Emigrant Springs State Park

Hunt's Astorians came over these mountains in the first days of 1812 through deep snow, eating their last horses. On the far side they found what Washington Irving, working from Hunt's journal, called a camp of Sciatogas and Tusche-pas: thirty-four lodges of woven mats, more than two thousand horses on the grass, and inside the lodges brass kettles and copper teakettles traded up from the coast. A blanket, a knife or half a pound of blue beads bought a horse. The people would not eat horse or dog, and some of the starving men ate themselves sick.

What the plaque says

Oregon History Emigrant Springs State Park In the first week of January, 1812, a party of trappers and traders, members of the Astor Overland Expedition, crossed the Blue Mountains in this area. Traveling afoot in bitter cold, often waist deep in snow, they were the first white men in this area. The route they traveled to and from St. Louis and Astoria developed into the emigrant route to the Oregon Country later known as the Oregon Trail. Wagon trains, Oregon bound, started their journey with the "greening" of the grass on the prairies, and crossed the "Blues" after completing some 2,200 miles of their journey, from late August to early October. Then as now this was the first forested area on the route. Altho Meacham Meadows was the favored stopping place, some emigrants used the spring located west of the park area, and for which the park is named.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tamástslikt Cultural Institute — 13 mi
  The only tribally owned museum on the Oregon Trail, where the Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla tell the wagon migration from the side of the people it rolled through.
• Pendleton Woolen Mills — 18 mi
  A mill that has woven blankets for the tribes of the Plateau since 1909, whose oldest customers folded its blankets into their own ceremonies.

More markers nearby

• Meacham — 2.9 mi
• Pendleton — 17 mi
• Triple Nickles - Pendleton — 18 mi
• Umatilla County — 20 mi