The Rogue River flows west for 215 miles (346 km) to the Pacific Ocean, about 23 miles (37 km) south-southeast of Port Orford and at Gold Beach, Oregon. It originates at Boundary Springs, at an elevation of 5,320 feet (1,622 m), near Mount Mazama‘s northern edge in Crater Lake National Park. The river drains a watershed of 3.3 million acres (1.3 million ha) through the Cascade Range and Klamath Mountains, traversing increasingly older geologic formations. It begins among Oregon’s youngest rocks—the pumice deposits from Mount Mazama’s eruption that created Crater Lake caldera about 7,700 years ago. The river then cuts through volcanic flows of the Cascade Arc, most of which are under 2 million years old, with the highest peaks less than 100,000 years old. Farther downstream, it flows through valleys with bedrock of layered marine sediments, 60 to 100 million years old, mostly buried under alluvium deposited by the ancestral river and its tributaries over half a million years ago. The river enters the Siskiyou Mountains and flows through some of Oregon’s oldest geologic formations, predominantly metamorphic rocks. These include altered volcanic flows and marine sediments initially deposited in an ocean trench. Over time, these sediments were lithified, folded, and pushed against the North American continent by plate tectonics, before being intruded by magmas between 350 million and 100 million years ago. The river’s last 10 miles (16 km) traverse the Otter Formation, which formed during the Late Jurassic period, approximately 201 million to 145 million years ago. This formation consists of layered graywacke, black shales, some red and green chert, and minor submarine volcanic rocks. The community of Gold Beach is primarily built on serpentinite, an igneous rock formed by the low-temperature metamorphism of a magmatic intrusion. Along the coast, the bedrock is largely buried beneath Quaternary dunes and beach sands.

Humans entered the Rogue River drainage at least 8,500 years ago, but little is known about these prehistorical people. In historical times, southwestern Oregon was divided into linguistic groups: the Shasta, the Takelma, and the Athapaskans. The Athapaskans are further divided by dialects, including the Chetco, Kwaishtunnetunne, Chetleshin near Pistol River, Chemetunne, Tututni, Mikonotunne, Shasta Costa, Yukichetunne of Euchre Creek, and Quotomah. The lower Rogue River was inhabited by the Shasta Costa near the Illinois River confluence, and the Tututni and other groups near the coast. The first recorded encounter between Europeans and Native Americans in coastal southwestern Oregon occurred in 1792 when British explorer George Vancouver anchored off Cape Blanco, about 30 miles (48 km) north of the Rogue River’s mouth, and was visited by canoes. Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader Alexander R. McLeod was the first European known to reach the lower Rogue River, traveling south from the Coquille River to the north bank in 1827. By the 1830s, conflicts with the Takelma led Hudson’s Bay Company traders to call it ‘Riviere des Coquins’, meaning ‘river of rogues’, resulting in the present-day name. Gold discovered in California in 1848 spurred overland travel from the Willamette Valley in Oregon to the Sacramento Valley in California. In 1851, placer gold deposits were discovered in the Siskiyou Mountains at Josephine Creek and soon after in the Illinois and Applegate Rivers, as well as the main stem of the Rogue River. Within weeks, thousands of prospectors were searching for gold in southwest Oregon. By 1852, placer gold was also found in the beach sands at the mouth of the Rogue River. As with all placer gold deposits, the gold concentrations were unevenly distributed. Some stretches of beach were exceptionally productive, while others contained only trace amounts of fine gold. Conflicts between Euro-Americans and Native Americans over land and river use led to several skirmishes known as the Rogue River Wars. The wars ended in June 1856 with the removal of most Native Americans in southwestern Oregon to the Coast Reservation, later known as the Siletz Reservation.

A small group of pioneers, including some Euro-American gold miners married to native Karuk women from the Klamath River basin, settled along the Rogue River. They established gardens and orchards, kept horses, cows, and other livestock, and occasionally received shipments of goods by pack mule over the mountains. The river’s mouth was called “yan-shu’-chit” in the Tolowa language of the Athabaskan people. In 1853, settlers named their town at the river’s mouth Ellensburg, after Sarah Ellen Tichenor, daughter of Captain William Tichenor, founder of nearby Port Orford. In 1858, Ellensburg was named county seat because Port Orford failed to finance a courthouse. On March 25, 1890, the postmaster changed the town’s name to Gold Beach to avoid confusion with Ellensburg, Washington. In 1883, Elijah H. Price proposed a permanent mail route by boat up the Rogue River from Gold Beach. The Post Office Department resisted, but in 1897 established a post office near the confluence of the Rogue and Illinois rivers named Agness. Since then, mailboats based in Gold Beach have been delivering mail to Agness, one of only two rural mailboat routes remaining in the United States; the other is on the Snake River. The gold supply eventually ran out, and the community subsisted on fishing, primarily for salmon and also for steelhead trout, sea urchins, and shellfish. Large salmon runs continued into the 20th century despite damage to spawning beds caused by gold mining in the 1850s and large-scale commercial fishing shortly thereafter. Salmon fishing peaked in 1908, but the size of salmon runs decreased considerably despite the construction of fish hatcheries. This decline resulted from overfishing with drift nets, fish wheels, and gill nets, as well as poor logging practices. When commercial fishing ended on the Rogue River in 1935, the town turned to logging as its primary industry. However, during the 1980s and 1990s, mills closed as environmental regulations, technology, and the timber market made milling less profitable. The river was historically crossed by ferry until the Oregon State Highway Department completed a bridge at Gold Beach. Dedicated on May 28, 1932, it was named after Isaac Lee Patterson, the governor of Oregon from 1927 to 1929. Read more here and here. Explore more of the Rogue River and Gold Beach here: