The first recorded encounter between whites and coastal southwestern Oregon Indians occurred in 1792 when British explorer George Vancouver anchored off Cape Blanco , about north of the mouth of the Rogue River , and Indians visited the ship in canoes . In 1826 , Alexander Roderick McLeod of the Hudson 's Bay Company ( HBC ) led an overland expedition from HBC 's regional headquarters in Fort Vancouver to as far south as the Rogue . The number of whites entering the Rogue River watershed greatly increased after 1846 , when a party of 15 men led by Jesse Applegate developed a southern alternative to the Oregon Trail ; the new trail was used by emigrants headed for the Willamette Valley . Later called the Applegate Trail , it passed through the Rogue and Bear Creek valleys and crossed the Cascade Range between Ashland and south of Upper Klamath Lake . From 90 to 100 wagons and 450 to 500 emigrants used the new trail later in 1846 , passing through Rogue Indian homelands between the headwaters of Bear Creek and the future site of Grants Pass and crossing the Rogue about downstream of it . Despite fears on both sides , violence in the watershed in the 1830s and 1840s was limited ; " Indians seemed interested in speeding whites on their way , and whites were happy to get through the region without being attacked . " In 1847 , the Whitman massacre and the Cayuse War in what became southeastern Washington raised fears among white settlers throughout the region and led to the formation of large volunteer militias organized to fight Indians , though no whites were yet living in the Rogue River drainage . Along the Rogue , tensions intensified in 1848 at the start of the California Gold Rush , when hundreds of men from the Oregon Territory passed through the Rogue Valley on their way to the Sacramento River basin . After Indians attacked a group of returning miners along the Rogue in 1850 , former territorial governor Joseph Lane negotiated a peace treaty with Apserkahar , a leader of the Takelma Indians . It promised protection of Indian rights and safe passage through the Rogue Valley for white miners and settlers
Whitman massacre
Whitman massacre
Rogue River (Oregon)