Sunbow over Virtue Flat

Look what greeted us this morning!

Thank You, Volunteers!

We just finished up our annual volunteer recognition and award banquet - a great meal and great fun visiting and reviewing the past very busy 12 months.  We gave recognition for a huge number of volunteered hours, and great individual contributions in outreach, interpretation, curatorial work, greeting, gift shop, and the many, many group activities throughout the year. 

Looking forward to many more wonderful activities and accomplishments in 2013 with the volunteers who make the Interpretive Center such a great place to visit and to work.  THANK YOU, VOLUNTEERS!!!



Our volunteers - good looking, hard working, creative and fun. Some of our volunteers have been helping at the Interpretive Center for over twenty years!




Dave the outgoing president hands over the gavel to Jack the incoming president.
The banquet was held in the Flagstaff Gallery at the Intepretive Center.  



Gift Baskets

Drop by the Oregon Trail Shop and we'll help you customize a gift basket for the people on your holiday list.

Gift baskets make great presents for any occasion--or even no occasion at all!

Rent This Gallery For Your Next Event

Did you know that the Flagstaff Gallery is available for hosting meetings, conferences or events? The Leo Adler Theater is also a great option for your next presentation or staff retreat.

If you are looking for a unique space to hold your holiday party or a family gathering, consider bringing your group up to the Interpretive Center. And for extra flair, consider adding one of our many programs to your event plans.

 

Call us at 541-523-1843 for more info on meeting room availability, services and fees, or review our group visit guidelines at oregontrail.blm.gov

Holiday Open House!

Sunday, December 2nd, 2012 was an eventful day here at the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center! Great weather made for a great turnout to our Holiday Open House! Check out our new album on facebook!

Fun for everyone

It's not every day we pull out the big box of pioneer toys, but last Friday was special - Family Fun  Day!
We had LOTS of visitors, and one of our volunteers showed how to play the historic games of "graces" or throwing hoops between players to catch on sticks.  Checkers, Jacob's Ladder, Limber Jack and other old favorites were also tested, and found to still be fun today. 

Litter Clean Up Day

Trail Tenders did their semi-annual litter cleanup along Highway 86 this morning.  It's always amazing what gets left along the highway - today's big catch was a brand new mounted tire.  Thanks to the volunteers who help keep this stretch of highway clean - and a bigger thanks to all those responsible folks who throw their litter in a trash can or take it to the dump instead of throwing it out in our beautiful outdoors!

Morning view from the Interpretive Center...

...

New Picnic Tables

Picnikers enjoy the new tables.

View from the picnic shelter inclues Baker Valley and the Elkhorn Range.

Trail Tenders recently purchased several new picnic tables for the picnic shelter at the Interpretive Center. For twenty years, it's been one of the most scenic spots around for a great picnic; and now, you can enjoy the view and lunch with no splinters!!!

Trails Through Time Exhibit

South Pass by Bob Wick

A special photography exhibit titled "Trails Through Time: Contemporary Photography of the Oregon Trail" is now in the Flagstaff Gallery, through November 12.   With over 50 images from 16 photographers at over two dozen locations along the Trail, the collection of images captures how the trail looks today.  Photographers were invited to submit photos along the theme of reimagining the Oregon Trail, and capture what a pioneer might have chosen to record if they'd had modern camera equipment in their wagons.

Scenes from Labor Day Weekend Wagon Encampment

We had a great wagon train encampment, with several hundred visitors, good weather, cooking, mountain men, ox drover and team, blackpowder shooting, trade camp, mountain men, medicine on the trail, music and dancing,  and games from the Trail Days.

Mountain man Mike skinned a deer hide to make some rawhide to back a bow.  He wet the skin, and then scraped off hair and first level of the skin.  It takes about an hour to do this. Although there are different techniques, he shared that this is one of the simplest for making rawhide.

Brian and Charlotte showed the types of food and basic "mess kit" used by pioneers with limited space on their wagons.  Dried foods, coffee, tea, and the versatile cast iron cookpot. Not a lot of culinary variety, but it kept the pioneers going.

Kelly and Grace cooked beans and served biscuits, sticking to authentic cooking techniques and cookware available in the 1850s.  Notice the tinware pans and canisters?  This is what was used before plastic storage containers were available.  Crockery was also used, but tinware was unbreakable, and kept out rodents and insects. Wooden bowls were also unbreakable - important for bumpy wagon travel. Because there was not always enough fuel or enough time to build a hot fire for cooking a pot of beans, pioneers might make a big pot of beans and a big batch of biscuits every three days or so, keep the leftovers in the pot in the wagon, and eat cold meals the next few days.

