David Brauner in French Prairie, at the site of the Willamette trading post established in 1814

A look at five OSU researchers who are revolutionizing their academic disciplines
By George P. Edmonston Jr. and Patricia Filip
Photography: Dennis Wolverton

The Search for a Missing People

These days, motorists traveling through the little hamlet of St. Paul, Ore., on state Highway 219, hardly give the place a second glance.

As most small communities go, St. Paul has a church, two cemeteries, a school, a roadside tavern, a post office, a small grocery store, a "feed and seed" with the latest farm equipment on display, and a large rodeo grounds and grandstand that hosts one of the Pacific Northwest’s longest-running July 4th rodeos.

About 1,000 people call St. Paul home. In appearance, it looks like a million other such places in America. Nothing to set it apart. Unless, of course, you know just what it is you’re looking at.

To researchers like OSU’s David Brauner, a professor of archaeology, St. Paul and the surrounding countryside still known to locals as French Prairie, is the place to study the state’s early history. Here lie many of the keys necessary to understanding the economic and social processes that helped in shaping and developing the Old Oregon Country, a label historians use to mean (approximately) the years from 1800 to 1850.

There’s an old adage about going to Europe: The most important thing you can pack is an education. Otherwise, all the old buildings look the same. How true of visiting St. Paul. For the uninformed, there’s the scene described above ... nothing special but a small town you pass through on your merry way to somewhere else.

Brauner visits the oldest brick building in the Pacific Northwest — the old Catholic church in St. Paul.

To the informed, St. Paul presents a different world, one rich with Oregon’s early history.

In the older cemetery, the one across the road from the high school, lie the bodies of two men who claimed with some convincing evidence they were members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition ... Francois Rivet and Philippe Degre. Rivet died in 1852 at age 95. Degre was 108 when he died in 1847. A grave mate of theirs is Entienne Lucier, the "Father of Oregon Agriculture." Mr. Lucier was also one of two French-Canadians to vote pro-American at that historic meeting at Champoeg on March 3, 1843, when, by a tally of 52-50, the group agreed to form a provisional government as an important first step to Oregon eventually becoming an American state (1858).

In the other cemetery, just a stone’s throw away, lies Archbishop Francis Norbet Blanchet, first Catholic Missionary to the Pacific Northwest and the priest who once had responsibility for all Catholic churches west of the Mississippi. Blanchet figures prominently in the early history of French Prairie and took the leadership role in forming the coalition of Americans and French-Canadian/Metis who helped successfully launch Oregon’s provisional government.

The Catholic church he helped build still stands in St. Paul and still is used for Mass. Its congregation is proud of the fact that its church building is the oldest brick building in the Pacific Northwest, older than anything in Portland or Seattle. Older than the Jason Lee Mission. Older than the Oregon Trail itself.

For the past 20 years, David Brauner has been fascinated with this special piece of the valley, always comparing the physical evidence found in his diggings with that of the written word ... the books, documents, and diaries from the period that have played such an important role in shaping the current perceptions and attitudes surrounding the settlement and building of the Northwest.

All this has led Brauner to one conclusion, succinctly put:

"It’s an old adage ... winners write the history," he says. "This is especially true here in Oregon and there is no better place to demonstrate this than at French Prairie. Spots on the map familiar to many residents of the area — St. Paul, Champoeg, Butteville, St. Louis, that is, all the little communities that sit between Newberg and Woodburn east of I-5 — hold the key to our complete understanding of the development of early western Oregon."

Brauner likes to emphasize the word "complete" in this context because he strongly believes that up to now, the picture passed down by past generations of specialists has been anything but.

"Grouping them together — which may be unfair but let’s do it anyway — many of these writings from this early period are overly patriotic, pro-American historical works produced in the mid-to-late 19th century by retired governors, senators, congressmen and judges. They are still with us today, still very influential and, within the limitations we have posed here, still somewhat useful."

