Oregon, Part 3

Out of Pendleton, and off to Baker City. The Oregon Trail Interpretive Center (similar to a museum, except that it has no actual artifacts, and uses displays to approximate life on the trail) examines the preparations, experiences, and results of the thousands of people who traveled west during the early and mid-1800s. A National Parks Service site for the Interpretive Center is here.

A walkway from the front door leads through a panorama-type display in which the Trail actually crosses the floor and you have to walk on it. I'm posting a movie of it below.




This leads to a large window with a marker pointing out some of the original Trail's ruts that can still be seen on the landscape. You then step into a room that describes the kinds of wagons and supplies people would have used or purchased and the routes they took to the Trail head, located in Independence, Missouri. (There's a hands-on display that lets you try loading supplies on a small-scale Conestoga Wagon, shown at right.)

Later displays describe the terrain along the way. The Snake and Columbia Rivers posed particular hardships, but the pioneers also suffered from diseases like smallpox, attacks by hostile Native Americas, and natural disasters like prairie fires.

Other displays show trading with Native Americans like the Nez Perce, and life in frontier forts. Along the "trail" are markers, like the ones at left. Each gives the number of miles back to civilization, and the number of miles forward to Oregon.

After leaving the Interpretive Center, since we had no other plans for the day, Mom decided we were going to Wallowa to look for Chief Joseph's grave. Chief Joseph led the Nez Perce Indians on their final attempt at escape to Canada after refusing to be placed on a reservation in 1877. The tribe, many of them women, children, and elderly, were stopped within 12 miles of the Canadian border.

We left the main highway and drove for about 40 minutes to the town of Wallowa, where we found a sign for the Nez Perce Interpretive Center. After two drives through town and a request for directions at a local gas station, we found the Center, which was closed. We then stopped at the Town Hall, which was also closed, but found the Town Clerk, who was happy to talk to us.

Chief Joseph, she said, wasn't buried in that area at all. We needed to get back on the road and drive through the next two towns to the end of Lake Wallowa. The person running the Interpretive Center was also a part-time teacher, who was substitute teaching for someone for the rest of the school year, so the Center wasn't open often. Also, had we seen the grounds for the annual Pow Wow, held in July? People used the area for exercise walking, it was just under a mile around the grounds, etc.

All this in about a minute and a half of conversation. Gotta love small town America.

At that point, we gave up. It was already after four in the afternoon, and we had a two-hour drive to get back to our hotel. (We try to be in by dark, given that we have to senior citizens in the party.) So it was back on the road, driving the 40 minutes back to the highway, then another 40 minutes to the casino restaurant where we had eaten last night, and finally back to the hotel.

Tomorrow it's off to the local Western shop, possibly back to Pendleton Woolen Mills' gift shop, and then back to Portland.