The Mountains of Central Oregon and Unplanned Adventures

So here is the beautiful pond at Bates campground between two National Forests along Hwy 26.  We saw an immature eagle and its mother flying over the pond and two new ducks, merganser and golden eye and this strange plant, I hope to id as soon as we have good internet.  Internet has been unpredictable here and there. 

We are finding unplanned adventures to be more fun than the planned ones.  We ended up today at the Kum Chung Wah Memorial and John Day National Fossil Beds on our way to the Newberry National Volcano area and High Desert Museum near Bend, Oregon.  We will see those areas before the end of the weekend, I hope.

The Kum Chung Wah Memorial was fascinating and told the story of two Chinese men who came here as part of the gold rush in Oregon and stayed in the tiny town of John Day until they died.  They became partners, one a traditional doctor of herbs and the other the gregarious Lung On who made over $900,000 while selling goods to both Chinese and Americans.  He had the first car dealership in John Day and became a Mason even though he was a Buddhist. He died in 1948.  Both left wives and children in China (US would not allow them to emigrate with their husbands) and never saw them again. During WWII the band on emigration lifted and a nephew of Dr. Ing Hay family came over.  He died in 1952 at the age of 89.  His great nephew is/was the President of American Medical Association.  Neat story.  The Chinese were hated and had to protect themselves from the bigotry at first in the area, but that changed with time, by the 1920s Dr. Hay had people coming from as far away as Utah to get his medicines and consult him. 

In the 1860s the area was also being explored for fossils as well as gold.  A young minister by the name of Thomas Condon discoveries of mammalian fossils from 45 million years ago spurred more scientific investigations and new methods of dating fossils.  The John Day National Fossil Beds are considered one of the best in the world and cover 100s of square miles of central Oregon. This was the perfect end of our fossil explorations after seeing Dinosaur National Monument. We missed one other National Fossil Monument in Idaho due to a miscalculation of which road to take.  Maps are not always accurate and sometimes we get turned around.  The Lady on the GPS has gotten us lost also on this trip twice.  But she saved us twice as well. I am thinking the next time we plan these long trips I need to get detailed maps, but where???
PS John Day was a fur trapper and hunter for the Astoria Expedition (yes, John Jacob Astor who funded the expeditions).  He has a river, town and the fossil beds named after him.  His claim to fame was being stripped naked and robbed by Native Americans somewhere up on the Oregon trail near the Columbia River. he went mad at some point.