They saw success as a reward for virtuous striving and likewise as an assignment of spiritual favor; thus, elders counseled, "Work hard so that people will respect you."

The most distinctive feature of pre-contact Klamath culture, compared with other Native American societies, was their individualistic rather than purely communal concept of wealth.

Anthropologist Robert Spencer in "The Native Americans" [2] asserts that among the Klamaths, "A basic goal was wealth and the prestige derived from it ...

"[3] In 1826 Peter Skene Ogden, a fur trapper from the Hudson's Bay Company, was the first white man recorded to have left footprints on Klamath lands.

In 1832, the Hudson Bay trappers under John Work were in the Goose Lake Valley and their journals mentioned Hunter's Hot Springs.

[4] In 1838, Colonel J. J. Abert, a U.S. engineer, prepared a map that includes Warner Lakes and other natural features using information from the Hudson's Bay Company trappers.

They did, however, retain rights to hunt, fish and gather in safety on the lands reserved for the people "in perpetuity" forever, which gave rise to modern litigation discussed below.

Linus M. Nickerson, a former U.S. Army Chaplain in the American Civil War who had also worked for the Freedmen's Bureau in Fairfax, Virginia.

By 1881 tribal members had already built a boarding school, an office building, many residences and agricultural outbuildings, miles of fencing and were working on a new police headquarters.

Early in the reservation period, Klamath Tribal members demonstrated an eagerness to turn new economic opportunities to their advantage.

Both men and women took advantage of the vocational training offered, and soon held a wide variety of skilled jobs within the reservation, as well as, the Fort Klamath military post, and in Linkville.

However, he worried about superstitious practices and particularly requested funds to set up a hospital because native doctors were losing control, and threatened to poison people.

He also noted that tribal members were excellent workers and sought-after for work outside the reservation and that a syphilis problem since contact with whites three decades earlier was being controlled.

Nickerson also requested 300 yearling cattle and 20 breeder stallions to augment the ranching operations, as well as steel plows, but recognized that climate issues in the high desert would limit European type agriculture (the tribes cultivating some root crops and harvested aquatic plants in the swampy lake that gave the County its name during the summertime).

A rarity among Native American groups, the Klamaths were financially self-sufficient, being the only tribe in the US to be funding the administrative costs of the Bureau of Indian Affairs through income tax contributions.

But this was partly due to the sale of communal timber reserves which provided every Klamath with regular disbursements, that amounted to $800 a year by 1950 (equivalent to $10,460 in 2024).

As testified to Congress by the Assistant Secretary of the Interior, "It is our belief ... these people have been largely integrated into all phases of the economic and social life of the area ... Their dress is modern, and there remains little vestige of religious or their traditional Indian customs ..." Klamath traditions also encouraged individualism and discouraged collectivism, the tribe having originally been a loose collection of autonomous tribelets which had only rarely, in their long history, united together in order to fight a common enemy.

[17] In 1957, Congress were told that in the 1953/54 school year, 40% of Klamath students had failed to move up to the next grade; that two-thirds of able-bodied males do little or no work; and that a majority of the Indian population had been arrested at some point in their lives.

[18] Congress heard further testimony that although Klamaths had "shed the blanket" by abandoning outward Indian customs and dress, they hadn't "acquired the skills and attitudes necessary for the assumption of the responsibilities in a non-Indian society which they will be required to assume upon termination."

[21] Of the 2,133 Klamath tribal members at the time of termination, 1,660 (78%) decided to withdraw from the tribe and accept individual payments for land.

Their Economic Self-sufficiency Plan reflects the Klamath Tribes' continued commitment to playing a pivotal role in the local economy.

As is the case with many Native American tribes,[28] today few Klamath tribal members live on the reservation; the 2000 census reported only nine persons resided on its territory, five of whom were white people.

[31] In 2002, U.S. District Judge Owen M. Panner ruled that the Klamath Tribes' right to water preceded that of non-tribal irrigators in the court case United States vs. Adair, originally filed in 1975.

The Klamath Tribes opened the Kla-Mo-Ya Casino in Chiloquin, Oregon in 1997 on forty acres (16 ha) of land along the Williamson River.