Bandon

The mouth of the Coquille River was the home of the Nasomah band of the Coquille, whose plank-house village stood on both banks a short way upstream. Gold in the beach sands brought miners in 1853, and on January 28, 1854, about forty of them, organized two days earlier as volunteers over a list of minor complaints, attacked the village as its people slept, killing about sixteen and burning their houses. The Indian agent who arrived afterward called it a massacre too inhuman to be readily believed. The Coquille were later moved north to the Coast Reservation; a sacred rock at the river mouth, Tupper Rock, was later blasted for the jetty. The federal government restored the Coquille Indian Tribe in 1989, and the tribe celebrated it here, near the Nasomah village site, which a small park in town now memorializes.

In 1873 George Bennett arrived from Bandon in County Cork, talked his neighbors into taking his hometown's name, and planted gorse, the yellow-flowering, oily shrub of Irish hedges. It spread over the hills and into the vacant lots. On September 26, 1936, a forest fire east of town reached it, and the gorse went up as if it had been doused with gasoline; water only scattered the burning branches. Ten or eleven people died, by different counts, and most of the town burned, the whole business district with it.

Bandon rebuilt, and gorse still covers thousands of acres of southwest Oregon. Old Town lines the harbor; south of it, Beach Loop Drive runs above Coquille Point, Face Rock and a beach full of sea stacks. Across the river the Coquille River Lighthouse, lit in 1896, stands in Bullards Beach State Park, and cranberry bogs surround the town.