Oregon's oldest hotel was a hideaway for Hollywood stars

There were times, during Hollywood’s golden age, when Clark Gable simply couldn’t be found anywhere.

Studio executives would search frantically for the top-shelf star, needing to talk to him about a project and facing a tight deadline. He’d be gone.

In fact, he’d be fly-fishing on the Rogue River in Oregon, while staying in a small inn that today is the oldest continually operating hotel in the entire Pacific Northwest: The Wolf Creek Tavern.

Clark wasn’t the only Hollywood bigshot in on the secret, either. The Wolf Creek Tavern was a regular place of refuge for a bunch of Golden Age Hollywood stars, including Carole Lombard, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Mary Pickford, Orson Welles, and even John Wayne.

And none of them was even the most prominent person to have spent the night at the Tavern. In 1880, United States President Rutherford B. Hayes spent the night at the Tavern. (This was on the same visit to the West Coast that would expose President Hayes a couple days later to the dangers of stray bullets from gunfighter-rabbi Moses May on the street outside the Esmond Hotel in Portland; that, of course, is a story for another time!)

Also, if you are more of a literature buff, Sinclair Lewis’s name is also on the guest register, and Jack London was a regular and did quite a bit of writing there. With his wife, Charmian Kittredge London, he holed up in a tiny little garret-like room over the hotel’s front porch for several weeks in 1912 to put the finishing touches on the manuscript for The Valley of the Moon.

(The Valley of the Moon is not London’s most famous novel, but maybe would have been if it had come out a decade or two later; a University of California Press reviewer described it as “a road novel 50 years before Kerouac.”)

The Wolf Creek Tavern got its start in 1883, when pioneer Henry Smith built the “Six Bit House” on the stagecoach road used for folks traveling the Oregon Stage Coach line between Portland and Sacramento. He called it Six Bit House because, well, it cost six bits (75 cents) to stay the night there. Basically, that broke down into two bits each for dinner, a room, and breakfast.

Business, on that basis, was really good. Wolf Creek turned out to be perfectly positioned for an overnight stop for passengers on the regular stagecoach line. So four years later, Smith built a bigger inn right across the street — a “first-class hotel” featuring 16 guest rooms, separate men’s and ladies’ parlors and a nice dining room. There were no bathrooms; each room came with a bowl and pitcher of clean water, and a “deluxe privy” stood just outside the back door. The meaning of “first class” has, it appears, changed in the intervening years.

So, too, has the meaning of the word “tavern.” The Wolf Creek Tavern served no alcohol until much later (they have a decent wine list today featuring primarily Oregon vintages).

The stagecoach stopped running in 1887, the same year the tavern was built, because a railroad link to Sacramento made it obsolete. But the stagecoach road remained busy with travelers on horseback and in wagons and carts, and a few years later Highway 99 followed the same route. So the hotel business remained brisk.

The price of a room for the night also remained at 75 cents for a long time, and that was a problem for some of the travelers because, well, that was a decent amount of money in the 1880s. Not everyone passing through could afford that rate.

So to accommodate working cowboys and other traveling bindlestiffs who needed a cheap place to sleep while passing through, Smith let them stay in the attic for a dime a night.

The trouble was, the attic wasn’t fully floored; all it had was a sort of shelf around the perimeter, two or three boards wide. So to keep from rolling off this shelf and crashing through the board-and-batten ceiling into some unsuspecting guest’s room, the cowboys would jam their spurs into the rafters. The marks from these spurs, left 125 years ago, can still be seen.

There are also a few bullet holes in the bricks and woodwork here and there, apparently put there by guests in a rowdy and frolicksome mood — one has to suspect the cowboys of having been responsible for these. This sort of thing was more typical with inns that served whiskey, but maybe guests brought their own. In any case, there they are, and it’s sort of fun to wonder about the circumstances that resulted in such dramatic damage.

The Wolf Creek Tavern can’t really be discussed without bringing up some of the legends and stories of paranormal activity there. Stories of ghostly fingers tickling the ivories of the piano in the parlor and furniture rearranging itself while nobody is looking are common there. Over the years ghost hunters have flocked to the inn with electromagnetic-frequency “ghost meters,” EVP detectors, dowsing rods, and various other spirit-detection wheezes, and several of the ghost-hunting TV shows have sent crews to investigate the place. Supposedly there is a daughter of an innkeeper that wanders the halls, and a man that sometimes materializes in the Clark Gable suite. The place is even rumored to be haunted by Jack London himself — London died in 1916, so he's had plenty of time to get settled in.

If the tavern really is haunted, the ghosts all seem to be on board with the program; they add color to the place, but don’t do much to frighten guests. In fact, during the Halloween season the tavern leans into the “Elvira, Mistress of the Dark” theme with cobwebs, plastic skeletons and other spooky décor.

The Wolf Creek Tavern was a successful enterprise for most of its existence. Its closest brush with disaster came after Interstate 5 took all the traffic off Highway 99, in the 1960s.

Still, partly because it’s just a few hundred yards off I-5, it managed to survive until 1975, when the Oregon Department of Parks and Recreation bought it and started a complete, historically accurate restoration, which was completed in 1979.

Since then, the parks department has operated it — either directly or through concessionaries — with an eye for historical accuracy. The rooms now have private bathrooms, but otherwise they’re just like they were 100 years ago. There are no TVs, although there is WiFi in the hotel and during the summer months guests will appreciate the tastefully-retrofitted air conditioning.

The restaurant is particularly nice, trimmed and decorated just as it was a century ago, and it enjoys a really good reputation.

Two rooms in particular are not available to stay in, though. The huge upstairs suite that movie stars used to stay in has been set up just as it was when Clark Gable was expected — right down to the whisky decanters full of what looks like Scotch — and roped off as a museum-like tableau.

The same has been done with the closet-sized, very-basic Jack London room, just a few steps down the hall. The contrast between them is striking — and, if you happen to be a novelist, maybe a little depressing too.

(Sources: “The Historic Wolf Creek Inn,” an un-by-lined article published at rogueweb.com; “Historic Wolf Creek Tavern,” an article by Finn John published in the August 1999 issue of Travelin’ Magazine; Oregon State Parks: A Complete Recreation Guide,” a book by Jan Gumprecht Bannan published in 2002 by The Mountaineers; “Haunted Tales from Wolf Creek Inn,” an article by Jen Anderson published Sept. 27, 2018, on traveloregon.com.)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon, published by Ouragan House early this year. To contact him or suggest a topic: [email protected] or 541-357-2222.