Winema Beach, a coastal strip adjacent to Winema Lake, was once the site of a town platted as Wi‑Ne‑Ma near Oretown in southern Tillamook County, about 15 miles (24 km) north of Lincoln City and 4 miles (6 km) south of Pacific City, Oregon. The name honors a Modoc woman forcibly removed from northern California after the 1849 Gold Rush and relocated to a reservation in southern Oregon. The north coast of Oregon was inhabited by the Tillamook people for thousands of years before European contact. The Tillamook comprised several divisions with distinct dialects, including Siletz, Salmon River, Nestucca, Tillamook Bay, and Nehalem. In 1805, while the Lewis and Clark expedition wintered at Fort Clatsop, it estimated the Tillamook population at around 2,200. In 1824 and 1829, smallpox epidemics introduced by Euro-Americans caused high mortality. The arrival of Oregon Trail settlers in 1841 and ensuing conflicts over land and resources further reduced their numbers. By 1845, Charles Wilkes estimated that 400 Tillamook remained; by 1849, only 200 survived. In 1850, the Donation Land Claim Act encouraged American homesteading in the Oregon Territory, bringing settlers onto traditional Tillamook lands and igniting numerous conflicts. A treaty in 1855 relegated the Nestucca to a reservation; by 1876, however, the agreement was annulled in favor of white settlement in the valley. In the spring of 1876, a group of settlers from Oregon City traveled from Grand Ronde along the old Gauldy Trail—an early route to the Little Nestucca Valley—to file homestead claims on the coast. In June, under pressure from the United States government, the Nestucca vacated the valley. They departed by canoe, paddling downstream over the ocean bar at the mouth of the Nestucca River and proceeding south to the Salmon River.
By 1877, pioneers built a school on the south bank of Nestucca Bay. James B. Upton and S.H. Rock petitioned Senator John H. Mitchell for a mail route and post office. Upton’s seal, reading ‘Oregon City,’ led him to propose ‘Ore City’; to avoid confusion, Mitchell suggested ‘Oretown,’ which became Nestucca Bay’s first official settlement. About one mile (1.6 km) southwest of Oretown, a coastal lake became a popular camping and picnic site. Initially called Shortridge Lake for owner Lewis Shortridge, it was renamed Daley Lake by the late 1870s after pioneers built a cabin on its south end. The lake attracted ducks, geese and salmon – as many as 20 caught per tide – and a wooden flume provided spring water for campers. In 1886, the Linewebber and Brown Packing Company built a cannery at Oretown to process Nestucca Bay salmon amid the collapse of the Columbia River fishery from overfishing. That year, the British bark Carmarthen Castle, of 1,468 tons and 234 feet (71 m), ran aground on the beach below Daley Lake while en route to Portland to load grain. In 1917, the beach served as an encampment and training base. In 1927, the lake area was platted as the townsite Wi‑Ne‑Ma, comprising 0.5 miles (0.8 km) of beach, the lake and residential lots. During World War II, the US Coast Guard maintained a station at Wi‑Ne‑Ma, patrolling the beach. US Coast and Geodetic Survey maps from 1941 used the names Winema Lake and Winema Beach. In 1944, Bill Morse, pastor of the Amity Church of Christ, led a youth camping trip to Wi‑Ne‑Ma. With Coast Guard permission, his group camped on the beach. Morse later purchased the property, eventually repaying loans with residential lot sales. It is now the Wi-Ne-Ma Christian Camp.
The Modoc inhabited the sagebrush-covered lava plateaus and wooded mountains of northern California and southern Oregon. Their settlements dotted the shores of Tule Lake and the Lost River, where they subsisted on fish, waterfowl, wild game and native seeds and bulbs. When Euro-Americans settled near the Lost River, they demanded the Modoc be removed to the Klamath Reservation with the Klamath and Yahooskin tribes. The Modoc and Klamath had long been enemies, and relations with the Yahooskin were similarly strained. For young Modoc leader Kintpuash—known to settlers as Captain Jack—the reservation was never home. He and his followers left, demanding a separate allotment on the Lost River. Oregon Indian Superintendent Alfred B. Meacham convinced him to return at the end of 1869, but harassed by the Klamath, Kintpuash and 371 Modoc moved south to their Lost River homeland in April 1870. In 1873, after two years of skirmishes with the US Army, President Ulysses S. Grant organised a peace commission to meet the Modoc leaders unarmed. Winema (Toby) Riddle, one of several Modoc who learned English, later married settler Frank Riddle, who had mastered the Modoc language. The couple served as interpreters during negotiations establishing the Klamath Reservation and ending the Modoc War. During talks, Winema relayed messages between General Edward Canby and Kintpuash and warned commissioners of a plot to assassinate Canby. Nevertheless, the meeting proceeded; Canby and Reverend Eleazer Thomas were killed while the third commissioner, Alfred Meacham, was wounded—with Winema credited with saving him from being scalped. Shortly afterward, General Jefferson C. Davis’s US Army captured Kintpuash and three other Modoc, all of whom were tried, convicted and executed by a military court. Meacham later championed Native American rights and published a book about Winema in 1876. These events epitomized the fraught interactions between Native Americans and settlers during a turbulent era. Read more here and here. Explore more of Winema Beach and Oretown here: