Multnomah people
Native American tribe near Portland, Oregon
The Multnomah are a tribe of Chinookan people who live in the area of Portland, Oregon, in the United States. Multnomah villages were located throughout the Portland basin and on both sides of the Columbia River. The Multnomah speak a dialect of the Upper Chinookan language in the Oregon Penutian family.
History
The Multnomah people are a band of the Chinookan peoples who originally resided on and near Sauvie Island in Oregon. The Multnomah and the related Clackamas tribes lived in a series of villages along the river near the mouth of the Willamette River on the Columbia River (the Willamette was also called the "Multnomah" in the early 19th century). According to archaeologists, the villages in the area were home to approximately 3,400 people year-round, and as many as 8,000 during fishing and wappato-harvesting seasons (wappato is a marsh-grown plant like a potato or onion and a staple food).
In 1830, a disease generally thought to have been malaria devastated the Multnomah villages. Within five years, the village of Cathlapotle was abandoned and was briefly inhabited by the Cowlitz tribe. The Multnomah people had nearly been wiped out by the year 1834 due to malaria and smallpox outbreaks. With only a few Multnomah left by the year 1910, the remaining people were transferred to the Grand Ronde Community which is also located in the Northwest of Oregon.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Multnomah people” as native American tribe near Portland, Oregon. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as native American tribe near Portland, Oregon. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6471409. The Library of Congress control number is sh85088393. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1830, 1834 and 1910.
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This entry incorporates text from “Multnomah people” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.