Before the Coos Bay Wagon road was built in 1872, the settlers in Oregon’s Bay Area were more closely connected to San Francisco than they were to the rest of Oregon. Steve Greif is a former history teacher and track and cross country coach at North Bend High School, and a board member of the Coos County Historical Society. He’s giving a series of presentations about the road in honor of its 150th anniversary. Greif joins us to talk about the region’s history and geography.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller, coming to you on our last day of this week from Coos Bay. We drove here from Portland last weekend: I-5 to Route 126 to 101, then down the coast. It was an easy drive. It took about four hours. There would have been nothing easy about a trip like that in the mid 1800s, when Coos Bay was really cut off from the rest of Oregon. That started to change about 150 years ago, in 1872, when the Coos Bay Wagon Road was completed. It provided an overland connection between Oregon’s Bay Area and Douglas County. Steve Greif is a retired North Bend High School history teacher and track coach. He is also a local historian and a volunteer at the Coos History Museum. He’s giving presentations about the wagon road and about isolation and geography and history Sunday and Tuesday. He joins us now to talk about all of this. Welcome to the show.
Steve Greif: Hi Dave.
Miller: I want to start with the physical realities of this region. How has the geography here, the land and the water, shaped history?
Greif: The theme of our museum is waterways because, from the Native Americans on, the waterways meant transportation in and out of Coos County. The coast range gets up to 3,500 feet, 4,000 feet, in elevation. On the way there, there’s a lot of puckerbrush, ferns, huckleberries and a lot of thick trees. It’s just tough to go by land.
Miller: It’s easy to forget that because it’s not the Rocky Mountains, it’s not the Continental Divide, it’s not the Cascades – peaks of 10,000 or more.
Greif: Right.
Miller: But it was a major impediment to connections?
Greif: It was. There were Indian trails. The local tribes here communicated with the Umpqua Valley natives and all up and down the coast of course. But they used canoes when they could. It was much easier than walking overland.
Miller: So what was life like in Coos Bay before overland roads?
Greif: The bay is the largest bay on the Oregon coast. Early on Euro-Americans that came here right after Oregon became a territory recognized that fact, and a military presence on the south coast at Fort Orford – which is now Port Orford – was established. When settlers started getting here, the way in and out was by ship. Because the trees were here, they were able to make their own ships. These were sailing vessels: three- four- even five-masted vessels, hundreds of them, built here on the Coos River Basin and Coquille River. That was the way to ship in goods and passengers.
Miller: What would be shipped in here and what would be shipped out of here?
Greif: People were shipped in, mostly, and goods from San Francisco. We had quite a relationship with San Francisco. It was a much tighter relationship than with Portland. [It was] a little bit quicker to get to San Francisco by boat, and you didn’t have to cross the Columbia River Bar to get into San Francisco. But shipping out was… we were a resource-based economy, and the Euro-Americans here realized early on that California needed lumber, we had that; needed foodstuffs, we’re a big dairy-producing area. And then, on top of that, there’s a vein of coal under Coos County, unlike any other place in the state of Oregon. I believe around Puget Sound there’s some coal too, but it’s rare in the Northwest. But they had coal here, so we had a big coal-shipping business from the 1860s through the 1920s.
Miller: So coal was mined here and then put on ships and sent to California.
Greif: Right, right. Its market was mainly for low-grade industry and home consumption. It wasn’t the greatest coal in the world. But it was business, and it was a big deal. It’s a little known… I think most Oregonians, if you told them that there was coal mining in their state, they wouldn’t believe it.
Miller: I’m hearing some landscaping happening outside the window right now. My guess is it’s the last effort at beautification before tonight’s big football game. [both chuckle] They want to show North Bend the grass is cut neatly here. [Greif laughs] I want to go back to this sense of the connection between San Francisco and Coos Bay. What did it mean culturally, or socially, and I suppose economically as well, to be closer in some ways to San Francisco than to Portland?
Greif: In the 1800s, from what I understand, the fashions that were in San Francisco were the ones that the local people here wanted to follow. The newspaper we got was probably more likely from California news than Oregonian news. It was just tough to get that kind of material here. Culturally, if you wanted to see a cultural event, you probably went south rather than north. Economically, it was everything. When the great quake happened in San Francisco, that very day, Coos Bay and North Bend people gathered all kinds of stuff and sent it out on ships to... we were the first people to provide rescue material after the quake.
Miller: Wow. Is that part of the reason that this is called Oregon’s Bay area?
Greif: I think so. We’re considered the Bay Area, and of course that’s what San Francisco calls them as well.
Miller: What if somebody did want to go to Eugene or Roseburg, let alone Portland? You’re a Coos Bay resident. How do you do it?
