Brian's Ghost Town Safari #1: Champoeg

If you think Americans today move around a lot, try reading Honey in the Horn by H. L. Davis. He portrays the twentieth century dawning over a population completely adrift. In Davis’s Oregon, caravans of fortune-seekers, entire towns’ worth, pour over the mountains from West to East and back again seeking better land. Schemers plot out competing, fantastical cities on paper in order to win the favor of the railroad surveyors. The novel’s young protagonists, Clay and Luce, join crowds of itinerant laborers, hop-pickers, farmhands, and outlaws who pass by each other again and again on the backroads of a country already half-abandoned.

In a lot of ways, the book is about the stubborn refusal of Western settlers to truly settle – to adjust to their new environment and build a community of dwellers in the land, instead of just constantly looking for greener pastures. One throwaway joke line which stuck with me comes from Clay and Luce’s time on the coast. After living off the bounty of the land for months, they stop at a hotel in Coos Bay on their way inland which has a different culinary philosophy. “The next morning there was a restaurant breakfast which, because the natural products of that country were beef, elk, venison, honey, wild-fowl and two hundred species of edible fish, consisted of ham, eggs, pancakes and maple syrup.” No locavores, these pioneers!

(I have tons to say about the book, it’s really snidely funny and is one of my all-time favorites, please get @ me in the comments if you’ve read it and pick it up if you haven’t.)

Fig. 4.1: It's not quite as sexy as this cover makes it look, although it has a couple moments.

Davis’s observations about the transience of settlement in the American West are spot on. This side of the Mississippi, the continent is scattered with hundreds of ghost towns. Each one was once people’s home, before something – usually, from what I’ve seen, the profit motive running up against environmental conditions and creating disaster – forced the residents back on the road. People ate ham instead of fish, or whatever, and disaster followed. Residents scattered, and in many cases, thriving communities ceased to exist overnight. It was a level of mobility and instability hard to imagine even today.

I’ve been fascinated by ghost towns for a while, but I’ve recently started actively seeking them out, and I plan to record my finds on this blog. I’ve visited eight or so thus far in Oregon and Washington, and I have many more lined up – there’s no danger of running out.

Oregon is thought to be the nation’s ghost town capital, although counting ghost towns is practically impossible since there’s no strict definition of one. Some places popularly deemed ghost towns are thriving villages whose population has merely fallen from boomtown heights. Others are areas of wilderness with not a crumb of rubble to be seen. Very few are clusters of intact, standing, and completely vacant buildings, although of course those are the most fun. One website I’ve found uses lists of extinct post offices to estimate an Oregon ghost town count of over 1,600. However, that list includes places like the city of Albina, which was incorporated into Portland and still exists as a neighborhood, so it’s probably way too expansive.

In any case, this isn’t really a catch-em-all hobby; it’s a way to get outside, see new places off the beaten track, and learn some history. Let’s start with my New Year’s visit to the granddady ghost town of them all…

Champoeg, Marion County, OR

Est. c. 1829, abandoned 1861

Fig. 4.2: Bustling downtown Champoeg, pictured from the corner of Napoleon and LaSalle.

Now, Champoeg wasn’t the first settlement in what was then called the Oregon Country. Astoria had been founded in 1811, and the Hudson’s Bay Company had already begun building its network of trading posts – and there were hundreds if not thousands of Native towns and villages scattered across the country from the boreal forests to the high desert. When French-Canadian HBC trappers arrived in the Willamette Valley, they encountered temporary Kalapuyan encampments along the river, including near what became Champoeg.

If the trappers had asked, they might have been told that building a permanent village at the place the Kalapuya called čʰámpuik wasn’t the soundest idea. Naturally, they didn’t ask.

Today, the uninhabited floodplain is designated as a State Heritage Area. I visited on December 30^th, at the tail end of 2019. It was one of those days when you really, really need to get out of town and see some green along with the gray. I got a pleasant surprise on the way over when my GPS informed me that the village’s Anglicized name is pronounced “shampooey.” “CHAMPOEG FOR MY REAL FRIENDS, REAL POEG FOR MY SHAM FRIENDS,” I yelled at the steering wheel. (I do a lot of enthusiastic yelling when I’m driving alone.)

The Newell House, a Champoeg-era home and museum not far from the townsite, was closed that day. It’s privately run by the Daughters of the American Revolution, and they do what they want. The state park, though, was wide open for the curious.

Writing thirty years ago, travel writer Ralph Friedman described the park’s Visitor Center as one of the best museums in the state. His claim holds up, although I assume a lot of the digital interactivity came after he drove through. I was outnumbered by friendly docents and given free rein to explore.

The story of Champoeg – and the reason it’s a State Heritage Area, unlike most of the other sites I’ll be covering – is really the story of how Oregon went from a being a Mad Maxian free-for-all to having an organized government. In the early 1840s, the “Oregon County” was just a set of lines on a map. There were people here, and there was a thriving Cascadian biosphere that roughly overlapped with those artificial lines, but there was no polity to speak of. Under the terms of an 1818 treaty, the area was “jointly occupied” by America and Britain, but that didn’t mean anything in practice – neither country collected taxes, provided services, or really exercised any control there at all. The native nations that had traditionally owned the land were undergoing hideous demographic and societal collapse from epidemic diseases, not that the rising tide of white settlers would have abided by their laws anyway. It was a total power vacuum.

