20 minutes North of Portland is an island. It lies sprawled out in the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, face down like a redneck passed out in a mud puddle after a long day of tailgating. If you’re a Portland cyclist, you know this island well. When frost turns the West Hills into a Boitano-esque skate fest, when the thought of running the guantlet of ‘luded-out zombies and pathletes on Marine Drive makes you puke in your mouth a little bit, Sauvie Island beckons.
You know Sauvie Island. But do you know it. Like in the biblical sense. Do you know where to touch it to make it bark like a dog? Have you made it sleep in the wet spot? We do. We have.
Sauvie Island is more than just a bastion of pepperspray-happy shitbags, cornmazes, and freeballing 40-somethings with tramp stamps. It has a richly-marbled history. Like pancetta. Or the urinals at Caesar’s Palace Reno.
Sauvie Island was once called Wapato Island for the wapato, or marsh tubers, that grew there in abundance. You want a wapato? I can get you a wapato, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don’t wanna know about it, believe me. Hell, I can get you a wapato by 3 o’clock this afternoon… with nail polish. These fucking amateurs..
Before whitey came and ruined their 24/7 wapato rager, the Multnomah tribe of the Chinook people were the only game in town. Numbering over 2,000 people in 15 villages, they built longhouses, practiced serious cranial deformation, and–I’m not shitting you–harvested wapato with their toes. Then they all got ague fever. And died. Now they’re the Mult-no-mo’. True story.
Lewis and Clark spent a fitful night on the Island and their way to the coast. Clark remarked in his journal,
“I [s]lept but verry little last night for the noise Kept [up] dureing the whole of the night by the Swans, Geese, white and & Grey Brant Ducks &c. on a Small Sand Island … they were emensely noumerous, and their noise horid.”
Clark then went on to found the “Birds are Too Damn Loud” party and ran for mayor.
After the Multnomah got that fever! That ague fever!, the kindly old grandpas from the Hudson Bay Company decided to put all that conveniently de-populated land to use. They enlisted a French udder yanker named Laurent Sauve (from which Sauvie Island gets its name) to float a heap of heifers across the river and establish a dairy on the island. Just lonely ol’ Laurent and 400 nubile cattle, their pendulous udders swollen and swaying, just begging to be tugged. Needless to say, Laurent didn’t leave the farm much. And those forearms. Like Popeye on ‘roids (ster, not hemmor).
But one cow-happy Frenchman goes not a community make. So more settlers came. And came. One of these early pioneers, James Francis Bybee, made sufficient skrilla in the California gold rush to afford to build a house worthy of an entire episode of Cribs 1850. His was the first house in Oregon to use plaster in its construction. Presaging the current influx of boring whiteness from Brooklyn to Portland, Bybee had to import the plaster from New York and bring it by boat around the Horn. “Bringing plaster ’round the Horn” was also Bybee’s signature sex/finishing move.
A fact of life for settlers on Sauvie Island was the annual floods, or “freshets” which inundated the island after the Spring melts. “Leaving a floater” in the 1850s basically meant building a house on Sauvie. Dikes to control flooding were installed in the 1930s, effectively putting “Wacky Wilhelmena’s WaterWing and Reed-Snorkel Emporium” out of business. It remains closed to this day.
The 20th century came slowly to the island, as evidenced by the current popularity of Spuds McKenzie paraphernalia in the Cracker Barrel convenience store. Electricity was absent until 1936, and only in 1950 was a bridge built to connect the island to the mainland.
