By H.L. Delaney

William Tichenor and the Founding of Port Orford

Before Port Orford was a town it was an idea in the head of a sea captain. William Tichenor looked at a black basalt harbor on the southern Oregon coast and saw a supply port for the gold country, a place a man could found and profit from. The town he planted there is the ground where the novel ends, and where a man named Enos was hanged.

Many towns on this coast grew without a plan, a store and a landing and then a few houses collecting at a river mouth. Port Orford was planned from the start. It began as a speculation by one man who had the means to try it, and the story of that man is worth telling on its own, apart from the fight on the rock that the town remembers itself by. The landing of 1851 and the battle that followed have their own account here, on the page about Battle Rock. This page is about the captain who ordered the landing and the town that came out of it.

The captain with a town in mind

William Tichenor was a sea captain, one of the men who worked the Pacific coasting trade in the years after the California strikes. He ran a steamer, the Sea Gull, on the water between San Francisco and the mouth of the Columbia, carrying passengers and freight along a coast that had suddenly filled with people and had almost nowhere to put in between its two ends. He was a man of some standing who had held public office back east before he came to the Pacific. He had sailed the southern Oregon coast enough times to know its few safe landings, and he had the vessel and the capital to act on what he knew.

The gold rush is the background to everything he did. The strikes in California pulled ships and men north along the coast, and the long unimproved middle of the run, the rocky southern Oregon shore, had no settled harbor between San Francisco and the Columbia. A captain who could put a town at a good landing on that stretch would own a link in a chain that everyone else on the coast had to use. Tichenor set out to be that captain.

A town-site as a speculation

What Tichenor proposed in 1851 was a real-estate venture with a harbor at the center of it. He announced that he meant to found a town on the southern Oregon coast and to open a road from it into the gold district in the interior. The two halves went together. A port with no road behind it would be only a landing. A port that fed the mines would draw freight, passengers, and settlers, and the man who owned the town-site would draw the profit of all of it. This was the ordinary arithmetic of frontier town-founding. Ground claimed for little, improved just enough to look permanent, and sold on to the people the improvements pulled in.

Planting a town also meant planting a claim, and on this coast a claim was made with bodies on the ground. To hold the harbor against other captains who might want it, Tichenor needed men living on the site, a presence a land office or a court could later recognize. So in the summer of 1851 he ran the Sea Gull into the harbor, put a small party ashore on the black sea-stack by the beach, left them a cannon, and steamed on for more settlers and supplies. What happened to those men, and to the Quatomah who came down to the beach against them, is told in full on the Battle Rock page and is not the subject here. What matters for the founding is the intent behind the landing. The men were there to hold a speculation.

The name came with the same confidence. The headland already carried an English name that a British naval expedition had put on the charts decades before, and Tichenor fixed that older name, Port Orford, to the town he intended. A place that had been lived in and worked for a very long time was given a name off a chart and entered into the American record as a town-site, as though the founding had begun on the day the captain decided on it.

The beach that was already someone's

The harbor Tichenor had chosen was already occupied ground. It was the home shore of the Quatomah, one of the Athabaskan-speaking bands of the lower Rogue and the coast that the record files under the name Tututni. They lived in permanent villages at the good sites along that coast, worked the salmon runs and the tide flats and the sea, and had done so for a very long time before any ship of the coasting trade came over the horizon. The harbor was sheltered and well placed, which is why the Quatomah had built their life around it and why Tichenor wanted it for a port.

A town-site scheme has no room in it for the people already on the site. In the language of the venture, the Quatomah counted only as a difficulty to be managed on the way to a town, and the record of the scheme treats their harbor as vacant. The cannon Tichenor left with his men said as much. It announced that the claim would be defended, and it fixed the people of the coast as an obstacle before they had done anything at all. The collision that followed was built into the plan. Tichenor had decided to take a harbor that belonged to somebody, and the taking of it could not be anything other than a collision.

