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The site of Oregon City, the first incorporated city west of the Mississippi, also was the most important Indigenous settlement on Kalapuya land.
Oregon’s first city is blooming. Come see for yourself this spring. Two easy hikes take you on loops through fields of blue camas flowers on bluffs overlooking the Willamette River.
Oregon City was the first incorporated city west of the Mississippi and served as the Oregon Territory’s original capital. Before that, however, it had been the most important Indigenous settlement on Kalapuya land. Willamette Falls, where the river tumbles over a curving lava ledge, was a sure place to net leaping salmon and find sacred lamprey eels.
The powerful waterfall also attracted Dr. John McLoughlin of the Hudson’s Bay Company. He built a water-powered lumber mill in 1829 and founded a city next door. Later, paper mills clogged Willamette Falls with industrial buildings.
The abandoned mills and the dammed falls have long been a sore subject for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. They are working on a complicated, expensive project to restore the falls.
Meanwhile, Oregon City is shaking off its image as an industrial backwater. History is still big here. You can ride a free 1952 municipal elevator from the lower, riverside portion of Old Town up 130 feet to the upper part of the city, atop a lava bluff. The 1922 Arch Bridge crossing the Willamette River from Old Town was designed by Conde McCullough, the highway engineer who built the scenic spans on the Oregon Coast Highway.
In Oregon City you can now also choose from two dozen food carts and several breweries at 14th and Washington streets, where a large sign boasts “FREE BEER” (with smaller letters specifying “FREE wifi, great BEER”).
The two short hikes I recommend mix history and nature. Atop Canemah Bluff, a 1.3-mile trail starts at the site of a pioneer schoolhouse and loops past a historic cemetery. Canemah was originally a Native settlement called Kanim — the word for canoe. People would land canoes here to fish at Willamette Falls or to portage around them.
In 1844, an Oregon Trail pioneer named Absalom Hodges claimed the area as his private property under the Homestead Act. By 1850 he was building stern-wheel riverboats here to ply the upper Willamette. When navigational locks opened around the falls in 1873, Canemah became a residential suburb and was eventually annexed to Oregon City.
Because of the schoolhouse and the nearby pioneer cemetery, a large part of Canemah Bluff was never developed and now has been preserved as a nature park.
The cliffs are part of a 2.5 million-year-old basalt lava flow that once dammed the Willamette. Soil is sparse atop the cliffs because of Ice Age floods. Until about 12,000 years ago, a glacier in Canada repeatedly pinched off a branch of the Columbia River in what is now Idaho. That ice dam broke about every 80 years, unleashing a flood that roared down the Columbia and backed up into the Willamette Valley as far as Eugene.
At Oregon City, the incoming and outgoing floodwaters scoured the ground to bedrock. Scrub oak trees now struggle in a savannah where wildflowers bloom between rock outcrops.
Start your visit to Canemah Bluff by parking at the schoolhouse site, now converted to a children’s playground. Follow a paved path around the edge of the playground to the right, and then continue on a wide gravel path that’s open and wheelchair accessible for half a mile to the cemetery. Although the pioneer cemetery is open rarely (Memorial Day, Labor Day, and second Saturdays from May through September), you can peer through the gate.
Turn around at the cemetery and keep to the right on marked trails to return on a loop that climbs through deeper Douglas fir woods.
The other short hike I’m going to recommend near Oregon City visits a similar blufftop on the opposite side of the Willamette River. The Nature Conservancy bought 27 acres here in 1962, largely to preserve wildflower habitat. The Camassia Natural Area is named for Camassia quamash, the blue lily whose potato-like roots were a mainstay of the Kalapuyan diet. Also here is a rare white larkspur, found in only six other locations in the world.
Start out to the right on the 0.6-mile loop trail. After 0.2 miles a spur to the right leads to a clifftop viewpoint almost directly above the roaring I-205 freeway, with a distant view of Mount Hood. Near the end of the loop you could take a spur to the left to see a small, partly overgrown pond.
What’s remarkable about the trails near Oregon City is not their length or present grandeur. It’s that such wild areas have survived so close to Portland, in the historic heart of the old Oregon Territory.
Ready to take the trip?
- The Canemah Bluff trailhead starts from the Canemah Neighborhood Children’s Park in Oregon City.
- The Camassia Natural Area is 2.3 miles away by car, an 8-minute drive back across the river, at the end of Walnut Street in Oregon City.
