Betty of Sunny Valley

Sunset, Oct, 1998 by Peter Fish

This month the Applegate Trail Interpretive Center celebrates its official grand opening in Sunny Valley, Oregon, a little north of Grants Pass. If you are one of those people for whom the term interpretive center inspires only yawns, take heart: This one is different.

The Applegate Trail was born out of grief. In 1843, three brothers, Charles, Lindsay, and Jesse Applegate, traveled to Oregon via the more northerly Oregon Trail. As they crossed the Columbia River near The Dalles, one of their boats overturned. Charles and Lindsay each lost a 10-year-old son. The brothers decided to blaze a safer route to Oregon. Three years later the first emigrant party traveled the new Applegate Trail, which branched off the California Trail in Nevada and ran northwest across the Black Rock Desert and the Siskiyous into the Rogue and Willamette river valleys.

The trail's story is compelling. And yet, says William Emerson, an Ashland, Oregon, writer who has published a guidebook on the subject, the trail is little known. "Even in southern Oregon, most people aren't aware of it."

Though Betty Gaustad set out to remedy that ignorance, your first impression of her is not of someone who spends a lot of time pondering our pioneer heritage. Instead she looks like the hostess of a Palm Springs cocktail party. In a region of rural Oregon where the dress code leans toward T-shirts and blue jeans, Betty is coiffed and accessorized. Things match. A Minnesota farm girl, she went to college in Southern California, putting herself through school working at Disneyland and at a dairy; the latter job got her crowned Southern California Dairy Princess. After college she became a flight attendant; she was in fact named a United Airlines flight attendant of the year. And it was from a jetliner that she spotted Sunny Valley. "I looked down and said, 'That's where I want to be.'"

In Sunny Valley, Betty acquired an antiques store, a grocery store, a gas station, and a restaurant (all clustered on either side of Interstate 5), raised a daughter, and moved her mother out from Minnesota. It was the senior Ms. Gaustad who discovered that the Applegate Trail ran right through their new home. "She was a history buff," Betty says. "She wouldn't let it go." Betty's mother pushed her to found a museum celebrating the trail.

As a rule, there are two species of museums. There is the sleek, well-funded variety with artfully arranged displays shining under recessed lighting. These tend to be sponsored by very rich people or large government agencies. Then there are the small-town museums crammed with displays of barbed wire and someone's grandmother's wedding dress drooping on a yellowed mannequin. Given Sunny Valley's relative lack of wealth and population, Betty might have settled for the second species of museum. But she wanted the first.

Betty suggests I see Sunny Valley before I tour the center. She asks her brother Dennis to drive me around. AS we walk to his pickup, a local carpenter delivers a pine bench for the center's porch. That was one of Betty's other goals: to hire local workers. Pretty as it is, Sunny Valley is not a hotbed of economic opportunity. "People move up here," Betty says, "but there aren't a lot of jobs. Then they run out of money." I get into Dennis's pickup, and he drives me around the valley. He explains that Betty brought him out to build the museum-he's responsible for its two-story, fir-columned, balconied false front - but that he had his doubts about the project. "I kept telling her, 'You're not going to get anything out of it.'"

Her brother's warnings were well founded. As it turned out, the world does not encourage individual people who want to start museums unless they are oil or software millionaires. With the help of her daughter, Jacquelana, Betty applied for and received some regional economic grants. Otherwise money was hard to come by. She had to mortgage her ranch, her businesses. "I think she had to sell the furniture out of her house," says Tommy Griffin, the Eugene consultant she hired to design the exhibits.

Still, Griffin says, the project had particular pleasures. "Every morning, half the community would line up and say, 'How can I help?' Betty was passing out jobs right and left. It's sort of Betty Valley out there. That's one of the things I most loved about it."

Late in the game, Betty realized that sleek, expensive museums all featured video presentations. She wanted one. Griffin helped her hire an experienced director, but she had no money to hire actors. So Sunny Valley neighbors played the parts of Applegate Trail pioneers. A dusty lot served as Nevada's Black Rock Desert; Grave Creek, 1/4 mile down the road, represented every river crossed. Filming lasted three days, often until 3 in the morning. "One woman stood in the creek so long she got a frostbitten toe," Betty says. "I asked her, 'Why didn't you get out?' She said it would have ruined the scene."

After hearing all these stories, I'm worried when Dennis takes me back to the center. I am afraid I'm going to find it amateurish and embarrassing. I don't have to worry. The center has everything you'd want from a slick museum: handsome graphics and artfully arrayed artifacts, and the 15-minute documentary where sturdy pioneers push wagons across rivers and play the fiddle around campfires. For Betty, the only disappointment was that her mother didn't live to see the project completed - she died last winter. "I know she's here," Betty says.