Baker City: Queen of the Mines

Baker City sits in a green valley between the Wallowa Mountains to the east and the Elkhorn Range to the west, a setting so dramatic that travelers on the Oregon Trail wrote about it in their journals. Tens of thousands passed through this valley in the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties, heading for Oregon or Bust, and most of them kept moving, never guessing what was in the ground beneath their boots.

In October of eighteen sixty-one, four prospectors discovered gold a couple of miles south of the present townsite. Within a year the Oregon legislature had carved off the eastern edge of the state to create Baker County. The county seat was Auburn, a tent city that mushroomed to more than four thousand miners in the summer of eighteen sixty-two, at that moment the largest settlement in Oregon outside of Portland. But the placer gold played out fast, and by eighteen sixty-five Auburn was nearly empty.

Baker City was laid out in eighteen sixty-five and named for United States Senator Edward D. Baker, a close friend of Abraham Lincoln and the only sitting senator to die in combat during the Civil War. The city took Auburn's place as the county seat in eighteen sixty-eight. What followed was not another boom and bust but something more durable: Baker City became the commercial center for the entire region's rich gold, copper, and silver fields. By nineteen hundred it was the largest settlement between Portland and Salt Lake City. Local promoters called it the Queen of the Mines, and they meant it.

The wealth produced a city of remarkable ambition. The Geiser Grand Hotel, which opened in eighteen eighty-nine, was regarded as the finest hotel between Salt Lake City and Portland, featuring mahogany woodwork, crystal chandeliers, and a stained glass ceiling. A city of six thousand in eastern Oregon was building like a metropolis.

The boom eventually faded, but Baker City's Victorian commercial architecture survived largely intact. Today the National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center sits on a bluff above town, where visitors can see the ruts the emigrants cut into the earth more than a hundred and fifty years ago still visible on the hillside.