Fig. 4.3: Map of the Oregon Country showing competing American and British claims and the network of HBC trading posts. Image created by user Kmusser on Wikipedia, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

The closest thing to a ruling power in the Oregon Country was the Hudson’s Bay Company. A fur-trading monopoly that owned much of what is now Canada, the HBC was supposed to be an arm of the British crown but in practice operated independently like a cyberpunky corporate government, with its own money and its own courts. Its trading posts were the main centers of power in the region, and its Chief Factor John McLoughlin, based at Fort Vancouver – today’s Vancouver, Washington – was half-seriously called the “King of Oregon.”

(In case you’re curious, the HBC lost its government monopoly and its quasi-statehood in 1869 but kept on trucking; it currently exists as a bougie department store chain in Canada. They bought Saks Fifth Avenue in 2013.)

Along with McLoughlin and his underlings, there were a few hundred settlers living in the Willamette Valley. Many were former HBC employees of Québécois or Métis origin who had left the company’s service to build lives of their own. Some were affiliated with the Methodist Church, which had sent a mission to minister to the native population. Others were independent Anglo-American homesteaders who harbored hopes that this land would eventually become US territory.

Before long, this scattered community of rugged individualists started to run into the kind of problems that required a legal framework to deal with. A man named Ewing Young died without heirs, leaving behind an enormous herd of cattle and a profitable sawmill for his neighbors to fight over. Wolves and other predators attacked livestock and required collective action to fight off. Somebody committed murder. At first, these issues were dealt with via ad hoc meetings, but soon the settlers of the Willamette Valley began to realize that – as we say – they lived in a society.

In 1843, about a hundred people convened at Champoeg to discuss forming a government. The tiny settlement, at this point consisting of little more than an HBC grain warehouse, was the most central and convenient gathering point in the territory, and men rode in from distant farms for the meeting.

The debate over organizing a government had already developed along national lines. Most of the Americans resented the power of the Hudson’s Bay Company and mistrusted the Catholic, Francophone John McLoughlin. Some wanted their own government in order to prepare for annexation by the United States, while others dreamed of an independent Pacific Republic, but they were united in their belief that some kind of civil authority was necessary. The Canadiens, on the other hand, were concerned about the legal implications of instituting a government. Would they be considered rebels against the British crown if they voted in favor? If Oregon was annexed by America, would they be granted citizenship, and would they be granted title to their land? (Remember, without laws, everyone was effectively squatting on stolen property at this point.)

Fig. 4.4: Joe Meek raises a point of parliamentary protocol with his coonskin cap.

According to legend, it was Joe Meek who forced the issue. Meek, a onetime independent trapper and “mountain man,” had settled in the Tualatin Valley with his Nez Perce wife and children a few years earlier and enjoyed wide respect among both the American and Canadien communities. As the debate dragged on, Meek grabbed a stick, drew a line in the dirt and said, in a weird mixture of call-to-arms and Robert’s Rules procedurese: “Who’s for a divide? All for the report of the committee and an organization follow me.” The men formed up on either side of the line, and the vote was tallied: 52 for, 50 against. The Oregon Provisional Government was born.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the whole story has an odor of patriotic foundation myth to it. It may have been set up that way intentionally by the pro-government side: Ralph Friedman refers to Meek’s theatrics and the vote as a “well-organized spontaneous demonstration.” This was an era when the small communities of white people on the frontier thought of themselves consciously as historical actors and believed their personal choices could shape the lives of millions of people yet unborn.

I stepped out of the Visitor Center, exchanging some cheerful Happy New Years with the docents, and started down the hill to the floodplain and the site of that fateful vote.

In the wake of the vote, Champoeg grew slowly as power and population concentrated in Oregon City upriver. The town at the falls of the Willamette was soon the Provisional Government’s meeting place and the center of all business and political activity, and would remain so until American annexation in 1848 and its eventual eclipse by Portland and Salem. By 1860, Champoeg was a backwater, with a population of about 180 and a small economy based on the warehousing and shipment of grain. The village might still exist today as a quaint tourist attraction… if its founders had platted on higher ground.

Today, the Willamette’s volume and flow are controlled by a score of dams. Like most of the nation’s major rivers it is a combination power generator, irrigation ditch, and freight highway, run like an organic machine by a half dozen governmental agencies. But in the mid-nineteenth century, it was still wild, and in particularly wet years, it would flood – sometimes spectacularly. 1861 was one of those years. That spring, the snows in the mountains melted, the rain poured down, and the river rose, overtopping the banks and scattering the rude wooden buildings of Oregon’s first capital.

This is why the Kalapuya hadn’t built permanent settlements right on the riverbanks.

No one was killed, but the village was completely destroyed and was never rebuilt. Today, what was once downtown Champoeg can only be identified by the hollow courses of its streets and by a series of regularly spaced wooden posts, each one marking the location of an intersection.

