The Takelma, meaning “People of the River,” had a village at Ti'lomikh Falls, where tradition holds that Daldal, the Great Dragonfly, brought the Salmon Ceremony. For thousands of years, the People of the River celebrated salmon there. During the ceremony, a Takelma elder sat in a stone seat called the Story Chair to net the first salmon of the spring run. To allow salmon to pass upstream to spawn, that first salmon was carefully prepared and divided as a sacrament among the people, and divers returned the bones and skin of the first fish to the pool below the falls so the salmon would always return. Only then did the fishing season begin. Salmon ceremonies managed the fishery until 1851, when gold was discovered. A brutal war followed, and in 1853 a treaty ceded the Rogue Valley to the U.S. with the promise of a permanent reservation. A temporary reservation was established near the Table Rocks, but war continued, and in 1856 the surviving Takelma and other tribes were marched north to the Siletz Reservation and the Grand Ronde Reservation. Mining, overfishing, logging, farming, dams, and urbanization decimated the salmon runs, and although hatcheries were built to compensate for the loss of wild fish and habitat, current salmon runs average only about ten percent of the pre-settlement period. The Ceremony and the Story Chair might have been forgotten, but in 1933 Takelma elder Gwisgwashan, Frances Johnson, and family including George Baker traveled there from Siletz with John P. Harrington, who recorded the story for the Smithsonian Institution. In 2007 Grandma Agnes Baker Pilgrim, the oldest living Takelma, came to Ti'lomikh with a photograph of her father, George Baker, taken by John Harrington. The Story Chair was rediscovered, and the Salmon Ceremony was restored to the ancient site. Since then, three dams have been removed on the Rogue River, and the salmon runs have improved. In 2012, Grandma Aggie took her seat on the Story Chair and blessed the water, saying, “We are all water babies. We are all people of the river.”