Sandy River (Oregon) - History

History

Archeological evidence suggests that Native Americans lived along the lower Columbia River as early as 10,000 years ago. The area near what later became The Dalles, on the Columbia east of the mouth of the Sandy River, eventually became an important trading center. The Indians established villages on floodplains and traveled seasonally to gather huckleberries and other food on upland meadows, to fish for salmon, and to hunt elk and deer. Although no direct evidence exists that these lower-Columbia Indians traveled up the Sandy, it is likely that they did. Traces of these people include petroglyphs carved into the rocks of the Columbia River Gorge. More recently, within the past few thousand years, Indians created trails across the Cascade Range around Mount Hood. The trail network linked the trading center at Wascopam, near The Dalles, to settlements in the Willamette Valley. One popular trail crossed over Lolo Pass and another, which later became the Barlow Road, met the Lolo Pass trail roughly where the Zigzag and Salmon rivers enter the Sandy. Indians from villages along the Columbia, Clackamas, and other rivers also traveled by water to the lower Sandy River area to fish for salmon and to gather berries, nuts and roots.

In 1792 William Robert Broughton of the Vancouver Expedition explored the lower Columbia River. He named the Sandy River "Baring River", but noted the existence of a large sand bank that nearly blocked the Columbia River at the mouth of the Sandy River. In 1805 and again in 1806, members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition explored the lower stretches of the Sandy River as they traveled down the Columbia to the Pacific Ocean. Mount Hood, at the river's headwaters, had erupted a few years earlier, causing loose sediment to collect at the river's mouth. On November 3, 1805, William Clark wrote: "I arrived at the entrance of a river which appeared to Scatter over a Sand bar, the bottom of which I could See quite across and did not appear to be 4 Inches deep in any part; I attempted to wade this Stream and to my astonishment found the bottom a quick Sand, and impassable... ".

One of the first documented visits by European-Americans to the upper Sandy River basin occurred in 1838, when Daniel Lee, the nephew of missionary Jason Lee, used the Indian trail over Lolo Pass to drive cattle from a Methodist mission in the Willamette Valley to a mission in Wascopam. Other pioneers later used the trail to drive livestock over the mountains. The first wagons came over the Cascades in 1840, and in 1843 the great east-west migration of settlers to the Oregon Territory began. The Barlow Road, along the Indian trail leading west from the Lolo Trail, opened in 1846 and became popular with new settlers. A branch of this road followed the Devil's Backbone between the Sandy and the Little Sandy watersheds.