The McKenzie River: Eight Thousand Years of Passage
Near Eugene, Oregon
The McKenzie River begins at Clear Lake, high in the Cascades east of Eugene, fed by springs so cold and clear that a submerged ancient forest of logs is still visible through the water at the lake's surface, preserved for more than three thousand years by the near-freezing temperature. The river runs west and then southwest for roughly ninety miles before joining the Willamette at the southern end of the valley.
Native Americans have lived along the McKenzie for at least eight thousand years. The Kalapuya and Molala people used the lower valley for winter settlements and moved east into the Cascades in summer to fish and harvest. The upper McKenzie remained largely unknown to Euro-American travelers until October of eighteen fifty-three, when a group of Oregon Trail emigrants tried to cut through the Cascades on an untested route called the Elliott Cutoff and became lost for weeks in the high mountains before finding their way down.
The river was named for Donald McKenzie, a Scottish Canadian fur trader who explored the region for the Pacific Fur Company around eighteen twelve, though he is not known to have traveled the full length of the river that bears his name.
In the nineteen forties, an original boat design emerged from the McKenzie that spread to rivers across the American West: the McKenzie River drift boat, a flat-bottomed dory with flared sides and a high prow designed for rowing upstream to hold position on fast water while a fly fisherman worked the pools. The design was developed and refined by a community of fishing guides working the river, and adaptations of it are now used on the Colorado, the Rogue, and dozens of other western rivers.
Today the McKenzie is the sole source of drinking water for Eugene and Springfield, serving around two hundred thousand people. The water comes from the Cascades, travels the McKenzie, and arrives through the infrastructure that began with EWEB's Walterville plant in nineteen eleven.