Greif: Well, now it’s two hours, but then it was two days. Until the railroad came in 1916, here’s the way out: You find a way to cross the bay, over to what we call The North Spit. You get to the beach, you hope it’s low tide. There’s a stage there waiting for you…
Miller: A horse-drawn wagon.
Greif: Correct. And it’s gonna go north for about 20 miles to the…
Miller: On the sand?
Greif: On the sand. And hopefully you don’t get swamped by a wave. You’re gonna get to the mouth of the Umpqua River. You catch a steamboat there that takes you past what now is Gardiner and Reedsport, all the way up to tidewater, which is at Scottsburg. You get off at Scottsburg, and you catch another stage or you get a horse and you get to Drain on land. At that point, by the 1870s or 1880s, the California and Oregon Railroad had come down from Portland towards Sacramento. It’s made its way down there. So, if you can get to the railroad, then you can probably get to Portland.
Miller: Now the network is more opened up to you.
Greif: Yes.
Miller: But this is after horse-drawn wagons on sand for hours and hours and hours, a steamboat and more horses.
Greif: Yeah, and you’re probably staying overnight in Scottsburg.
Miller: Okay. And that’s not a way to carry goods, right?
Greif: No.
Miller: That’s just to carry people or mail?
Greif: Right. Yeah, mail until the Coos Bay Wagon Road opened; that was another mail route. But pretty much that’s just passenger traffic. Goods had to come and go by ship.
Miller: So what was the Coos Bay Wagon Road? What was the idea behind it?
Greif: People early on recognized the necessity for getting something other than passenger travel and to get mail here quicker and get a telegraph line in, those kinds of things. So, to find a way across, they used kind of an old gambit that had been used in other areas called a military road. They applied to the government, federal government, for help. Could a company be formed and be given the option of having every other square mile, in a checkerboard pattern, of land to sell. Then that would develop a pathway from the bay to Roseburg.
Miller: Just like the O&C Lands…
Greif: Exactly.
Miller: That patchwork for the railroad.
Greif: Right. Exactly. So there’s the same idea. In 1870 they got the military grant, a company was formed, and construction started in 1870. It took two years to build. You wouldn’t call it a finished route in 1872, but we’re saying that at least mail deliveries came over that way, and some passenger traffic was going back and forth east-west, west-east by 1872,
Miller: But that was still about horse-drawn wagons?
Greif: Correct.
Miller: This was way before cars.
Greif: Right, and an overnight stay. There’s still today a couple homes you can clearly tell were like halfway houses where people could stay the night.
Miller: So I mean it seems like this wagon road, it shrank the effective distance a little bit between Coos Bay and and the other side of the Coast Range, but it didn’t fundamentally change the status quo.
Greif: No, that road was not for hauling logs, for example, or coal. That just wasn’t… It was a way to take herds of cattle or sheep or hogs over to Roseburg and for Roseburg to sell some of their goods here that could be lightly traveled, but had to go by stagecoach or cart.
Miller: So when did the railroad or highways, closer to the way we know them now. When did those finally connect this Bay Area?
Greif: In the 1890s, there was an attempt to build a railroad to Roseburg – south through Coquille and Myrtle Point and then over to Roseburg. It was called the Coos Bay, Roseburg and Eastern. It never got to Roseburg or Eastern. It got to Myrtle Point and then the Panic of 1893 happened, and the railroad ended there. Eventually, about 20 years later, the Southern Pacific got interested in this area as a resource. There were resources here that could be made into money. So they eventually built a line from Eugene through Florence, the way you came, along Highway 126. Then, following a number of lakes and rivers and sloughs, they got to Coos Bay, Marshfield, North Bend in 1916. So we’re pretty late to the game for rail in Oregon.
Miller: On a basic level, what we’re talking about here is isolation. It’s being cut off, for really clear geographical reasons, from other people in the rest of the state. How much of that has lingered, despite the fact that we now have the interstate highway that gets us all the way down…
Greif: That interstate highway is two hours away from us.
Miller: But then a number of them…
Greif: Yes.
Miller: …Highway 38 others that do cross, very easily and effectively, the Coast Range.
Greif: Right.
Miller: I mean it’s not the same, but I’m wondering if the sense of isolation has lingered.
