It used to take six months by sea, at least four months by land; now the cheap seats will get the job done in 12 hours. Wow. A lot has changed in the two centuries since Lewis & Clark, guided by teenager Sacagawea, first saw the Oregon territory with a license from easterners to stay for good. Good it has been; particularly lately as much of today’s internet and tech revolution is being powered by the smarties from Portland and its companion burg 90 minutes north across the Columbia River in Seattle.
Earlier last month, it was the happy duty of Quillnews and his wife to see our son in the town he’s been calling home for the past eight months. After stints in the job-school-job-school rotation, Quillnews’ tech guru and entrepreneur had come to rest on a regular payroll at a start-up in Portland. We spent more than a week there, touring and learning, much of it joyfully renewing family ties and rhythms, but also less wonderfully as each of us would come down with what it known the world around this season as the flu – ouch! I’m just beginning to come out of the fog, now more than two weeks later.
It was while visiting and then recuperating back east that I’ve come to appreciate the magic that has been accomplished by the descendants of those easterners who included Lewis & Clark’s patron, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, Quillnews’ current turf. Oregon came into America’s national consciousness after the Lewis & Clark expedition from May ’04-Dec ’05 plotted lands “acquired” by Jefferson from Napoleon in the so-called Louisiana Purchase. The plan was for Lewis & Clark to survey the land and follow the Columbia River to the Pacific. This would open the region to development dominated by the newly formed republic on the east coast of North America, and keep the land from the designs of any Russian, Spanish and British colonial land development committees. Lewis & Clark’s expedition spent the winter of 1805-06 at Fort Clatsop just west of Portland in the midst of the North Coast Mountains, as deep, dense and damp a green pine wood forest as imaginable, but rich with wildlife, game, fish and resources.
In 1810, John Jacob Astor in New York saw the region’s fur trade possibilities, and dispatched two expeditions – one by sea, and one by land. All knew the ocean passage took six months; the question was how long it would take an overland expedition to make it through what, until that time, had been the impassable Rocky Mountains. Astor’s agents discovered a 20 mile gap in the Rockies called South Pass in today’s Wyoming that would permit practical transcontinental travel and trade. Development lagged for years, but was given a renewed shot in 1825 with the rediscovery of the South Pass by mountain man, Jedediah Smith, the archetype of the mountaineer, Indian trader and trapper.
Demands by easterners and newly arrived immigrants for land in the west grew. Word spread. Commerce beckoned. Lands taken from Mexico in war required settling. Farming prospects in the Willamette Valley of Oregon were attractive and there were inviting prospects in California to the south, where gold was discovered in 1849. Cross country wagon trains were organized and launched along the so-called Oregon Trail. More than 500,000 made the 2,000 mile transcontinental crossing from St. Louis to Oregon from 1843-68, ending with the completion of the link between the Union Pacific and Central Pacific transcontinental railroads in 1869. About one in 10 died along the way – that is a cost of 2,000 dead each year for each of the 25 years the trail was used! Half the survivors stayed to develop farms, timber land and trade in Oregon, while the other half headed to California in search of gold and to the other mining boom towns in the west.
The lure of Oregon’s farms, commercial rewards of the region’s fur trade and mines and the natural cut through the Rockies at South Pass combined to enable the ambitious and hungry citizens of the United States, and the immigrants arriving by the boat load daily in eastern ports, to migrate west and add the lands of today’s Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California, Nevada and Utah to their new and growing nation. There was heart ache, theft, war, murder, trade, commerce and integration and development and growth of a human society that today aspires to instruct the world. It was an unstoppable migration of an acquisitive community of people who believed they had a freedom bestowed by Providence to improve themselves and develop the land they could settle. After a while, the prosperity of these people could not be denied, and they would settle the land under simple laws of common sense guided by the Bible teachings, often in spite of their leaders back east. What a story! The spread of the commercial, social and political hegemony that began with these people continues. And it isn’t even close to over – as current events in the Middle East show.
Today’s Portland is booming, reborn again from its industrial and trade origins into a center of medicine, education and entrepreneurship so modern and advanced a few of its firms, such as Intel, which has 15,000 employees in town, lead the world.
