ARCHIE SATTERFIELD

The Tillamook Way

By Archie Satterfield


The history of Tillamook has been that when problems arose, when things needed to be done, there was an overabundance of common sense, fairness, and a desire to excel.
--Beale Dixon



Chapter 1
Beginnings

There were three dairies in operation in the county at this time. Dougherty’s, Trask’s and Wilson’s, the latter a bachelor. Captain Ketchum paid forty cents per pound in trade for butter here and sold it for fifty cents in Astoria.
--Warren M. Vaughn diary, 1853


It would be nice if history told us the first batch of cheese in Tillamook was made by a kindly, wise man who had the welfare of the community in mind. But history can be revised only up to a point and we have to live with the facts. The first vat of cheese was made in either 1855 or 1856 by a man named William W. Raymond, who was in the valley because he was the first Indian Agent. Sadly, it must be reported that this gastronomic pioneer was also a scoundrel. The Bureau of Indian Affairs issued him more than $3,000 in trade goods--flour, sugar, coffee, blankets, hickory shirts, calico, pitchforks, rakes and even two large cast-iron plows--and instructed Raymond to use these goods to buy Tillamook Valley from the local Indians.
If he bought any land from the Indians, no record of the transaction survives. Instead, he kept the piles of goods for his own use. Consequently, the three tribes in the region--the Tillamooks, Nehalems and Nestuccas--were never paid for their land. A scoundrel to the end, Raymond told the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Portland, General Joel Palmer, that he had bought the entire valley from the Indians. General Palmer passed along this false information to his superiors in Washington, D.C. Also, Raymond did not sign receipts for the $3,000 worth of goods from Portland, so Palmer had to make up Raymond’s shortages out of his own pocket.
At this late date we have no way of knowing what kind of cheese he made but we can be certain the only resemblance between it and the cheese made in Tillamook today is that they both happened to be made in the same geographic area.
The only other reference to cheese from this pioneering period was what they called “Dutch cheese,” which was probably what they later called pot cheese. It was similar to cottage cheese, according to Floyd Bodyfelt, the Tillamook County farm boy who became a world famous Oregon State University specialist in cheese. Cottage cheese was developed in Tigard, Oregon, in 1915 by the Red Rock Cheese factory. “People used to call it pot cheese,” Bodyfelt said. “They skimmed the milk and sent the cream to the creamery. Originally they used the skimmed milk to slop the hogs. But to make pot cheese, they put the skimmed milk on the back of the stove and let it clabber. Then they cut it into curds, cooked it to force out the water then ate it with a milk or cream dressing.”
Life was harder in the remote valley than in the rapidly filling Willamette Valley and along the Columbia River, but the land was free. So they came. The first settler of European descent, Joe Champion, arrived in 1851 and lived in a hollowed-out tree while he built a proper house for himself. When the first official census was conducted on January 1, 1854, it showed a population of five or six families and eleven bachelors for a head count of 50. Champion, the first and most famous citizen, had by this time packed his meager belongings and wandered out of Tillamook history. Several other pioneers were questioning the wisdom of their choice of a place to live. Tillamook Bay is still somewhat remote, but when the pioneers came it was at least a three-day march through brush, over fallen trees and back and forth across rivers from the Willamette Valley. Walking or riding a horse north to Astoria was a major undertaking because crossing Neahkahnie Mountain was almost as formidable as crossing the Rockies.
The only other real choice was by the small coastal sailing vessels that took passengers and their produce out of the safety of Tillamook Bay into the open Pacific, north to the treacherous Columbia River bar, then upriver to Portland. Nearly all of these small boats were future misfortunes, waiting their turn to run aground along the coast and perish.
Although several of the first settlers, especially lonely bachelors, gave up and left, most stayed on and began the agonizingly slow process of clearing their land for crops. For decades this clearing continued in the valley: cut down a tree, saw it into firewood or lumber, then begin digging up the stump. The first generation of settlers seldom had the benefit of explosives, so they had to use axes, shovels and saws, slowly digging up each root until the stump was clear. They had to hitch a team of horses to the monster to add it to a pile of stumps, branches and other combustible debris stacked around a tree, slowly building a giant pyramid that was called a Tillamook Volcano. When the wood was sufficiently dry, the pyre was set afire and it would burn hot and bright for days.
This laborious land clearing continued for more than a century in Tillamook County and anyone over the age of 60 has vivid memories of this hard, seemingly endless work. Fritz Marti’s father bought a 93-acre farm in 1928 that was covered with trees, logs and brush and the family spent the next 20 years clearing the place. His father bought a steam donkey to help with the clearing, and in 1941 he and his father build a monstrous pile they were going to set afire that winter.
“It was more than 100 feet through,” Marti said, “but World War II broke out in December and the government wouldn’t permit such big fires, so the pile sat there until 1946 before we could burn it. Andy Anderson, an old-time farmer who lived near us, said that if we could can that heat we would stay warm for a long time.”
