• Hikes to this destination:
  • Amanda's Trail Hike   (TH | <—   —> | LOG)

• Weather forecast: NWS/NOAA
• Maps: Oregon Hikers Maps Google Maps
• Latitude, Longitude: 44.29178, -124.10656
• Elevation: 150 feet

Description

Near a footbridge over Amanda Creek, there’s a memorial bench and a concrete statue, usually draped with necklaces, of Amanda De Cuys.

In the 1850s, Native Americans from various tribes were forcibly marched overland to the vast Coast Indian Reservation, which had two sub-agencies that stretched from Cape Lookout in the north to current-day Dunes City in the south. People regularly ran away from the reservation and headed back south towards their homelands, then becoming rapidly populated by white settlers, especially miners and farmers. In 1864, a detachment of the 4th California Infantry led by Lt. Louis Herzer went to Coos Bay to round up the "runaways". They swept up any Indian they could find in their path to take to the Alsea Sub-agency at Yachats.

Amanda de Cuys was a blind Coos woman who had been living with a white man and had a daughter by him: the daughter was left with her father, but the latter refused to marry her mother, so she was taken north. Her fate is unknown.

Signs in the vicinity describe the atrocity of the forced removal of southern Oregon Natives to the vast Coast Indian Reservation, and then their subsequent relocation from that reservation to the small Siletz Indian Reservation and the Grand Ronde Agency when white settlers began to claim coastal lands. The site is on private forest land near the boundary of the Siuslaw National Forest, but is part of the Oregon Coast Trail.

This is the second Amanda statue; the first, situated below the trail, was engulfed in the debris of a December 2015 storm (The first statue is the one depicted). A sign warns that the statue is equipped with a tracking device. Nearby is the statue of a bear.

More Links

• The Amanda Trail Story (Yachats Info)
• “Trail along Oregon Coast near Yachats connects communities, cultures” (OregonLive)
• “An unforgotten legacy Yachats commemorates the history of the Amanda’s Trail” (South Lincoln County News)

Contributors

bobcat (creator)