"IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE" IN OREGON - Southern Oregon Digital ...

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and small-scale lumbering for the local market.
Two settlements grew into thriving towns by the close
of this period: Jacksonville, the county seat (and former
Rich Gulch mining camp) located on the western margin of the
Rogue River Valley, and Ashland, in the southern section of
the valley at the foot of the Siskiyous and strategically
situated on the main wagon road to California.
The region's
economic isolation ended in the mid-1880s, when the railroad
completed construction through Jackson County.
Linking
southern Oregon with Portland, San Francisco, and the rest
of the nation, the tracks bypassed Jacksonville in favor of
Ashland, where the Southern Pacific Railroad built a major
depot and a roundhouse to service the engines that steamed
daily over Siskiyou Pass.
In 1885, about ten miles east of
Jacksonville on Bear Creek, near the center of the valley,
the Southern Pacific established a new town, Medford. 1
1 For comprehensive narrative accounts of the Indian War
period in southern Oregon, see: Stephen Dow Beckham, Requiem
for a People: The Rogue Indians and the Frontiersmen
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971); E. A.
Schwartz, "Blood Money: The Rogue River Indian War and Its
Aftermath." (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Missouri,
1991). (Schwarz emphasizes the importance of state and
local political factional conflicts as contributing directly
to the outbreak of the final phase of the Indian War.) A.
G. Walling's History of Southern Oregon (Portland: A. G.
Walling Printing, 1884), with its ethnocentric and
celebratory bias, remains one of the best general sources
for local history up to the coming of the railroad. Other
useful but dated overviews include: William P. Tucker,
"History of Jackson County, Oregon" (M.A. thesis, University
of Washington, Seattle, 1931) and Jesse Lee Gilmore, "A
History of the Rogue River Valley--Pioneer Period, 1850-
1860 (Ph.D. dissertation, Univeristy of California,
Berkeley, 1952). A projected volume on the history of the