This one-time submarine tender turned fishing boat was once a curious sight along the Siuslaw River near Cushman. But like most reminders of past life along the river, it has since disappeared, as has the once-vibrant town that stood here, and before that the entire population of the valley’s original inhabitants. The Siuslaw people fished, farmed and traded up and down this valley long before it was appropriated into the Coast Indian Reservation in 1855. The Siuslaws’ own twilight glimmered and dimmed in the last decades of the1800s, when treaty violations and land grabs pushed the natives into smaller and smaller pockets of land. By 1910, only seven natives were counted as residents in the Siuslaw Valley.