Greif: I think to an extent. I’ve grown up here. Every five or six years, people running for political office talk about an east-west highway: Wouldn’t it be grand to have a direct route to I-5? Hasn’t happened in the 50-60 years I’ve lived here, but it’s been talked about a lot. Here’s another sense of isolation I get. I volunteer at the Coos History Museum. On Thursdays I’m at the front desk, and we greet a lot of visitors. I always ask them, ‘How did you get here?’ And if they’re Oregonians, I say, ‘Have you visited us before?’ You can imagine the small percent of Oregonians that say, ‘Oh, I’ve been here before.’ It’s actually not very high. A lot of folks, this is a corner of Oregon they just haven’t come to. They get to Seaside out of Portland, out of Salem. They get to Newport out of Corvallis. They even get to Siuslaw, Florence out of Eugene. But to get down here…
Miller: The next hour is where they stop.
Greif: And Curry County, forget it, unless you’re on your way to California and you want to see the redwoods. It’s a new venture for a lot of people.
Miller: How do you feel about that?
Greif: I love it, actually. [both laugh]
Miller: Why?
Greif: Those of us that live here… We are a real modern area. We have a community college that’s robust. We have the best hospital on the Oregon coast. We have movie theaters. We have great high schools here. The Mill Casino is booming. There’s lots of outdoor activities and the weather here is moderate. So it’s a great place to live.
Miller: But you don’t want a bunch of people to come and change it? I mean, is that the flip side? Because you’ve just explained in a kind of proud, boostery way what you love about this place.
Greif: Right.
Miller: But it seems like you’re also happy that it’s slightly undiscovered by the rest of the state.
Greif: Every person in this county that drives to Portland curses the traffic once we get north of Salem. None of us want that. I don’t think we’ll get it, but there it is. Oh…
[Voice in background over loudspeaker: “...game at 7 p.m. The theme is Pirate Pride. Let’s pack the student section. Go Pirates!”]
Greif: Well, as a Bulldog, I take great revenge on that one. But… [both laugh]
Miller: Well, let’s turn to that. As I noted, you were… How many years did you teach history and coach track and cross country?
Greif: I was in North Bend for 32 years.
Miller: 32 years. At the neighboring high school, the rival high school.
Greif: Right.
Miller: Why are there two cities here? Unlike the Twin Cities in Minneapolis or a lot of other places where there are two cities together, a river separates them. Here it’s just two cities abutting each other, and neither are huge.
Greif: Let’s go back to the transportation issue. When Marshfield – which was named Marshfield until 1944, and I’ll tell you why in a second – was started, it was on the other side, the south side, of Telegraph Hill. And there was no easy way… It was four miles to the north end of the peninsula, which is why it’s called North Bend. There wasn’t a land route. The early games between Marshfield and North Bend, kids took boats to get there.
Miller: Wow.
Greif: There wasn’t a bus that took kids. There were boats there.
Miller: I should say, this is 144 years ago, is when this sports rivalry…
Greif: Not 144 years, 144 games have been played since 1907…
Miller: Oh.. Okay.
Greif: …when Marshfield and North Bend finally had 4-year high schools.
Miller: Okay.
Greif: North Bend was a year earlier than Marshfield, by the way.
Miller: 115 years. Oh, and… [both chuckling] All the digs. This is what rivalries are about. [both laugh] You’re 1 year earlier.
Greif: Yeah, right. But, it was tough to get there. As the city’s moved closer together and the peninsula filled up, there were attempts – even from the North Benders – to put the two together. Part of it has to go with the fact that two school districts: Would they merge into one high school? And the difficulty of getting kids to those high schools was not erased until highways came in. I’ve talked to people who could not play North Bend High School athletics because they lived north of town and had to cross the bay, and the ferry… you know, it was tough to stay after school and play athletics, until the 1960s probably. So these two towns developed. In 1944, there was an attempt to consolidate everybody around the bay, and North Bend voted no. According to the laws, if one of the sections that are applying for consolidation says no, it doesn’t happen. When that consolidation did happen on other parts of the bay, Marshfield changed its name to Coos Bay. So 1944 is when it becomes Coos Bay. There have been three other attempts since then, and typically North Bend has said no. Because typically I think North Bend people – they have an airport there, they have Pony Village, the shopping center there – and I think they basically wondered what would happen to the city they knew if it merged, and City Hall was four miles away. But, personally, I had a hard time deciding, when I voted a couple of times on that issue, because there are some advantages to being one city. Certainly North Bend is sort of lost from time to time. People have flown in here thinking they’re in central Oregon, north of Bend, and it’s confusing.
Miller: Steve Greif, it was a pleasure talking to you. Thanks very much for helping us better understand the land and the history around here.
Greif: Sure. Great. I hope people come visit.
Miller: But don’t stay. [laughing]
Greif: [laughs] No, they can stay.
Miller: Okay. [both laughing] That is Steve Greif, a former North Bend High School history teacher and coach, a volunteer at the Coos History Museum. You can see Steve Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Dora Library and Tuesday evening at the Coos History Museum. There are gonna be more details at cooshistory.org.
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