Depoe Bay

The man the town is named for came from the lower Rogue River. He was Tututni, one of the people forced north onto the Coast Reservation after the Rogue River war, and at the Siletz Agency he was known as Depot Charley, by one account for working at the army depot up the Yaquina near Toledo. The family name later became DePoe. In 1894, under the Dawes Act policy of cutting reservations into individual allotments, he and his family were allotted more than two hundred acres beside a small ocean bay. His heirs sold the last of it in 1923 to a Siletz couple, who sold it on to a real estate speculator, and the town that went up in the late 1920s took the family's name.

The bay is a pocket in the lava with a narrow, dog-legged channel, about fifty feet wide, opening into a harbor of six acres that the town bills as the world's smallest navigable harbor. Charter boats work out of it, and skippers coming in time the swells to run the slot under Conde McCullough's 1927 arch, widened in 1940 because so many drivers stopped on it to look. Walk under the bridge on the stairs from the seawall to watch them.

Gray whales pass on their migrations, and a group of a couple of hundred stays the summer to feed close inshore, often near enough to see from the sidewalk; late summer into fall is the best time. Oregon State Parks staffs a whale watching center on the seawall at the north end of the bridge, free, with binoculars and someone who knows where to look.