The McLoughlin House

Saturday morning I drove up to Oregon City, which at one point was the capital and major city of the Oregon Territory. Its might was founded on the waterfalls of the Willamette river, and even today paper production along it is a major economic factor here. Uphill, in a very cozy neighborhood with lots of nice old homes, lies the McLoughlin House landmark (it is also the gravesite of John McLoughlin). The house used to stand by the river, but numerous floodings led them to move it in 1909. That move is a story in itself, as they jacked the whole thing up in one piece and then used a single horse to drag it up the hill on big logs, a few yards at a time.

John McLoughlin is known today as "The Father of Oregon". In the 1820s and 30s, Great Britain and the US had joint ownership of the area, and the British were hoping to make the Columbia river the eventual border (today it marks the state border between Oregon and Washington), maybe even push the yanks out altogether and take all the land clear down to California, which at this time was still Mexican. Had they succeeded, the US might have had no west coast today. McLoughlin was a Scots-Canadian and the local representative of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). He oversaw their operations from California to Alaska, and was for all intents and purposes the law in that vast region. His headquarters was Fort Vancouver, in what is today the state of Washington, just across the river from Portland.

Sadly for the British, the HBC never put the needed resources into their project, and eventually the Americans began to outnumber them. Contrary to company orders, McLoughlin opened the fort for trade with the yanks and even helped the needy with food and medicine. He repeatedly asked the company to send more British/Canadian settlers to populate the area if they wanted to have a realistic claim to it; he understood the political and humanitarian folly of trying to starve out the Americans, who as of yet had numbers but very little in the way of organization. They were mainly poor, rough settlers while McLoughlin had highly trained craftsmen and administrators under his command.

Eventually he was more or less kicked out by the HBC and then he built his home south of the river and became an American citizen. He helped set up a proper administrative center in Oregon City - the first American official presence on the west coast. Oregon City even administered land claims as far south as San Francisco for some time and its local newspaper was the first west of the Mississippi. I highly recommend you take the guided tour - it's free, and the people there are knowledgeable and nice, and this is a very interesting part of the history of European settlement in the west.

The side facing the street is actually the back of the house; the movers in 1909 screwed up...