Our son took us on two jaunts outside town that were more than memorable. One day trip was to Portland’s east, along the Columbia River Gorge, where in sight of both Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens, we visited the picturesque Wankeena and the Multnomah falls at state parks along the river. The waters of Multnomah Falls dropped 620 feet from Larch Mt., in what was said to be the second largest year round falls in the US. These incredible falls were situated in dense state parks, well used by scores of visitors and day hikers that day who were outfitted in Oregon’s must-wear outdoor gear, whose styles are brought to the world by Portland-based Nike and Columbia, and which are perfectly suited to the damp, cool weather.
In our trip to the west, we began our day after departing from our son’s Pearl District loft, heading over the hills along a winding Cornell Street through Holman Park and into the Portland’s western suburbs of Beaverton and Hillsboro, where we got on Route 26 and headed through picturesque prairie-like farmland, as we traveled the 60 miles to the Pacific Coast.
In what seemed no time (compared to the days of travel required to pass through similar looking farmland in the Midwest) Route 26 entered the North Coast Mountain range. We drove along the winding roadway through the Tillamook and Clapsop state forests, part of the 780,000 acres of state forest land protected by the state. Now past the farm spreads, we entered the domain of trailers, double-wide’s, and backwoods homes that housed locals who were making their way without benefit of the WTO, World Bank development loans, or the Internet’s new e-economy that Portland tech firms were helping create.
Driving through the incredibly dense, wet and mossy forest, the natural beauty of this mountainous roadway was simply stunning. Looking at the raw forest and rugged terrains on other side, it was hard to imagine any pioneers from the East, let alone local Indians, navigating an existence amidst this landscape. Then, here and there, we drove past clear cut patches of acreage on the hillsides nearby where the timber was gone, where the bright light of the sky shinned through, dramatically changing the landscape and vista. The stumps, scars and debris on the cleared land made me recall the vertigo I had experienced during my first trips to hard rock copper mines, and coal strip mines in Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona years before. Seeing this violation of the land, scared this way, was sickening, akin to hearing the screams of livestock in the slaughter house. No wonder greenies were such hard cases. Yet, being a modern natural resource consumer, I soon would calm down, as I had before. I mean: grow up! Where do you think the wood for your home, paper, furniture and other products comes from?
Oregon state foresters were tending the resource, after all, earning an estimated $100 million last year from the harvest of 200 million board feet. Land and resource management like this not only helps pay for state services it mitigates real dangers, including fire. For example, for 20 years beginning in August 1933, Oregon lost 350,000 acres of forests to fires, including much of the land we were driving through now, which had to be reclaimed and reseeded, and remained at risk unless tended carefully by grown-up’s who took responsibility for the reality that human beings in fact have a huge impact on any land they occupy.
With my sense of order restored somewhat, we emerged from the mountains to link with Highway 101 and drove south to Cannon Beach, a Cape Cod like village on the coast overlooking Tillamook Pock Lighthouse, which had protected shippers from 1880-1957, and several monolith outcroppings, including the 235 foot Haystack monolith that is a must snap vista for any tourist. Beach combers wandered in the rocks around its base with seagulls. Under a clear cloud less blue sky, the air was a brisk 50 degrees; the low intensity coastal development made the coastline appear like a park preserve.
We drove south along Highway 101 through Gov. Oswald West State Park and came to rest at the highway’s overlook at Neankahnie Mountain 700 feet above the towns of Manzanita and Nehalem on the coastline below. This simply fabulous vista was enabled by the roadway carved into the mountains in the 1930s as part of a WPA project, building on the conservatory policies instituted by Oregon’s visionary Gov. West in the early 20th century to keep the coastline public.
We took Highway 101 south along a picturesque coastal ride to Nehalem Bay, where we had lunch at Currents, at 35815 7th St., and then a lazy drive to the “home of land, cheese and ocean breeze,” otherwise known as Tillamook, where a huge cheese co-op dominates the crossroads near Route 6, where we turned east to get back to Portland. Along the way we passed Intel’s massive factory campus in Hillsboro, where the tools to travel today’s Oregon Trail – the internet – are being devised.
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