On the morning of February 22nd, 1856, U.S. Indian Agent George H. Ambrose carried out a grim directive from General Joel Palmer. Several hundred indigenous men, women, and children were forced from their ancestral homeland in Southern Oregon and marched 263 miles to a reservation in the Mid-Willamette Valley. The journey lasted thirty-two days and was marked by suffering, deception, and death. I’ve spent years researching this tragic chapter—reading thousands of letters, poring over 1850s survey maps, and using modern satellite imagery to retrace the route. What I uncovered was not just a path, but a story long buried.
The project began as a quiet obsession. I wanted to understand the terrain, the choices, the silences. I mapped every mile, locating roads that had vanished and tracing those still in use. Each bend and rise in the land told a story. I imagined the footsteps, the weight of grief, the cold nights. I wasn’t just following a route—I was walking through history. The deeper I went, the more I realized how little of this story had been preserved. It wasn’t just forgotten—it had been erased. And I felt compelled to bring it back.
To do that, I turned to photography—not digital, but historical. I used an antique wooden view camera and the wet plate collodion process from the 1850s, the same era as the march. The imperfections in the images—blurs, streaks, ghostly shadows—felt right. They echoed the fractured memories and the pain that lingered. I paired each photo with journal entries from Ambrose’s own hand. His words, cold and procedural, contrasted with the haunted landscapes. Together, they formed a visual and textual record of Oregon’s “Trail of Tears.”
The photographs are not beautiful in the traditional sense. They are raw, eerie, and unsettling. But that’s the point. This was not a beautiful journey. It was a forced removal, a rupture. The ghostly flaws in the plates mirror the emotional scars left behind. I didn’t want to romanticize the past—I wanted to confront it. Each image is a question, a reckoning. What does it mean to walk through a land that remembers pain? What does it mean to document a story that was never meant to be told?
I’ve shared this work with historians, tribal members, and educators. The response has been overwhelming. Many had never heard of this specific march. Others had family stories that echoed its pain. The project has become more than documentation—it’s a bridge. A way to connect past and present, memory and truth. It’s not enough to say “this happened.” We have to feel it. We have to see it. And we have to carry it forward. Because history doesn’t disappear—it waits to be acknowledged.
So here it is: a visual archive of a journey that should never have happened. A tribute to those who walked, suffered, and endured. A reminder that the land holds stories, and sometimes, the camera can help us hear them.
