Peter Skene Ogden

The board credits Ogden with discovering Mount Shasta; the mountain he named may not have been Shasta. In his 1826-27 journal he wrote of a mountain, a people and a river he spelled Sastise, Castice and Sasty, and his description fits the peak now called Mount McLoughlin, in the southern Oregon Cascades. The name seems to have moved south when the Wilkes Expedition of 1838-42 transferred Ogden's Sastise to the great volcano in California. The board's birth year is off as well: Ogden was baptized in 1790, not born in 1793.

What the plaque says

Oregon History Peter Skene Ogden This park is named for Peter Skene Ogden, 1793-1854. In the fall of 1825, Ogden led a Hudson's Bay Company trapping party on the first recorded journey into central Oregon, crossing the country to the north and east into the Crooked River Valley not far above here. He was in the vicinity again in 1826 bound for the Harney Basin and the Klamath Region where he discovered Mount Shasta. Ogden was an important figure in the early fur trade and ranged over all the west. He rescued the survivors of the Whitman massacre. Ogden, Utah, was named for him.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Smith Rock State Park — 3.0 mi
  Ridges of welded tuff from what geologists call Oregon's greatest eruption, cut by the Crooked River into orange walls and a 350-foot spire called Monkey Face.