The John Day River
Oregon
The John Day River drains a swath of central Oregon the size of some eastern states before emptying into the Columbia near here. It is named for a Virginia-born fur trapper who joined the Astor Pacific Fur expedition of eighteen ten and suffered one of the unluckiest stretches in exploration history: robbed, stripped, and left for dead by a band of raiders near this very confluence. Day survived but his mind never fully recovered.
He died in eighteen twenty in what is now Idaho. The river that carries his name runs for about two hundred eighty-four miles. The watershed above you holds the John Day Fossil Beds, where volcanic ash layers have preserved some of the best Eocene and Oligocene mammal fossils in the world, including ancient horses the size of house cats.
