"A Giant in the Earth"

"A Giant in the Earth". . , Old Wasco County was uniquely different from all the rest. The Territorial Legislature created it in massive form in response to a citizen petition citing need and desire of residents east of the mountains. , At first the name was to be Whitman but this gave way to Wasco and the new county came thus into existence on Jan. 11, 1854. , Old Wasco's 130,000 square miles extended in a giant swath from the crest of the Cascade Mountains to the continental divide atop the Rockies and made it the largest organized county in U.S. history. It occupied a sizable part of Oregon Territory in 1854 and remained so until 1859 when statehood arrived and the eastern boundary retracted across what later became Idaho. Wasco County no longer encompassed parts of Wyoming and Montana, including a corner of what became Yellowstone National Park. , And no longer did enterprisers on rivers such as the Green and the Snake need a license from Wasco County to operate a ferry. The west slope of Wyoming's South Pass lay in the extreme eastern part of the Old County and from there is was tilted downhill for emigrants on the Oregon Trail. Untold thousands headed for what they conceived as a new Eden, leaving their more timid neighbors behind and seeking fulfillment in the Willamette Valley. , Those who took the Sublette Cut Off west of the Pass instead of staying on the curving main line traveled the whole distance to the Cascades on a line north of the 42nd parallel and thus rolled their wagons in our county at least 900 miles nearly one half of the whole mileage to Oregon from the Midlands. , Nature decreed that old Wasco would help shape Oregon's history by offering two travelways past the Cascade Range the Barlow Road, after 1845, around the south flank of Mount Hood and the swirling Columbia-Willamette trail for those who preferred to "take water!". , By the time this county was established, Fort Dalles had it's garrison and missionaries had been preaching to Native residents for years. , Divisions in subsequent years yielded 17 new counties out of Wasco's portion of Oregon. So Wasco is sometimes called "The Mother of Counties".