This young man is checking out the equivalent of a frontier shopping mall....this is how mountain men might have set out trade goods at a rendezvous or fort along the Trail.  Beads, firearms and knives, clothing and blankets were prime trade goods.

Getting Ready to Cook at Wagon Encampment

Our Labor Day Weekend Wagon Encampment is coming up September 1st & 2nd. Our interpreters are getting ready to re-create pioneer lifeways. Bullwhackin Kass will be there with her ox team, the mountain men will set up camp and possibly making jerky, and our dutch oven cooks will be preparing trail side foods such as stew, biscuits, and cobbler.

One of the big preparations is all the research by our interpreters to recreate pioneer cuisine and answer questions about what

people ate, why certain foods weren’t available, and how the technology of the day affected food choices. One of our favorite resources is the books by Jacqueline B. Williams. Her in-depth research combines American history with the daily realities of food. "Wagon Wheel Kitchens: Food on the Oregon Trail" has information on what was eaten while traveling overland. "The Way We Ate: Pacific Northwest cooking, 1843-1900" covers how settlers and homesteaders fed themselves after arriving at Trail’s end.

If you are preserving food from your garden this time of year, you’d be fascinated by the variety of techniques used by our ancestors to dry, jelly, and pickle food using whatever ingredients and resources were available. The chapter on flour will give anyone new appreciation for the abundance our country enjoys today, even though many think we have shortages! The books include creative pioneer recipes and instructions for substitutions to deal with scarcities of eggs and sugar, or how to turn an abundance of apples and tomatoes into a substitute for almost anything.

Hope you can come visit with our frontier cooks September 1st and 2nd! And if you love cooking and American food, think about picking up a copy of one of the many frontier themed cookbooks in the Oregon Trail Shop.

The Way We Ate: Pacific Northwest Cooking, 1843-1900 by Jacqueline B. Williams. $22.50.

Bridges Between Past and Present

One of the wonderful things about a place like the Interpretive Center is when our visitors find an emotional connection to our programs or exhibits and share it with others around them.

In Linda Russell's living history program yesterday, an older gentleman in the audience was so moved as to shout out “Momma!” during the middle of the show. At the end of the performance, the visitor explained in a voice filled with emotion that his mom sang like a bird, and Linda had just brought her back to life. His confession moved many others in the audience to respond in a similar manner, and everyone present was very touched by this brief experience.

We’re sharing this story to remind ourselves of how special those moments of connection between the past and present are, and how they can turn up in the most unexpected of places.

Independence Rock Fruit Cobbler - Dutch Oven Recipes

Independence Rock Fruit Cobbler

Oregon Trail Pioneers didn’t eat this well every night – but they did stop traveling and take time to do pies, cakes, and cobblers for a 4th of July celebration at or around Independence Rock.
(approximately 10 plated servings, or 30 small sampler servings)

#12 Dutch Oven

Filling:

• 6 cups fresh or 4 cups dried fruit – sliced. Okay to leave on peels. Apples, apricots, peaches, and berries all work well.
• 4 tablespoons butter
• ½ cup all purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg or mace or ginger
• 3/4 cup sugar
• Water as needed to re-hydrate if using dried fruit.

Topping:

• 1 cup all purpose flour
• ¼ cup whole wheat flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• ½ teaspoon soda
• 2 tablespoons melted butter
• Dash of salt
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 3 tablespoons cinnamon

Basic Instructions for Fruit Cobbler:

1. Clean, slice, and prepare fruit by mixing with sugar (about two tablespoons per cup) in a mixing bowl and setting aside. Just before adding to cook pot, add melted butter and flour, and mix thoroughly. As you wish, add seasonings such as cinnamon, salt, nutmeg, or ginger to your taste.
2. Warm the cookpot, melt enough butter to coat the bottom, add fruit, and enough liquid to prevent the fruit from sticking to the pot, cover and stew the fruit until soft. Check occasionally and add water if needed to prevent the fruit from burning.
3. Prepare the topping, which will be “dump” poured or dropped from a spoon over the fruit. Combine one part flour, ½ part sugar, teaspoon per portion of baking powder, ½ teaspoon soda, dash of salt and stir in one part buttermilk, and dash of melted butter. Stir until well blended, smooth, and fairly elastic.
• You can get creative here and add spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg or ginger to your topping as you like.
4. When fruit mixture is bubbling and has some syrup like consistency, dump or spoon drop the topping on top of the fruit. You may need to remove the cover and let some of the liquid boil down before adding the topping. Once you have added the topping, sprinkle with additional sugar and cinnamon, if you like your topping sweet.
5. Cover the pot. Shovel coals over lid, and keep up from the heat a bit.
6. Check occasionally to see when topping is lightly browned and firm.

