RHODODENDRON, CLACKAMAS COUNTY; 1850s:
Laurel Hill was Oregon Trail’s ‘final boss battle’
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The road was a one-way affair. You could travel along it from The Dalles to Oregon City; but you could not go the other way, at least not with a wagon. And the reason for that was Laurel Hill.
The river passage was far harder, far more expensive, and much deadlier; but it was pretty easy for most folks, standing at the top of Laurel Hill and contemplating all the grisly death scenarios it conjured up, to forget about that. And deadly as the rest of the Oregon Trail had proven, death never seemed quite so close and threatening as it did during the last stretch of Sam Barlow’s wagon road, when it got to Laurel Hill. The hill was so steep that ropes had to be used to lower the wagons for at least part of the descent. The ropes would be wrapped around a stump or tree, or “snubbed,” so that the friction would slow the wagon’s descent. Until fairly recently one could still find rope burns around trees by the hill. As more and more wagons slid down the hill with brakes locked on and sometimes a tree slung underneath as a drag anchor, the hill quickly lost its topsoil and became more and more eroded until the roadbed was a narrow trench seven feet deep and lined with rock. This, of course, made the tree-brakes less effective, so eventually someone would start a new path down the hill. Eventually there were a good half dozen of these “chutes” for emigrants to choose from. On more than one occasion ropes snapped under the stress of snubbing, sending wagons hurtling down the hill to ruin. Emigrants crowded close to the livestock by the walls of the chute got their feet stepped on or run over by wagon wheels. On one occasion, a “grandma” who had decided to ride down the hill in the wagon tumbled over the front and landed on her head. The source claims she was unhurt, but she has to have at least been badly bruised. But, certainly she was more lucky than not on that day. At the bottom of the hill was a more-or-less permanent camp, where the emigrants would stop, nurse their wounds, catch their breath — and, for the unlucky among them, bury their dead. Today, the site of that camp is near the unincorporated community of Rhododendron (the “laurels” of Laurel Hill were actually rhodies). Over the years the Barlow Road was in use, the camp developed into something much more substantial, like a large logging camp with bunkhouses and a cook shack, which the Cascade Geographic Society has been working for several decades to restore to its 1890s splendor. They call it the “Living History Village.” And the word is, the place is haunted. There are persistent rumors of strange glowing “orbs” appearing in the old bunkhouses, and people have reported the buildings shaking mysteriously as if under ghostly footfalls. Volunteers in 2001 found a pair of rock-covered graves — a pioneer grave and a Native American grave — near the mess hall. There is also a more famous grave nearby, the Pioneer Woman’s Grave, the final resting place for someone who either died on Laurel Hill or not far from it. All of this may be true evidence of pioneer ghosts, or it may be the fruit of overheated imaginations of people all too aware that they’re standing on the site of one of the great graveyards of the Oregon Trail. Either way, the legends add spice to one of the most dramatic places in Oregon’s history.
ONCE THE BOTTOM of the brutal chute was reached, there was the “Devil’s Backbone” to traverse — a long, narrow ridge, barely wide enough for a single wagon, between two deep creek canyons. This was a little nerve-wracking, but nowhere near as dangerous or terrifying as Laurel Hill. And a few miles later, the exhausted travelers would arrive at Philip Foster’s farm, more or less at the end of the road in what today is Eagle Creek. In their writings, Oregon Trail travelers describe that farm as a pastoral Eden … and, well, compared with what they’d just been through, it surely was!
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