As I write my fourth historical novel about the West, I’m finding more and more things I need to research. Researching travel along the Oregon Trail itself was easy by comparison—all I needed to do was to decide on a route, describe the landmarks and the difficulties of daily life, and let my characters react to each other and to the land around them.
Now they are in Oregon. They have full lives. Each household needs a source of income. They need stores and mills where they can buy and sell their crops and goods. They need schools and churches and boardinghouses and other facilities of a full 19th Century community.
I had to deal with some of these issues when I wrote Now I’m Found, half of which took place in Oregon City between 1848 and 1850. But the impact of the Gold Rush trumped many aspects of daily life in both California and Oregon in those years.
My current work-in-progress takes place in 1850 and 1851. All my major characters are in Oregon. Several of them have lived in Oregon for over three years. They have homes. They have farms or stores. I have to describe all the routines of their daily lives—their household chores and their farm tasks and their shopping.
No longer are they reacting to the hardships of travel, nor to the impact of the Gold Rush. Now they are building—their families are growing, their homes need more rooms, they travel in the area and need to get from place to place.
One particular challenge I am having is describing how they move from homestead to homestead and from farms to town. How good were the roads? Well, I really don’t know.
How close were they to having railroads in Oregon? Well, I don’t know that either.
So I’m researching these issues.
Front St. in Portland in the 1860s. Still unpaved.
In 1844, the Oregon Territorial Legislature had passed an act authorizing a public road from the Willamette Falls to the falls on the Yamhill River. Laws approving other roads were similarly adopted. But how quickly were these roads developed? When were they first used?
On March 6, 1851, the Oregon Spectator, the weekly newspaper published in Oregon City, reported the construction of a road around the Willamette Falls. The Willamette Falls was the largest waterfall in the Pacific Northwest by volume, and one of the widest falls in the world. It was 1,500 feet wide and 40 feet high. The falls stopped boat traffic upriver, so a road would be a good improvement in the area. But I have yet to discover if or when this road was completed, and I don’t have any pictures of it.
The City of Portland, which had grown quickly in the late 1840s and was incorporated in 1851, had a plank road that was started in 1849 and completed in 1851. This road connected the agricultural lands to the west with the town. Still, the road remained primitive until the mid-1850s.
Oregon Spectator solicitation of railroad investors, March 6, 1851
For many weeks in early 1851, the Oregon Spectator contained an advertisement about future work on a railroad. The intent was to find investors. Were they successful?
In late March 1851, the paper reported on the development of the transcontinental railroad from Missouri to San Francisco. But we all know the transcontinental railroad was not completed until after the Civil War. Construction on that railroad line took place between 1863 and 1869. The famous Golden Spike completed the line on May 10, 1869.
And as best as I’ve been able to determine, railroads in Oregon didn’t develop until the 1860s and beyond. The first lines were portages around major obstacles on the Columbia River. The California & Oregon Railroad began construction in 1868 in Portland, but only made it to Oregon City by 1869, and by 1874 had not reached past Roseburg, Oregon.
A transcontinental line reached Portland along the Columbia River in 1883, but a rail line didn’t span from Portland to Sacramento until 1887.
So anyone investing in the railroad in 1851 in response to the ad placed in the Oregon Spectator would have had decades to wait before they saw any money back. Frankly, investing in a sawmill or a steamship would have provided a much better return.
Should I give my characters the benefit of my hindsight, or should I have one of them invest in the railroad?
Since they didn’t have your 20/20 hindsight, perhaps they should.