In 1846, Jesse Applegate and fourteen others from near Dallas, Oregon, established a southern route to Oregon from the Willamette Valley east to Fort Hall as an alternative to the dangerous final descent of the Oregon Trail on the Columbia River. The first emigrants left Fort Hall in early August 1846 with Levi Scott as guide while Applegate went ahead to mark the route, and they cut a wagon road through nearly 500 miles of wilderness to the upper Willamette Valley by November. Travel on the Applegate Trail continued in later years and greatly aided settlement in southern Oregon and the Willamette Valley, but the passage through Canyon Creek was especially brutal, with mud, rocks, icy stream crossings, broken wagons, dead cattle, abandonment, starvation, fatigue, and deaths. Women and children were central to overland migration as families crossed the continent between 1840 and 1870, performing domestic labor, taking on men’s work when needed, and even giving birth on the trail, as in Canyonville in September 1853 when Mrs. Weaver arrived after carrying a child through the canyon and delivered an infant that night. The trail had earlier roots in routes blazed by Hudson's Bay Company fur trappers, and advice from Peter Skene Ogden helped lead Applegate and others from Polk County to establish the route; explorers and scientists also examined the region in the 1820s and 1840s. The Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians entered treaty negotiations with the United States on September 19, 1853, and after Senate ratification on April 12, 1854, ceded nearly 700 square miles for less than three cents per acre in the first legally binding treaties between Oregon tribes and the federal government. After later termination and restoration by Congress in 1982, the Cow Creeks secured a settlement, placed the judgment in an endowment, and used its earnings to buy land and develop businesses at Canyonville. Meanwhile, the Oregon Donation Land Act of 1850 drew settlers with offers of free land, and by the early 1850s Applegate Trail emigrants were claiming land along Cow Creek and the South Umpqua River, bringing disease, farming, fenced pastures, loss of camas meadows, and declining elk and deer that reduced the Cow Creek Band and neighboring peoples to starvation. These events grew from a fundamental difference in outlook between emigrant farmers who expected to own land and Native peoples whose life, identity, and religion were bound to the land rather than to private ownership.