Bend – Oregon - History

The major mountain peaks in the Cascades include Mount Hood  and Mount Bachelor . Crater Lake  near the California border is formed by the caldera of an ancient Cascades volcano that erupted thousands of years ago. 500 square mile volcano, a volcano that remains very active to this day. Newberry is both seismically and geothermally active. Geologists believe the caldera sits over a shallow magma body only 2 to 5 kilometers deep. Visitors see numerous cinder cones (over 400 throughout the area), miles of basalt flows, as well as rhyolite flows of obsidian. 70 million years ago, most of what is now Oregon was covered by warm seas that supported a rich variety of sea life including brachiopods, corals, sponges, and ammonites. On low-lying land, ferns, cycads, ginkgoes, and conifers grew in a warm, temperate climate. Fossils of these and many other plants and animals have been found in the older rocks of Oregon.From about 70 million years ago to the present, land emerged from the tropical warm seas and volcanism dominated the geologic history of Oregon. The Cascade Range, a great north-south chain of volcanoes, has been growing in episodes for the past 40 million years. Fifteen million years ago they had grown high enough to affect the climate of central and eastern Oregon. The Cascades began to block moisture carried eastward by winds from the Pacific Ocean. Beginning 17 million years ago, about when rainfall began to decrease, volcanic activity sent enormous floods of lava, called the Columbia River Basalts, over the landscape east of the Cascades. For the next 5 million years, flood after flood of lava buried everything except the highest hills and mountains. All plants and animals in the path of these lavas were killed and buried. Enough time passed between some flows for plants and animals to re-establish themselves. Volcanism before and after these enormous outpourings was common but much smaller in scale. The Tumalo Project, which was begun in 1900, attracted numerous settlers to the area west of Bend during several bursts of optimism between 1900 and 1935. Unfortunately, the most ambitious construction project, and one critical to agricultural development of the Tumalo project, failed when the Tumalo reservoir failed to hold water. Engineers had simply overlooked the characteristics of the local volcanic landscape with its porous underlying rock and numerous subterranean lava tubes

The earliest Euroamerican entry into the semiarid interior of Bend Oregon was in 1825 with the explorations of Finan McDonald and Peter Skene Ogden. Following Indian trails, Hudson's Bay trappers set out to explore the upper Deschutes watershed and traveled as far south as Klamath Lakes. The British intended to trap out the area so that Americans crossing the Rockies would find hundreds of miles of terrain barren of fur resources. Initially, contact with native peoples was friendly; however, by 1826, Ogden's camp was threatened when local Indians set the plain near his camp on fire late one windy night. American fur trappers arrived in the 1830's, but encountered extreme difficulties and near starvation. It was truly a beaver desert (LaLande 1987).

In the 1840's, the promotion of the Trans-Mississippi West by Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton led to a round of government supported exploring expedition. Lt. John C. Fremont of the Topographical Engineers explored the eastern flank of the Cascades in 1843-1844. His diary celebrates the beauty of Central Oregon, "the beautiful pine forest, the deep and swift Deschutes, and the bottomlands of lush grass"

In the 1840's-1850's, the lure of Oregon Country stimulated thousands to set across the plains and cross the Rockies over the Oregon Trail that traversed western states north of present day Central Oregon. In 1843, 700 settlers crossed along the trail; in 1845, 3,000 emigrants traversed the trail. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 prompted a great rush of emigrants across the west. Several "shortcuts" also were used in 1845 and again in 1852. Crossing due west across central Oregon after the Oregon trail crossed the Snake River, more than 1,000 emigrants followed a former fur trapper named Stephen Meek over the disastrous Meek Cutoff. One contingent crossed near the present town of Bend. At the turn of the century, Bend & central Oregon focused on the developing of rail lines to their small communities. Rails meant prosperity, stability, and economic survival to small western communities.