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This statue, which resides in the temperate rainforest of Cape Perpetua, is in honor of Amanda, a blind Indian women captured from her native land and forced to live in a reservation camps near Yachats.

More than 1,400 native Indians from the Rogue River region were captured and by ship and/or by forced march, were brought to reservation camps at Siletz and Yachats. Those who remained behind were declared fair game for bounty hunters.

Nonetheless, some Indians escaped from Yachats to return south to their homeland. In 1864 the Army sent a patrol south to round up these Indians and bring them back to Yachats.

The soldiers found Amanda, an elderly-looking, blind Indian woman, at a farm owned by a white settler named De-Cuys, at the head of tidewater on the Coos River. When the soldiers told her she had to leave, she asked to say good-bye to Julia, the settler’s pretty 8-year-old daughter. The little girl threw her arms around the old woman and cried, “Dear Mama!”

They marched Amanda north over sand dunes and lava rocks until her feet were so bloody they left tracks. According to one soldier’s journal, some of the men swore at her, told her to hurry up, and threatened to leave her to die.

History does not record how long Amanda survived in Yachats, or if she ever saw her daughter again. But by the time the Yachats agency closed in 1875, disease and neglect had reduced the population there by half.