"The common thread or theme they all share is that the establishment of the Oregon Country came about through a combination of opportunity, political and economic will, and overwhelming numbers, and that this entire process was uniquely American. Only Americans were qualified to have the visions of prosperity, security and contentment necessary to develop the Willamette Valley and its natural resources. The ‘Golden Pioneer’ that sits atop the state capitol building in Salem is an American pioneer."

Brauner’s shovel, of course, hasn’t unearthed anything to dispute the important role American settlers played in the early growth of the state. It’s just that his blade has also uncovered some things that, for whatever reason, haven’t been talked about or written about much, ever.

By locating almost 95 former cabin sites in and around Champoeg and in other special locations throughout French Prairie, Brauner and his students have uncovered the physical remains of another culture, older than the first wagon trains to enter the state, older than the first American farm in the valley.

They were the Metis (pronounced "Matee"), mostly retired French Canadian trappers who once worked out of Fort Vancouver and then settled on small, French Prairie farm sites with Native American wives and large numbers of children. To Brauner and his students, the role of the Metis in the settlement and economic history of the Oregon Territory and the state of Oregon has never been fully explored or appreciated by historians.

"The Metis have only been minimally acknowledged," Brauner explains, "which, to me, represents a serious historical miscalculation.

"The truth is, a significant number of French Canadian-Metis employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company based at Fort Vancouver did begin settling the northern valley after their contractual obligations to the company were over so that, between 1829 and 1843, successful Metis agricultural communities developed in several locations throughout the Northwest. The oldest and largest of these, of course, was French Prairie, centered in that 10-mile strip that sits between St. Paul and Champoeg."

Brauner says his research indicates that more than a decade before the first Americans found their way into the Willamette Valley, the French Prairie farms of the Metis were flourishing.

"The Metis were the dominant population group in the valley, surpassing that of many of the Native American tribes whose presence in the area was ancient," he says. "I’m convinced that when the first immigrant train arrived in Oregon City in 1843, it was not greeted by a virgin wilderness but was witness to a partially settled landscape whose population had already developed suitable agricultural strategies for the successful exploitation of the best farm land in the valley.

"Put simply, the agricultural industry of the Willamette Valley was already under way by 1843, which explains why the Jason Lee Mission is so close to Salem. All the good land north into French Prairie had long been taken."

From this, Brauner draws a simple conclusion: The success of many of the first American farmsteads may well be attributed to the experience and guidance of the Metis community, a position he will put forth in an upcoming book on the subject and one that is destined to rewrite the early history of the state.

Known as the "French-Canadian Archeological Project," Brauner has identified and documented 93 families and their farmsteads in the area. Fifty-two of these dwelling sites have been physically located and five have been studied extensively, incorporating the use of private collections. These include the Willamette Station of the Jason Lee Methodist Mission, the first Catholic Mission site at St. Paul, the St. Joseph’s School for Boys at St. Paul, and the Hudson’s Bay Company granary and clerk’s house near Champoeg, which was the economic hub of French Prairie.

What caused the Metis to be largely forgotten is one of the most fascinating aspects of Brauner’s search for a missing people. "They were illiterate, so they didn’t chronicle their history, dreams, aspirations and goals for the future," Brauner explains. "They spoke French, jargon, and other native languages, but not English. They had Indian wives and Metis children ... for these reasons they were viewed by most Americans as being Indian. Also, having worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company, many Americans viewed them as British subjects."

"Most of all, they were Catholic," Brauner concludes, "which was absolutely abhorred by the increasingly dominant Protestant population pouring into the Willamette Valley."

Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, the French-Canadian/Metis land base in the Willamette Valley began to significantly diminish. Social and cultural incompatibility, exclusionary land claim laws and Indian removal policies were foremost in separating the Metis from their highly coveted land. By the beginning of the 20th century, the only perceived impact of this population on Oregon history is with a few scattered place names — small communities that still dot the landscape around and east of Woodburn — St. Paul and Champoeg already discussed, as well as St. Louis and Gervais in that same vicinity.

