May 21- June 1 Oregon

Finally got back to Oregon on May 21 and picked up the car and the motor home on May 22! We’re ready to see Oregon but the rain keeps coming down. Nothing has changed since December except it is not as cold!

Sunday, May 25 –We headed off to Portland to visit the Japanese Garden and the Chinese Garden. The Japanese Garden was really spectacular. It is set in a backdrop of 120’ tall trees which insulates it from anything outside. Every time you turn you get a different view. It was just a beautiful setting and a beautiful garden. The Chinese Garden was equally impressive but in a different way. The best thing about the Chinese Garden was the tour guide. She was so upbeat and fun and she gave us such wonderful facts and insights! The city of Portland teamed up with a sister city in China, Souzho, to work together to put a garden in each city. Souzho got help with a rose garden in their city (Portland is known for its roses…) The people backing the drive for a Chinese Garden had little money and no idea where they could get the land for the Chinese Garden. The local Natural Gas Company had two city blocks in downtown Portland that it was using for parking lots. They offered to lease the land to the group for a Chinese Garden for $1 per year for 99 years. The city block is .8 acre but when you are in the garden it feels like a sanctuary. It doesn’t feel small at all. It is laid out like a wealthy landowner’s estate in China with covered walkways, a study room, meeting rooms, etc. They imported both materials and workers from Souzho to build the garden. It is very well done…

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Monday, May 26 – Mark tried to fly but the weather was too bad. As an aside here, we left Oregon in December because it was cold and rainy for the entire 3 weeks we were here. We came back in May and it is still cold (although not AS cold) and rainy. When Lewis and Clark were here for the winter of 1805-06 they wrote in their logs that they were here for 106 days. On only 12 of those days was there no rain. On only 6 of those days was there sunshine. Nothing has changed in 200 years!

Mark came back home from the airport and there was an email from Jim Hill talking about the Portland Underground. Mark looked it up, called the number and booked us on the tour for 3 PM this afternoon! We dropped off some Home Port printing at Office Depot and drove into Portland. We were only one block away from the Chinese Garden we visited on Sunday! Underneath a large part of the city of Portland is a second world of basements that were all connected to form a pathway from the river back about 5 blocks into town. These pathways provided a haven for nefarious ne’er-do-gooders to make people vanish into thin air. They used trap-doors (dead falls) to get people from the bars down into the basements so they could be held until the men could be sold as deck hands to the ships leaving port and the women could be sold into “white slavery”. The area is supposed to be haunted and the guide did a good job of telling that side of the story. (He is a paranormal investigator so he “knows what he is talking about”.) It was a very interesting look at life in Portland in the 1850’s to 1941.)

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Tuesday, May 27 – Mark went flying. When he got back I picked up my printing.

Wednesday, May 28 – We went to the End of the Trail Interpretive Center in Oregon City. This was where the wagon train trail actually ended. People came here to register their land claims. This is such an interesting aspect of our nation’s history. After the fur trappers couldn’t make money trapping any more, they settled in the Oregon area with their Indian wives and took up farming. In 1843 the current settlers (mostly trappers and missionaries) got together and agreed on the Organic Act setting up the method of measuring land, the necessity of having ownership recorded in Oregon City and authorizing married couple to have 640 acres of land at no cost. (This was equal to one square mile.) The US extended its authority to include the Oregon Territory in 1849 and selected a Territorial Governor to make sure that the Organic Act did not include anything that the US Constitution would not allow. The only thing the Oregon had to change was its ability to mint gold “Beaver” coins since the US Constitution reserved this right for the federal government. In 1850 the US Congress passed the Donation Land Act of 1850 which voided all previous land grants while at the same time took into account the current ownership of the land. It granted every white citizen over 18 years old ALREADY LIVINIG IN OREGON 320 acres of land (a half section) and to every married couple ALREADY LIVING IN OREGON 640 acres of land (a full section) with half of the land in the wife’s name. (This was a first in the US.) They were required to live on the land and work it for four years. Settlers arriving in Oregon before the end of 1850 were given the same amount of land under the same rules. Settlers arriving after 1850 were given half as much land as those arriving before the end of 1850. After 1854 there was no longer any free land given away. The price then was $1.25 per acre with a maximum of 320 acres. The price rose steadily and the number of acres allowed decreased in the following years. A total of 7,437 land grants were issued under this 1850 law.

Thomas Jefferson outlined a surveying system that was adopted in the Land Ordinance of 1785. The “Willamette Stone” was set in 1851 at the intersection of a line between Vancouver and California and a line from the Pacific Ocean to the Snake River. This is the point from which all measurements in the survey were measured. The survey of Oregon City was completed in 1852. As you can imagine, there were many disagreements about where one person’s land started and another person’s land ended…

It seems that when the family finally reached Oregon City it was the beginning of winter. They could either stay in Oregon City for the winter and look for their piece of land in the spring or they could leave right away and hope to find the best piece of land still available before the rest of the people started looking in the spring. After the settler located the land he wanted, he would mark it our in some way (chop a tree with a certain mark, build a building, make a big pile of rocks, etc.) and then go back to Oregon City and tell the land man the description of his piece of land. Remember, then they had to live on the land and farm it. However, if their “business required them to be absent from the land for up to two years” they could pay $5.00 a year instead of actually occupying the land.

