Grants Pass: It's the Climate

Grants Pass, Oregon wears its identity on a sign. Downtown, above the main commercial street, hangs a banner that has welcomed travelers since nineteen twenty: "It's the Climate." The phrase was donated to the city by engineer John Hampshire as a simple boast about Josephine County's Mediterranean-ish weather, hot dry summers and mild rainy winters, unusually kind for the Pacific Northwest interior. It has stayed there ever since, becoming one of Oregon's most recognizable small-city slogans.

The town's name comes from a different kind of confidence. When the post office was established on March twenty-second, eighteen sixty-five, the settlers chose to honor General Ulysses S. Grant's breakthrough victory at Vicksburg two years earlier, a battle that had split the Confederacy and turned the war's momentum. Grant wasn't president yet, wasn't even a household name everywhere, but in southern Oregon's loyalist frontier communities he was a hero, and the town name stuck.

The setting that shaped Grants Pass was the Rogue River. Spanish explorers had named it El Rio de los Ladrones, the River of Thieves, after confrontations with Indigenous people along its banks. The Rogue became a highway for gold miners after discoveries at nearby Jacksonville in eighteen fifty-one drew thousands of prospectors into the Siskiyou foothills. Grants Pass itself grew from a stagecoach stop into a railhead in eighteen eighty-three when the Oregon-California Railroad, later Southern Pacific, pushed its line through the canyon.

Today the Rogue is the reason most people stop. More than twenty-five outfitters operate from Grants Pass, making it Oregon's whitewater capital, with multi-day float trips running west through the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest toward the Pacific. The river that prospectors once used as a supply corridor is now the town's primary economic engine, a fact that says something about how the American West has revalued its wild places. Nearby Oregon Caves National Monument draws visitors into marble caverns that Takelma people knew for centuries before a hunting dog named Bruno led homesteader Elijah Davidson to their entrance in eighteen seventy-four.