Well… In a strict geographic coordinate sense, the statement is not exactly true. With respect to the American West (in other words, when considering the western part of the contiguous 48 states), the title of westernmost point of land belongs to Cape Alava, Washington at 124° 44’ 12” West Longitude. At 124° 33’ 51” Cape Blanco is, however, farther west than Cape Mendicino, California (124° 24’ 34”), which does give some measure of both pride and amusement to Oregonians. A certain sense of humor is helpful when at the Cape, for it seems as if the wind is always blowing. Always. The folks at windfinder.com tell us that the annual average speed of wind gusts is 33 miles per hour, with November, December and January averaging 39, 38, and 40 miles per hour respectively. During the legendary Columbus Day Storm of 1962, the Cape experienced its highest recorded wind speed of 145 mph. Make sure to hang onto your hat, children, and small dogs.
Part of the reason for this is, of course, the prevailing westerly winds coming unimpeded – like the ocean swells they produce – across thousands of miles of the north Pacific Ocean. What geologists call the land/sea contrast is, however, an important element as well. Simply put, water and solid ground heat up at different rates under the same solar energy input from the sun. The land, warming up more quickly, produces rising air during the day literally drawing in air from the ocean (think of the temperature difference between the beach at Santa Monica and downtown Los Angeles – only a few miles away – on a summer day). In the late night and early morning the slow-warming waters have kept and maximized their heat while the land has more quickly lost its heat, reversing the rising air location – and the winds.
Coming into the country, originally from Tyrone County, Ireland, Patrick Hughes arrived at this windswept land’s end in the late 1850’s with his recent bride Jane (O’Neill) Hughes, For a few years Patrick tried his hand (as did many others in southern Oregon during the 1850’s – 1860’s) at gold mining, in his case on the Sixes River, which flows into the Pacific on the immediate north side of Cape Blanco. In 1860 he started a dairy farm operation that became something of a family empire in the Cape Blanco area. Their exquisite Queen Anne house, built in 1898 on a terrace immediately above the Sixes River floodplain, was occupied by members of the Hughes family until 1971. It is now part of the Cape Blanco State Park. Even 200 feet below the Cape Blanco headland and some half mile from the Pacific, the overwhelming sense when standing in the backyard of the house is of…wind.
The Hughes’ were not the first, nor the last immigrants into this windswept end of the West. Their arrival and lives there remain, however, an important “bookend” in the mythology of the American West.
There is probably no more potent symbol in that mythology than the Oregon Trail. Although there were other migration routes (The Santa Fe Trail, for example), nothing else has quite captured our imagination like the Oregon Trail. Escaping from the Depression of 1837 at a time when the West was opening for immigration, the hardy souls of the 1843 wagon train were bound for Oregon City and the Willamette River Valley in order to start anew. The process filled in the West: up the Missouri River into the Dakotas, into Kansas along the Kansas River, along the Platte through Nebraska, up the North Platte into central Wyoming, across the Rocky Mountains into the Great Basin and up into Idaho, and finally, across the Snake and Columbia river basins.
Given that mythology, it is appropriate that we look to Cape Blanco to close the chapter. If the West as a place and an idea started with the Oregon Trail, its conclusion is the short 6-mile road from US 101 to Cape Blanco and the Hughes homestead. The End of the West is there; found on that lonely, lovely, windswept headland, standing resolutely before the great Pacific. What….and Where next?
