Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is a National Wildlife Refuge located roughly south of the city of Burns in Oregon's Harney Basin. Administered by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the refuge area is roughly T-shaped with the southernmost base at Frenchglen, the northeast section at Malheur Lake and the northwest section at Harney Lake.
The refuge was created in 1908 by order of President Theodore Roosevelt to protect habitat for diverse waterfowl and migratory birds, and grew to encompass of public lands. A popular site for birding, fishing, hunting and hiking, the refuge gained widespread attention in early 2016 after its headquarters complex was occupied by armed anti-government protesters.
History
Archaeological research within the Harney Basin region, including near Burns, Oregon, demonstrates that it likely was home to Native Americans for about the past 16,000 to 15,000 years. The first recognizable remains of seasonal prehistoric dwellings appear later in the Harney Basin at the Dunn Site about 5,500 BP. Around Malheur and Harney lakes, the presence of identifiable remains of numerous settlements and burials of the Boulder Village Period demonstrate that these lakes were heavily utilized by Paiute tribes for hunting and fishing as part of their seasonal nomadic round of the Harney Valley from before 3,000 BP up until historic contact with and settlement of the area by non-Native peoples. For example, the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters lies within a major archaeological site that was once a settlement used by Paiute tribes seasonally for thousands of years until historic contact.
The arrival of settlers in the region led to restrictions on the use of the land by the Paiute people who were eventually restricted to living in the Malheur Indian Reservation. After it was established, the size of the Malheur Indian Reservation continued to shrink as small areas of it were repeatedly extracted from it and transferred to local settlers for their private use. The Paiute people were also denied the local fishing and hunting rights that were promised them.
The Paiute people were forced to leave their Malheur Indian Reservation after joining the Bannock people in Idaho in an uprising, the Bannock War, in 1878, and were resettled in Yakama Reservation, away in southeastern Washington. About 550 Paiute men, women, and children, of whom many had not engaged in any hostile action, traveled for nearly a month through the snow and over two mountain ranges. Even though supplies were in transit from the Malheur agency, the Paiute people were forced to leave Camp Harney under-equipped. As a result, five children, one woman, and an elderly man died along the way and were left unburied as they traveled. During the five years they spent on the Yakama Reservation, historian Sally Zanjani estimates that more than one-fifth of them died during their exile, mostly of malnourishment and disease. When they were allowed to leave the reservation in 1883, some of the Paiute people moved to either the Warm Springs Reservation or Nevada. Others returned to the Harney Basin and in 1972, acquired title to of land and created the Burns Paiute Indian Reservation.
After the removal of Paiute tribes, much of the region's land became public property. The region hosted large livestock operations while the area's water resources were altered by irrigation and drainage projects.
Devastation and study of bird life
The remarkable abundance and diversity of bird life within the pre-irrigation Malheur region was first described by Charles Bendire in the middle 1870s. Beginning in the late 1880s, the area's bird populations were devastated by the actions of plume hunters who harvested the showy feathers of Malheur's waterfowl for use as hat ornaments. In 1908, wildlife photographers William L. Finley and Herman Bohlman documented the area's unusual diversity of birds, as well as the detrimental impacts of plume hunting. Finley used photographs to personally lobby President Theodore Roosevelt for federal protection of the region.