As the research university of Oregon, OSU has more than 1,800 men and women involved in work that stretches our understanding of who we are and what this world is all about. Many of these projects, like Brauner’s, are helping to reshape the very disciplines in which they operate, forcing other experts in those same fields to rethink their thinking and to rewrite what they’ve written before. Here are four other examples of work going on right now at OSU that has the world of science all abuzz.

Morrie Craig, OSU professor of veterinary medicine

Like the proverbial Jonah, Morrie Craig, ’70, is well acquainted with the digestive track of whales. The OSU professor of veterinary medicine has probed the stomachs of whales and other animals for microbes that can degrade toxins found in poisonous plants, oil spills and TNT.

Craig and OSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine have developed one of the world’s leading programs in the study of anaerobic microbes — bacteria that do not live in oxygen and have the unusual capacity to break down a number of different toxic compounds.

Although anaerobic bacteria from soils have been used for several years to clean up pollution problems, few researchers have studied the potential of bacteria found in living animals.

Craig and his research colleagues have found microbes in the rumen (the first stomach in a cud-chewing animal’s digestive system) of sheep and goats that give them protection against toxic effects of tansy ragwort. This invasive weed can poison cattle and horses and once caused millions of dollars a year in losses to Oregon ranchers. When the microbes were introduced into cattle, the researchers found the cattle were protected from the disease.

"This was a new paradigm for dealing with toxic plant threats to animal health," said Craig. Because anaerobic bacteria can’t live with oxygen, Craig is working with OSU’s College of Pharmacy on methods for encapsulating the microbes so they can be used commercially.

When Craig talks about his research, he can’t help but use the word serendipity. While in Alaska setting up a drug testing system for the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, he met Inuit Eskimos who invited him to join them on their whale hunt.

Craig knew that whales had more than one stomach, as do sheep and goats, and was interested in discovering whether their digestive system also contained microbes that would break down environmental contaminants. What he found were microbes in the bowhead whale’s forestomach that could degrade PCBs and compounds found in oil spills.

Craig also has discovered microbes in goats and sheep rumen that can break down TNT. He currently has a fellowship from the Department of Defense to explore use of the microbes in cleaning up TNT residues at U.S. military bases.

Closer to home, Craig was able to avert a crisis several years ago when Oregon’s $50 million a year grass straw export business was threatened by importers’ fears that the straw contained endophyte toxins that would sicken beef and dairy animals. The National Hay Association, the Oregon Ag-Fiber Association and the Oregon Seed Council asked Craig to set up a certification process for the straw exports.

Over the last several years, Craig’s laboratory has been analyzing and certifying more than 1,000 samples per year. Although importers are satisfied the certified straw contains acceptable levels of endophytes, Craig and his laboratory are attempting to isolate anaerobic microbes that could break down endophyte toxins, much the same as the microbes that degrade tansy ragwort. Eventually they hope to create a product that would protect cattle and allow them to eat the straw with impunity.

Craig received his doctorate in biophysics from OSU in 1970. He was honored with the Outstanding Scientist Award from the Oregon Academy of Science in 1996. In presenting the award, Ken Doxsee, president of the academy, praised Craig for outstanding basic science in explaining the function of these anaerobic microbes. "But he’s also taken the next step," he said, "to see how this knowledge can help solve serious animal health or pollution problems in the real world."

Jack Barth with a MiniBAT, a submersible research vehicle used to study coastal waters

Ships, aircraft, submersible monitoring devices called MiniBATs and winged underwater vehicles. With equipment that seems like it belongs in a high-tech science fiction movie, OSU-led researchers this summer launched a blockbuster project of their own to learn more about the forces that move water, life forms and debris between the shore and deeper seas.

They conducted the first intensive summer field session under a five-year $9 million grant program known as Coastal Ocean Advances in Shelf Transport or COAST.

Their goal is to develop a comprehensive picture of the coastal ocean and to understand and eventually be able to predict wind driven ocean currents and their effect on ocean ecosystem health. Rather than "rewriting" the discipline of oceanography, "remapping" in three dimensions may be the more appropriate characterization.

