Joseph L. Meek

The board has Meek carrying word of the Whitman killings to Washington; part of the news was his own. His daughter Helen Mar, about ten, had been left with the Whitmans at Waiilatpu and was already ill with measles; she died while the survivors were held captive. Meek set out early in February 1848 and came back marshal of the new territory. On June 3, 1850, at Oregon City, he carried out the hanging of five Cayuse men convicted of the killings, Tiloukaikt, Tomahas, Kiamasumpkin, Iaiachalakis and Klokomas, after a trial whose jurisdiction their defense had disputed.

What the plaque says

Oregon History Joseph L. Meek This marks the land claim of Joseph L. Meek, famed and unlettered "mountain man," who arrived in 1840 after driving from Fort Hall to Walla Walla in the first wagon on that part of the Oregon Trail. He was a founder of the Provisional Government: served as the first sheriff, the first marshal, the first census taker. He carried word of the Whitman massacre to Washington, D. C., where President Polk, whose wife was his cousin, received him. Named marshal under the new territorial government, he accompanied Governor Lane to Oregon. His final Indian fighting was as a soldier in the Yakima War, 1855-56. He died here in 1875. A neighbor called him: "very popular and as brave as Julius Caesar".

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vanport — 13 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.
• Champoeg — 23 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 — 23 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 — 23 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.

More markers nearby

• The Willamette Stone — 12 mi
• Thomas McKay — 13 mi
• Vanport — 14 mi
• The Tillamook Burn — 20 mi