The overland Astorians traversed much of what would become the Oregon Trail in 1811-1812, including the Blue Mountains, and other fur traders would also travel through the area. But heavy traffic did not begin until the first large wave of settlers bound for the Willamette Valley came in 1843. Few of the hundreds and then thousands of Americans who made this trip thought of tarrying in northeastern Oregon. The storied lands and temperate climate of the Willamette Valley drew these travelers across the continent. The Powder River and Blue Mountains were troublesome barriers until a few settlers and then thousands of miners arrived in the early 1860s.
Most of the Oregon Trail was more tedious than harrowing. Not the Blue Mountains. Here the rocky, precipitous trail wore out and occasionally smashed both wagons and people. John T. Kerns remarked in 1852 that his party endured “the roughest road we have encountered on the journey, being up and down the sidling mountains, . . . over stony places enough to hide all despairing sinners.”
Few emigrants were impressed by what they saw in northeastern Oregon. The mountains were beautiful enough, but seemed to offer little to aspiring farmers. Flat places seemed barren. “Sage, sand, weeds—sand, weeds, sage,” as one traveler described it.
But even before the mining booms a few were drawn to northeastern Oregon. Traders circulated along the Oregon Trail in the 1850s to deal in worn out or excess cattle, and by 1853 a ferry operated at Malheur Crossing, in present-day Vale. Treaties with Indian nations made parts of the region seem safer. Soldiers who campaigned there discovered that gardens and livestock did well. Those who arrived in the Willamette Valley after the mid-1850s were often unable to find good land, and some began to consider moving east of the Cascades. A few ranchers moved into the Powder River area in 1861, when a handful of settlers appeared in what would become La Grande.
© David Peterson del Mar, 2005
