River Highway

The board here was rewritten. Until at least 2016 it told of Broughton's Expedition: Lieutenant William Broughton reaching his farthest point up the Columbia on October 30, 1792, and taking possession of the country for the British Crown with appropriate ceremonies. The board standing here by 2023 opens instead with the peoples who had lived along the river since time immemorial, and has Broughton's boats trading at their plank-house villages. The ceremony is gone from it. Britain pressed the claim that ceremony made until the 1846 treaty set the boundary at the 49th parallel.

What the plaque says

Oregon History River Highway Native peoples have resided along this river since time immemorial. These lands have provided a bountiful life and a highway for extensive trade and travel. In the 1700s, European and American seafarers began plying the Pacific coast, seeking commerce, mapping, and claiming places. In October 1792, HMS Chatham entered this river. Lieutenant W.R. Broughton, ship captain, led the party in small boats upriver to this point. His party traded with residents of the many plank house villages, took soundings, and journaled. Broughton named landscape features - the nearby, snowy mountain for First Naval Lord S. Hood and a sandy point across the river for his commanding officer, Captain G. Vancouver.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vista House at Crown Point — 1.5 mi
  A rest stop on a basalt point 733 feet above the Columbia, budgeted at $12,000, finished for about $100,000, and mocked for years as Oregon's most expensive outhouse.
• Multnomah Falls — 8.0 mi
  A 620-foot double waterfall whose 1925 stone lodge survived because firefighters kept it soaked while the forest burned around it in September 2017.
• Bonneville Dam — 17 mi
  The first federal dam on the Columbia, where someone has counted the fish climbing its ladders every year since 1938, beside an island the Corps used as a dump for forty years.
• McLoughlin House — 21 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

• Sandy River Bridge — 4.9 mi
• Troutdale — 5.3 mi
• Beacon Rock — 17 mi
• Vanport — 20 mi