The saga of mistaken history and how California stole Oregon's glory, and kept it. Part 1 of 4.
Two years ago on a gray day in the beginning of summer I found myself in a petite bookstore on the Oregon coast looking for a cheap guide to finding Oregon's infamous Neahkahnie Mountain Treasure. I only had a few hours but I felt pretty sure that it was my lucky day. I needed a new shovel, too.
I asked the gentleman working behind the counter if he had any suggestions. He told me that he didn't believe in the treasure. I asked him Why? He told me that he'd spent many years studying under local-legend-treasure-hunter Wayne Jensen. When Jensen died, he left his library to the lean historian behind the counter.
There was no Spanish Galleon; there was no treasure. He proposed that what history had decided to be a Spanish Galleon, was in fact an English Galleon, and that the foreign men that Native Americans saw on the shore hadn't been burying treasure, but rather, surveying the land!
Surveying the land? How boring.
The silver-goateed, sleek man behind the counter directed my attention to a different book titled, "Francis Drank in Nehalem Bay 1579". No treasure, no shovels, just history.
That, too, seemed really boring. But the man behind the counter launched into a polished speech to convince me otherwise. He proposed the following.
Men have been digging holes in Manzanita, OR., for time eternal in search of the mysterious treasure fabled in the Native American tales of explorers and chests. It was presumed to have been a Spanish Gelleon on the run from pirates in the 1700's.
This mystery captured the attention of a strange man named Wayne Jensen, who spent most of his life exploring the history of the Oregon Coast and digging holes wherever he could in search of that treasure. In his studies and searches, Jensen happened upon various "marked stones", which he took to be some form of treasure map--the digging continued.
(here's a brief interview CNN did with Jensen regarding the Neahkahnie Mountain Treasure http://www.cnn.com/2003/TRAVEL/DESTINATIONS/08/04/savvyt.oregon.coast/)
Down the line, Jensen realized that the markings on the stones were commonplace surveying symbols, which means that people weren't marking the mountain to remember where they had burried the treasure, but they marked the mountain so that they could document their explorations and return home with facts about the New World.
Well, this created a problem because there was no historical account of anybody "Discovering" Oregon before Lewis and Clark treaded the Oregon Trail hundreds of years later. The only explorer known for traversing America's Pacific Coast was Sir Francis Drake, who had never gone north of California--or had he!
Looking further into the situation, Jensen discovered that there is a section in Drake's journal "The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake," written by Francis Fletcher, that supports his theory that Drake had come far enough north to discover Oregon.
But there was a problem: What Jensen proposed was Oregon, history had decided was California, San Francisco, to be exact. It's common knowledge and a crucial--and sexy--part of Californian history that Drake had arrived in San Francisco in the late 1500's during his circumnavigation of the globe.
Jensen thought otherwise.
"So that's what the book is about. Oregon was actually discovered by Drake and his famous landing in San Francisco never took plce," the man said academically from behind the counter.
"Who wrote the book?" I asked.
"I did," he said.
And that's how I first met revolutionary historian Garry Gitzen.
I bought a signed copy of the book, went up to the hardware store, bought a shovel and then went back down to the beach where I dug and moved stones for the remainder of the day. I concluded the day at the bar, sitting over a chili-blue-cheese burger, wondering if Gitzen was correct.
Could history be wrong, and an eccentric self-proclaimed historian on the Oregon Coast be right about the discovery of America's greatest state, Oregon?
And so the story began. A hero arose from Oregon's stormy coast and a villain arose from the California sunshine. (to be continued)
