For thousands of years Native people lived on this land and were thankful for its bounty until white men arrived in strange clothes with goods to trade and a growing desire for land and resources. A westward invasion in the mid-1800s brought wagon trains of settlers into their homelands as squatters during a dangerous and difficult time. In treaty negotiations in the early 1850s, they tried to reserve land within their traditional homelands, but facing continued land-taking by settlers, they ceded most of their lands and were moved to the Grand Ronde Reservation. The treaties extinguished aboriginal title to their homeland and brought various tribes and bands together there as the government sought to ease tensions between settlers and Native people. In 1856 they became a group of camps at Grand Ronde and began struggling to scratch out an existence as farmers, gatherers, and laborers while trying to maintain their tribal identities despite different languages, different lifeways, and foreign rule. Before the move, promises were made of cattle, horses, clothing, and a piece of land for each person to cultivate, but Chief Sam said the government did not comply with these promises. Over the years, the reservation dwindled from 64,000-plus acres to 5 acres, a tribal cemetery, in 1954, and in 1983 began the slow process of reacquiring some of the original lands.