The Past         "The Hollering Place"

From the Collection of the Coos Historical & Maritime Museum
Click Photo to Enlarge

1. The Coos Indian villages of Waikdee, Hanistitch, Intesitch, and Walitch were located along the shore of Empire.  Ethnological records tell of a young Indian woman, Qaicac (Kyshus), who won great esteem playing shinny, a game like hockey, on the Empire beach.  Plus the records of place names tell that the Indian name for the place across the bay from Empire was named "The Hollering Place" because it was on the shore of the major north/south travel way of Oregon's south coast and people would holler over to the villages at Empire for someone to paddle over and pick them up in their canoes.

2.  The 1826 writing of Hudson's Bay Company fur trapper Alexander McLeod, the first white man known to have come to Coos Bay, includes his journal entry telling of standing on the west side of the bay, looking across toward the Empire side of the bay and describing the land as, "...lofty and covered with an impenetrable forest."  He also had to  have the Indians ferry the trappers and their families across the bay in canoes.  A recorded incident during his visit tells of an Indian man killed accidentally by the trappers when the Indian was pulling up a canoe containing one of the trapper's guns.  The trappers involved fled, but a later part of the party arrived on the scene and was killed by the Indians.  It was told by Lottie Evanoff to Smithsonian ethnologist John P. Harrington that the dead trapper's wife and daughter were held at Empire for four years.

In 1828, American fur trapper Jedediah Smith arrived on the east side of the bay from the south and the Coos Indians ferried his party across the bay while the horses swam.  The Coos Indians were nearly the last people to see the Smith party alive as they were almost all killed in a fight with the  Lower Umpqua Indians near Reedsport.

3.  The wreck of the old sailing ship Captain Lincoln in 1852 brought the first white settlement to Coos Bay, although accidental and temporary, on the North Spit, right across from Empire.  The wreck was very near where the New Carissa later foundered and in a similar ferocious winter storm.  The shipwrecked men made shelters from the ship's sails and lived there about four months.  They named their tent village "Camp Castaway".

4.  The beaches at Empire where the Indian village of Hanisitch had been located became like the Plymouth Rock of what is now permanent settlement on the bay in 1853.  They named it Empire City and established the land claims on the very sites where the Indians had lived for untold centuries.  Most arrivals at Empire City came from the north and, arriving at The Hollering Place, they called over for someone to come and pick them up.  Livestock was ferried in a scow or swam across the bay at Empire.

5.A gold rush to the black sand beaches south at Whisky Run nearly emptied the fledgling town in 1853.  Patrick Flanagan brought a mule train down from Scottsburg to carry supplies from Empire City to Randolph at Whisky Run.  The trail that began at Empire City is now known as the historic Randolph Trail, and it was an important Coos County travel way for over 30 years.  A map of Coos County made in the 1870's shows the locations of Empire City and Randolph with no designation for North Bend or Marshfield.  Although the mapmaker must surely have had old information, the map does reveal that in its earliest history, the most important place in Coos County was Empire City.  The Coos Indians were gathered up in 1856 and held at the place where the old paper mill is located several miles down the bay from Empire City.  then they were moved from their homeland and taken up the coast.

6.  Empire City was the first center of business and commerce at Coos Bay.  It became a very bustling waterfront town with the Luse Sawmill and Shipyard (1856), a post office (1858), docks crowded with sailing ships, and several stores and saloons.  It was the county seat of Coos County until 1896.

7.  Empire's unique and scenic location across the bay from the golden sand dunes of the North Spit is also where the lower bay is at its narrowest.  The force of the tides flowing through the narrow place brings deep water next to shore at Empire.  Instead of extensive mud flats typical of much of the bay at low tide, Empire has some sandy beaches.  Although the canoes of the Coos Indians are no longer pulled up to cedar-0plank homes at Empire, floathouses once lined the shore, and today's fisherman, clam diggers and windsurfers launch in the same places.  the windsurfers are really fun to watch in a windstorm and they favor the beach at Empire.  The Hollering Place Wayside provides a great view to watch the windsurfers, and it is a mystic and beautiful site to tell the enchanting history stories of our very own place.  These are the kinds of stories, which, offered in in a spot with such a grandeur of wide vistas, would entice visitors to stop , play, learn , enjoy, and stay for a while in our wonderful Bay Area.