[6] They lived in permanent cedar-plank lodges, illuminated at night with torches or by burning fish heads or whale oil.

Their diet included salmon, mussels, lampreys, berries, wild mustard, camas, grouse, beaver, deer, and elk.

[7] The Lewis and Clark expedition recorded in 1806 that 2,400 Tillamook people resided on Oregon's coast.

[8] As the white settler population increased, indigenous people suffered from newly introduced diseases including smallpox.

[8] Daniel Bayley was the first white property owner on this part of Tillamook Bay, having first settled here after the Civil War.

Bayley was one of the first white settlers who arrived in Tillamook Bay's northern end area.

In 1870, he was appointed by President Grant as the area's first postmaster and given the duty of naming the postmark.

This same year, Giuseppe Garibaldi helped unify Italy after a military career devoted to establishing democracy around the world and Bayley felt so inclined to name the post office after his hero.

[10] Starting in the 1870s, the region's indigenous people were relocated to the nearby Hobsonville Indian Community.

Tourists and antiquities dealers would visit, and the local Ku Klux Klan occasionally harassed the residents.

[9] During the 1950s the city's population increased to over 1500 with the construction of two large mills, The Oceanside Lumber Company and Oregon-Washington Plywood Corporation.

[12] In 2020, writer Helen Hill suggested removing Garibaldi's statue of Captain Robert Gray, due to claims about his treatment of indigenous people.