Most central Oregon residents are familiar with the Santiam Wagon Road, which parallels U.S. highway 20 up the Cascade Mountains from Sweet Home to Santiam Pass and then down the other side to Sisters. Parts of it are still open as a gravel road that is frequently used by recreationists and the occasional log truck. Other parts have been downgraded to a trail that is less frequently hiked. I’ve both hiked and driven much of the route.

Much of today’s post is based on this book by Cleon Clark, who wrote it after retiring from a career with the Deschutes, Ochoco, and Malheur national forests, all of which were crossed by the wagon road. This book was published by the Deschutes County Historical Society in 1987 and is not copyrighted, so I am making it available for download here. Click image to download the 22.5-MB PDF of this 122-page book with two large maps.

What most residents don’t know is that the Santiam Wagon Road is only part of what was supposed to be a road from Albany, in the Willamette Valley, to the Snake River on the eastern boundary of the state. Even fewer realize that this road was part of one of the biggest land scams in the state, even bigger than the Oregon & California Railroad scandal in the sense that the owners of the Willamette Valley and Cascade Mountain Wagon Road company got away with their scam, while the O&C Railroad did not. Continue reading →

I wrote several posts for my other blog, Streamliner Memories, that are relevant here as well. Recent news stories have asked why projects like the California high-speed rail and Honolulu rail line are so expensive. The answer is that the politicians who support these projects don’t care about the cost because someone else will have to pay it. Or rather they do care but for them the cost is the benefit — the more they spend, the more might be turned into contributions to their future political campaigns from grateful contractors.

This 1939 report from the Department of the Interior lists 105 railroad, wagon road, canal, and river improvement land grants made by Congress in the 19th century and how many acres various transportation companies ended up receiving for those grants. A few of the grants, including the massive Northern Pacific grant, were still open with the grantees hoping to get several million more acres. Click image to download a 4.7-MB PDF of the report.

We saw an early example of this in the First Transcontinental Railroad and later railroads supported by large federal land grants. Railroads weren’t the only transportation projects supported by federal land grants: there were also canals, wagon roads, and river improvements. As it happens, I live near one of the wagon road projects that turned out to be a giant scam in which a few people got more than 860,000 acres of federal land for doing little more than driving a wagon across the state of Oregon. Continue reading →

Americans drove 4.9 percent more miles in September 2022 than the did before the pandemic in September 2019, according to data that the Federal Highway Administration has finally posted on its web site. That’s the greatest amount, relative to pre-pandemic levels, of any month since the pandemic began.

Miles of driving in both urban and rural areas were greater than in September 2019 and driving was greater in 35 states. Of the states where driving still has not reached pre-pandemic levels, the biggest shortfalls were Hawaii (-23%), DC (-22%), Rhode Island (-22%), Delaware (-18%), and Pennsylvania (-11%). Driving grew the most in Arizona (33%), Alaska (19%), South Dakota (18%), Florida (14%), North Dakota (14%), Maine (13%), Louisiana (13%), Arkansas (12%), and California (11%). None of these are surprising except California, which was minus 3 percent in August. Continue reading →