Sherman County History

The Early Years

For centuries preceding western settlement, Columbia Basin Tenino and Wyam  Indians lived, fished, hunted and traded along the three rivers that border Sherman County, the Columbia, Deschutes and John Day.

The Nez Perce Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon, and the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakima Indian Nation are the tribes in the Columbia Basin with 1855 Columbia River Treaty rights to anadromous fish. http://www.critfc.org/text/tribes.html

Early explorers reported the splendid abundance of the Pacific Northwest and by 1843 thousands of pioneers set out for the Oregon Country. Emigrants passed through what is now Sherman County in a great cloud of dust on the way to the Willamette Valley.

The county’s first permanent white settler was William Graham, who located at the mouth of the Deschutes River in 1858. Next came innkeepers and operators of stage stations, ferries and toll bridges. Stockmen followed with herds of horses, cattle and sheep which ranged freely over the rolling bunchgrass hills. Jesse Eaton settled at the head of Spanish Hollow.

Homesteaders, eager for land, arrived in the 1880s by steamers, stages and wagons; shortly, farmers settled every quarter section. The area changed almost overnight from livestock country to a farming community as settlers built homes, plowed the grass and fenced the rolling prairie in order to receive government patents.

With the area growing rapidly and desiring independence from Wasco County, E. O. McCoy’s legislative bill creating a county to be called Fulton, after the pioneer Fulton family, passed in 1889. The name given, however, was Sherman after General William Tecumseh Sherman of Civil War fame.

Trails, Rails and Roads

Beginning in the 1840s, Oregon pioneers passed through the northern part of the county on the Oregon Trail, from the John Day River Crossing to the crossing at the mouth of the Deschutes River. Some emigrants destined for the Barlow Road took the Cut-off to the Barlow Road a short distance west of the John Day River  leading southwesterly through Grass Valley Canyon to present-day Grass Valley and down Hollenbeck Point to Buck Hollow and a dangerous crossing of the Deschutes River.

From the 1860s, a series of stage, mail and freight routes crossed the county, connecting The Dalles with Boise, Umatilla, Walla Walla and Canyon City. The Dalles Military Road, established in 1868, cut from the northwest on the Deschutes diagonally toward Shaniko in Wasco County on the south, following a route used for years by pack train operators.

Oregon Railway and Navigation Company trains roared down the Columbia from the John Day River to Celilo in 1881. This railway connected with the transcontinental line in 1883, bringing many settlers to this area.

The Columbia Southern Railroad, running from Biggs on the Columbia River to Wasco, was built in 1897 with much celebration as it ended long days of hauling wheat by wagon to the river. By 1901 the railroad reached Shaniko, stretching 70 miles.

The county’s population swelled to 4,242 in 1910, during the James J. Hill and E.H. Harriman fight to build a railroad up the Deschutes River.

Today, Interstate 84 parallels the Columbia River, intersecting at Biggs with Highway 97 which traverses the full length of the county and links Sherman County to Washington State via the Sam Hill Memorial Bridge.

Highway 206 follows Fulton Canyon from the Columbia River through Wasco to Cottonwood Grade and the John Day River, destination Condon and beyond. Highway 216 runs from Grass Valley to the juncture of Buck Hollow and the Deschutes River near Sherar’s Bridge.

Barges pushed by tugs ply the waters of the Columbia River pushing goods and fuel upriver and carrying grain to the port in Portland for distribution.