Jedediah Smith

In July 1828 Smith's brigade camped near where the Smith River enters the Umpqua, with some three hundred horses and a season's furs. On July 12 his men seized a local man over a stolen ax. Two days later, while Smith was off by canoe scouting the route north, Lower Umpqua (Kalawatset) men attacked the camp at dawn and killed fifteen of the nineteen. Smith and two others reached Fort Vancouver, where Arthur Black, the one survivor of the camp, had arrived first. John McLoughlin sent forty men to recover the furs, then bought them.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Oregon Dunes — 8.7 mi
  Forty miles of moving sand that Frank Herbert came to write about in 1957, and a government project to stop them that gave him Dune and is now being undone.

More markers nearby

• Tsunami - Reedsport — 0.7 mi
• The Hollering Place — 24 mi
• Coos Bay - Explore More — 24 mi
• Shifting Sands - Sand Dunes — 24 mi