I Am the Fruit of the Applegate Trail

Southern Oregon has the Klamath River, the Rogue River, the Illinois, the Chetco and Coquille and spawns of the Umpqua which mainly travels through the center of the state, but breaks itself well into the south with hundreds of streams and capillaries that run like water off the back of your wet hand. There are other rivers too or they may just be forks of the same, but they most burst out of the Cascades to the east and rush to the Pacific in the west. Remote as the Oregon coast can be, towns were settled long ago at the mouths of these rivers. I found a campsite on the Rogue and spent a cloudless night in warm late summer air.

My Rogue

Southern Oregon is September country, gold and green and dusty. The sun is still lively and bright at this time of the year but pitched at an angle that favors the rocky little valleys and waterways. It encourages the yellowness of the earth, without blinding you to it like in July. Meadows don’t have much of a chance here, with the crowding of mountain ranges pushing up from California - the Siskiyou - and east from the Cascades - the Klamath. Instead, cedar and fir shoot up on every slope and cool the corners and bends of the rivers. Despite the state border, Northern California-Southern Oregon is one unified ecosystem. If geography were allowed to settle borders, this might be the State of Jefferson.

The campsite I chose, about ten miles west of the freeway, is the unfortunately named Indian Mary Campground. For a county park, it’s pretty deluxe, with flat grassy yards, showers, and river launch - not for nothing the “crown jewel of the Josephine County Parks system.” I made it in before nightfall and cooled off in the Rogue, just below my site. It was still brisk at this time of the year, moving with purpose. Not the kind to wade into, but the kind to stand in ankle deep on slippery shale and scoop water onto my chest and over my head and under my arms before warming up again, dripped dry under the sun.

But is it the truth?

But Indian Mary park – proud to have been the site of the smallest Indian reservation once. I thought I just chose a crown jewel, but here, on the banks of the Rogue, land was given to the daughter of a local native - also unattractively Christainized to Umpqua Joe - who apparently warned white settlers in the 1850s of an impending, perhaps retributional, attack by natives. The settlers survived and in thanks gave him, or probably just put him in charge of, a ferry near here to carry other whites across the busy Rogue. Upon his death, having been shot by his Mary’s husband, Mary was put in charge of the ferry and the flat little area of riverbed around it. This, thanks to the Dawes Act, became her own reservation, which she turned around and leased to the stage line she’d been ferrying for and moved into town, Grant’s Pass. I don’t know what happened to her there. But a local historian, Percy T. Booth has told their story which, hopefully, one day, will be made into an opera of love and regret.

I woke up late in the morning, around 8:30. I headed back down to the river to sit and meditate. I found a small, flat sandy area, shaded by trees above the river and sat happily and quietly. When I looked at the space with fresh eyes, I could see that the sand ended at a little bank where the true forest stopped and though I was about 15 feet away from and a few feet above the river, this was unmistakably once part of the river, the sandy bottom of a pool with eddies curving against the bank with thick roots of overhanging trees and stones caught among them. However many hundreds of years ago, I was sitting on a spot for salmon to be born and die and regenerate.

I headed west and north, mainly following this part of the Rogue, with a quick stop at a river landing with restaurant and patio bar for ice and to spruce up the coolers. I passed through a few intersections which could have taken me the sixty or seventy miles to the coast, which can only be an awesomely lonely drive. At one point, my road gave up running two lanes, getting crammed between the river and mountainside, and I had no idea where I would bail if another car came at me.

The network of Oregon trails

After awhile I blundered into Wolf Creek where I hoped to catch up again with the 5, and it’s here the supposed usefulness of Joe and Mary’s ferry came to mind. There’s not much that I could see that made up Wolf Creek, but there was the Wolf Creek Inn, very proud of and happily sporting its National Landmark status not only with a plaque near the door, but an entire nature and history trail packed into its tiny front yard. It was already hot out, but I followed it from one sun weathered panel to another guiding me to the habitats of local flora and fauna (hemlock, spruce, tanoak; bears, hawks, otters) to the hardships of the Applegate Trail. I’d never heard of it, but here I was standing on it, outside of the inn which at one time was the haven of mule trains and settlers headed to the calmer, friendlier Willamette Valley.

Like the rivers out here, the Applegate Trail was one of the off shoots of the Oregon Trail. In order to avoid crossing the Cascades and/or the Columbia at any point on the way to settling in the Willamette Valley, the Applegate brothers had the idea to outflank the Cascades by coming in from the south. Meek's Cutoff inspired a movie with its deadly, questionable try at hitting the Cascades head on. Applegate's idea was thought preferable even though they first had to cross the Black Rock Desert of Nevada (which today is still only habitable by nomadic ravers and artists clever enough to cart in bicycle powered refrigerators, ice castles, yurts and temperate Bucky Ball domes one week out of the year) before jackknifing north. There it heads across the Southern Cascades, Klamaths and hits the Siskiyou Pass at the California and Oregon border, a mere 4500 feet.

But even here the traveling must have been dogged, with the countless hills and crags and descents and fordings, thank you Indian Mary. The trail succeeded, ultimately, after settlers killed and relocated the natives and discovered gold for a short while. It succeeded enough for someone to start the Inn and bring in paved roads and gas stations and to be used in parts as a starter road for Interstate 5.