As It Was

The orchard boom in Southern Oregon at the turn of the last century extended into the mountain valleys around Wolf Creek, where in 1907 a former Presbyterian minister, W.G. Smith, was selling land tracts.

Dead Indian Memorial Road that leads over the mountains east of Ashland, Ore., got its start as a wagon road in the late 1850s that later connected with roads leading to the Fort Klamath military outpost. Today, it’s a well maintained, paved county route that avoids the long drive to White City for motorists headed from Ashland to the Lake of the Woods or Klamath Falls.

In 1854, James Sterling and a partner dipped a sluicing pan into Sterling Creek near Jacksonville, Ore., and captured some gold nuggets. The two men agreed to keep their discovery secret until they could stake their claims.

The construction of the Shasta Dam in the 1930s and ‘40s at the north end of the Sacramento Valley was intended to provide long-term water storage in Shasta Lake, flood control, hydroelectricity and protection against the intrusion of saline water. It is the eighth tallest dam in the United States and has the largest reservoir in California.

Making remarks antagonizing to the government landed Klamath County rancher F.W. Bold in jail in 1919.

The finest boatman of his time on the lower Rogue River, Reuel Hawkins, could thread the water like no one else; some even wondered if the river talked to him.

Southeast Oregon’s Fossil Lake has attracted amateur fossil collectors and paleontologists since the l880s, but a recent discovery astounded University of Oregon scientists.

In 1916, a Klamath Falls woman roped a legendary wild stallion that had avoided capture by men for years.

Southern Oregon’s early Fourth of July celebrations were exuberant, all-day events, often livened by a group calling themselves the “Callithumpians.”

Northern California historian Jim Denny has called Whiskey Gulch above Old Etna, Calif., “One of the nicest little whiskey stills that ever turned out illegal whiskey. It was only out of business when whiskey could be produced legally.”