Canyon Creek

The board lists who used the canyon. Tabitha Brown, sixty-six that year, left the best account of what it cost in 1846. Her train had been talked onto the new southern road at Fort Hall by a guide she later called a rascally fellow, and Canyon Creek was its last test. She wrote that the canyon was strewn with dead cattle, broken wagons, beds and clothing, that out of hundreds of wagons only one came through unbroken, and that some families spent two or three weeks inside it. She reached Salem on Christmas Day.

What the plaque says

Oregon History Canyon Creek The narrow gorge of Canyon Creek has long served as a travel corridor. Native Americans likely trekked this canyon for thousands of years. Alexander McLeod of the Hudson's Bay Company provided the first written account of the route in 1829, while traveling from Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River to California's Central Valley. The U.S. Exploring Expedition, under Lt. George Emmons, followed the trail in 1841 making scientific observations. In 1846, this defile became part of the Applegate Trail, an effort by early emigrants to find an alternative to the treacherous Columbia River portion of the Oregon Trail. Prospectors and packers labored up the canyon en route to California's gold fields, beginning in 1848. Stagecoaches followed the rocky route in the 1870s, and today, Interstate 5 carries millions of vehicles over the steep pass.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wolf Creek Inn — 16 mi
  A stage-road hotel built in 1883 for the overnight stop on the sixteen-day run between San Francisco and Portland, still taking guests under state ownership.

More markers nearby

• Homeland of the Cow Creeks — 3.9 mi
• Umpqua - Southern Oregon — 22 mi