Reminders:

Let food cool before serving – this stuff can reach very hot, mouth burning temperatures pretty quickly.

We serve this outside at National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center at Baker City, in a beautiful setting, to an audience that is here to have fun and learn about pioneers – so it’s pretty hard to go wrong with the results! Have fun, and the food is almost guaranteed to taste good.

If anyone complains, tell them the story about the Donner Party.

Home! Sweet Homestead!

Our new exhibit opened in the Flagstaff Gallery on June 7th, celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the Homestead Act. Visitors have been sharing their homesteading stories with us in the gallery, and we will be adding them to this map all summer.

If you have a story to share, add it in the comments section, and we will create a map point for you!

View Home Sweet Homestead Stories in a larger map

Rose Parade 2012

   Hope you all saw Trail Tenders' entry in this year's

Grand Floral Rose Parade!

Thanks to Vickie Leonard, her wonderful helpers, & her mules Jack & John!

Thanks to our volunteers who happily made the 4+ mile walk through downtown Portland!

And thanks to everyone who turned out to cheer us on!

(It's great to have so many supporters over on the "west side"!)

Transit of Venus-you won't see this again for 100+ years!

One Day Before Our Once-in-a-Lifetime Event 

by R. G. Rienks

 

Tomorrow afternoon, Tuesday, June 5th, 2012, you will have an opportunity to safely view and photograph the Venus Solar Transit. This event will not be repeated for 105 years, or until 2117. Come to the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center and look on the west side of the building for our selection of telescopes. These are solar research telescopes and will allow safe views of the Sun. NO OTHER TELESCOPE IS SAFE FOR VIEWING THE SUN. Be sure to bring your camera as you will be told how you can take photos of the transit. As Venus passes across the face of the Sun you will see the planet as a black spot in the telescopes. Perhaps you will be able to detect the atmosphere of Venus. Will you be able to see it through our viewing masks? We will find out just how big the planet appears. The transit begins at 1500 hours or 3:00 PM PDT and we will stay until closing at 6:00 PM. The Sun will set with Venus in transit. A variety of hand-outs will help you in your explorations of astronomy. Thanks to our sponsors, Astronomy Magazine and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

 

Saturn remains in Virgo, Mars is 16.5° behind Regulus. The full Moon rises by 9:00 PM, more than 60° behind Saturn. I have been asked to explain the meaning of these degrees of separation. The degrees relate to the distance in angle of arc between two objects. To make it easy to gauge the distance we use our hands and fingers. In simple form, if you make a fist and hold it at arm’s length, the width from one side to the other across the knuckles will be about ten degrees. Using your star chart from www.skymaps.com (this is a free download) locate the constellation Leo. Next find Regulus. Mars will be about a fist and a half to the east of Regulus. Note the red color of Mars - if the clouds allow a view. For one degree we use the index finger first joint. As the Moon is about half a degree wide when full you can cover it with your finger, proving the value of body metrics. Curiously, a ruler marked in centimeters also works. One centimeter at arms length is roughly one degree of arc.

 

Gold Panning!

Our "resident" gold miner

These warm spring days bring occasional flurries of activity at our gold sluice. This morning we had 150+ visiting school children on the hunt for gold! Rumor has it that several of them found polished stones to take home.... and dreams of finding gold another day.

gold panning...we found something!

The Snowbirds Are Back

And this time, they brought a monkey!

Sena, a 15-year old capuchin monkey, paid NHOTIC a visit yesterday, and wanted to help us out in staffing the information desk. 

While we do not allow pets inside the Center building, service anmials are permitted entry under the Americans With Disabilites Act. Sena has been a service animal since she was two months old, and travels the country with her owner, who is a full-time RV'er.

