The origin of the name "Coos" is open to discussion. It means "lake" and
"place of the pines" in a Native American Language of the nation's east
Coast. According to historians, the explanation has been around so long it
has gained almost universal acceptance. Several Native American tribes
claimed the Coos Bay Region as their ancestral homelands for thousands of
years before Europeans first visited the Oregon Coast. Members of the
Coos, Lower Umpqua, Siuslaw and Coquille tribes lived, hunted, fished and
gathered food along the bay and its estuaries, area rivers, and in the
forests and meadows.
British and Spanish sea captains made the first approaches to the South
Coast beginning about 400 years ago. Sir Francis Drake is said to have
sought shelter for the Golden Hinde somewhere near Cape Arago in 1579, but
few white explorers visited the region by land until the 1820's. Legendary
trader and adventurer Jedediah Smith journeyed through the region seeking
furs and Hudson's Bay company dispatched Alexander McLeod to search for an
inland passage.
The area remained largely unknown to Euro-Americans until the 1852
stranding of the schooner Captain Lincoln on the North Spit. The
survivors' 4-month encampment and subsequent rescue the brought attention
of gold prospectors who came to seek their fortune from beach placer
mining. The Coos Bay Commercial Company arrived the following year from
the Rogue Valley to open the wilderness to settlers. They established
Empire City, the county seat of government until 1896.
Early on, entrepreneurs were drawn to the area's waterways, forests and
fertile valleys. Sawmills and shipyards at Old Town North Bend and Empire
City fueled economic development and brought workers and their families.
Bay towns provided early commercial hubs for transportation systems
reaching inland as well as a home for the Mosquito Fleet of small boats.
Rivers and sloughs served as highways for transporting agricultural,
forest and coal products as well as carrying people to and from town.
Early promoters, in fact, called the Coos region the "Venice of the West".
Coal mining and salmon canning helped build the economy along with timber
harvesting and production, shipbuilding and farming.
Before the mid 1910's, difficulties of fording rivers and crossing the
Coast Range isolated the Coos region from the rest of Oregon. The Pacific
Ocean became the regional link to the outside world. A journey to San
Francisco by sailing ship took 48 hours and was easier and more
comfortable than the 150 mile, 3 day trip inland to Eugene via Scottsburg
and Drain by steamer and stage coach. Establishing passenger and freight
rail service to the interior valleys in 1916 --"Where Rail Meets
Sail"--opened this region to widespread commercial trade and tourism.
A shift to forest industrial production, improved highways and a booming
national economy led to extensive urban growth in the 1920's. The one-time
mixed economy was gradually changing from rural agricultural and
connections to
San Francisco were coming to an end. The first lumber shipment destined
directly for a foreign port left in 1922, bound for Japan.
The 1930's - 1950's brought about major changes. Shipyards contracted with
the U.S. Government to build minesweepers and rescue tugs for World War II
defense purposes. Large national lumber companies set up operations and
expanded significantly for the next two decades. Jetty improvements,
commercial fishing and crabbing shaped the development of Charleston. The
completion of the Coos Bay Bridge (now McCullough Memorial Bridge) in 1936
and the Roosevelt Highway significantly improved modern transportation
connections and provided the final link in opening the Coos region to the
outside world.
Coos Bay, Oregon's largest Coastal estuary and shipping port, together
with its surrounding Coastal range forest lands and tributary streams, has
provided human beings with a place to live and work for thousands of
years. The ancestors of today's local Indian tribes--the Confederated
Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians, and the Coquille
Indians--lived here long before Europeans landed on the eastern shore of
North America. The Coquille Tribe, as owner of the Mill Casino on Coos
Bay, is today one of the region's largest employers.
Although Spanish and English ships sailed along the Oregon Coast as far
back as the 16th century, Hudson's Bay Company fur traders were the first
Europeans to reach Oregon's south Coast and Coos Bay in the 1820s. After
early settlement of the Willamette Valley by white Americans in the 1840s,
and the California gold rush in 1849, a small group of Americans reached
Coos Bay in 1853, and established the first town of Empire City, which is
now part of the city of Coos Bay. The lumberman and shipbuilder Asa Meade
Simpson established the mill and shipbuilding town of North Bend in 1856.
The pioneer period on Coos Bay lasted for about another half century. The
first sawmills and shipyards were built in the 1850s. Coal mining began
with the first settlers who came in 1853. By the late 1850s and 1860s
farmers settled along the Coos and Coquille Rivers. A war between whites
and Indians that engulfed all of southern Oregon from the Umpqua River
south to the California border in 1855-56 led to the defeat of Indian
people and their forced relocation onto Indian reservations on the north
Coast of Oregon. From the beginning of white settlement the Coos Bay
region was tied into a Coastal market for lumber, coal, salmon, and
agricultural products centered on San Francisco and Portland. From the
1890s to 1920 the Coos Bay region's economy shifted from a mixed economy
to one centered more on forest industrial production and large-scale coal
mining. Agriculture became more specialized with dairy farming becoming
the chief producer. During World War I there was a temporary expansion of
wooden shipbuilding, but it proved to be the last days for this industry.
The single most important event was the opening of the C. A. Smith Lumber
Company mill on Coos Bay in 1908. This was the largest and most advanced
mill on the Pacific Coast at the time. From the 1890s, federal funding of
bar and harbor improvements helped make Coos Bay an ideal lumber shipping
port.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the coal mining industry collapsed because of the
introduction of fuel oil. Shipbuilding on Coos Bay also declined. But new
technology in forest industry led to the construction of veneer, pulp and
paper, and plywood mills throughout the region. In the 1920s road building
created a new transportation network. People were no longer dependent on
riverboat transportation. As of 1916 the railroad competed with Coastal
steamers to transport people in and out of the region. But in the 1930s,
during the Great Depression, federal and state government funded Coastal
highway and bridge building. After 1936, Coos Bay was linked to the
Willamette Valley and the rest of the Oregon Coast by automobile
transportation. After 1945 Weyerhaeuser Timber Company and Menasha
Woodenware Company built manufacturing plants on Coos Bay. The region
launched into a new era of stepped up forest industrial production. The
peak year of employment in forest industry came in 1960-61. But a steep
decline in forest industry employment, and closure of manufacturing
plants, did not come until the 1980s. In the years 1981-83, some 2,000
timber industry jobs disappeared in Coos County. The decline in forest
industry continued through the 1990s.
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