Fig. 4.5: Looking down Napoleon Street, the main drag. Some of the roads were named after French national heroes, some after American presidents – Champoeg was an international community.

The day I visited, the townsite was mostly deserted, and the river lay low and leaden below the banks. A few old couples walked dogs along the paved paths. I tried to follow the old streets, and the tall grass soaked my pants. Just west of “downtown,” the ground rose slightly to a plateau forested with enormous trees. Apparently, this is where the fateful divide took place all those years ago.

Two Canadiens, Étienne Lucier and François X. Matthieu, had been the swing votes that day – they’d joined the Americans in voting for government while the rest of their countrymen voted against. Matthieu, a carpenter, was a political fugitive and a longtime admirer of American law and values. He’d been involved in the 1837 Lower Canada Rebellion against British rule over Québec, and after its failure had spent the intervening years hiding out on the frontier. Lucier, a former HBC trapper, was a founder of Champoeg and may have been the first white settler in the Willamette Valley. He was less radically inclined, but over the previous winter, he and Matthieu had become close friends. In the latter’s memoirs, he recalls winning Lucier over to his brand of pro-American republican politics – and thereby takes credit for deciding the vote and creating the Provisional Government.

Subsequent generations of Oregonians took Matthieu at his word. By coincidence, he happened to live longer than any other participant in the meeting, and until his death in 1914 he was celebrated as the “hero of Champoeg” who “saved Oregon for the United States.” In 1901, forty years after Champoeg’s destruction, Matthieu returned to the townsite amid pomp and circumstance to dedicate a memorial to himself and the others who voted with him.

Fig. 4.6: Supposedly, the little obelisk sits exactly where Joe Meek drew his line in the dirt, although they were working off of the octogenarian Matthieu’s memory when they erected it so I’d take that with a grain of salt.

Let’s assume the story is true and that Matthieu really did swing the vote. Did that act alone “save Oregon for the United States”? I’m not much of a Great Man historian, and I suspect that the outcome would have looked the same no matter what the tally had been that day. There were more and more Americans coming into the Oregon Country every year, while the HBC was already losing its sway in the British Empire and would have trouble getting any government backup for its interests. The demographics made the formation of a government only a matter of time; if it didn’t happen at Champoeg that day it would have happened the next time the settlers convened to solve a problem.

The more interesting question is what that government’s purpose would have been. Most of the Americans involved in the Provisional Government saw it as a step towards annexation, and indeed that’s what happened; Britain and America finally divvied up the region and by 1848 began exerting state power. But there was also a faction led by mountain man Osborne Russell that advocated dropping the “provisional character” of the government and declaring a free Republic of Oregon. The idea was that both the American and British metropoles were too far away to govern the country effectively, and that the community of settlers had already organized themselves as a sovereign body, drawing political legitimacy only from themselves. Russell ran a close second in the Provisional Government’s first gubernatorial election. Even John McLoughlin started expressing interest in independence as his influence with the British government collapsed. However, every successive wagon train brought more American patriots, and Oregon independence soon became a fringe idea.

An independent state in the Northwest may not have been a total impossibility, though. In the 1840s, there was still widespread anti-expansionist sentiment back in the United States, usually coming from Whigs who predicted (correctly) that it would inflame tensions over slavery. President James K. Polk, whose political project the Oregon Treaty was, was only elected by a hair. If a different American administration had disclaimed interest in the territory, maybe the jilted settlers would have been more interested in Russell’s ideas. An 1840s Oregon Republic would be no Ecotopia, of course; it’d be a violent settler state just like the Republic of Texas or like America itself. But in the longer term an independent Oregon may have been able to avoid the extractive, quasi-colonial relationship with the industrial East which the American West had to endure in our reality...

(As a side note, President Polk was married to Joe Meek’s cousin. I know the population was drastically smaller back then and everybody knew each other, even Presidents and mountain men, but I kind of want to believe that this is evidence that the Champoeg meeting was part of a long, stage-managed American imperialist conspiracy. It would make a fun Pynchon novel or something.)

I headed back upland. There was one part of the park left to see.

Fig. 4.7: Not gonna lie, this barn got me excited.

Outside the Visitor Center stands Champoeg’s only surviving building. The barn, raised by pioneer Donald Manson and his family immediately before the flood, was knocked off its foundations by the rising waters, but it was washed up downstream intact and was eventually hauled to higher ground and restored. There are a few other artifacts remaining: scraps of pottery and other archaeological remnants can be seen at the Visitor Center, and active archaeological work on the townsite is ongoing. Additionally, the community’s church bell was salvaged from the river and is now in use at the chapel in Butteville, just down the road.

Seeing the bell would have been the logical next stopping point had I planned this trip in advance and not driven down in the afternoon on a day when everything was closed. I may have to go back, see the Newell House, and slide into Butteville to check out the church and buy a Gatorade at the oldest operating store in Oregon. (Butteville’s bodega was founded in the 1860s by none other than François Matthieu.) Hit me up if you want to come – I’ll be ghosting every weekend.