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Reviews
Willamette Landings: Ghost Towns of the River, 3rd edition
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By Howard McKinley Corning with a new introduction by Robin Cody
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Oregon Historical Society Press, Portland, 2004. Illustrations, maps, index. 240 pages. $16.00 paper.
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Reviewed by Charles Goodrich
Oregon State University, Corvallis
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| Willamette Landings is full of steamboat explosions, town-devouring floods, and fortunes made and lost. Author Howard McKinley Corning was a poet as well as a historian, and beneath the clamor of commerce and natural disasters, he delivers the precise details and vivid scenes that re-animate a time when the river was the dominant mode of commercial and passenger transportation. Willamette Landings, originally published in 1947, draws together research and oral histories collected by writers working for the Works Progress Administration's Oregon Writers' Project in the 1930s. This third edition includes newly added historical photographs, maps, and an insightful introduction by Robin Cody. |
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Oregon possesses a short, damp, and worm-eaten memory. Native peoples of the Willamette valley — primarily the many local bands of the Kalapuya — were decimated so quickly by diseases that the very survival of their culture was threatened, and relatively few artifacts survived. The physical culture of the first half century of European expansion into the Oregon Country has proven nearly as ephemeral: houses and public buildings, wagons, boats, and wharves — all made of wood — are mostly gone without a trace. Whole towns were swept away by floods, dismantled for salvage, or left to decay under devouring waves of blackberry bushes. |
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Corning's Willamette Landings is made of more durable stuff. In wonderful vignettes, in the patient recording of town histories, and in its evocation of a bygone time, Willamette Landings is a stay against forgetting. It serves as a marker in our cultural baseline by which we may measure the speed and trajectory of our furious and sweeping transformation of the landscape. Its proper nouns — all the haunting names of people and places — conjure the times with remarkable eloquence. Listen to these names from the seven-page list of Willamette steamboat landings appended to the back of the book: "Gillihan's Landing ... Lover's Lane ... Mock's Landing ... Shaver's Dock ... The Old O.S.N. Co. Bone Yard ... String Town ... Shank's Landing ... Hince's Woodyard" (241–7). Corning caught the period music that still resides in those names. |
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In his spirited introduction, Robin Cody places Willamette Landings in its historical context, noting that Corning's masculinist outlook, his slighting accounts of Native Americans, and his scant attention to environmental concerns reflected the dominant views of Corning's day. Cody suggests taking Willamette Landings on a canoe trip down the Willamette to see firsthand how our relationship to the river has shifted from commerce to recreation and conservation. There couldn't be a more pleasant way to experience the book. But Willamette Landings is also a record of how river transportation shaped the development of the invading European culture and how the advent of the railroads led to wholesale abandonment of much of that riverside infrastructure and cultural ways. |
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Another fruitful way to read the book might be to take it along as one drives the I-5 corridor, thinking ahead to the next enormous transformation in our dominant mode of transportation. Proprietors of those nowhere commercial nodes and bedroom communities that rely on the continuous flow of cheap oil may want to consider the fate of the steamboat landing towns of the Willamette. Some prescient poet-scholar might even now be collecting material for a companion volume, Acres of Outlets: The Lost Interchange Cities of Interstate 5. |
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One criticism: the oversimplified map of the Willamette River in the front of the book may perpetuate the illusion that the relatively fixed, single-stemmed river of today is the same wild river that the incoming Europeans encountered. A series of maps depicting the engineering of the Willamette, first to accommodate steamboat transportation and later to provide flood control and irrigation, would do better service to Corning's text. |
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