Southern Oregon is a land of great geographic diversity, from the more than 250-million-year-old Klamath Mountains in the south to the uplifted 50-million-year-old ocean floor and overlying sediments called Siletzia in the north, with Crater Lake in ancient volcanic Mount Mazama to the east and Basin and Range fault block mountains beyond it, separated by lakes including Summer Lake, Lake Abert, and Upper and Lower Klamath Lakes. The geological processes that formed southern Oregon’s rocks also produced mineral deposits such as gold, mercury, and nickel and created a complex topography that has shaped human life for thousands of years. In this part of southern Oregon, the Land of Umpqua is marked by forested slopes cut by the canyons and valleys of the Umpqua River and its tributaries, along with oak savanna lands, grassland hillsides, and volcanic bluffs, while its central valleys provided abundant resources including acorns, hazelnuts, huckleberries, camas tubers, salmon, steelhead, trout, lamprey eels, elk, and deer. The region became the homeland of the Kalapuya, Yoncalla, Takelma, and Cow Creek Umpqua Indians. Its valleys also served as a north-south trade route later known as the Applegate Trail, followed in time by railroads and roads that developed into the Interstate 5 corridor. The first Euro American presence came in 1836, when the Hudson’s Bay Company established Fort Umpqua near present-day Elkton to trade for beaver furs, and gold discoveries near Jacksonville in the 1850s greatly increased travel through the Land of Umpqua. After disease had severely weakened the Indian population early in the 19th century, conflicts with American miners and agricultural settlers led to the Rogue River Wars from 1851 to 1856, after which most of the area’s Indians were forcibly removed to coastal reservations. By the 1860s, towns such as Roseburg and Elton had been founded as trading centers for farmers raising wheat, fruit, and livestock. A railroad from Portland reached Roseburg in 1873, connected the Umpqua region with California in 1887, and opened new markets for local wheat, fruit, and lumber. For most of the twentieth century, the regional economy rested on timber, agriculture, mining, and tourism, with federal timberlands supplying Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir logs to mills in Glendale, Winston, Riddle, Roseburg, Sutherlin, and other towns. Fruits including prunes and grapes became major crops, hops were exported as far as Germany for beer production, dairy cattle and poultry were important, and Oakland became the center of turkey raising on the Pacific Coast. Winemaking, revived in the 1960s, became a major regional industry by the late twentieth century. Small-scale gold mining continued from the 1850s through the 1930s, and a nickel mine near Riddle was the primary domestic source of the metal from the 1950s until 1987. The North Umpqua River and South Umpqua River continue to define the area, meeting in the Umpqua Valley, the heart of the Land of Umpqua.