"We need to understand coastal ecosystems all the way from physics to chemistry and biology," said Jack Barth, professor of oceanic and atmospheric sciences at OSU and one of the study’s principal investigators.

He said that although much is known about the way coastal currents move from north to south, far less is understood about the movement of water from east to west and from west to east.

Winds and currents are especially relevant to fisheries. Strong winds cause upwelling, pushing up nutrient-rich subsurface water near the coast.

The nutrient-rich water combined with sunlight creates phytoplankton blooms, which form the base of the food chain and are the foundation of productive fisheries. The research will provide information about the dynamics of nutrients, phytoplankton blooms and fish productivity. It also will examine how iron stimulates phytoplankton growth and how the topography of the ocean bottom affects biological productivity.

"The coastal ocean is extremely productive," said Barth. "Fifty percent of production occurs within 100 miles of the coast. The rest of the ocean is practically a desert."

The research results also have implications for pollution control and problems of invasive species. For example, if scientists had had a better understanding of the currents and wind off the Oregon Coast they would have been able to more accurately predict where the leaking oil from the shipwrecked New Carissa would have drifted.

They also hope to determine how far off shore ships can safely dump ballast water to keep invasive species and pollutants out of productive coastal areas.

Because the ocean is an extreme environment, Barth said, it is challenging to make good observations and map out a three-dimensional picture.

"It takes a huge amount of resources to do it right," he said. "No one before has had the resources to attack the problem the way it needs to be done."

The field session this summer involved two major research vessels, Oregon State University’s Wecoma and the University of Washington’s Thomas G. Thompson, as well as OSU’s coastal vessel Elakha. Scientists on board measured water temperatures, salinity, turbulence, zooplankton fields, wind velocity and rate of upwelling. From a twin-engine aircraft, scientists dropped temperature probes over coastal water and measured the wind field and ocean color.

One ship towed a SeaSoar or winged underwater vehicle loaded with instruments to measure physical, biological and chemical properties. Scientists released a fluorescent dye and used a submersible monitoring device called a MiniBAT, which looks like a 3-foot robotics airplane, to track dye dispersion. Because light provides limited visibility in deep water, scientists employed a range of acoustical devices to explore underwater conditions.

Researchers will use the data they gathered to develop computer models to predict the effects of winds and currents on coastal ocean productivity. They will build an entire model of the Oregon Coast with grids of one-quarter of a kilometer.

Barth said that models have been made in the past without such extensive, high-quality "ground truth," or as oceanographers say "sea truth," but that the new research results will keep the models honest.

Bev Law

OSU researchers are at the forefront of the quest to understand a key aspect of global warming: how much carbon dioxide is taken up by vegetation and soils and how this might be modified over time with climate change or agricultural and forestry practices.

Bev Law, ’93, an assistant professor in the College of Forestry, is director of a major initiative to gather and manage data that will be used to study these issues.

She is science chair for the AmeriFlux network of 45 research sites in North, Central and South America that measure the exchanges of carbon dioxide, water and energy between the terrestrial ecosystem and the atmosphere. AmeriFlux is part of a worldwide network that includes 150 research sites ranging from the Arctic tundra to forests in the Brazilian Amazon.

The data gathered may help provide scientists with critical new information to help mitigate carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and to develop more accurate global climate change projections.
Human-related carbon emissions add approximately one billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere per year, primarily from deforestation and fossil fuel combustion. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is the principal greenhouse gas linked to global climate change.

Because studies have shown that up to 25 percent of human-made carbon emissions may be absorbed and stored by plants for use in photosynthesis and growth, scientists are striving to understand the complexities of carbon exchange between the atmosphere and biosphere.

"Are we really affecting the atmosphere like we think we may be?" asks Law. "We’re not just looking at vegetation effects on the atmosphere, but atmospheric effects on vegetation."

