By Kristin Koptiuch
Oh Garibaldi, your roots in the Oregon territory
run deeper than you claim—
deeper than the settler’s telling,
deeper than the plaques and monuments,
deeper than the names etched in pride.
You bear a name bestowed by an admirer
of a heroic unifier of Italy’s north and south
just before America’s Civil War.
But your Pacific unity was built on erasure
“The first significant property owner.”
So the record states, so the story holds.
Daniel Bayley, granted land
by Ulysses S. Grant himself.
Appointed first postmaster, the first to name.
No mention of those
who knew this land for ten thousand years,
who read the tides,
who spoke the five rivers’ languages,
who walked these shores before ownership
was a word that could be spoken.
“The first significant property owner.”
A phrase repeated verbatim on Google websites
seventeen times over—
as if to insist it is true.
Oh Garibaldi, your history is stacked high—
a prideful monument to industry:
The great smokestack,
memorials to sailors and fishers,
to lumbermen and railroaders,
the white “G” blazing in the forested hills,
the old railroad winding its way
through a past that you refuse to reckon.
And there, bronze and resolute,
stands Captain Robert Gray,
colonial seafarer and merchant of furs.
Tillamook County’s lone memorial monument
honors the man who “discovered”
what was never lost.
He named the bay Murderers Harbor
when his own crew’s violence was met with resistance.
He claimed the mighty Columbia
as if rivers could belong to men.
Violence and epidemics laid waste to a people.
Their survivors’ ghost dance
could not spare
a way of life extinguished.
Seized homelands set the stage for territorial expansion.
The captain’s deeds, enshrined on the pedestal:
“The vast Oregon territory is
the only piece of real estate
acquired by the United States of America
that was discovered by an American.”
The only piece of real estate.
The only.
Oh Garibaldi, you are steeped in history,
but not in its depths.
You trace your lineage through industry, through war,
but hesitate to unearth the stolen soil beneath your feet.
Yes, a mural on your Maritime Museum nods to a past you do not tell—
a dugout canoe, hovering, a ghost of acknowledgment,
adrift in the currents of forgotten names.
The museum’s silence is louder than the waves.
No reckoning, no redress,
just passages from old texts,
painting the indigenous as primitive,
as if to justify their undoing.
The first significant property owner.
The only piece of US real estate discovered by an American.
Oh Garibaldi, you have preserved much,
but your curation is self-serving.
You know your roots are in this land.
But how deep will you dare to delve?