OTE - Oregon Travel Experience

A strategic site for communication, trade, and travel: Where this marker now stands, the villages of Kie-mes-itc on this side (Hanis Coos people) and El-ka-titc on the spit to the west (Miluk people), were close enough to call across the bay for a canoe ride-hence the translation of El-ka-titc, “Hollering Place.” Coos Bay has been a trade and transportation center for thousands of years.

Camp Cast-a-way: In 1852, the chartered schooner …

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SUNDAY, JUNE 14, 1903A flash flood swept down on Heppner, and caught residents unaware, killing hundreds and destroying nearly the entire town. A cloudburst hit in Balm Fork Canyon, south of Heppner. The rushing waters tore down the narrow canyon, picking up haystacks, chicken pens and livestock and piled it all up behind a steam laundry that straddled the canyon near the edge of town. This very effective dam held …

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This site marks the northern limit of the Great Basin, a region some six hundred miles long and up to five hundred miles wide. It began forming 17 million years ago as the result of regional uplift and east west stretching by geologic forces that continue today. This stretching created a pattern of north trending mountain ranges separated by broad flat valleys. Precipitation that falls within the Great Basin leaves …

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Captain Robert Gray, commanding the sloop Lady Washington, left Boston in October 1787 on a trading voyage to the West Coast of North America, seeking otter furs. To his small crew of about a dozen men, Gray soon added Markus Lopeus, who boarded at the Cape Verde Islands off West Africa. Rounding the tip of South America and sailing north, the Lady Washington traded along the coast, and reached Tillamook …

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Indians inhabited Oregon’s inland valleys for thousands of years before Euro-Americans began to arrive in the late 18th Century. In the early 1780s, and again in the 1830s, diseases spread by seafarers and fur trappers swept through Oregon’s valleys killing most of the native population. The opening of the Oregon Trail in the 1840s incr4eased pressure to remove the remaining Indians from their homelands.In 1856, the U.S. Government created the …

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The Fremont Memorial Marker was two-sided, which makes the final results doubly impressive!

A MEMORIAL TO THE PERSONNEL OF THE SECOND FREMONT EXPLORING EXPEDITION TO OREGON AND NORTH CALIFORNIA.

The reports of this expedition directed the migration of the Western Settlement toward the Oregon Country which hitherto had been merely a rendezvous for trappers. On December 16th, 1843 the expedition while enroute from The Dalles of the Columbia to Sutters Fort on …

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Clatsop people controlled trade on this side of the lower Columbia River for generations. Visitors described the Clatsop’s bustling communities. The Hudson’s Bay Company attacked a village here in 1829, believing untrue rumors of Clatsop hostility. Settlers soon began claiming nearby lands. Clatsop chiefs signed a treaty with the U.S. in 1851, reserving land, but the U.S. Senate never ratified the treaty. The 1855 Oregon Coast Treaty was also unratified, …

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Fort Rock is the remnant of a maar volcano or tuff ring, formed when rising basaltic magma encountered water and exploded violently. The exploded debris- called tuff-fell back to earth around the volcanic vent to form this steep-walled, fort-like ring. Over time, the basin filled with a shallow lake, which breached the south rim of the tuff ring and ut a terrace about 60 feet abobe the floor of the …

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