What Was The Oregon Trail

Baker City and the Oregon Trail take visitors back to days of gold fever and ...

BAKER CITY, Ore. -- With Victorian-era buildings nearly uninterrupted along the city's expansive Main Street -- wide enough for a mule team to turn around -- Baker City makes a modern visitor feel like a time traveler.

More than 100 Baker City buildings are on the National Register of Historic Places and Baker City is just seven miles from the Bureau of Land Management's National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, where visitors can still walk the same path as the Pacific Northwest's pioneers.

Although the Oregon Trail runs near Baker City, it does not go through the town, which was built during the gold rush of the 1860s and during a second, 20-year mining boom from 1890 to 1910, well after the Oregon Trail's 1840-60 heyday. Discoveries from the gold rush are on permanent display at the U.S. Bank on Main Street, where a five-pound gold nugget shines in a glass case.

Nicknamed variously Queen City of the Mines and Queen City of the Inland Empire, Baker City became one of the largest outposts between Salt Lake City and Spokane, Wash. (Baker City is a two-hour drive from Boise, Idaho, and five hours from Portland.)

With gold flowing freely, opulence followed, including the arrival of a saltwater aquarium to hold live lobsters imported from Maine in the 1890s.

As the decades passed, mining gave way to ranching and efforts to update the cityscape resulted in the erection of aluminum storefronts that hid the history beneath. These facades may have been ugly, but they also protected the historic buildings. By the 1970s, Baker City had fallen on hard times.

"People walked out and closed the door," said Ann Mehaffy, director of Historic Baker City Inc., a nonprofit revitalization program. "They didn't have the will or the money to tear down old buildings and build new ones. That was a huge advantage in the end."

Baker City's historic district was nominated to the National Register in 1978 and efforts to revitalize the city core took off in the 1990s with a strategic plan to preserve and promote the city's historic buildings, unearthed from their mid-century makeovers.

"If there's one thing you're going to do, go explore the historic district," suggests Barbara Sidway, co-owner with her husband, Dwight, of the Geiser Grand Hotel. "It's the most intact, 19th-century streetscape in the American West and there are friendly shopkeepers who will welcome you in their doors. It's like a museum that's always open and it charges no fee.

Salmon Bay School simulates Oregon Trail » My Ballard

This is so cool.  I’ve been researching my great grandmother’s life after her husband was killed over a grazing dispute and imagine her trip in the 1800’s from Kansas to Montana was  via horse and wagon.  How difficult life must have been.  Re: the kid they pulled off the trail, cholera was a big deal back then – my great gma lost her pigs and chickens to their versions of it.

The Oregon trail, sketches of prairie and Rocky-mountain life

The Oregon Trail, An American Saga

The Oregon Trail

Life on the Oregon Trail

Oregon Trail Stories, True Accounts of Life in a Covered Wagon