OROregon History

The free state that banned Black settlement

Oregon joined the Union on February 14, 1859 as a free state, and its constitution carried a clause forbidding free Black people to live in it, hold property in it or make contracts in it. Voters had approved that clause separately in 1857 by a lopsided margin, and it was the third such ban Oregon had written, after exclusion laws passed by the settlers' own provisional government in 1844 and 1849. The 1844 version briefly prescribed whipping. None of the bans was enforced with any consistency, but none was repealed either until 1926, and the dead language sat in the constitutional text until voters struck it in 2002. Understanding Oregon means starting there rather than with the postcard version.

Eleven thousand years of salmon at Celilo Falls

Where the Columbia narrowed and dropped over basalt near today's The Dalles, people fished from wooden platforms for something like eleven thousand years. Celilo Falls, called Wyam by the people who worked it, was the great trading place of the interior Northwest, where dried salmon, obsidian, shells from the coast and goods from the plains changed hands. Chinookan villages held the lower river and controlled the trade downstream. The Kalapuya of the Willamette Valley set fire to the valley floor every autumn to keep it open camas prairie rather than fir forest, which is precisely why later emigrants found it looking like ready-made farmland. Nez Perce, Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla held the plateau; Klamath and Modoc the high country in the south; Tillamook, Coos and Siuslaw the coast.

Two empires on one river, 1792 to 1846

Captain Robert Gray took the ship Columbia Rediviva over the bar and into the river on May 11, 1792, named the river for his vessel, and handed the United States a claim. Lewis and Clark wintered at Fort Clatsop near the mouth in 1805 and 1806. John Jacob Astor's men founded Astoria in 1811, the first American settlement on the Pacific coast, and lost it to British traders during the War of 1812. From 1818 the two countries simply agreed to occupy the country jointly and defer the question, an arrangement renewed in 1827 while the Hudson's Bay Company ran the region in practice from Fort Vancouver under John McLoughlin. Expansionists shouted for the line at 54 degrees 40 minutes. The Oregon Treaty of June 15, 1846 settled it at the 49th parallel, with Vancouver Island left whole to Britain.

Wagons, a vote at Champoeg, and 320 free acres

The Oregon Trail ran about 2,000 miles from the Missouri River to the Willamette Valley, and the Great Migration of 1843 brought roughly 900 people over it in one season. That same year, on May 2, settlers meeting at Champoeg voted 52 to 50 to organize a provisional government, a margin of two. The killing of the missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman near Walla Walla in November 1847 pushed Congress to create Oregon Territory in 1848; Washington Territory was carved off in 1853. The Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 then gave 320 acres to a white male settler and 640 to a married couple, and drew tens of thousands more, while the same law excluded Black settlers by its terms.

Statehood in 1859 brought no Civil War battles. Oregon volunteers spent the war garrisoning posts against tribes whose land the treaties of the 1850s had taken. The Rogue River War of 1855 and 1856 ended with western Oregon peoples marched to the Coast and Grand Ronde reservations. In 1877 the army pursued Chief Joseph's Wallowa band of Nez Perce more than a thousand miles across Idaho and Montana after they refused to give up their valley. A century later Congress compounded the loss by terminating federal recognition of more than sixty western Oregon tribes in 1954; the Siletz regained it in 1977 and Grand Ronde in 1983.

Ships, sawmills, and the flood that erased a city

Timber built the twentieth century economy. Oregon led the country in lumber production for decades, and the Tillamook Burn, a series of fires beginning in 1933 that consumed roughly 355,000 acres of Coast Range forest, was fought and replanted as a public project. The Columbus Day Storm of October 12, 1962 knocked down billions of board feet in a single afternoon. Then the northern spotted owl was listed as threatened in 1990 and the Northwest Forest Plan of 1994 cut federal harvests sharply, hollowing out mill towns from Coos Bay to Prineville.

The war changed Portland faster than anything before it. Henry Kaiser's shipyards drew workers from across the country, including tens of thousands of Black Southerners barred by covenant from most Portland neighborhoods, and the government built them a stopgap city called Vanport on the Columbia floodplain in 1942. It briefly became the second largest settlement in the state. On May 30, 1948 the river broke through a railroad embankment and Vanport was gone within hours. Displaced Black residents concentrated in Portland's Albina district, which urban renewal and the Interstate 5 alignment later cut apart.

The Oregon System and what it produced

In 1902 Oregon amended its constitution to give voters the initiative and the referendum, adding the direct primary in 1904 and the recall in 1908. Newspapers called the package the Oregon System, and other states copied it. The habit of governing by statute and ballot produced an unusual run of firsts: the Beach Bill of 1967 put the entire ocean shore in public hands, the Bottle Bill of 1971 was the first container deposit law in the country, Senate Bill 100 in 1973 forced every city and county to draw an urban growth boundary, voters approved the first physician assisted dying law in 1994, and the state moved every election to mail ballots in 1998. Meanwhile Blue Ribbon Sports, founded in 1964 by a Eugene runner and his coach, renamed itself Nike in 1971, and chipmaking plants in Washington County turned the farmland west of Portland into the Silicon Forest.

More Oregon, and the neighbours