A column written by Ruth Guppy and published in the Nov. 27, 1975 edition of the Hood River News.
It can’t be stated with certainty that the first white settlers took time off to observe Thanksgiving during their first busy autumn in Dog River (Hood River). Not a whole day. Few did then.
There probably was a special Thanksgiving meal because these people were first-comers themselves.
One of the few references in the Coe journals occurred Nov. 22, 1858: “Indian shot a drake. (We) cooked a swan. Called it Thanksgiving dinner.”
From the Coe farm records and Henry Coe’s voluminous memoirs we get a pretty good idea of the first Thanksgiving in Dog River, which was later renamed Hood River by Mrs. Coe.
Place:
The dinner would have been held in the Nathaniel Coe home in the center of the family’s 320-acre Donation Land Claim. Today the location is the north side of State Street between 10th and 11th streets.
For a few months after arriving in 1854 the Coe’s lived in an abandoned log cabin about 16 feet square. Earlier in the year Coe had ordered lumber from the Bradford mill at the Upper Cascades, intending to start a store in The Dalles. Instead, he chose Dog River as his home. The lumber cut to build a store came by steamer and by November was the Coe family home, one room 20 X 40 feet, without ceiling, without partitions.
What a change for the Coe’s, who had been affluent citizens of Auburn N.Y. Nathaniel, the patriarch, had been a lawyer, state legislator, and “gentleman horticulturist” until assigned by Pres. Millard Fillmore as special postal agent to the Oregon Territory, setting up postal routes, letting mail contracts and establishing post offices.
With a change in administrations his appointment ended. At the age of 66 he brought his family to settle this community. Mrs. Coe was then 53.
Weather:
November of 1854 was pleasant, with only a skiff of snow, a minimum temperature of 21 above and an average of 35.60 degrees.
New years of the next year was to be one of the mildest ever recorded and the Coes sailed across the Columbia to have dinner with their friends, the pioneer E.R. Joslyns on the present site of Bingen.
By February of that following year the Coes had spaded a half-acre for gardens. Meadow land below the homestead was being prepared for fruit trees and berries brought by steamer from the original Luelling nursery in Milwaukie, Ore.
Guests:
Around the table would be Mr. and Mrs. Coe and their youngest son Henry, then 10; sons Eugene Frank, 18, and Charles, 20.
The oldest son Lawrence, 23, worked at the Upper Cascades, later building steamboats, supervising construction of the mule-powered portage tramway on the north side of the Columbia and managing the Bradford store. Three of the four Coe sons became river captains.
In addition, there would surely have been the Benson brothers who had come out from Auburn, N.Y. to settle up 160 acres each, Nathan along the Columbia east of Dog (Hood) River, and James on Indian creek. Plus their sister, Phila Benson Jenkins and her husband William, who held 320 acres west of the Coe property.
These were the only white people living between The Dalles and the Cascades on the south side of the Columbia in 1854. Jonah Mosier started a mill in 1855 of the creek named for him.
Neighbors:
Possibly Erastus and Mary Joslyn, a New England couple who had earlier settled across the Columbia, came over for Thanksgiving dinner. For many years the two families held alternate Sunday services whenever the weather permitted.
The Coes closest neighbors were the Watlala Indians living in a small camp of teepees and eight or 10 cedar bark shelters located at about present Second and Cascade which they called Waucoma-place of the cottonwoods.
Food:
Likely the table groaned with venison roast and wild fowl. Jenkins and the Benson brothers regularly sold the Coes deer ($1.25), ducks and geese (25 cents each). Records show that the flour ($2.50 a sack) and other staples came from the Bradford store at the Upper Cascades. Potatoes and other late-season vegetables came through trades with the Joslyns.
Thanks-giving:
The small gathering that first Thanksgiving of 1854 in this Valley must have bowed heads while Nathaniel Coe, aged 66, recited the bountiful blessings they were enjoying.
As Henry Coe later wrote, “Our community was a singularly harmonious one. Our domestic life was also unusually peaceful. Father’s word was law and he was the unquestioned head of the house. Our family was really a partnership affair. Each morning after prayers father said, “Well, boys, let’s plan out our program for the day.”
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