Chief Kno-Tah
sculpture by Peter Wolf Toth
Chief Kno-Tah was a wooden statue located in Shute Park in Hillsboro in the U.S. state of Oregon. Carved by Peter Wolf Toth, it was the 56th Native American head in his Trail of the Whispering Giants series. The 25-foot (7.6 m) tall, 250,000-pound (110,000 kg) statue was the first of two carved by Toth in Oregon. Completed in 1987, the statue was named in honor of a chief of the local Tualatin Indians. In early 2017, the statue was damaged by a tree blown over in a windstorm. It was ultimately determined to be beyond repair and was removed in June 2017.
History
Toth selected Shute Park in Hillsboro for his first sculpture of a Native American head in Oregon in July 1987. He wanted a location in the Portland metropolitan area to allow easy access for a large population to see the statue that would include features drawn from Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe in northeastern Oregon. For his Trail of the Whispering Giants series, Toth carved a statue in each U.S. state with Oregon as the penultimate state. He began sculpting that month on a log of Douglas fir, Oregon's state tree.
The public source identifies “Chief Kno-Tah” as sculpture by Peter Wolf Toth. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Chief, Kno-Tah and sculpture.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5096825. Authority coordinates are 45.513, -122.974. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1987 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chief Kno-Tah” 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.