Willamette Landings/Wilderness River
WILDERNESS RIVER
The Willamette is one of the few American rivers of any volume flowing north. It is the largest river contained wholly within the state of Oregon.
"Lying like a cupped leaf dropped on the map of Oregon, with its veins the tributaries and its stem the main artery, wrote Verne Bright, the Oregon poet, in 1941, “the Willamette drains twelve thousand square miles of territory. Precisely confined by the snow-tipped Cascade Range, the ancient Clalapooyas, and the newer elevations of the Coast Range, it gathers moisture from the east, south and west, and in one tremendous north-flowing stream, pours it toward the Columbia. From the stem of the leaf where the Willamette enters the Columbia to the distant tip where the least faint stream fades in a mountain-side trickle, the veins are numerous and varied. Some, like the Tualatin, the Pudding, and the Long Tom are deceptively sluggish much of the year. . . Other branches, like the Clackamas, the Santiam, the Molalla, and the McKenzie are as unruly as the sound of their names. . ."
From the mountainous region at the head of the valley, the Willamette emerges as three forks. The Coast Fork bubbles from a mountain spring in a deeply forested wilderness. The Middle Fork flows from the base of Emigrant Butte, which towers over the pioneer road that threads through the Calapooyas. These two streams join in the valley's upper reaches. At a second point, not many miles below and to the north, the third fork, the McKenzie, joins the other two. To this fountain-head stream, in 1812, came Donald McKenzie, of Astor's Pacific Fur Company, exploring the river's possibilities as a source of beaver skins; but not for at least fifteen years more was it given his name. The courageous Scotsman did not guess the origin of the swift waters, though he must have glimpsed the white crests of the Three Sisters, from whose base they rise, to the east- ward in the Cascades.
The Willamette River had not one, but several discoverers, for no single man first saw more than a portion of its 190-mile length. Peering through the haze of late October, 1792, the English navigator, Lieutenant William R. Broughton, was first of all white men to sight the river's mouth. A member of the British maritime expedition of Captain George Vancouver, he had sailed up the "River of the West," the Columbia, beyond reach of his master's heavier-burdened vessel, and so entered the Willamette and its history.
Thirteen years passed before Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, overland trail-breakers to the unknown West, entered the Oregon Country. They and their men were destined to pass unknowingly the mouth of the river Willamette, both on the journey to and from the Pacific. Returning, their eyes intently eastward, they ascended the Columbia River as far as the mouth of the Sandy before they were aware of their oversight. On April 2, 1806, Captain Clark, he of the red thatch and the nimble but poor-spelling pen, was informed by visiting Indians of a "river which discharges itself into the Columbia on its south side some miles below us," and "runs a considerable distance to the south between the Mountains.” Clark thereupon took a small party and returned. He wrote in his Journal: “I entered this river ... called Multnomah ... from a nation who reside on Wappato Island, a little below the enterence.
The following day, the record shows, he proceeded a few miles upstream, but the mist over the gray waters was so thick he could see but a short distance up the bending river. Yet when he left he was “perfectly satisfied of the size of the magnitude of this great river which must water that vast tract of Country between the Western range of mountains and those, on the sea coast as far S. as the waters of California."
After the passing of Lewis and Clark over the curve of the continent, the name of the little-known river changed from Multnomah to Willamette—but sometimes with devious spellings; for so the stream was called by the trader-travel- ers, Gabriel Franchere, Alexander Ross and Ross Cox, all of whom left reputable records.
For the first dwellers along the Willamette—the native
races—the river had no name. Instead, areas of the greenbanked waterway were known after the tribes dwelling with in them. Multnomah, as the lower river was first called, was the name of the resident Indian tribe, dwellers on Wappato Island and in scattered camps along the west bank of the river southward to Hyas Tyee Tumwater, or "the falls," twenty-five miles inland. In like fashion the red inhabitants dwelling along the stream known as the Clackamas and which debouched from the east just below the falls, were of that tribal name. Above this area of brawling waters lived the Clough-we-wallahs, along the Willamette's eastern shore; but no geographical feature retains their name.
Spreading over the wide Tualatin Plains, westward of the Willamette waters, wandered the Tuality Indians, or the Atfaliti Tribe, giving their name to the meandering river that drains this beautiful expanse, and sharing, not too willingly, their "good hunting" with visiting Klickitats and Snakes from east of the Cascades.
Southward in the valley dwelt other tribes, the Molallas and Santiams to the east, the Yamhills to the west, and centrally throughout the wide prairies and into the foothills and mountains of the south, dwelt the wandering Calapooyas. All of these tribes had central camps by principal streams. Thus, from native tribes, most of the river tributaries of the Willamette acquired names, usually of white bestowal but of red origin.