Most of the people in the wagon train started the trek from Independence, Missouri. They came from lots of other places TO Missouri, then got all of their supplies, formed groups and started the trail. There were some books available describing the trails and the trip. These were usually dependable, but some were written by men who had never left the cities and were really a work of fiction. They left Missouri as soon as the grass was tall enough to feed the oxen and horses and mules. They wanted to leave early enough to arrive in Oregon before winter set in. There were certain points along the way that tradition held must be reached by a certain date in order to arrive in Oregon before winter. Independence Rock had to be reached before the 4th of July. The trek was 1,941 miles (assuming, of course, that everyone walked the dotted line in the sand that marked the exact trail!) and was expected to take 180 days. Toward the end of the wagon train era (just before railroad travel became available) the trek was cut down to 140 days because it was so easy to just follow the trail of all of the wagon trains that had gone before. Very few black people came across on the wagon trains. Some groups specifically forbid black people to be a part of the group.

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Fascinating.

Thursday, May 29 – We left the motor home and drove south to Coburg, OR, to visit the Monaco Coach Company and see the factory where motor homes like ours were built. The plant was not working at the time. The workers all had one week off (without pay) because of the lack of orders for new motor homes due to the increased price of diesel fuel. The painting of the coach seems to take more time than anything else. The do really fancy paint jobs at this factory.

After that we headed east toward the Three Sisters Wilderness Area and the city of Sisters. This is part of the Oregon Scenic Byway system. We continued on through the Ochoco National Forest to Dayville. Absolutely beautiful drive. We stayed overnight in Dayville in a unique little motel. We were lucky that they had one room with a private bath… Grandma Etta would love this place!

Friday, May 30 – We headed in to the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. This area was covered by layer upon layer of lava flows and lahar (mud flows from volcanoes). The bottom layer used to be the bottom of the ocean and is approximately 100 million years old. There are then up to ten different formations of deposits above that totaling 3 miles in thickness. (In Yakima, WA, the lava flows are 15,000’ deep.) The “John Day Formation” is about 18 million to 39 million years old. (By the way, John Day was a settler who left the main group to set out on his own with another man. They got lost, then met up with Indians who took everything they had including their clothes. They were later found by other settlers where a river flowed into the Columbia. That river became known as the John Day River. Since the river was named John Day at the mouth, that means that the rest of the river is also the John Day River. John Day actually was never within 100 miles of the John Day Fossil Beds! The colorful exposed rock (browns and beiges) is the John Day Formation. These exposed rocks give a 40 million year fossil record of plants and animals. There is a research facility at the Sheep Rock Unit Visitor’s Center and you can watch the researchers removing the fossil from the surrounding rock. (This is not an exciting thing to watch…) We really enjoyed the loop ride around the area.

We drove on to John Day city and visited the Kam Wah Chung Interpretive Center. There were a lot of Chinese in this area because of the gold mining. Doc Hay and Lung On were two Chinese men who bought a building, set up a doctor’s office and a business establishment. They were so well respected that even after the rest of the Chinese left, these men remained and carried on their businesses.

We drove past Sumpter and the Sumpter wood fired locomotive train and the old Sumpter gold dredge. The most interesting thing was the miles of dug up land that the dredge had worked. There were mounds of stone debris from the dredge covering acres of land.

We drove into Baker City and got a hotel for the night.

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Saturday, May 31 – Vance’s Birthday. We got an early start and went to the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center outside of Baker City. It was better than the one in Oregon City but we could only stay until 11 AM. Outside of the Center was a trail that you could follow to see the actual ruts in the field from the original wagon trains. (We didn’t have time to take that trail…) Then we had to drive 2 ½ hours over to the Idaho side of the Snake River and drive the windy private road up to the Hell’s Canyon Dam. We arrived at the landing site for the jet boats of Hell’s Canyon Adventures. We had a really great 2 hour ride down the Snake River north of the Hell’s Canyon Dam. We stopped for a short shore excursion. (Mark didn’t go because of his broken foot!) Our driver showed us a huge rock with painted drawings on it that he said were about 2000 years old. He told us a story about an elderly lady passenger that they brought to this site with a tour that stopped here for lunch. The lady walked around a little bit and then said she was going back to the boat because she “wasn’t supposed to be here”. The crew talked with her and asked her what she saw that bothered her. She said she was a Nez Perce Indian and her grandfather had told her many stories. One of them was about this place. She said she recognized it because of the “rattlesnake rock”, the “bear rock” and the paintings. She said that she was sure there would be a “wolf rock” further down the shore and as the boat passed it she pointed it out. She said this was the place that the young boys were brought to undergo the ceremony before being sent out to see their “vision”. They would have nothing to eat, nothing to drink and no sleep for 24 hours. Then there was the ceremony and then they would go off into the mountains until they saw a vision. (It didn’t take long to see a vision after three days of no food, no water and no sleep!) Then when they came back their vision was recorded. The lady said that no women were ever allowed to be in this place. See the photos for pictures of the rattlesnake, the bear and the wolf. The trip was altogether worth every penny. The scenery was just what we wanted to see and the power of the jet boat fighting its way back upstream was fun!

We drove back over the same road to Route 84 and headed north. We spent the night in Pendleton, OR.

Sunday, June 1 – Heather and Ronnie’s Anniversary. We left early again and headed west on I-84 toward the Columbia River Gorge and Mt. Hood. We enjoyed seeing the gorge again with its fantastic geologic formations. We turned south on Rt 35 at Mt. Hood and headed into the Mt. Hood Recreation Area. We had sun and the drive up to Mt Hood was beautiful. As soon as we passed over the top of the mountain and were on the west side of the Cascades it started raining again. Oh well, we had two very nice days on the east side of the state!

We headed toward Oregon City again and back to the motorhome. Then I started on this story, which took forever. We really had a great trip!