History
For around 8000 years, the McKenzie River has been home to local Native American peoples of the region. In more recent history, the area has been populated by the Kalapuya and Mollala peoples, whom spent their summers in the high Cascades and their winters in the lower valley. This way of life continued until the mid 1800s, when many of native locals were relocated to reservations.
The first recorded exploration occurred in the spring of 1812 by the Pacific Fur Company, as part of a larger exploration led by Donald Mackenzie. The company had, in 1811, established a post at Fort Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River as part of the Astor Expedition. Mackenzie, the following spring, formed an exploration party and explored the Willamette River. The party named the north fork of the Willamette after Mackenzie. However, much of the river would be largely unvisited by white settlers and explorers until October 1853, when a group of Oregon Trail settlers became lost trying to cross the Cascades into the Willamette Valley via the Elliott Cutoff.
Major crossing along the McKenzie River started in 1910 with the first automobile crossing over the McKenzie Pass. However, crossing along the river was limited to summer due to winter conditions closing the pass. Year round travel was not possible until 1960 with the completion of the Santiam Pass.
Read more about this topic: McKenzie River
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Free from public debt, at peace with all the world, and with no complicated interests to consult in our intercourse with foreign powers, the present may be hailed as the epoch in our history the most favorable for the settlement of those principles in our domestic policy which shall be best calculated to give stability to our Republic and secure the blessings of freedom to our citizens.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)