Law has established three flux research sites in ponderosa pine stands in central Oregon. "These forests are wired," she said. A giant tower erected at each site is rigged with instruments that measures changes in water vapor and carbon dioxide as the forest "breathes." Needles inserted in tree stems continuously measure sapflow to estimate water transport through trees, gas analyzers are used to measure photosynthesis rates, and automated soil chambers measure carbon dioxide respired from soil.

Law said her team is one of the first to study the effect of tree stand age on the level of carbon dioxide taken up by the forest and released to the atmosphere. She has found that a site with a young trees produces more carbon dioxide than it absorbs, while a site with old-growth trees serves as a carbon sink, taking up more carbon dioxide than it releases.

In addition to her work with the AmeriFlux network, Law serves on the Committee on Air Quality Management in the United States operated by the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council. Since 1998, she and her co-investigators have received more than $7 million in grants from federal agencies to study forest ecosystems.

Law received her doctorate in forest ecology from Oregon State in 1993. She has had a lifelong interest in forestry, nurtured by her grandfather who was a state forester in Minnesota. "He was my mentor," she said. "When I was four, he taught me how nitrogen cycles through forests."

Aaron Wolf has compiled the world’s most comprehensive collection of water treaties.

When it comes to water issues, Aaron Wolf likes to talk about cooperation rather than conflict.

In examining 3,600 water treaties going back centuries, he has found that a full-scale war between countries over water issues has happened only once. And that was 4,500 years ago.

Wolf, an OSU associate professor of geosciences, debunks the notion of water as a cause of historic armed conflict and a source of potential battles in the 21st century. He has found water is more often used as a tool for cooperation.

"What we’ve done in our set of projects here is actually look at the process more scientifically," he said. "The literature that talks about conflict only looks at conflict. Our feeling was you have to balance that with a record of cooperation if there is one. So we broadened the number of basins we looked and broadened the spectrum of possible interactions. We found the historic record is pretty overwhelming in what it tells us about what people do and don’t do over water."

Wolf has identified and mapped all of the world’s 261 international water basins— all the places where water crosses international boundaries. They account for about one half the land surface of the earth and include 40 percent of the world’s population.

He also has developed a computerized database, which includes the full text of some 300 treaties.

"Basically the largest compilation of the world’s experience with international waters is housed here at OSU," he said.

Wolf has shared his expertise with the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank by working as a consultant on various aspects of international water resources and dispute resolution.

Even though much of his research has focused on international water conflicts, Wolf said lessons learned from international conflicts can be applied locally. He said the Columbia River Treaty between the United States and Canada set an important precedent by allocating benefits from water rather than allocating the water itself.

"That’s an important shift in thinking because it allows people to think about why they actually need the water," he said.

"I think that’s part of the problem with our issue in Southern Oregon. In successful negotiations, people go from thinking about their rights to thinking about their needs to thinking about their interests. I think here we’re still thinking in terms of rights. The Reclamation Act gives rights to irrigators. The Endangered Species Act gives rights to fish. Well, if you’re only talking about your rights there’s really very little room to move."

By focusing on interests, people can begin to ask, for example, whose interest is served by ensuring compliance with the Endangered Species Act. Would Oregonians be willing to pay a little more for water or for energy production to help fund improvements that would make irrigation more efficient? "That’s the kind of solution that comes up in an international setting," he said.

Wolf believes there is plenty of room to improve the management of water in this country. "If we managed water with the same intensity as a place like Israel does, with drip irrigation, with wastewater reuse, I can’t say there would be enough water for everything, but we would certainly be in a lot better shape than we are now. To anyone from the Middle East who has been here in western Oregon, the idea that we even have a drought is absurd."

One of Wolf’s students is working to identify interests of the parties involved in the dispute over water in the Klamath Basin. Even in this situation, Wolf said, solutions are possible.

For example, irrigators who plant annual crops, could be subsidized during a drought year to enable them to get through the year financially. In addition, he said, contingency plans should be developed for drought and for very wet years.

"I can’t say these ought to be the solutions. I am suggesting that if different groups of people in an international setting can resolve their differences, which are much more deadly and much more intense, I think the precedent is there for us to be able to solve them in this