Our Country Walkers group meets in Portland, Oregon and we drive through farmland to the first volcano of the trip, Mount Hood, 11,235 feet high.
Mount Hood
The Lewis and Clark expedition opened up this area of the country after Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. The explorers arrived at the Columbia River in October, 1805, eighteen months after leaving St. Louis to search for the ‘Northwest Passage’. Their venture established a US claim on the northern Pacific region and a basis for relations with the Native population. Sacagawea and her French trapper husband facilitated this by acting as interpreters and guides.
The Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery --thirty three people--were the first from the United States to confront the Columbia River's turbulent waters. These rapids were bigger, faster, and more hazardous than anything they’d ever seen. They negotiated their way through some of the whitewater to briefly set up camp near an area today known as The Dalles. The region had been a Native American trading area for many years.
Western migration 2,000 miles across the Great Plains followed not long after Lewis and Clark. By 1838, pioneers had set up a trading post along the salmon-filled Columbia River. In the 1840s, the US established Fort Dalles to protect settlers. Reports of fur trade and agricultural possibilities spurred more people to go west. A trickle from Missouri had swelled to 1,000 emigrants in 1843. In 1845, three thousand people, with their livestock, made the trip.
Most of the travelers were using ‘prairie schooners’, wagons smaller than the famous conestogas. When Samuel K. Barlow and others arrived in 1845, they found The Dalles crowded with earlier pioneers who had faced the roiling river and the formidable Mount Hood---and gone no further.
Barlow and others began clearing a road through the forest, an alternative to going down the river. Ascending hills demanded additional animals to pull the prairie schooners. Going down steep hills was even worse. Pioneers tried using ropes tied around sturdy-looking trees to control the wagons' descent. Or they tied trees to the backs of wagons to slow them down. These measures didn't always work as intended, but they dug into the already steep slope, creating chutes.
Because my photos and accompanying notes of this stop are a little unclear, I’ve
added this photo from http://tinyurl.com/s-usda-gov-recarea-mthood
At the base of the towering Mount Hood, we stop briefly at the Laurel Hill Chute, a two thousand feet treacherous drop that was an one of the alternatives to the impassible Columbia River.
Many pioneers watched their belongings crash to the bottom of the chute, losing almost everything when they were already within sight of their goal.
Laurel Hill Chute on the Barlow Road
And yet this was a little less risky than the Columbia rapids. Not much.
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