When white settlers began to arrive, Indians inhabited all of present-day Oregon. Unfortunately, as they did in most of the America's, these white settlers considered the Indians to be nomads who drifted purposelessly form place to place. In reality, Oregon Indians moved from winter to summer villages and encampments to hunt, fish, and gather food. In turn, Indians did not understand white customs and traditions. As a result, Indian-white relations were marked by frequent skirmishes during the early period.
In 1543, Spanish explorers sighted the Oregon Coast near the Rogue River, but interest didn't begin growing significantly until 1778, when Captian James Cook began trade along the Oregon Coast. Publication of his journals about his voyages spurred great interest in future trade and he was followed in 1793 by Alexander McKenzie who lead an expedition over the Canadian Rockies to the Pacific, then by Lewis and Clark's expedition, which reached the mouth of the Columbia River in 1805. In 1811, The Pacific Fur Company, founded by American financier John Jacob Astor, established a string of trading posts along the lower Columbia and in 1818, the United States and Great Britain agree on "joint occupancy" for the Oregon Country. By 1821, The Hudson's Bay Company had acquired a fur monopoly for all of British North America after merging with the North West Company.
Then in 1851, paying gold mines were discovered in the Rogue River Valley,
which lead to the establishment of cities and towns in Southern Oregon wherever
they examined these streams. In 1849, some Oregonians found gold at the old
fort of Rogue River, but it was not worth working and was never reported as
a discovery.
Then gold was discovered first in Josephine County by a party of sailors who
deserted their ship at Crescent City on hearing of the discovery in the Rogue
River valley, and made their way across the mountains to the head waters of
the Illinois river, and commenced prospecting in the vicinity of the old mining
camp of Waldo. Here they struck "pay dirt," so rich as to attract
many others to the place, which from that date on went by the name of "Sailor
Diggins."
Around 1852, gold dust was discovered in the sea beach sands in Coos and Curry
Counties. In 1853 more than a thousand men washed gold out of the black sand
along the sea shore south of Coos Bay. This gold is supposed to have been
washed down into the ocean by the coast rivers; and every big storm carried
back in a fresh lot of gold dust within the reach of the miner who has patience
enough to work the sands over often enough to get the gold dust out of them.
Beach gold is so fine that the use of a microscope was often necessary to
detect it; but with the use of quicksilver, it could be recovered in quantities.
Hundreds of machines have been invented and patented to save that sea beach
gold; and yet none of them seems to have much advantage over the original
methods of the first miners using the quicksilver. The sand in which this
sea beach gold is found exists not only on the present day sea shore but is
also found on the ancient sea shore line forty miles back in the interior
on the upper Coquille river.
Gold aided in the established of Oregon's towns and Portland was officially "founded" in 1843. The first transportation system in Portland was the Columbia River and the Willamette River when the waterfront was thickly populated with sailing ships and steamboats. The columns of the Oregonian in 1861 and 1862 covered the gold hunting tales and success stories in Eastern Oregon.
Like San Francisco's shipping history, Portland has a dark era that began in the late 1800s with Joseph "Bunco" Kelly, a hotelier notorious for kidnapping young men and selling them to ship captains. Many bar owners and hotel operators relied on this shanghai trade to supplement their businesses, and Kelly was one of the best. Paid by unscrupulous captains to intoxicate potential crewmembers, Kelly would deliver his drunken quarry to waiting ships. The unfortunate men would wake up the next day - stranded at sea and forced to work for indefinite periods of time.Oregonian, July 23, 1861:
There are now arriving in this city by steamer, stage and private conveyance hundreds of miners on their way to the mines. The Julia on Monday was crowded. We learn from persons from Yreka that the exodus from Northern California is immense. Parties are constantly going to the mines by way of Klamath Lake. The Red Bluffs Independent says there is a perfect stampede from that section. Many from the Upper Willamette go by the different roads across the Cascades. By the Julia last evening $28,000 came down from the Nez Perces mines.
Steamers from San Francisco bring large numbers bound for the mines and the overland stage comes every day loaded with miners. Besides, we have reason to believe, that numbers of miners from California take the route east of the mountains to Walla Walla. There will probably be nearly or about 5,000 persons at the mines by October. Tracy & Company brought down last night, per steamer Julia, $12,000 in gold dust.
Kelly often bragged that he could gather a full crew in less than 12 hours. Inevitably a ship captain would challenge him. One evening, in his quest to fulfill a boast, Kelly ran across a group who had stumbled upon the open cellar of a mortuary. Thinking the cellar was a part of the Snug Harbor Pub; the men had each consumed cups of embalming fluid, which they had mistaken for liquor. When Kelly found them, several had died and others were dying. Claiming the dead were merely unconscious from too much drink, Kelly sold all 22 to a captain whose ship sailed before the truth was discovered.
In another attempt to make a quick buck, Kelly delivered a dime store Indian heavily wrapped in blankets to a ship. When the captain learned the next morning that his new crewmember was a wooden statue, he became so angry that he threw it overboard. Two men operating a dredge nearly 60 years later recovered it.
"Sweet Mary," the proprietor of a brothel, is another interesting figure in Portland's history of the late 1800s. In order to elude taxes and city laws, she operated her bordello on a barge that ran up and down the Willamette River. Technically, she was outside everyone's jurisdiction. The turn-of-the-century, however, seems to have brought a close to Portland's colorful early years. Secure jobs in lumber mills and wealth from providing goods to the California Gold Rush helped stabilize the economy, giving the city's population more time to regulate the seedy activities of its busy waterfront.
In the coming decades, the gold seekers were joined by legions of loggers and salmon fishermen. Many worked on their own or for small local companies. But an increasing number toiled in mills, mines, and canneries for large corporations, often based in far off cities. New industrial techniques developed as Oregon's economy came to rely on extracting natural resources such as timber, minerals, and salmon for a growing nation. As a result, Oregonians rode the same boom and bust cycles that plagued the national economy in the late 1800s. Of course, farming remained a mainstay of the economy from the earliest pioneer days. And cattle and sheep ranching expanded as more people settled in the drier areas of central and eastern Oregon during the last decades of the 1800s.
Portland was the only Oregon town that grew into a city of size in the state.