Willamette Landings: Ghost Towns of the River by Howard McKinley Corning

Abstract

to explorations in other regions ? the failed American expeditions up the Red River and Mungo Park's disastrous push into thedisease ridden tropics. This brief summary cannot do justicetothese varied essays and theirappeal todifferent kinds of readers,but itshould suggestthattheycontain attractive samples of stimulatingnew work and new questioning. Books about Lewis and Clark already filla long shelf,but thesepapers display how open-ended the discussion continues to be: relating art, science, geography, diplomacy, political theories, anthropology, literature,and technologytoThomas Jefferson, his twocaptains, and their adventures. Not even the branching linksofa computerprogram can quite hold all the questions and lore these fewessays takeup. This book also embodies three endur ingways ofmaking sense of such sprawling materials. It records lively exchanges between expert participants as they answer and refer to each other. Itholds their reconsidered and re sharpened arguments.And itreproduces some valuable graphics, includingmaps, illustrations of particular terrains, and artistic treatments of natural objects. Even an expert reader will find good reasons to pause and reconsider such details, from the tellingarrangements ina drawing to thevectors on amap or the garish modern structuresnow embedded in American landscapes. The subtitle makes a nice echo: Lewis and Clark infactfollowed old trailsinnew direc tions, and so do thesewriters in retracing their many routes intoour history. Willamette Landings: Ghost Towns of theRiver, 3rd edition ByHoward McKinley Corning with a new introduction by Robin Cody Oregon Historical Society Press, Portland, 2004. Illustrations, maps, index. 240 pages. $16.00 paper. Reviewed by Charles Goodrich Oregon State University,Corvallis Willamette landings isfullof steamboat explosions, town-devouring floods, and fortunesmade and lost.Author Howard McKinley Corning was a poet aswell as a histo rian, and beneath the clamor of commerce and natural disasters, he delivers the precise details and vivid scenes that re-animate a timewhen the river was thedominant mode of commercial and passenger transportation.Willamette Land ings, originallypublished in 1947,draws together research and oral histories collected bywriters working forthe Works ProgressAdministration's Oregon Writers' Project in the 1930s.This third edition includes newly added historical photo graphs,maps, and an insightfulintroductionby Robin Cody. Oregon possesses a short, damp, and worm eatenmemory. Native peoples of the Willamette valley ? primarily themany local bands of the Kalapuya ? were decimated so quickly by dis eases that thevery survival of theirculturewas threatened,and relativelyfewartifactssurvived. The physical culture of thefirsthalf century of European expansion into theOregon Country has proven nearly as ephemeral: houses and public buildings, wagons, boats, and wharves ? allmade ofwood ? aremostly gonewithout a trace. Whole townswere sweptaway by floods, dismantled for salvage, or leftto decay under devouring waves of blackberry bushes. Coming's Willamette Landings ismade of more durable stuff.Inwonderful vignettes, in the patient recording of town histories, and in its evocation of a bygone time,Willamette Reviews 317 Landings isa stayagainst forgetting.Itservesas a marker inour culturalbaseline bywhich we may measure the speed and trajectoryof our furious and sweeping transformation of the landscape. Itsproper nouns? all thehaunting names of people and places ? conjure the timeswith remarkable eloquence. Listen to these names from the seven-page listofWillamette steam boat landings appended to theback of thebook: "Gillihan's Landing ... Lover's Lane ... Mock's Landing... Shaver's Dock... The Old O.S.N. Co. Bone Yard ... String Town ... Shank's Landing... Hince's Woodyard" (241-7). Corn ing caught theperiod music that stillresides in those names. In his spirited introduction, Robin Cody placesWillamette Landings in itshistorical con text, noting thatComing's masculinist outlook, his slightingaccounts ofNative Americans, and his scant attention to environmental concerns reflected thedominant views ofComing's day. Cody suggests taking Willamette Landings on a canoe tripdown the Willamette to seefirsthand how our relationship to the riverhas shifted from commerce to recreation and conservation. There couldn't be amore pleasant way to experi ence thebook. ButWillamette Landings isalso a record of how river transportation shaped the development of the invading European culture and how theadvent of therailroads led to whole sale abandonment ofmuch of that riverside infrastructureand culturalways. Another fruitful way to read thebook might be to take italong as one drives the I-5 corridor, thinkingahead to thenext enormous transfor mation in our dominant mode of transporta tion.Proprietors of those nowhere commercial nodes and bedroom communities that...