OTE - Oregon Travel Experience

The first emigrant train over the “Southern Route” including more than fifty wagons under the leadership of Captain Levi Scott and David Goff, left the Oregon Trail at Fall Creek or Raft River on the Snake River, August 10, 1846. The Klamath River was crossed eight miles upstream from this sign on October 4, 1846. This trail, roughly 680 miles, took fifty-six days of travel. Captain Scott, leading the second …

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Before a network of dams controlled the Columbia River it was often a raging torrent. Here at Wyam Falls, known today as Celilo Falls, a vertical drop of more than 20 feet and sheer basalt bluffs on either shore forced the river into seething, boiling rapids.

From time immemorial this region comprised the fishing grounds of all Indian tribes of the middle Columbia River area. Early Indians speared huge salmon while …

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American Indians have occupied portions of the northern Great Basin for 10,000 years. The region’s earliest inhabitants lived in caves and camps along the shores of glacial lakes and marshes. This area was the homeland of the “Wada-tika” (wada seed eaters), a band of the Northern Paiute Indians. They often camped near this site between Malheur and Harney lakes called “The Narrows,” and collected seeds from the seepweed (Suaeda sp.) …

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In 1860, Abigail Jane Scott Duniway and six other women attended a campaign speech by Col. Edward D. Baker, a U.S. Senate candidate. Their attendance shocked the town of Lafayette, because most people considered it inappropriate for women to take part in any aspect of political life. Age twenty-six at the time, Duniway’s leadership in the act may have been the first of countless steps taken by Oregon’s pioneer of …

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Behind you to the east is a steep cliff called Abert Rim, made of many layers of hardened lava flows. This 30-mile-long, 2,500-foot-high, steep cliff is an example of a fault scarp, produced over millennia by great blocks of rock tilting and moving along faults in this region where the earth’s crust is thinning and stretching.

The fault that produced Abert Rim is one of many in the …

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From 1845 to 1849, George Abernethy was the first Provisional Governor of the Oregon Country, which extended from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains and from California to Northern British Columbia. After arriving in Oregon in 1840 as part of the Methodist Mission at Champoeg, he was involved in a series of meetings that ended in the celebrated May 2, 1843 vote to organize a Provisional Government under the …

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The story began at the Oregon Caves in 1938. After taking a tour, William B. Gruber, an Oregon inventor, met Harold J. Graves, the president of postcard company, Sawyer’s Inc. Graves asked Gruber about the device he carried consisting of two cameras mounted side-by-side on a tripod. Gruber described his work to create a 3D viewing device. That evening, they met in the Oregon Caves Chateau, and their conversation led …

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This division was organized for World War I in 1917 at Camp Greene, North Carolina and was demobilized at Camp Die, New Jersey in 1919. It was reorganized and Federally recognized at Portland, Oregon in 1930. The division was mobilized for World War II 16th September, 1940, and campaigned in Papua, New Guinea, Luzon and the Southern Philippines. It was inactivated in December, 1945 in Japan. The Sunset Division was …

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Up the hill behind this marker was the home of Jesse Applegate, a captain of the first major wagon train to Oregon in 1843, traveling from Missouri with his brothers Lindsay and Charles. Jesse was a major force behind the Provisional Government of 1845, which held Oregon for the United States until admission as a territory in 1848. As a delegate to Oregon’s Constitutional Convention of 1857, he was a vocal opponent to slavery in Oregon. Jesse also …

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