Corvallis photographer Rich Bergeman will talk about his project called “The Land Remembers,” in which he spent two years searching for landscapes that were involved in Rogue River Wars of Southern Oregon the 1850s.

One of the bloodiest, and yet mostly forgotten, of the Indian conflicts to occur in the Oregon Territory, the Rogue River Wars began as a cycle of clashes and truces between local tribes and the miners and settlers who flooded into southwest Oregon during the early gold-rush and settlement years. The increasing violence eventually erupted into all-out war involving the U.S. Army that finally ended in 1856 with the forced removal of the Rogue Valley and South Coast tribes to reservations at Siletz and Grand Ronde, where many descendants still live today.

Using infrared-sensitive cameras, Bergeman spent two years traveling from the Rogue Valley to the Oregon Coast to photograph scenes at or near the sites of battles, peace parlays, massacres and other significant events that occurred during the war years of 1851-56. He said he did not set out to simply record specific historic sites, but rather to create an “impressionistic experience of the war through views of the idyllic landscapes that played host to such tragic events.”

Bergeman is a retired instructor of journalism and photography at Linn-Benton Community College in Albany. The 75-year-old photographer has been exhibiting his work throughout the Northwest since the 1980s. Over the past two decades he has focused primarily on portraying forgotten Northwest histories through photographs of what’s been left behind. His various projects can be seen at richbergeman.zenfolio.com, and in book form at blurb.com