History of Early Pioneer Families of Hood River, Oregon. Compiled by Mrs. D.M. Coon

LOUIS HENDERSON

     The second son of John Jr., and Catherine Henderson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1853. When five years of age the family moved to the home of his Grandfathers John Henderson Sr., whose beautiful and luxurious home was a meeting place for the educated and influential politicians of the South.
     The boy enjoyed the wonderful vegetation and the beautiful water in which he learned to swim and search for the strange forms of life so abundant in that locality.
     He was not interested in politics but remembers a quiet energetic young lawyer who stood well in the graces of his Grandfather, and he remembers the lawyer's name was Jefferson Davis. Then the family moved to Arkansas, a new and undeveloped country, where streams and vegetation lured him on to new discoveries.
     A year later the family moved to Now Orleans where the father established a law office. The mother was not rugged and she with her two sons went to the Pine Lands for a short stay. The breaking out of the Civil War left them stranded, unable to go away and without means of support.
     How the emergency was met has been told in the mother's sketch. Four years of toil and privation dragged slowly along; years that brought serious thought and real problems to the growing sons, and strengthened the bond between them and their mother.
     In the fall of 1865 they were again in Now Orleans, a reunited family, but only for a few brief months. John Henderson, the father, was a well known lawyer and politician and an admirer of Abraham Lincoln. A state convention was called to discuss the status of the negro. The returned Confederate soldiers were very bitter and a mob stormed the building and every one who attended the meeting was either killed or wounded, John Henderson received many wounds and after lingering for nearly three months succumbed to his injuries.
     Mrs. Henderson immediately returned to her old home in Boston and obtained a position in a Vermont Military school which her sons attended for two years.
     When Louis Henderson entered Cornell University he took up the study of botany at the solicitation of his friend, David Starr Jordan, who said, "Come over with me and study botany." After his graduation he went West, teaching one year in a military academy at Oakland, California. He came to the Willamette Valley to see his brother John, and taught at Albany College. His father, both grandfathers and all his uncles were lawyers and it was his mother's wish that he should be one, so he spent two years in a law office in Portland when he became convinced that legal work did not go well with scientific research and so gave up the study of law.
     In 1880 he was one of the party that rediscovered Lost Lake. Beginning in 1876, he taught French, Latin, botany and elocution for thirteen years in Portland's only High School. In 1889 he was elected principal but while at his summer home in Hood River, a severe attack of typhoid fever threw him out of school work.
     When he had sufficiently recovered his health he went into real estate business in Olympia, Washington, with his brother, John.
     The President of the State University of Idaho, who was an old friend, invited him to become an instructor in that institution. For ten years he remained with the school. During that time, besides studying and classifying the flora of Idaho he made several trips for the U.S. government. His spare time for years had been utilized in herbarium work. He had made collections throughout Oregon, Washington and Idaho.
     A fire in one of the buildings destroyed the work of twenty five years in which he had been making collections of botanical specimens. He became so discouraged over the loss that he revolted at the thought of continuing and retired to his summer home in Hood River where he engaged in the fruit business.
     But time healed his hurt and his love for the works of Nature came back and he turned again to search the woods and mountains with renewed interest.
     The flora near the snow line seemed peculiarly attractive with their exquisite coloring and he sought the snow line for specimens and explored the peaks to enjoy their beauty and grandeur.
     In 1880 he climbed Mt. Adams. The mountain was swathed in clouds, but they reached the top where the sun shone in all its glory. The masses of clouds below them tossed and moved about like the billows of the sea, while to the north, Mt. Rainier, and Mt. Baker showed their peaks, Mt. St. Helens on the west, and Mt. Hood and Jefferson on the south.
     Mr. Henderson says, "Standing there above the clouds, with five snow peaks in sight, and the earth blotted out below, we felt that we were creatures of a different world." In 1881 Mr. Henderson climbed the north peak of the Three Sisters under peculiarly hazardous conditions, and barely escaped with his life. He climbed alone and was the first person to set foot on its summit.
     Working to make collections for the World's Fair in September 1890 on Mt. Rainier, he was caught in a storm and had another narrow escape. Mr. Henderson was with the first expedition that went into the Olympic Mountains. This was of a semi-scientific nature, with government officials and soldiers from Vancouver, members of the old Oregon and Alpine Club, with Will Steele in charge. Mr. Henderson accompanied the expedition as botanist, mineralogist, zoologist and mapmaker.
     In 1925 Mr. Henderson took up his work as curator at the Oregon State University and is striving to preserve the flora of Oregon, Washington and Idaho before it has been utterly lost. Modest and unassuming, the true value of his work in the Northwest will be more apparent as the years go by.

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