Baker County hill saw a lot of history
Monday, February 16, 2009 10:58 AM PST
BAKER CITY (AP) — A lot of history and an estimated 55,000 emigrants passed Flagstaff Hill outside today’s Baker City between 1840 and 1860.
But it wasn’t until Henry Griffins found gold on Oct. 23, 1861 near the gulch that bears his name that many people found reason to stay.
Sarah LeCompte runs the 23,000 square-foot National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, which sits atop the 7,800-foot hill and overlooks miles of preserved wagon wheel ruts.
From the hill exhausted pioneers got their first look at the Blue Mountains, a sign, they thought, that the journey to Oregon’s Willamette Valley was near its end.
In a paper she published in 1999, LeCompte wrote that there are about 280 surviving documents penned by the pioneers who passed through in the 1850s.
As Flagstaff Hill was not a landmark, she wrote, descriptions specific to the area are few.
The best ones, she wrote, were from a military quartermaster, Osbourne Cross, and two women, Cecilia Adams and Parthenia Blank, who wrote in the 1850s that grass was abundant in the valley floors, less so at higher elevations.
LeCompte wrote that even open-range grazing didn’t pick up until the 1860s. The scarcity of records regarding native animals make it hard to determine what effect the grazing had on the native populations, she wrote.
The big migration to Oregon started in 1842. But by 1859, Oregon’s statehood year, more began turning south.
That year of the estimated 20,431 pioneers who crossed the Oregon Trail, about 17,000 pushed on to California.
Cayuse Indians in the area grazed their livestock a little north of the hill and made money by trading horses with emigrants, LeCompte said, and sold them fresh vegetables, usually through barter.
Money had no value here except at trading posts, LeCompte said.
In his book, Powerful Rockey, former Eastern Oregon University historian Jack Evans published journal entries from pioneers who scaled the Blue Mountains.
One from Sarah Sutton, an 1850s emigrant, is, Evans wrote, lively at first, then increasingly grim.
Sutton wrote of her experience camping along the Snake and Burnt rivers:
‘‘the road has been very mountainous and rocky to day, we have come about 12 miles to day and campt for the night on burnt river, the road is strung with dead cattle old and new, grass is pretty good the mountains are very high over our heads.
‘‘Mr. Tipners (Tiptons) 4 wagons are campt with us to night and the widow Waldo with 7 negroes ...”
August 10: ‘‘came about 8 miles and noond on burnt river, met 3 men with about 20 pack horses and mules packed with flour and other eatables, and materials for gold dig(g)ing on burnt river, they had been out here prospecting and we heard they found as much a(s) 10 dollars per day and had gone back for provision our boys have prospected some, and found gold, came on the afternoon, and passed a wagon and yoke of oxen dead by it ...
‘‘We are trying to get to the grand rounds before we leave any. our case looks desperate but some of us have faith strong enough to believe we shall get to Oregon, we know in whom we trust and are waiting patient for the promise...’’
In his introduction to Evans’ book, former U.S. Senator Bob Packwood wrote, ‘‘The story of the Oregon Trail resounds with strength, endurance and physical prowess. We can stand alongside the hardened ruts of the old trail and reflect on the cold, the hunger and the fear the pioneers overcame.
‘‘We can stand near the old trail on the last rise above Baker City, considered by many to be the end of the Oregon Trail, and gaze over the broad green valley the pioneers deemed to be the gateway to paradise.’’
