The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest

by Marc James Carpenter

The small, mostly forgotten wars of the 1850s in the American Pacific Northwest were part of a broader genocidal war—the War on Illahee—to seize Native land for Euro‑Americans. Illahee (a term for "homeland" in Chinook) was turned into the states of Oregon and Washington through the violence of invading soldiers, settlers, and serial killers. Clashes over the brutality of invasion—should it be celebrated, isolated, or erased?—left behind accidental archives of atrocity, as history writers disagreed over which stories they should tell and which stories they could sell. By the 1920s, the War on Illahee had been disappeared.

Drawing on records from the perpetrators themselves, the papers of historians, and previously suppressed evidence from Indigenous survivors, Marc James Carpenter has written both a new history of pioneer atrocities within and beyond the wars on Native people in the American Pacific Northwest, and a new history of how these wars were remembered, commemorated, and forgotten. The overlapping distortions have embedded inaccuracies in our histories and textbooks all the way to the present. Beyond reshaping the history of the Pacific Northwest, this searing book opens broader conversations about settler colonialism, historical memory, problematic monuments, and the historical profession.

Genres: Nonfiction

400 pages, Hardcover

Published October 28, 2025

Reviews

[Margaret Butler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very hard to read, but a very clear account about how much agreement there was in the settler community in Illahee (the Pacific NW) that all the Native people had to go, one way or another. He goes through lots of primary source evidence to make his case that the so-called friends of the Indians all believed that Native people needed to be removed. He also goes through all the histories written during and after the 1850s to show how the genocide was covered up.

[Lottie C · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.75⭐️

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