Champoeg

The board gives the 1851 treaties one clause; they were the first land cessions negotiated anywhere in the Northwest. That April and May a federal commission under Governor John P. Gaines met the Santiam and Tualatin Kalapuya here, then the Yamhill and Luckiamute and two Molala bands. The Santiam leaders Alquema and Tiacan would sell everything except the land between the forks of the Santiam, and every treaty kept a reservation in the valley. That is why they failed: the land was already claimed, settlers complained, and Congress tabled them. The tribes signed again at Dayton in 1855.

What the plaque says

Oregon History Champoeg This area, once named tchampuick, the 'place of yampah' was the traditional homeland of the Tualatin Kalapuya tribe. Fur trappers first arrived here by canoe in 1811, and they found lush open prairies bordering the Willamette River. In 1830, French-Canadians retiring from the Hudson's Bay Company and their Indian wives began farms and raised families near here. Champoeg soon became a shipping and commercial center. In 1851, local tribes and the U.S. government negotiated six treaties at this location; all went unratified by Congress. A thriving town existed here until the flood of 1861 swept away all the buildings. It is also the memorial site of the May 2, 1843, meeting of the "inhabitants of the Willamette settlements" who formed a provisional government, the first American government on the Pacific coast.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Champoeg — 0.8 mi
  The river-bend meadow where settlers voted for a government in 1843, and where the Willamette took the entire town but one warehouse eighteen years later.
• Willamette Falls — 15 mi
  A horseshoe of basalt across the Willamette, ringed by a century of mills, that is still one of the last places in the Columbia basin where tribes gather lamprey by hand.
• McLoughlin House — 16 mi
  The retirement house of the Hudson's Bay man who supplied the Oregon Trail's starving arrivals, saved from a paper mill's lot in 1909 and hauled up the bluff to a park he had given the town.
• Vanport — 26 mi
  Briefly Oregon's second-largest city, built in about 110 days for Kaiser's shipyard workers, washed away in an afternoon in 1948, and later renamed out of existence.

More markers nearby

• Willamette Post — 1.9 mi
• Boone's Ferry — 6.4 mi
• Boone's Landing — 6.9 mi
• Aurora — 7.4 mi