Joe Meek: Mountain Man, Oregon Founder

This marker stands on the land claim of Joseph Lafayette Meek, one of the most colorful figures in early Oregon history. Meek spent eleven years trapping beaver in the Rocky Mountains before arriving in the Willamette Valley in eighteen forty. He had driven a wagon from Fort Hall to Walla Walla, covering ground no wagon had crossed before on that stretch of what would become the Oregon Trail.

When American settlers and British Hudson's Bay Company interests were competing for control of the Oregon Country, Meek helped tip the balance. In eighteen forty-three he was a leading voice at the Champoeg vote that established a provisional American government in the territory, and he later served as the first United States Marshal of Oregon Territory. Meek was largely unlettered, as his own contemporaries noted, but he carried the kind of practical authority that frontier democracy ran on. His land claim here anchored him to the valley he helped make American.