John Day Fossil Beds State Park

About John Day Fossil Beds State Park

The river is named after John Day because it was plundered by the American Indians at the mouth of the Columbia River. He came to Oregon as a Virginian and spent most of his time in northern Oregon, but also in Washington, California, New York and New Jersey.

Other pioneers of the settler movement farmed and felled timber, and today the region, which was uninhabited in its own way, includes more than 100,000 hectares of agricultural land in the Columbia River basin.

Another early settler was the Rev. Thomas Condon, and his pastor and passionate naturalist was one of the first to recognize the fossilized teeth and bones the cavalry had collected on their way out of the country. The Captain was received in Oregon by the Reverend C Londonon, a member of his church and friend of John Day, and met the Captain.

The nation was divided, and so was the world, but the nation as a whole was not as divided as in many other places.

At the centre of the controversy was a book published in 1859 by a British biologist called Charles Darwin. In the halls of global learning, he discussed the new species of plants and animals that emerge from old species in an ever-changing and evolving world. As the North-South conflict raged, a firestorm of controversy gathered pace.

Neither side could prove their arguments without evidence and fossil evidence: gold minted from the remains of ancient animals and plants, gold mint in the form of diamonds and gold coins, or gold and silver.

Fossil science in Oregon could determine the evolutionary controversy, and the Oregon Gold Union could decide the war. With an army escort, Condon looked after the other riches of the John Day Valley in the gold fields of Canyon City. Military patrols stepped in to guard the ore transports, but without an army escort they were looking out for each other and for the empires of the John Day Valley.

When Condon ventured into the Pictorial Gorge in 1864, he discovered a lost world of eroded canyons and cliffs with no signs of life.

He called the valley Turtle Cove because he found many petrified turtle shells, and here was the wealth of fossils he was looking for.