APT Best of the City tour things to know

Points to get across

It’s not necessary to tell every tour guest every thing on this list. But this is a good list of what people who know about Oregon history SHOULD know; and by extrapolation, they say a lot about the history of us all. Routes.

The first peoples were here for thousands of years — as many as 14,000+. We know this because of archeological evidence and stories from the native mythology telling of huge floods (those floods occurred between 19,000 and 13,000 years ago). There were somewhere between 75,000 and 150,000 people living in Oregon and SW Washington prior to European contact. A series of small pox epidemics beginning in the 1780s (or earlier) led to a great reduction by 1805, when Lewis & Clark came through. It is thought somewhere between 30,000 and 75,000 people lived here then — Lewis thought it was “more than live in Paris.” That would have been 50,000 – 55,000.
By the time the first Europeans began settling the Willamette Valley and in Fort Vancouver, in the late 1820s and 1830s, there were somewhere in the area of 5,000 – 15,000 native peoples remaining. The populations had been devastated by diseases in an accidental genocide far greater than we could have devised. This is one reason why place names and stories are so conflicting and difficult to find; the tribes had been decimated, some wiped out completely, and many groups with very separate culture and stories had merged for survival.
The main groups of native Americans living in the Willamette Valley were the Kalapuya, the Chinook, and the Clackamas. There were many many sub-groups that we now use as place names, including the Yamhill (Kalapuya), the Multnomah people (who were once living on what we now call Sauvie Island, Chinook), Wasco (Chinook), Clatsop (who lived near the Columbia’s mouth and traded with Lewis & Clark’s expedition, Chinook), Siuslaw and Molala (both Kalapuya).
The first two groups of Caucasian people here were trappers in the 1820s (the Russians were here for otter from the BC coast to the Russian River in California; the French and British came for beaver) and Methodist and Lutheran missionaries between 1827 – 1833. The Methodists settled in Chemeketa, near modern-day Salem, realizing as soon as they’d settled that the savages they intended to convert were nearly all gone.
Place names we use are confusing because of many things. First, the native people often had names for features instead of whole bodies of water, whole mountain ranges, etc — there was a name for a confluence, or a series of cascades in a river. Second, much native lore was lost either in the death of cultures or the failure of the white people to care about the stories of those who came before. Too busy telling the people who lived here OUR stories, teaching OUR culture. Third, many things were written down first by French, then said by English speakers who listened rather badly. An example is “Rickreall,” a small town near Salem, which may be a bastardization of “La Creole” (the catch-all French name for someone of darker skin). We could be pronouncing every native word wrong.
The name “Willamette” comes from a French pronunciation of a Clackamas people’s village. We’ve heard it means “green water,” but that may just be a pretty story.
No one knows where the name “Oregon” came from and what it means. At some point it began being used on maps, and it stuck, but it’s likely a mixture between mapmakers’ confusion and mispronunciation. The Oregon Territory once stretched all the way from the California border (we called it “Mexico” then) through British Columbia, and east up to the Continental Divide; all or part of four states and one province.
Portland was settled here because it was halfway between Fort Vancouver, the area’s first settlement (and outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company), and Oregon City, where you would register for land.
Portland’s first nickname was “the Clearing.” It was called this for obvious reasons (the trees were already cleared here on the first townsite, near the west end of the Morrison Bridge), but those trees were cleared by the people who lived here before European immigrants settled in what came to be known as Oregon Territory. Asa Lovejoy and William Overton were the first claimants in 1843, but Overton couldn’t afford his part of the filing fee (25 cents), so Lovejoy paid the price.
We don’t know what happened to William Overton. For a while he sold shingles and staves. When he failed to sell his half of the claim to Stephens for 300 barrels, he sold it to Pettygrove for $50. He owed Lovejoy $60 for the improvements made on his land, so he sold his land like sailors earn their wages; with money still owed. He moved back to Texas to look after a sick mother, and it’s rumored he was hanged there.
Portland got its name from a famous coin toss; or so the legend goes. Asa Lovejoy, from Boston, wanted to name the town after his hometown; Francis Pettygrove argued Portland, Maine was a better namesake. If the story is true, the best two out of three went Pettygrove’s way. The coin found in Pettygrove’s effects is on display at the Oregon Historical Society. Maybe. There is a rumor that there are two coins, and the OHS switches them out once every few weeks. (And who can say what penny is the one that was tossed?)
Both Lovejoy and Pettygrove sold their land and went on to other things by the late 1840s. They may have all the glory in Portland but they did very little to make Portland what it is today — beyond the name and picking the riverside spot on land the Multnomah people probably prepared for them. Lovejoy sold his land to Daniel Stark in 1845, then had a busy career as a part-owner of the Oregon City-based Oregon Telegraph, railroad developer, and politician, notably serving on both the Oregon Territorial legislature and the Oregon Constitutional Convention, representing Clackamas County. (Let us not forget the territorial legislature in 1849 included a provision banning blacks — “it shall not be lawful for any negro or mulatto to enter into, or reside” in the state. The state constitutional Bill of Rights in 1857 went on to prohibit blacks from being in the state, owning property, and making contracts. Incidentally this Bill of Rights also allowed that men could marry at 16, women at 14, but never intermarry with Chinese, blacks, or native people.)
The city’s central design is very influenced by Daniel Lownsdale, who bought the land from Pettygrove in 1848. Pettygrove left town, bent on creating a rival to Portland, the hoped-for metropolis of Port Townsend, Washington. He never returned (but failed in his quest to create a rival). Lownsdale re-platted the streets to his liking.
The Park Blocks are thanks to Daniel Lownsdale. Before Pettygrove left town, in 1845, Lownsdale bought the land to the south and west of the original city plat — at the time, the “frontier.” His blocks were far less
Chapman Square
Harbor Drive
Percent for Art
Portlandia
The Portland Building
Theatres and the Schnitz
Mill Ends Park