For the past month or so, these "Snowbirds" have been regular visitors to the Interpretive Center, making their springtime journey north after wintering in warmer climates. 

How do you think these modern-day mobile homes compare to the covered wagons of the pioneers?

Run to the Ruts! Sign up!

Sign up for our 2nd Annual Run to the Ruts event! All 5K Walk & Run participants must sign up by May 11th to be guaranteed a t-shirt.

Call us today

541-523-1844

Trails Through Time

Calling All Photographers!

Enter your shots in our fall photography exhibit 

Click the image below for details on how to submit your photos

 

We're sharing some of our most frequenyly asked questions here at
Interpretive Center. We have visitors from all over the U.S. and the world, and hear the question "what's that green stuff out there?" It's sagebrush. An everday thing for people in eastern Oregon, but for those from other regions, here is s0me information: Sagebrush is probably the most common steppe plant you'll find in eastern Oregon, but not the only one. It shares space with horsebrush and rabbitbrush. Sagebrush is most easily identifiedfrom theother shrubs by its leaves because they are tridentate (they have three small teeth at the tip of the leaf). Most other shrubs have leaves with smooth edges. It is a lunchbar for several species of mammals and birds, including pronghorn, deer, rabbits and sage grouse. Sagebrush provides shade and cover from predators for small birds and mammals. Pioneers were not really able to use it for cook fires as it burns quickly and doesn't generate much heat; mostly is was an obstacle they had to cut away to clear a road for wagons and stock.

You know one of the most frequent questions our living history interpreters hear at the NHOTIC? It's kind of nosy, but people want to know if re-enactors are wearing authentic underwear! Why the fascination with underwear? We haven't figured out yet why people want to know this, but we do have a program to answer the question! "Under It All" this Saturday the 14th at 11:00 and 1:00. (PS...it's PG and PC, so you can bring the family)

Scats, Skulls and Animal Tracks!

Demonstrating different animal scats & tracks

 

More spring break activities through the rest of the week - check out the schedule below

Spring Break at the Center

Looking for a way to spend your spring break?

We've got some great activities for you!

DAILY: 11:00 am - 1:00 pm, March 26 - 30

Mon. March 26:   Geology & How to Pack a Wagon

Tues. March 27:  Skulls and Scat & Animal Tracks

Wed. March 28:   Sticker Quilt Blocks & Origami Flowers

Thurs. March 29: Obsidian Hand Tools & Origami Flowers

Fri. March 30:      Rag Dolls & How to Pack a Wagon  

Register for Run to the Ruts

Don't miss out on this fun-filled community event at Flagstaff Hill on June 2!

Registration is now available online, Walkers are just $10 and Runners are $15. Sign up by May 11 to reserve a t-shirt in your size.

The Trail Tenders are also looking for local businesses to sponsor the event - find more information here.

kestrel

yellow-bellied marmot

....rock chuck... ..groundhog....  ...a ground squirrel in the marmot genus...

...taking in a spot of morning sunshine...

Pack Your Wagon Exhibit

Pack Your Wagon!

Our interactive kids exhbit is now open, through May 28th

Come try your hand at packing a full-scale wagon or estimate the number of steps it would take you to walk the entire Oregon Trail!

Run to the Ruts---Save the Date!

Save the Date!

detailed information and registration forms available here!

Winter 2012

late January at NHOTIC

Windows in Time

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Homestead Act. Our volunteers & staff interpreters are developing some new living history presentations for the occasion.

Here's a sneak peek at "Windows in Time," a conversation between homsteaders over coffee:

January Sunrise

Sunrise from Flagstaff Hill, January 12, 2012

Dusty Ruts Banquet

Trail Tenders gathered for the annual Dusty Ruts Banquet on Saturday, January 7th.
Held at Crossroads Carnegie Art Center this year, almost fifty attended.

Honored for their volunteer service were:

Susan Kolb/Volunteer of the Year
Jack Jacobson/Visitor Service Award
Mike Bainter/Outreach Award
Tonia Johnson/Marian Brown (Interpretation) Award
Austin Nickens/Maintenance Award
Sarah Durflinger/Rookie of the Year
Shelby Sieckman/Trail Tender 2.0

Those honored for giving over 300 hours of volunteer time in FY 2011 were:
Dave Noble/653 hours
Mike Bainter/524.5 hours
Susan Kolb/315 hours
Jack Jacobson/308.75 hours

Thanks to all our Volunteers!