The story around the film.
Around 1930, La Grande horsewoman Jean MacDonald Birnie began leading all-women horse-packing trips into the Wallowas, and the “Hen Party” kept riding for some thirty summers. In 2023 her descendants rode back into the Eagle Cap Wilderness, and Oregon Field Guide went with them.
An Oregon Public Broadcasting production published April 4, 2024, alongside a written feature of the same date. The Hen Party rode in from the Grande Ronde Valley, so this is a Union County story set in Wallowa County’s mountains. The feature also records Birnie’s part in the 1970s “Save the Minam” campaign, which ended with 73,000 acres added to the Eagle Cap Wilderness in 1972. The family history is told by descendants from the Reece family archive; the atlas has not examined the archive itself.
