Butter Creek Ranch

Our story/The names

Every place on the ranch is named for where it is. This is where those names came from.

Butter Creek
For butter taken from the army's stores, or from the officers' mess, by volunteers in the Cayuse War, according to a pioneer diary of 1852. A second story, that emigrants found stale butter on the bank, has never been confirmed.1
Battle Mountain
For the fight of 8 July 1878 at the head of Butter and Birch creeks, said to have been the last battle of its kind in Oregon.1,2
Meacham
In the 1840s H. A. G. Lee camped here, and the place was known as Lee's Encampment. In 1863 the brothers Harvey and Alfred Meacham opened a small stage station on the road over the Blue Mountains, and built a larger Meacham Station in 1865. Alfred Meacham later became Oregon's Superintendent of Indian Affairs.1
Gurdane
For John S. Gurdane, a pioneer settler of south Umatilla County and a member of the state legislature. The Gurdane post office opened in 1890.1
Camas Creek
For camas, whose bulb was a staple food of the Native peoples of the region. The word comes through the Chinook trade jargon from a Nootka word meaning sweet.1
Vinson
On upper Butter Creek. George Vinson came from Iowa in 1852 and was the first to take a wagon up the creek.3
Nolin, once Happy Canyon
Where the Umatilla runs through a wide defile below Pendleton. In stage-coach days it was the most fertile spot around, with gardens and orchards, and settlers rode in from fifty miles for all-night dances at its ranch houses, so it was called Happy Canyon. When the Pendleton Round-Up built its night show of a frontier town, it named the show Happy Canyon after this place. The name Nolin was in use by 1885; where it came from is not yet known.4,5
Mud Springs
For the springs above Nolin. Mud Spring and Lower Mud Spring feed Mud Spring Canyon, which runs down to the Umatilla River beside the ranch headquarters. The ranch company formed in 1934 carries the same name.6,7

Sources

  1. 1.Lewis A. McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 3rd ed. (Portland: Binfords & Mort, 1952)
  2. 2.Battle Mountain historical marker, U.S. 395
  3. 3.Morrow County pioneer history, OrGenWeb Morrow County
  4. 4.Charles Wellington Furlong, Let 'er Buck (New York: Putnam, 1921), pp. 103–104
  5. 5.Weston Leader, 5 June 1885
  6. 6.U.S. Geological Survey, Geographic Names Information System, Oregon
  7. 7.Ranch records and family history

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