BAKER CITY, Ore. – When they strung up poor Bogs Greenwood on a ranch near here in 1864 for murder, most probably figured it was the start and finish of his moment of fame.
But when a Main Street bank building was torn down decades later, a time capsule turned up, and there was Bogs’ skull, along with a brief biography.
The skull and its libretto are missing, but a plaque on the replacement building tells all about it. And that explains a lot about Baker City.
The town is within spittin’ distance of the Oregon Trail, the 1,900-mile route used by a half-million pioneers heading west before the transcontinental railroad was built. Later, when the mines were belching gold, oh, Lord, how the money rolled in.
But with the mines silent now, and the timber industry in shards, Baker City’s future may be defined by its past. Visitors to the area today will find buildings restored to 19th century architectural glory, gold-rush ghost towns and tributes to the pioneers’ ordeals.
The town, built to support the gold rush, was named for Edward Baker, one of Oregon’s first U.S. senators. Baker, a close confidant of Abraham Lincoln, was the only member of Congress killed in the Civil War. Lincoln named a son after Baker, and another Lincoln son wrote a poem – an awful one – mourning Baker’s death.
The people in their stiff poses and derby hats in early photos of the town are long gone. But much of the city looks as it did. Original building facades have been restored, and the Geiser Grand Hotel, then as now the town pride, has undergone a $7 million makeover.
The hotel opened in the 1880s and was said to be the finest between Portland and Salt Lake City, with the third elevator ever built west of the Mississippi. Today more than 100 cut-glass chandeliers (the originals vanished long ago) dangle from its high ceilings. The hardwoods glisten and the stained-glass ceiling in the dining room defies description.
Local history buff Beverly Calder owns a deli and wine shop in the town’s historic district. The store was originally on what was once considered the “shady” side of Main Street, where respectable people didn’t walk and the Salvation Army trolled for lost souls.
“Older women told me not to open it there, that ladies would never shop there,” Calder said. “This was in 1998! But they remembered how it was as recently as the 1930s and ’40s.”
The county was also rough enough to inspire Walter Winchell to comment that if you wanted to kill someone, Baker County was the place to do it.
Visitors can use Baker City as a jumping-off point for the Snake River and Hells Canyon, the nation’s deepest, as well as for the magnificent Oregon Trail Interpretive Center and a collection of ghost towns left over from the 19th century gold rush.
Hobby miners still find gold in the streams and rivers, but the big operations are gone, silenced largely by environmental regulations and high costs.
“There’s not much of the easy gold left to be found,” said Terry Karp, owner of Baker City Gold and Silver, which has gold found in the area on display. Gesturing to a small container, he added: “And 90 percent of what they find is like that in this vial of dust.”
It wasn’t always like that. The Armstrong Nugget, a 5-pounder found in 1913, is on display with other samples at the U.S. National Bank.
The massive Sumpter dredge, still intact in nearby Sumpter, was one of three that took 9 tons of gold from the Sumpter Valley. Do the math at today’s price of about $400 an ounce. Gold worth millions more came out of other mines.
The dredge is a state heritage site today, free for the public to explore. You can ask questions at a small gift shop. Buy an inexpensive gold pan if you want to try your luck, or buy a tiny nugget of Baker County gold for as little as $5.
Seven large area claims are held by Eastern Oregon Miners and Prospectors Inc., a nonprofit that sells family memberships for $50 a year.
Closer to Baker City is the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center on the actual Oregon Trail, a museum that does a superb job of bringing to life the Great Migration to the West.
The life-size wagon replicas and excerpts from diaries debunk many myths. Most of the pioneers didn’t ride in on the billowy prairie schooners of Hollywood. They walked, sometimes barefoot, to Oregon’s Willamette Valley, described by one pamphleteer as “a place where God tempers the wind to shorn lambs.”
But getting there wasn’t so pleasant, and by the time the wagon trains reached Eastern Oregon, they were in rough shape. Oxen were dying, heirloom furniture had been jettisoned, the pioneers were exhausted and many had perished. Mountains lay ahead and winter was coming.
Most people had sold everything for the trip, and there was no going back. You can stand on the trail, still visible after tens of thousands of wagon wheels formed it, and wonder how on earth they made it.
The museum documents it all with diaries, photos and careful replicas in displays that put the era in context.
“Nothing but rock upon rock, nothing but sage,” recorded Esther Hanna in 1857.
“The roads here is very deep, dust something like hot ashes,” George Belshaw recorded four years earlier.
“A lazy person,” wrote another, “should never think of going to Oregon.”
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