Last Updated: November 16, 2007

For centuries coastal Oregon was fully an area of Indian occupation. These people's names designated the headlands, waterfalls, fishing holes, berry-picking sites and village locations. The first recorded white intrusion into this Indian world occurred in the summer of 1788. That year Captain Robert Gray, an American, sailed his vessel, the Washington, close to the shore at Roads End. That August the Indians who lived in the villages between the outlet of Devil's Lake and the Salmon River sighted this vessel and some ventured out in their canoes to observe these visitors. (1) At that time it is likely that the Salmon River Indians occupied the area now known as Roads End. (9)

Historical Note: In 1792 Captain Gray, commanding another vessel, sailed about 80 miles north of Roads End into the mouth of a large river. On May 11, 1792 he named the river after his ship the "Columbia". (12)

Not until June 1826 did an expedition of white men traverse this section of the coast by land. Alexander Roderick McLeod led an expedition for the Hudson's Bay Company over Cascade Head to the Salmon River Estuary and south along the coast. (2)

Whites intermittently passed through this area in the late 1840's and early 1850's, especially after the establishment of white settlements on Tillamook Bay in 1852. As early as 1837 Rev. Jason Lee and Cypress Shepard from Willamette Valley brought their wives for a honeymoon on the Oregon Coast somewhere near present Lincoln City. (3)

Probably prior to 1851 cattle drovers from the valley brought their herds west over a forest trail for pasture in the salt marshes along the Salmon River. (4)

The area of Roads End became part of the Siletz Indian Reservation by Executive Order of November 9, 1855. By the summer of 1856 the U.S. Army commenced relocation of hundreds of refugee Indians from southwestern Oregon to this reservation following the conclusion of the Rogue Indian Wars. (5)

Roads End is truly the end of the road. Historians feel that it was probably built while Phil Sheridan was running a patrol out of the Grand Ronde Indian Agency in 1856. (The Vacationer Volume 1, Number1)

Oregon was admitted as a state on February 14, 1859. At that time the area of North Lincoln County, although an Indian Reservation,  was included in Polk County. (7)

By 1875 white squatters had moved onto the northern part of the Siletz Reservation and, increasingly in the 1880's, took up lands just north of the Salmon River in southern Tillamook County. Since both banks of the river and the coast south toward Boiler Bay were reserved by allotment in 1894, it was only with the opening of "surplus" lands or the death of Indian title holders to these properties that whites could legitimately settle in the area. (4)

Lincoln County was created on February 20, 1893 and was governed by the Lincoln County Commissioners Court which consisted of two commissioners and presided over by the County Judge. The court started meeting in April 1893 in a rented building in the then County Seat at Toledo (7)

The Roads End area remained part of the Siletz Reservation until August 15^th, 1894, when Congress authorized the allotment in severalty of all of this district under the terms of the Dawes Act of 1887. By this action, tracts of land up to eighty acres were assigned in trust management to specified Indians enumerated by the Allotment Commission working at Siletz in 1891-1893. Many of these properties continued in trust management until termination by act of Congress in 1956. (6) In 1894 President Grover Cleveland gave Amanda Logan a 25-year trust patent for 76 acres in what is now Roads End. (NG - 6/10/76)