Meacham: The Man Who Survived the Modoc War

The Blue Mountains summit here was a critical rest stop on the Oregon Trail, first used as a troop camp by Major Lee in eighteen forty-four. Alfred B. Meacham opened it as a toll road station and supply post in eighteen sixty-two, feeding stagecoach passengers and emigrants before their descent into the Grande Ronde Valley.

Meacham later served as Oregon's Superintendent of Indian Affairs and, in eighteen seventy-three, chaired the peace commission during the Modoc War in northern California. During a disastrous ambush, Modoc warriors killed two commissioners; Meacham was shot and scalped and left for dead, but Toby Riddle, a Modoc interpreter, intervened and saved his life. He survived, wrote a memoir, and toured the country with Modoc speakers.

The pass bears his name. When President Warren Harding stopped here in nineteen twenty-three to mark the eightieth anniversary of the Oregon Trail, and local tradition says he called Meacham the capital of the United States for a day.