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Washington County Museum Hosts Evening Lecture About Legendary
“Mountain Man” Joe Meek

Wednesday May 20, 6:30 pm, 120 E Main in downtown Hillsboro, general admission $6, seniors/children/college & military with ID $4, Museum members free.

John Terry, long-time reporter and author of the popular Oregon Trail” column in the Oregonian, will lecture about one of Washington County’s most famous and favored sons, Joe Meek. Meek has become somewhat of a symbol, part myth, part history, “Joseph LaFayette Meek, partly via his own ego and partly through romantic portrayals by others, has come to epitomize the genre we know as ‘Mountain Men.’ But what was life really like for Joe Meek and others of his ilk in the peril-frought frontier of the American West?” asks Terry. He says the answer often surprises people, “The lives of these men were pretty much nothing like that of television’s “Grizzly Adams” and Robert Redford’s “Jeremiah Johnson.”

Joe Meek was born in Washington County, Virginia, near the Cumberland Gap, in 1810. At the age of 18 he joined William Sublette and the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, and roamed the Rocky Mountains for over a decade as a fur trapper. Meek left the fur trapping trade in 1840. He joined up with two other trappers, Caleb Wilkins and Robert Newell, to lead a small group of emigrants from Fort Hall to Oregon. The trappers agreed to guide the group to the Whitman Mission near Fort Walla Walla. The single wagon that brought the group was the first ever to make it as far west as the mission on the Oregon Trail. Meek eventually ended up in the Tualatin Valley in 1841.

At meetings in Champoeg, Oregon, called to form a provisional government, his was one of the foremost voices on the side of the American settlers. In 1843, when the provisional government was formed, Meek was appointed sheriff, and was elected to the legislature in 1846 and 1847. Meek died in 1875 at his home near present day Hillsboro, and is buried at the Old Scotch Church. He said, “I want to live long enough to see Oregon securely American... so I can say that I was born in Washington County, United States, and died in Washington County, United States.”

Terry retired from writing his popular “Oregon Trails” column in 2011 and is currently working on a compilation of the columns to be published in the future. Terry graduated from Sheridan High School in 1956 and began his newspaper career while still in High School. He worked for a number of newspapers, including the Statesman Journal in Salem and the Oregonian. He has won several Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association awards for Best Local Column, 1969 and 1975; and Best Feature Story, 1968. His column “Oregon Trails” devoted to Oregon and Northwest history was published from 1996-2011.

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