Of the name Willamette itself, at least one historian of an early day claims that the term was first used to designate a place on the river's west bank—"green waters"—just below the falls. Probably no tribe bore the name. Undergoing various spellings, it crystallized into the present accepted form with the visit in 1841 of Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the United States Exploring Expedition.
The native dwellers of the Willamette were greatly dwindled in numbers when the white settlers came. Historians attribute their rapid decline during the last of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries to epidemics directly or indirectly traceable to maritime traders into the Columbia, to smallpox and scarlet fever and other foreign ailments, and to the natives' usually fatal methods of combating illness by means of sweat-baths followed by cold plunges. Thus, with the advent of white homeseekers, the aborigines were already releasing, unwittingly and tragically, the land of their forebears. More than eighty per cent of their once large numbers had perished. As a consequence, the Indians put up little resistance to white occupation.
Along the tributaries, in the evergreen wilderness from which the Willamette emerges, are occasional waterfalls.
But on the main river there is only the one great overleap, known as Willamette Falls. As early as 1838, in his Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains,
the Rev. Samuel Parker wrote
in somewhat romantic vein
of this
geographic feature:
“The river above spreads out into a wide, deep basin, and runs slowly and smoothly until within a half mile of the falls, when its velocity increases, its width diminishes, eddies are formed in which the water turns back as if loath to make the plunge; but it is forced forward by the water in the rear, and when still nearer it breaks upon the volcanic rocks scattered across the channel, and then as if resigned to its fate, smooths its agitated surges, and precipitates down an almost perpendicular. . . presenting a somewhat whitened column . . . The rising mist formed in the rays of the sun a beautiful bow . . . "
Of the extensive Willamette country, much of a descriptive nature appears in the accounts of early day travelers through the region. Joel Palmer, settler, mill owner and early Indian agent, in his Journal of Travels over the Rocky Mountains, 1845–46, makes this observation: “The Willamette valley, including the first plateaus of the Cascade and Coast ranges, may be said to average a width of about sixty, and a length of about two hundred miles. It is beautifully diversified with timber and prairie.” Of this diversity, Lieutenant Wilkes wrote in his Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition into the Oregon country in 1841: “The prairies are at least one-third greater in extent than the forest; they were again seen carpeted with the most luxuriant growth of flowers, of the richest tints of red, yellow and blue, extending in places a distance of fifteen to twenty miles.”
“Many of the prairies . . .,” remarked J. Quinn Thornton, Oregon settler of 1846, “are several miles in extent. But the smaller ones . . . where the woodland and plain alternate frequently, are the most beautiful, although the prospect is more confined . . . The space between these small prairies is covered with an open forest of tall, straight evergreens . . . The clusters of trees are so beautifully arranged, the openings so gracefully curved, the grounds so open and clean, that it seems to be the work of art; and these beautiful avenues are calculated to cheat the imagination into the belief that they lead to some farmhouse or pleasant village.”
There were, however, noticeable differences in the extreme lower and upper valley. The lower Willamette, from its mouth to the falls, was darkly covered with evergreens and had few openings. Only the cottonwoods and alders held their yellow torches against the autumn sky. Mountains stood closer. Of the upper valley, “the narrowing toward its head,” observed Frances Fuller Victor, Oregon historian, in 1872, in All Over Oregon and Washington, “brings mountains, plains, and groves within the sweep of unassisted vision, and the whole resembles a grand picture. We have not here the heavy forests of the Columbia River region, nor even the frequently recurring fir-groves of the Middle Wallamet. The foothills of the mountains approach within a few miles of either side, but those nearest the valley are rounded, grassy knolls, over which are scattered groups of firs, pines, or oaks, while the river-bottom is bordered with tall cottonwoods, and studded rather closely with pines of a lofty height and noble form.”
Settlement in the beautiful valley began about 1829–30, when released Hudson's Bay Company trappers, principally French-Canadians, located farms on the rich prairies above the falls. Soon thereafter came the first American settlers, a mere handful. In 1834, a group of Methodist missionaries, headed by the Rev. Jason Lee, arrived, building a mission station on the southern fringe of French Prairie. Father F. N. Blanchet and other Catholic priests came in 1838 and established a mission on the prairie. George Ebbert, Joseph Meek, Robert Newell, Caleb Wilkins, and other American "mountain men" out of the Rockies, entered the region with their Indian wives and half-breed children to make homes. By 1840 there were a few hundred settlers established in the area between the Willamette Falls and the Jason Lee mission on the central Willamette bottoms and across the river on the Tuality Plains to the northwest.