooted in living with the land and using its abundant seasonal resources. Because European-style land ownership was alien to the tribes, this clash in perspective helped set the stage for tragedy. From about 1850 to 1856, tribal and American cultures fought for their lifeways in the Rogue River Wars, as skirmishes, ambushes, and murders by both sides led to a cease fire in August 1853 and the Table Rock Treaty meetings, where some 700 Indians from many tribes joined military personnel, settlers, and miners. Under the treaty, the tribes ceded the entire Rogue Valley in exchange for $60,000 in blankets, clothing, and agricultural implements, subject to deductions for settler depredation claims, and the Table Rock Reservation was temporarily established until the President of the United States selected a permanent reservation. Over the years, eight treaties were signed in attempts to save western Oregon tribes from slaughter carried out by some emigrants, but in the fall of 1855 the act of James Lupton of Jacksonville, Oregon, who urged extermination as a solution to the Indian problem, ignited the last stage of the Rogue River Wars. The Rogue Valley tribes had long cared for the land through low-intensity burning that reduced forest diseases and wildfires, encouraged diverse plant communities, and provided nutritious browse for deer and elk, while their husbandry sustained a wide variety of foods, materials, and medicines. Their practices also joined function with artistic expression in baskets, ceremonial regalia, and woodworking, and their systems of trade, marriage, and dispute resolution supported a healthy tribal society in which political groups could live beside one another in relative peace.