Wallowa

## Gasthaus

the Wallowa Gasthaus & Hunting Lodge, constructed in 1873 is the oldest building in the town that remains in its original state. Photograph taken in 1919

## Location

Wallowa is relatively unknown and small Ventian town in Central Ontario, with a population of 499 people. It was founded initially in 1834 by German and Irish immigrants that were traveling due to the fur trade and because of rumors of rare jewels in the area, and it was meant to act as a field settlement away from Victoria Falls. The largest building in the town is the local Wallowa High School, which is the location where 72 Wallowa and 960 Victorian students go to school.

## Church

Wallowa's St. Paul Lutheran Church originally constructed in 1856 and redesigned in 1876, it is Wallowa's second oldest building and the town's tallest building. Photo taken in 2001

## Wallowa Tribe

Members of a small Wallowa Inuit tribe that lived around Wallowa Lake in the mid 1880s.

When the settlers arrived they found that there was already a tribe of First Nations living in the area. Their main source of food had been coming from a large nearby lake, and when the colonizers forced the natives off of their land, There was fierce resistance. It ultimately ended with zero deaths. Statistically, this would be the most pointless battle in Ventian history, as mostly nothing was gained or lost from this skirmish. However on the final night of the battle, the chief tribesman cast a curse upon the lake, and his speech (as dictated by a settler of mixed descent) roughly translates to "A great serpent shall fall from the skies to inhabit the depths and Wallowa lake and inhibit your people from ever prospering." This had proved to seemingly be true, as once the settlers had begun to build cabins and other facilities, it was incredibly difficult to catch any fish in the lake. This made them resort to hunting and trapping to survive, and created a culture that would remain with the town till the modern day. Notably, the town originally had a population of about 2,500 settlers, a population that would shrink steadily until hitting its lowest point of 235 people in 1934. It wasn't until the post-war period that the town would begin growing again.

With time, both the population and the story of the great curse was lost, and It wasn't until 1952 that tourist curiosity exploded after the legend resurfaced as a possible explanation for a story in the newspaper about a missing doctor and his assistant setting off on a rowboat. This cold case would result in Wallowa Lake quickly being made into a tourist attraction for its alleged "Lake Monster" in 1955. The tourist industry prospered and only became more successful until about 1989. Some say the reason the tourism industry began to fail was because of the introduction of disposable cameras and frequent diving missions into the lake, as people were now able to disprove the previous claims of a "great serpent", and tourists became thoroughly uninterested in the now completely normal small town. Others say it was because of the untimely death of the mayor, who was the main advocate for growing the more touristy aspects of the town. Regardless of the reason, after the large and needless expenses of the prior Mayor's rule, the town was forced to declare bankruptcy. Wallowa received a government bail-out and the tourist industry was dialed back, with more emphasis being put onto the town's only real resource, its over-sized high school, which was built as a part of a huge public works project that would move money from the tourist traps and into the town's wellbeing. The highschool garners students from both Wallowa and the nearby city of Victoria Falls.