There were disappointments upon disappointments for the first settlers. It did not take them long to discover that the land they were working so hard to clear also had limitations imposed on it by the damp and cool climate. There weren’t enough growing days in the average year to support row crops. Few vegetables had a chance to mature before autumn, and every diary of the period mentions killing frosts in mid-summer, constant rainy and overcast weather, frequent floods and days or weeks with no sunshine. But the land did grow one important crop very well, and that was grass. It grew almost the year around and remained green even in the middle of the wet winters. Cattle thrived on the lush grass. The valley soon had a surplus of milk and the settlers knew that dairy products and salted salmon were the only reliable sources of cash.
Since nearly everyone had at least one cow, the local market for milk and butter was limited. The only solution was to ship their goods to the growing city of Portland by small trading vessels. They shipped potatoes when the growing season cooperated, maybe some grain, always barrels of salted fish and wooden kegs of butter called firkins. This wasn’t very satisfactory, either, because the ships were not at all reliable, and the butter they so laboriously churned and packed was often rancid before it could reach the market. Some farmers took their butter to Portland, Sheridan or McMinnville over the torturous wagon roads at the end of the milking season each summer.
Butter posed several problems related to storage and undesirable flavors. Cows ate wild onions and various strong-flavored weeds and butter makers tried numerous methods of counteracting the taste. Some added chlorine to the cream before it was churned. Artificial flavors were tried. But the end result was the same; bad butter.
Seeing the need to own their own ship, a group of farmers and fishermen formed a company and in the summer of 1853 bought the sloop Rogers in Portland for $800. They filled it with provisions and sailed down the Columbia River, across the bar into the ocean, then south to Tillamook Bay without incident. They decided the Rogers should be enlarged, so they hauled it out of the water, removed the deck, raised the sides about a foot with lumber they had made, then replaced the deck. They proclaimed it better than new. There remained a problem, though: nobody in the valley was a professional seaman and if ever a stretch of ocean required expert seamanship it was the north Oregon coast and the Columbia River bar which nearly every year earned its nickname, Graveyard of the Pacific, by wrecking another boat or two, often claiming lives as well.
Then came a fortuitous event that probably caused Tillamook residents to believe in good luck. During the winter of 1853 a storm delivered a group of experienced seamen to Tillamook. A bark named the General Warren was enroute to the Columbia River when the storm dismasted her about 50 miles south of Tillamook Bay and all rigging was lost. The seamen stayed aboard the dying ship for about 10 days before she finally went aground south of Tillamook Bay. Eight survived the event and were rescued by a group of Indians who guided them north to the settlers in Tillamook. There they were fed and clothed and permitted to rest for a few days before continuing their journey overland to the mouth of the Columbia. Two of the seamen decided to stay on in Tillamook and help the settlers with the sloop they had just bought.
At last, the settlers thought, their transportation problem was solved. They loaded the sloop with dried fish and butter and set sail for Astoria. That night a gale came up and the sloop was wrecked on Clatsop Beach, boat and cargo a total loss. Fortunately the crew got ashore and the two sailors walked on in to Astoria and caught a ship to England and were never heard of again.
This left the Tillamook residents in worse conditions than ever. They were stranded with no hope of getting more provisions for at least four months. The company they had formed was broke and the 25 barrels of dried salmon would never sell so the word was passed through the community to come and get as much of the dried salmon as they needed. Free.
With some luck still with them, they found a small wrecked sloop named the McEwing in Skipanon Slough near Astoria. They bought it for $50 with hardly a glance at it, then found that in addition to the obvious problems of no sails or rigging, it had many broken timbers and planks, no rudder, no booms or bowsprit. It was indeed a wreck and probably should have been left to rot in peace, but somehow they raised enough money to have her rebuilt in Astoria and sailed down to Tillamook. By still another stroke of good luck, they found two experienced Danish ship carpenters in Astoria, Charles Hendrickson and Peter Morgan, who agreed to come to Tillamook, file land claims and become partners in the plan to build a community-owned schooner.
The Danes’ first order of business was building homes for themselves, and this kept them occupied for the next three months while Tillamook citizens waited. Once their homes were built and the men settled in, it was time to begin building the ship. Four men, the carpenters, Hendrickson and Morgan, and two residents, Warren N. Vaughn (from whose diary most of this information was gathered) and O.S. Thomas, formed a company to build the ship. They began work on September 24, 1854, by cutting a stern, stern post and keel, which they hauled down to Vaughn’s Landing on Hoquarton Slough. There they built a crude shelter called a salmon house to use for cooking and shelter from the frequent rain. A jovial blacksmith named Stephen Clark trudged across the mountains with his family and he was immediately hired to work on the ship.
