Aerial view of Neskowin, Proposal Rock and the beach along the Oregon coast
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Stephen Dow Beckham’s last book brings Boas’ Oregon Coast notes home

ByMegan Harlow

Neskowin and Proposal Rock from the air. Photo: Twelvizm, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

On the evening of Friday, Oct. 9, Stephen Dow Beckham stood in front of a room in Neskowin with a set of slides and talked about the book he’d been waiting most of his career to publish. He wasn’t feeling well. He went ahead anyway.

“He had slides, and he talked, and then he collapsed at the end,” Jim Affolter, president of the Neskowin Historical Foundation, told OPB. “And the next morning he was gone.”

Beckham, one of Oregon’s best-known historians, died Oct. 10 at 85. His last book, Nestucca, Nechesne, and Siletz: Indians of the North-Central Oregon Coast, will get a second public presentation on Saturday, Nov. 14, at the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum. Affolter will give it in his place.

Sixty years with a box of notes

The book started in the mid-1960s, when Beckham, then a graduate student, found the papers of anthropologist Franz Boas at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. Boas, often called the father of American anthropology, had traveled to the Oregon Coast in 1890. Among his notes were long interviews with a Nestucca man named Hyas John, also known as John Baxter, who was born at Neskowin around 1858 and had spent most of his adult life among the Nechesne, or Salmon River people, near Otis.

Beckham also found the journal Boas wrote to his parents, describing a train ride from New York to Toledo, Oregon, and then a buckboard trip over the Coast Range to the Siletz Agency.

“I had been sitting on these materials since the mid-1960s,” Beckham told Oregon ArtsWatch in an interview published Oct. 2. “It was a very obscure account, and I thought it could be of real interest, but it’s not often that you can find a venue where this kind of information gets published.”

The Neskowin Historical Foundation, which Beckham co-founded, became that venue. It’s the group’s second book, after Neskowin: A Book of Found Photos in 2025.

What’s in it

The book covers three things: the traditional culture of the three southernmost Salishan-speaking tribes in North America, their oral literature, and their history, including the creation of the reservation and the tribes’ later ties to Siletz and Grand Ronde. Hyas John’s accounts describe housing, food, tools, worldview, burial practices and beliefs. There are ten oral tales Boas recorded in 1890, one of them about a band of men who paddle a canoe beyond the sunset, dive under the horizon, find a mirror-image world and come home ten years later.

Beckham also added a section of Native place names in Tillamook and Lincoln counties recorded between 1855 and 1880 by George Davidson of the U.S. Coast Survey. The volume is illustrated with engravings, historic photos and maps, plus new photography by Duncan Berry, including drone shots of the mythological rocks at the mouth of the Salmon River, bird images by Albert Rykman and a language-distribution map by Robert Reynolds.

“This is a window into the lifeways of the Native Americans who, for at least 7,000 years, lived in coastal Oregon,” Beckham said. People who live in Lincoln City, Newport, Neskowin and Tillamook today, he added, mostly “know nothing about this.”

A long career

Beckham was born near Coos Bay in 1941. He studied history and biology at the University of Oregon and earned his doctorate at UCLA. After starting at Linfield in 1969, he joined Lewis & Clark College in 1977 and taught there for 34 years. He was named Oregon Professor of the Year in 1994.

He served as an expert witness in dozens of cases involving tribal treaty rights, federal recognition and land claims, and helped build exhibits at the National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center in Baker City, the High Desert Museum in Bend and the Oregon Historical Society. He and his wife, Patti, kept a home in Neskowin for years.

The Nov. 14 presentation

The presentation starts at 5 p.m. at the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum, 2106 Second St. in Tillamook. It’s free, but the museum recommends an RSVP at tcpm.org because seating is limited. November is Native American Heritage Month. Copies of the book are $50 at the museum gift shop or through the Neskowin Historical Foundation.

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