By Roberta McKern
For The New Era
While thinking about the East Linn Museum and stories from it of the trek made down the
Oregon Trail by those who settled here, the words “shank’s mare” came to mind.
Some pioneers likely traveled by shank’s mare nearly most of the way. That is, they walked.
True, when we think of the unity of traveling in wagon trains, we can imagine them riding along, but in reality, the wagons were primarily conveyances of food, water and other necessities. In order to spare the oxen or horses pulling the wagons, those who were neither too old nor too young or ailing, were expected to walk.
“Shank’s mare” is a phrase referring to our lower limbs and our being able to put one foot in front of the other as we learned when we were young. And, probably, many more people walked west than we realized.
Settlers coming down the Willamette Valley were lucky to have horses or oxen after the trials of the trail and its western mountains, and some arrived with wagons pulled by milk cows like Josiah Weddle and his family, who lit near Holley.
For the earliest settlers, having draft animals was nearly imperative because the one grist mill
serving the area was in Oregon City. In fact, anything not brought with them that the settlers
might want was up the Willamette to the Columbia under the dominance of the Hudson’s Bay
Company. That situation lasted until the question of the boundary between the U.S. and Canada was settled.
That happened in 1846, by which time four years of arriving settlers had brought over 5,000 into the valley, enough to influence the decision to give the Americans more than the British
wished – although it was less than in the American slogan of “54 – 40 or fight.”
One interesting way that settlers from the valley reached Oregon City was to ride and tie, a
variation on shank’s mare, it involved two people and a horse.
One person rode the horse to a designated place along the way, tied the animal up to wait, and continued walking on. The second person, who had been walking all along, but presumably slower than the horse, had a turn on the horse, riding forward and passing the first rider and going up to a point where the horse was again tied up to await the other walker and so on.
Was this a better way to go instead of having two men walking and leading the horse? Did time pass faster?
It’s like an arithmetic story problem:“If two men and a horse start off to go seventy miles, plus or minus, to Oregon City and they have only one horse, how long will it take them to get to Oregon City?”
Was the horse expected to carry grain to the grist mill or were flour and supplies simply bought
to be brought home to this area? At any rate, the trip took days and maybe up to two or three
weeks.
It was better if a community could join to send a contingent north with grain to be ground into the
flour needed. But it was even better if a community had a grist mill of its own.
We are looking at the way in which our area was the product of rapid change as the Oregon
country became settled.
Fortunately for those who first came here, Richard C. Finley of the Crawfordsville vicinity knew how he could construct a grist mill on the Calapooia River, where a basalt dike causes an area of riffles and a faster current.
One problem: The site was already part of a filed land claim, but the man had gone away for the moment, for word of California gold had filtered north.
There was no better place for the first grist mill south of Oregon City, Finley insisted. Build, his
neighbors decided and they would back him. Necessity ruled.
The original claimant to the site did return and there were hard feelings, but the need for the grist mill overruled.
However, building of the mill, which went into business in 1848, left Finely in debt. With the discovery of gold in California, like many other Oregon men, Finley headed south. He
was able to send gold dust home to his wife, who found that when visitors to the mill asked to
see and feel it, the gold dwindled, flakes having clung to fingers.
She realized it could be seen but not felt.
Many Oregon men caught gold fever in the 1800s as gold in the mountains was discovered at
various sites.The demands for supplies in the gold fields fueled Oregon’s economy because
crops, including potatoes, onions, and wheat for flour were in high demand among the gold
seekers pouring into the West by oxen, horse or mule propelled vehicles, as well as shank’s
Mare – nearly always a dependable way to travel on a budget.
The 1800s were an amazing time, men seeking land as well as gold and other exploitable resources could head to Oregon country, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Nevada, and California as well as further south through Texas into New Mexico and Arizona territories.
Gold acted as the lure and funded telegraph lines to California and Oregon in the 1860s and contributed to ship building, stagecoach and mail lines, all other sorts of developments, including vice, which pulled in populations.
Thoughts of easy riches exercised strong dynamics in the past, as well as the present.
People headed into our area. Looking at the 1914 Oregon Blue Book, we get some interesting
statistics. In 1890, the population of Linn County was 16,285 people. By 1910, it had grown to
22,662, an increase of over 6,000 in 20 years.
By 1910 Sweet Home made it into the Oregon Blue Book census with a reported population of 202. By then too, the state’s population was 672,765 compared to 52,465 in 1860.
With the help of various means of locomotion, including trains, steamships, and stagecoach lines, the nations and Oregon’s growth had begun to gallop, and shank’s mare was still in the running.
We don’t see much of a direct influence here by steamboats and trains in the immediate East
Linn area until the 1930s, when Sweet Home got a train station; however, coastal steamers and
steamboats on the Columbia and Willamette Rivers shuffled people and goods around starting
in about 1845.
Oregon was, after all, discovered by sail in its first days of exploration. The natives used sea-going canoes to chase whales on the coast and traveled the inland rivers by dugout ones. Hudson’s Bay voyageurs traversed inland waterways to arrive from Canada at Fort Vancouver.
The Methodist missionary Gustavus Hines recalled traveling up the Willamette River to the mission in the Salem area by canoe manned by Kalapyan Indians from a band, which did not survive the fatal impact on native people who lacked immunity to European diseases.
Hines was one of those baffled by it, while seeing that their passing opened the Willamette Valley for settlement.
Steamboats strengthened communications with the East because information could be brought
from San Francisco’s telegraph and be published in the Oregonian newspaper, plus allowing for the delivery of mail at 50 cents a letter.
Mailboats and steamboats up the Columbia and on the Snake took produce and miners into new inland gold strikes.
Our area did have a flirtation with a steamboat. The little Calliope made it up the Santiam River
to Lebanon. The Calliope, like other river boats, had a shallow draft and the Santiam was in
flood stage.
The town planned a banquet, once the boat was loaded, to celebrate a bright future.
But the river began to drop. The Calliope was hastily unloaded and the banquet postponed.
The celebrants banded together to pull and shove the Calliope downstream. It steamed back to
Jefferson the best it could and that was the end of a steamboat connection further up the
Santiam.
Stagecoaches and freight trains influenced travel on the Santiam toll road and otherwise came
and went. Still, shank’s mare had a place in the area’s settlement.
One museum story tells of Jess Barr, an early settler on Fern Ridge, who worked at Finley’s grist mill on the Calapooia and was known to sling a 50-pound bag of flour on his shoulder and walk those several miles home, mostly uphill.
We know many people in the past did not walk everywhere, with horses, mules, oxen, and
buggies and wagons available, but many people did. When limitations set in, they had feet to
amble with.
In praise of shank’s mare, it been said humankind in its rise first learned to walk on two legs.
This freed the hands to reach with and exercise the opposable thumb in a power grip. Gripping
and hanging on allowed the brain to develop and to come up with many diverse ideas including
the mechanical automations that lead us to travel less with our shank’s mare.
It is something to ponder.
East Linn Museum is celebrating its 50th anniversary in July and is open for visitors now.
Welcome, come one, come all!