OTE - Oregon Travel Experience

Courthouse Square Park is a monument to the civic and commercial aspirations of Dayton’s founders, Joel Palmer, his son-in-law Andrew Smith, and Christopher Taylor. Palmer and Taylor, who settled here to farm in 1848, laid out the town site on the banks of the Yamhill River in 1850. Taylor became the first postmaster in 1851. The founders hoped that Dayton would become the county seat of Yamhill County, and planned …

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Samuel K. Barlow established a wagon road in 1845-46 from The Dalles across the Cascade Range. Many Oregon Trail emigrants preferred the new road to the perilous Columbia River route, which had claimed many lives. The Barlow Road allowed emigrants to drive wagons to the Willamette Valley for the first time.

By 1848 many overlanders left the Oregon Trail soon after crossing the John Day River on a Cutoff to the …

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Eager to save time on the Oregon Trail, emigrants often attempted shortcuts. Between 1845 and 1854, three wagon trains left this campsite seeking a cutoff to the Willamette Valley

The Meek Cutoff of 1845Frontiersman Stephen Meek persuaded over 1,000 people with 200 wagons to avoid the notorious Blue Mountains, Cayuse Indians, and Columbia River by turning west up the Malheur River into central Oregon. Unable to find water west of Wagontire …

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The story of the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians is a tale of perseverance and strong recovery in the face of great loss. Epidemics and hostilities with miners led to large population declines. The tribe entered into a treaty with the United States in 1853, and ceded nearly 800 square miles for less than three cents an acre. This treaty left them without access to traditional hunting …

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After the close of the Sioux and Piute Indian Wars the ranchers of Wyoming and Montana discouraged in their attempts to fatten the Texas Longhorn, turned to Oregon for their cattle. During the spring cattlemen and their cowboys arrived daily from the Rocky Mountain Area to purchase herds which had been assembled around Baker from remote parts of the state. The herds were sometimes six months in making the 1,200 …

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The narrow gorge of Canyon Creek has long served as a travel corridor. Native Americans likely trekked this canyon for thousands of years. Alexander McLeod of the Hudson’s Bay Company provided the first written account of the route in 1829, while traveling from Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River to California’s central valley. The U.S. Exploring Expedition, under Lt. George Emmons, followed the trail in 1841 making scientific observations. In …

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Long before the first pioneer settlers arrived here in the 1840’s, this area was occupied by the ancient Mound Builders and then the Kalapuya Indians. The relative ease of finding food in the valley made the Kalapuya vulnerable to intruders, including other tribes, because they did not need to fight or go very far for food. At the time of Lewis and Clark, about two thousand were distributed in forty …

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