12/09/2024
Here's little piece I worked on last winter:
From Piney to Portland: A Connection Between the Cherokee Nation and the Pacific Northwest
Steve Garrett
In the handful of years before the Corona Virus Pandemic of 2020, there was a connection established between the sleepy Oklahoma town of Stilwell and the bustling city of Portland, Oregon.
Although the Stilwell area is home to the largest number of full-blood Cherokees anywhere, Cherokee citizens can be found all across the United States and, indeed, the world. Groups of Cherokees in these far-flung places have formed groups to re-familiarize themselves with the culture, language and ways of their forefathers and mothers.
To assist in this re-familiarizing, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, through it’s Department of Community and Cultural Outreach, created the Community Organization Training and Technical Assistance program. This program couples an outlying group, one that has been formed in a locality somewhere across the United States with a Cherokee organization from within the tribe’s Northeastern Oklahoma territory.
One of those pairings connected a Stilwell group, the local Friends of the Library organization, with an At-Large group of Cherokees in Portland, Oregon. Representatives from the Stilwell group made annual trips to Portland to make presentations on matters of Cherokee history and culture. The Okies were pleased to find the children and grandchildren of people who were born and reared in the Boston Mountains of Oklahoma in this most westward of places interested in their heritage.
But unknown to most, the neighborhood of Stilwell, Oklahoma has another connection to Portland, from the city’s very beginning.
The start of the City of Roses, as Portland has become known, was the same as many pioneer settlements on the frontier. In the 1840s, with the increased number of immigrants arriving after trekking across the continent on the Oregon Trail, the newcomers began to gather into settlements. Prior to that, the area had been occupied by a few mountain men, farmers and missionaries. The year of 1843 , the start of the Great Migration, brought 875 settlers coming from the east, with the numbers increasing each year following for the next two decades.
In those early days of the trail, a party could join a wagon train headed for the Oregon territory for the sum of one dollar. The terminus of the trail was Oregon City, located just a few miles east of the present location of Portland.
Situated between Oregon City and Fort Vancouver, the Hudson Bay Company post on the Columbia River, the future location of Portland was called “The Clearing” or “Stumptown,” the latter moniker attesting to the number of stumps left after trees were felled to make way for development.
When the Americans started arriving in the Oregon Country, jurisdiction of the area was still disputed between the United States and Great Britain. With the signing if the Oregon Treaty between the U.S. and the UK in 1846, Oregon became part of the United States but was not organized into a Territory until after the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848.
With the unpleasantness of the war now over and California and other previously Mexican held territories under the jurisdiction of the United States, the organization of the Pacific West could begin in earnest. As part of that organization, the settlement in “The Clearing” was incorporated as a municipality in 1851 and named Portland.
Among the residents of the new town was Hugh O’Bryant, a local carpenter. O’Bryant had arrived in Oregon in 1843 with his brother Humphrey Posey O’Bryant, as two of the 875 hearty souls in the first wave of settlers in the region. Hugh first settled in Oregon City, but eventually made his home in “Stumptown” sometime around 1845.
In 1847, O’Bryant volunteered to fight in the Cayuse War after the killing of several missionaries and family members at the Whitman Mission in present day Washington state. The following year he was a first lieutenant in the Territorial government’s Second Company of Oregon Riflemen.
The 1850 census listed Hugh as residing in the household of Job McNamee, a Portland businessman who had arrived in the territory in 1845. It has also been reported that O’Bryant founded Portland’s first public library in 1850.
With the incorporation of Portland as a municipality and the organization of a local government, Hugh O’Bryant was elected the first Mayor of that city by only four votes over challenger Joseph Showalter Smith.
O’Bryant’s tenure as Mayor was less than stellar. His one-year term became known for the failure of Portland’s first government to effectively manage the affairs of the City. Out of the thirty-one council meetings held that year, O’Bryant missed seven. The Council passed several ordinances authorizing the construction of streets and a jail and to purchase a fire engine but none of these came to be under O’Bryant’s administration. He left office in March of 1852 leaving the orders for the fire engine, the purchase having been approved by the City’s voters the previous May, unsigned on his desk. The failures of the first administration led to a new charter being adopted in that same year.
