Umpqua River

Yeah, like the murky water, I can't.

But lakes, rivers, and I used to swim in the Russian River, which you really can't see through, and the Umpqua River in Oregon, which there were some places that were pretty clear and then some places that were a little algae-ish.

And I remember one time I was – there was a pretty strong current.

I think I was at River Forks.

On the way home, we stopped at something called the Twin Rivers Campground.

And my family, my sister and mom and dad and I, in the late summer of 1971, And I swam in the Umpqua River.

In fact, the Twin Rivers came in and I swam across the river.

Mom said, be careful, be careful.

Loved the water.

Fell in love with rivers in Oregon on that trip.

The Umpqua River.

Well, okay.

A land of delight it is, from Puget Sound to the Riviera of California, from the snow mountains to the sagebrush plains, where rose the dust of immigrants' prairie schooners not so many years ago.

The guardian of Oregon's southern gateway is Shasta, and close beside its gleaming flanks rolls the modern trail of steel, where on the wayfarer from San Francisco passes over the Siskiyouth into the valleys of the Rogue and the Umpqua.

Shasta displays its attraction surprisingly well.

An appreciative nature placed this great white gem in a wondrously appropriate setting of broken foothills and timbered reaches that billow upward to the snow line from the south and west, with never a petty rival to break the calm dominance of the master peak, and nothing to mar the symmetry of the cool green woodlands.

Slowly the serried mountains iron out into gentler slopes dimpled with meadows, and here and there are homes and cultivated fields, and steepish roads of many ruts.

Then the rushing Rogue River is a companion for a space, and orchards and towns dot the wayside.

More rough country follows, the Rogue and the Umpqua are left in turn, and the rails bear you to the regions of the Willamette.

A broad valley, rich, prosperous, and beautiful to look upon is the Willamette, and a valley of many moods.

Here we go.

More than 200 years ago, in late August of 1808, four men stood on the shore of an island near the mouth of the Umpqua River and looked out to sea.

An empty ocean stared back at them.

The ship that had carried them all the way from London to Oregon, the 170-ton sea otter, was gone, wiped off the face of the sea with every soul aboard by a violent late summer storm.

They had the clothes they were wearing, the rifles they were carrying, a total of six pounds of gunpowder and twenty of lead, and whatever might float ashore from the shipwreck.

These four stranded fur traders were about to embark on possibly the most remarkable overland journey of their century, a century that A. had just started and B. was studded with remarkable overland journeys.

Over the next two years they would walk, and occasionally float, from the mouth of the Umpqua River, the site of present-day Reedsport, to the mouth of the Mississippi River at New Orleans.

And outside of the frontier community in Louisiana, almost no one would ever know about it.