In 1859, Oregon became a state because so many American settlers had come here on the Oregon Trail. In 1959, Oregon celebrated the centennial of statehood and commissioned public projects to identify and mark the Oregon Trail for the benefit of future generations.

In 1993, the 150-year anniversary of the Great Migration of 1843 on the Oregon Trail was celebrated. Guide books to the Oregon Trail sold by the thousands. Families took Oregon Trail vacation tours. Hundreds of thousands of people came to the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center at Baker City and the End of the Trail Interpretive Center at Oregon City. New monuments were erected on the Oregon Trail by the state of Oregon, the U.S. Forest Service and the federal Bureau of Land Management.

But in 2009, the Oregon Trail is in the way of a gold rush that will demolish part of our history and leave us poorer. The Oregon Economic and Community Development Department, now operating under the new moniker Oregon Business, was commanded by statute to promote the Oregon Trail as a major tourist attraction consistent with maintaining the historical integrity of the Oregon Trail.

I wish that were the gold rush I write about.

The gold rush that threatens the Oregon Trail is "free" and "green" energy from the wind. If only it were so.

Some of the most attractive areas for developing wind energy are on and along the Oregon Trail. Wind energy developers could avoid the Oregon Trail and protect the viewshed in a few special, historic locations.

The location of the Oregon Trail is well known. It was surveyed by Oregon State Highway Department engineers in the 1950s for the Oregon centennial celebrations. It was surveyed again in the 1970s for the U.S. bicentennial. Eventually, the Oregon Trail was designated by Congress as a national treasure.

The wind energy developers have easy access to that free information.

Protecting the Oregon Trail would require little effort if the location of the Oregon Trail were considered in the planning of the projects.

But few developers care about or plan to protect the known historic sites to reduce the impact on the Oregon Trail.

Some sacrifices are always made in the name of progress, and we cannot roll back time nor live in a museum.

However, when public funds are used to destroy irreplaceable historic public treasures, perhaps we should be a little more careful and consider whether and how we should proceed.

Each windmill in Oregon receives cash subsidies from taxes paid by state and federal taxpayers. Hundreds of millions of dollars are already committed to projects under consideration. Gov. Ted Kulongoski pushed to expand the amount of taxpayer money for wind energy projects on the Oregon Trail without requiring the developers to avoid and protect the Oregon Trail.

This gold rush is not in generating electricity. There are billions or trillions of dollars in the cap-and-trade market waiting for those who have grabbed the development rights to wind energy in Oregon and other areas. European developers may already be profiting in the secretive European cap-and-trade market by trading their ownership of Oregon's wind energy capacity as offsets for otherwise undisturbed, coal-fired, electricity-generating plants in other countries.

Oregon may be downwind of the ashfall from those plants, but it is not downwind of the money windfall.

Protecting the Oregon Trail would require adjustment of a few sites and not placing a few dozen windmills. If windmills were about generating electricity instead of cash, we could protect the Oregon Trail and have wind energy. Those are two legacies that would be worth passing along to our children.