Cascade Falls Portage

Cascade Falls Portage. . Thousands of Oregon Trail emigrant passed this way toward new lives in a place Abigail Scot, emigrant of 1852, called the "Garden of the World" The Willamette Valley was nearly 2,000 miles from Missouri, and by the time emigrants reached this portion of the trail with over 1,800 miles behind them, progress was impeded by the last major obstacle on the river route to the Oregon Trail - the great Columbia River Cascades, , Emigrant families reaching The Dalles in the 1840's often separated. Women, children and disassembled wagons boarded rafts and, with the help of local Indians, floated down the river. Men and boys drove livestock along the banks of the river. Waterborne emigrants were forced to portage around the perilous Columbia Cascades across the river from this site. By the 1850's this portage was improved by what Lydia Rudd, emigrant of 1852, called "an excuse here of a railroad...." This railroad was initially little more than a mule pulled car on a rough plank road. , ... we start this morning around the falls with our waggons we have 5 miles to go. I carry by babe and lead or rather carry another through snow and mud and water al most (sic) to my knees it is the worst road that a team could possibly travel. I went a head with my children and I affraid to look behind me for fear of seeing the wagon turn over in the mud and water with every thing in them my children give out with cold and fatigue and could not travel and the boys had to unhitch the oxon and bring them and carry the children on to camp. I was so cold and numb that I could not tell by feeling that I had any feel at all we started this morning at sunrise and did not get to camp untill after dark and there was not one dry thread on one of us not even my babe. I had carryed my babe and I was so fatigued that I could scarcely speak or step. -- Elizabeth Dixon Smith, November 18, 1847