'forties, and the capture and hanging in 1850 of the Marcus Whitman murderers, created great excitement in local life. Late in 1847, to avenge the deaths of the missionary, his wife Narcissa, and eleven others, the “Oregon Rifles” was organized at Oregon City. That was the second military force organized for the protection of Oregon Country settlers.
In 1849 the Mounted Rifle Regiment crossed the plains to Oregon, to provide Federal protection for the newly created Oregon Territory. This regiment was stationed at Oregon City for more than a year.
The ’fifties were years of growth. A female seminary was opened in the town, and the Willamette Iron Works began the manufacture of sawmill parts. Oregon City found itself in competition with Linn City, a companion town with industrial ambitions, across the river. “Gold rush” money from California and from the southern Oregon mines stimulated commercial development. Finally, in 1864 Oregon’s first woolen mill utilized the power of the falls. Soon afterward a paper mill, the first on the Pacific Coast, began the manufacture of paper.
Down river, another small town was bidding for growth.
Linnton, situated on the west bank of the Willamette just above Sauvie Island, was platted in 1844 by M. M. McCarver and Peter H. Burnett, immigrants of the previous year.
McCarver had dreams of a city that would stand at this point
near the Willamette’s mouth and where his only conceivable
handicap lay in not securing nails soon enough to build his city before some other enterprising individual built one of promise elsewhere. But growing impatient, he departed for the Puget Sound country where he later founded Tacoma. Linnton, however, was not doomed, but struggled on as a shipping point through the decades and into another century, eventually to become a small lumber-mill town.
Of Linnton townsite, and another greater city to be, Jesse A. Applegate, son of Lindsay Applegate, wrote in Recollections of My Boyhood:
“Not long after passing Linnton we landed on the west shore, and went into camp on the high bank where there was little underbrush among the pine trees. No one lived there
