Bandon, a picturesque coastal town with a history of rising from ashes, is worth a visit

Bandon is not only the most picturesque town on the southern Oregon Coast, but it’s also the most stubborn. I’m going to suggest that you stroll a scenic 4.8-mile loop from Old Town to Face Rock. Meanwhile, allow me to recount a few tales of Bandon’s perseverance.

To start, drive Highway 101 south of Coos Bay 24 miles and turn left through an archway proclaiming “Welcome to Old Town Bandon.” Then drive a block to the riverfront and turn left to a big parking area beside the harbor, where seagulls screech from pilings.

Bandon’s “Old Town” — three blocks of shops, boutiques and galleries — is actually the most recent of four cities built on this site.

The first was a Coquille tribal village of cedar-plank longhouses. Looming above the town was Tupper Rock, a sacred monolith where good spirits dwelled. In those days, the tang of woodsmoke, kelp and fish drifted from the houses past a row of dugout canoes on the river beach.

The Coquilles’ 30-foot cedar canoes were ideal for river travel, but too small for the ocean. A legend tells of a time long ago when the tribe was tempted to travel the seas like their powerful Yurok neighbors on California’s redwood coast.

According to the legend, the evil ocean spirit Seatka left a huge redwood log on the village’s beach after a storm. Many in the tribe had avoided the foreign log as an omen. But two young brothers dared to carve it into a 60-foot canoe that could challenge the Yuroks.

As soon as the brothers paddled it onto the rough river bar, however, they capsized and drowned. Then the tribe knew Seatka had been using the redwood log as bait to capture foolish people.

The tribe was even more suspicious when strangers began arriving from the ocean in giant, white-winged canoes. After the California Gold Rush, miners searched the Pacific Coast for gold. They found it 5 miles north of Bandon in 1853, in the black sands of Whiskey Run Beach.

In 1854 a group of 40 miners decided to exterminate the natives. Without provocation, the miners attacked the village one morning, killing 15 men and one woman. The Army took the survivors to a reservation at Fort Umpqua in 1857. When settlers wanted that land in 1861, the Coquilles were marched to a new reservation at Yachats. And when even that rocky shore was opened to settlers in 1876, the tribe was forced farther north to the Siletz Reservation.

Shipyards and sawmills dominated the pioneer city that sprang up on the ruins of the Coquille village. By 1900 Bandon boasted the largest fleet between San Francisco and Astoria. Ocean steamers crossed the treacherous river bar regularly. Then fire swept through Bandon on June 11, 1914, leaving little more than ashes.

For the next two decades the town clawed its way back onto its feet. By 1936 it again boasted 500 buildings and a population of nearly 2,000. Bandon had risen for the third time.

In the summer of 1936 the hills about Bandon glowed with the yellow blooms of Irish gorse. Lord Bennett had brought the prickly wildflower to Bandon in the 1800s to remind him of his home in Bandon, Ireland.

Since then the oily bushes had spread to the edge of town. On Sept. 26, 1936, a wildfire raced through the gorse toward Bandon. All night, fishermen ferried people across the river to safety.

By morning only 16 buildings still stood.

After you have toured the shops of Old Town, head west along the riverfront toward the sound of the ocean. Across the river you’ll see the 40-foot tower of the Coquille River lighthouse. The beacon was built in 1896 to guide ships across the treacherous bar. But ships continued to founder. In fact, a three-masted lumber schooner nearly rammed the lighthouse in 1904, smashing into the rock just 30 feet away.

In the early 1900s the Army Corps of Engineers decided to protect ships by building jetties at the river mouth. To save money they quarried rock nearby, from Tupper Rock. Although this monolith had been the Coquille’s sacred site, the Army blew it up and dumped the boulders into the sea.

Then, in a final indignity, the government announced that the Coquilles no longer existed. They were declared “Americanized” and stripped of tribal status.

But the descendants of the Coquilles refused to give up their heritage. They started coming back to their homeland. They helped with excavations at the old village site, organized salmon bake festivals, and lobbied for reinstatement. In 1989, they won back tribal status. In 1990, they won back the quarry where Tupper Rock had stood. And in 1994 they built a retirement home there called Heritage Place, reclaiming for their elders the tribe’s most sacred place.

Have the people in Bandon always been so patient and yet so enduring? If you doubt it, continue to the setting of another legend. 

When you reach the jetty, walk left along the ocean beach. Offshore islands swarm with seagulls, cormorants and murres. Bring binoculars to spot the red-beaked puffins that arrive in April. After a mile on the beach you’ll cross a sandy gap between Coquille Point and Elephant Rock, an island shaped like a big-eared elephant with sea caves for eyes.

A mile further down the beach you’ll see Face Rock, an island with the striking profile of a girl’s uplifted face. According to a legend that has been reworded and revised many times over the years, this is Ewauna, the most stubborn of all Bandon’s visitors.

Ewauna was the daughter of a Takelma chief from far inland. When the Coquilles invited their neighbors to a potlatch feast, she insisted on coming along.

“I’ve never seen the ocean,” Ewauna explained to her father. “This is my chance.”

When she reached the Coquille village, the locals warned her about Seatka, the evil ocean spirit. They said he captures his victims by gazing into their eyes. Ewauna’s father forbade her to visit the beach alone.

But that night Ewauna stole down to the shore. She splashed through the waves and went for a swim by moonlight. Before long a dark cloud slid across the moon. Seatka’s cold hands began closing about her from behind.

Frightened, she tried to shake free. “Let go!”

“Come now,” Seatka murmured, turning her about, “Just look at me.”

Suddenly she remembered the warning that Seatka controlled people with his eyes. “No, I won’t look at you!” She turned her face away.

“Oh, yes.” He pulled his head closer. “Yes, you will.”

Defiantly she looked up into the sky and fixed her eyes on the most constant thing she could imagine — the North Star. And there she stubbornly gazes to this day, though time has turned the headstrong girl to the stone of Face Rock.

If you’re feeling stubborn, you could hike the beach another 2 miles past Face Rock to the Devils Kitchen. A wiser choice, perhaps, is to leave the beach just beyond Grave Point, where a staircase climbs to a picnic area. Then follow Beach Loop Road left back to Old Town — the fourth incarnation of the diehard city of Bandon.

Portions of this column originally appeared in William Sullivan’s book “Hiking Oregon’s History.”