Unlike their neighbors to the North, Oregon Indians were not whale hunters.  This was probably a matter of geography: While the Washington and British Columbia coastlines are protected by islands and inland waterways, Oregon’s coast is straighter, less protected.  Coastal tribes, which are all named after the rivers they were associated with, usually lived at river mouths.  This allowed them a highway into Oregon’s dense coastal forests, and the bounty of the river and tide.

But beached whales never went unprocessed: in Southern Oregon, beach strips were privately owned, and in Northern Oregon, the person who found the whale claimed ownership. Either way, the whale was stripped and its meat cherished by entire tribes.

As I child, I imagined the American genesis as a couple of Eskimo families carrying spears and chasing mammoths across a narrow and long land bridge.

Almost everything in that image is likely wrong; but the new science that describes why that image is wrong is fascinating.  The land bridge was actually a sort of subcontinent, formed by the low sea levels of the ice age: Beringia was a thousand miles wide.  Crossing this giant land bridge and then passing through Alaska during the ice age would have been technically impossible for any prehistoric human.