Page:Oregon Geographic Names, third edition.djvu/617



August 24, 1810. He came to Oregon in 1846. He rendered important service toward creation of Oregon Territory. He wrote Oregon and California in 1848, in two volumes, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1849. He died at Salem February 5, 1888. His address on the migration of 1846 to Oregon appears in OPA Transactions, 1878, pages 29-71; history of the provisional government, ibid., 1874, pages 43-95. Thornton was a member of the emigration that came by the Applegate Route in 1846, and for many years was especially bitter against Jesse Applegate and other members of the party who went from the Willamette Valley to prepare a road for the emigration. Particulars of this difficulty may be found in Bancroft's History of Oregon, volume I, page 542, et seq. Thornton challenged the integrity of David Goff, a member of the Applegate party, and James W. Nesmith, Goff's son-in-law, challenged Thornton to a duel. As a result of Thornton's failure to accept Nesmith's challenge, the latter prepared a poster and tacked it up on trees about Oregon City in June 1847, calling Thornton a variety of names. Judge Deady describes the poster as "a wealth of adjectives." C. H. Stewart, of Albany, calls attention to the fact that Thornton called this lake Fairmount Lake, presumably for a small hill to the north. The name Fairmount has not persisted for the lake, although it is applied to a school nearby. When Thornton settled on his homestead in November, 1846, he called the place Forest Grove. The name seems to have been unusually attractive to him, for on January 10, 1851, he suggested it for the locality which is now a town in Washington County. See under Forest

GROVE for details.

THORP CREEK, Wallowa County. Thorp Creek is just southwest of Wallowa Lake. It was named for C. H. Thorp by Fred McClain.

THREE FINGERED JACK, Jefferson and Linn counties. While this peak is one of the lesser ones of the Cascade Range, as far as altitude is concerned, its unusual appearance has given it much prominence. Its elevation is 7848 feet, or practically the same as that of its neighbor, Mount Washington. Its name is in a way descriptive, but the writer has been unable to learn who named it, or when. It has three main rock spires. It is not mentioned by any writer of the exploratory period. Some time in the '70s it was called Mount Marion because of the activities of a Marion County road locating party under the leadership of John Minto, who investigated passes over the Cascade Range nearby. The writer was told about 1900 that the present name had been applied because of a three-fingered trapper who lived nearby, whose name was Jack. As far as known the first ascent made of Three Fingered Jack was on Labor Day, September 3, 1923, when six boys from Bend, some of whom had made the first ascent of Mount Washington on August 26, reached the summit. These boys found a series of lava chimneys to ascend in mounting the almost perpendicular walls of the highest finger. For particulars about Three Fingered Jack, see Mazama, for December, 1917.

THREE LYNX CREEK, Clackamas County. This stream, a tributary of Clackamas River below Old Grove Fork, bears a name that has provoked much controversy. Old maps show the name Three Links, and there is a legend in eastern Clackamas County to the effect that this name was the result of loss, by a surveyor, of three links out of a surveying chain. Ernest P. Rands and William C. Elliott of Port