O’Bryant moved to Salem in 1852 and later to Roseburg, where he married Matilda, with whom he was to have seven children. He was elected to serve as a Democrat in the Territorial legislature in 1855. He was elected the next session to represent several counties in Southern Oregon in the upper chamber of the legislature. In 1857 he was elected the President of that body. He served until the Territorial government was closed upon Oregon’s admittance as a state.
In 1860 he moved to Walla Walla in the Washington Territory and served in the territorial legislature for a few terms. He served as a justice of the peace and did some gold prospecting in his later years. He moved to Merced County, California where he died in 1883.
O’Bryant’s legacy lived on through the years through O’Bryant Square, a park in the heart of the city. The park, however, was demolished in July of 2023 as part of a redevelopment project.
Before Hugh Donaldson O’Bryant was an Oregon pioneer and a significant character in the development of the Pacific Northwest, he was a pioneer of a different sort. He was the son of Duncan O’Bryant. Those familiar with Cherokee History and the story of the piney Community in Adair County will readily recognize the name of the Baptist Missionary whose grave marker sits alongside a county road just north of the old Frank Adair place.
It was through Duncan O’Bryant’s service to the Cherokees and his eventual move west of the Mississippi River with the Hickory Log church in 1831 that brought young Hugh, then 18 years of age, to the Arkansas Territory and the Cherokee Nation West. Six of the seven children already born to Reverend O’Bryant and his wife Patsy had come west with the family, with Eliza Jane and Sarah Ann, who died in infancy, to follow.
Hugh and the other other O’Bryant children had been raised among the people of the Cherokee Nation, their father serving as a teacher and a missionary to that tribe since 1821. The State of Georgia had begun requiring missionaries of all denominations working among the Cherokees to swear a loyalty oath to the state. O’Bryant and others refused to swear such an oath. This conflict and others created by the Georgia neighbors became some of the reasons for the trek west.
Joining with another group headed to the Cherokee Nation West, the O’Bryant family and 28 members of his church sought the peace and prosperity they hoped awaited them in that far off place.
There, on the banks of the South Fork of the Illinois River, now called the Barren Fork Creek, the Reverend and his flock established New Hope Mission. A school was quickly established as well as a gristmill in the months that followed.
Following an illness, Duncan O’Bryant passed away in August of 1834. Another missionary was sent to take over the pastoral duties at the New Hope Mission but he passed away the following year. The Mission was discontinued in 1836. No longer associated with a mission and no longer supported by the Baptist Missionary Board, Mrs. O’Bryant, now legally a white intruder upon Cherokee land, was asked to leave the Nation.
The widow O’Bryant was unable to care for all her children as she was being forced to relocate across the line in Arkansas. She left her two youngest daughters, Fannie and Eliza Jane, with two Cherokee families. Times did not improve however. The Panic of 1837 had a devastating effect of the economy of the country, especially the west.
In the years after the panic of 1837, “Oregon Fever” hit the hard pressed populations of the then western United States. Explorations of Oregon and California undertaken by John C. Fremont, the Great Pathfinder, had been made public and reports of a fertile land with a mild climate were reported by other visitors to the area.
“Oregon Fever” and the prospect of a better life brought a thirty-year old Hugh Donaldson O’Bryant, with his fifteen year old brother Humphrey Posey O’Bryant in tow, to make the landmark 1843 crossing to the Columbia River Valley. The two brothers did find a better life in the Oregon Territory. Humphrey became an Indian Agent and a respected member of society in the Washington Territory.
In Cherokee history, the name of Duncan O’Bryant is easily recognizable. His grave is one of the oldest marked graves in the State of Oklahoma. But, as in the case with many of the characters in history, once they have left the stage, we rarely think further of them. Not only did the O’Bryant family have a significant impact of the history of Piney and all of Adair County, but also of the City of Portland and the Pacific Northwest.
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