Founding the town after the rock

The first landing failed. When Tichenor came back to the harbor his men were gone, and he took them for dead. He did not take it as a reason to give up the scheme. He sailed to San Francisco, gathered a larger and better-armed party, and returned to the same harbor to plant the town in force. This time the settlement held. His men built a fortification above the beach, and the town of Port Orford took root around it. The fort he raised was later taken over by the United States Army and used as a base during the years of war on the southern coast.

So Port Orford was founded twice over, once as a landing that was driven off and once as an armed settlement that stayed. The second founding is the one that took, and it took because it came with soldiers behind it. The town that Tichenor had pictured as a peaceful link in the coasting trade was established as a garrison on a contested coast. Tichenor himself settled into the place he had made. He became its postmaster and sat in the territorial legislature, a founder grown into a town father, while the people whose harbor he had taken were pushed toward the edge of it and then off it entirely.

The country Port Orford was built to reach

The road into the interior was the whole point, and it proved harder to cut than the harbor was to hold. Parties went out from Port Orford to find a pack route to the mines, and the country behind the coast, steep, timbered, and defended, did not give one up easily. One such party met disaster on the Coquille that fall, an episode the histories fold into the opening of the Rogue River War. The war is its own long story, told here on the page about the Rogue River Wars. What Port Orford supplied to it was a foothold. The town was the beachhead from which the interior was entered, supplied, and finally cleared, and the clearing ended the way it generally did in Oregon, with the surviving bands of the coast and the Rogue removed to the reservations at Siletz and Grande Ronde, far from the country they were taken from.

That is the town Tichenor founded, seen at its full size. It began as one captain's bet on a harbor and grew into a base for the taking of the country around it. The land it was built to reach was seized, and the people it was built among were removed. A speculation in coastal real estate became a hinge of a war.

The gallows at the founded town

Port Orford is where the novel ends, and it ends there for a reason rooted in this history. Around 1857, six years after the first landing, a man the settlers called Enos was hanged at Port Orford, on the same black rock where Tichenor's town had begun. He had been charged with a leading part in the violence on the lower rivers, tried in a civil court, and ordered released for want of testimony. A mob took him anyway and hanged him on the rock. The full and contested account of that life is set down on the page about who Enos was, and the 1851 fight the rock is named for is on the Battle Rock page.

It is worth keeping the two dates clearly apart. The landing was 1851. The hanging was around 1857. The same ground holds both, which is part of why the old county histories sometimes blur them together, though they are six years and a whole war apart. Tichenor put men on the rock in 1851 to found a town. The people of that town hanged a man on the same rock around 1857. The place began as a claim staked with a cannon and became, within a few years, a claim enforced with a rope.

Enos was the kind of man the coastal ventures used, a guide and interpreter who could move between languages and sides, the sort of figure the whole enterprise depended on to go anywhere at all. He died at the hands of the town that grew out of exactly the kind of scheme he had spent his life serving. The rock Tichenor's men had held against the Quatomah became the place where his town put a Native man to death. That is the shape the founding finally took, and it is the ground the book was written to stand on.

The Renegade Enos: Witness to the American West is a novel by H.L. Delaney, forthcoming from Basalt Sea Press, the conquest of the West at the eye level of the man it used and discarded. Port Orford is where the book comes to rest, and William Tichenor's town-site is the stage its last act is set on. More documented history sits behind the book at The History Behind the Novel, the 1851 fight the town remembers is told on Battle Rock, and the man hanged there is on Who Was Enos. Get launch news →

Sources & further reading

• Shirley Nelson, "City of Port Orford," The Oregon Encyclopedia — the founding of the town and Tichenor's part in it.
• "Battle of Battle Rock (1851)," The Oregon Encyclopedia — the June 1851 landing and its place in the Rogue River wars.
• William Tichenor reminiscences, 1849–1886, Archives West (Orbis Cascade Alliance) — the captain's own later account of the Port Orford venture.
• Stephen Dow Beckham, Requiem for a People: The Rogue Indians and the Frontiersmen (University of Oklahoma Press, 1971).
• Nathan Douthit, Uncertain Encounters: Indians and Whites at Peace and War in Southern Oregon, 1820s–1860s (Oregon State University Press, 2002).