In the meantime, the small sloop the settlers had rescued was kept busy that fall hauling out four tons of butter and some wheat and barley over a period of several weeks. Just after work began on the new sloop, the skipper said the McEwing was leaking badly and needed to be hauled out and repaired. But winter was almost on them and there was still butter and grain to be hauled, so with misgivings the skipper, Sam Howard, set sail again for Astoria. He unloaded, then took on a load of material for the new sloop and some provisions for the settlers and departed for Tillamook. While crossing the Columbia bar, the wind failed and the little McEwing drifted onto Peacock spit and broke up. No lives were lost but Tillamook was without a contact with the rest of the world again. The loss so demoralized the community that three more bachelors gave up and walked out of the valley, never to return.
The partners worked even harder on the new sloop and when the keel was laid, she measured 37.5 feet with a hold of 6.5 feet and was registered at 31.5 tons. “But she could carry fifty tons with ease,” Vaughn proudly wrote.
A sailing vessel requires a lot of hardware and they hoped they would not have to ask the blacksmith to make it all. So their luck, which seemed to ricochet wildly from terrible to good, improved when someone told them that a British man ‘o war named the Shark had been wrecked on the Columbia Bar sometime between 1843 and 1846. The deck and parts of her hull had drifted south and grounded on Arch Cape. The shipbuilders wasted no time in getting up to Arch Cape on horseback to look over this treasure chest. They found many pieces of hardware that could be used on the sloop, and more than enough other iron to be fashioned by the blacksmith as needed. They hauled four loads of the iron--all brass fittings had been taken by earlier scavengers--on pack horses, learning how to properly balance and secure loads as they went along. Before they learned completely, one horse almost fell off the narrow trail around Neah-Kah-Nie Mountain when a cinch broke and the pack swung down under his belly.
After they had all the ironwork they needed, good luck intruded again when they heard of another shipwreck, this one loaded with stores for a lighthouse. It had also wrecked on the Columbia bar and split in half. One half drifted all the way down to Netarts Bay where the Indians stripped her of her iron bolts and standing rigging. More important, they also found several bolts of canvas for sails. The Indians walked up to Tillamook Bay to talk to the ship builders and sold everything to them for $10.
The ship was ready to launch on December 29, 1854, but one important item was missing; the tallow to make the ship slide down the ways. Hendrickson, by now referred to as Captain Hendrickson, was certain the slippery mud from the bay would be sufficient. So on January 1, 1855, with nearly everyone in the community watching, the ship was readied for its launching. A speech was made George Scott, who was also given the honor of naming her.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned, “it has fallen to my share in the program to name this craft. Now as we look to the east early in the morning, we see a beautiful bright star ascending. We all know it to be the harbinger of a new day, and as we all look at this sturdy craft, we hail it as the blessing of a new day in Tillamook County. We therefore name this schooner the Morning Star of Tillamook.”
He had no bottle of wine to break over the bow, but Tillamook had lots of water, so he improvised with a bottle of water. The blocks were loosened to let her slide into the water. The ship just sat there. It didn’t move an inch on the muddy planks. The crowd cheered anyway. Suddenly a hard rain began falling and the citizens dashed for cover. The shipbuilders stayed in the shelter and partied all night to the sound of Sam Howard’s fiddle while the rain poured and a flood developed. The next day Adam Trask, one of the community leaders, told the group he would kill a steer so they could use the tallow to launch the ship. They agreed it was a good idea and several went with him, fighting their way to Trask’s home through the hard rain and acoss the flooded valley. Trask killed a steer and fried off enough tallow to make the ways slippery.
The ship was launched on January 5 with no further fanfare, which is just as well. It immediately ran aground because the flood had changed the channel. No matter. It was pulled off the mud and she floated majestically on the bay. Soon they had her loaded and were out of the bay and on their maiden voyage to Astoria. Just as they cleared the Tillamook bar, they met the revenue cutter Carvin, which heeled over to come for a closer look at this sloop with no paint and splotches of pitch marring her sides. The owners were surprised that the cutter didn’t board the Morning Star on the grounds she looked like something smugglers or thieves would own.
Thus the first ship built and registered in the Oregon Territory began her career. Sadly, the ship that became such a strong symbol to the Tillamook community in the pioneer period, and remains a vivid symbol today on the logo of Tillamook Cheese, did not long remain in Tillamook ownership. Two of the owners were in financial difficulty, and one owed so much money in Portland that creditors were threatening to attach the schooner. The other owners didn’t have enough money to buy out their partners, so the Morning Star was sold to the merchants Leonard and Green in Astoria, who also were owned money by one of the owners. They soon sold the Morning Star to a company on Puget Sound and she was lost in the Strait of Juan de Fuca in November, 1860.