7. They got there

Bend passed a hundred thousand people in 2021, and it has kept growing. The Census Bureau’s estimate for July 2025 is 107,342; Oregon’s own certified estimate for the same day is 107,079. The oath said “until Bend has a population of one hundred thousand.” From the night it was read to the year it came true was a hundred and eight years.

The men who read it believed it would be quicker. Cheney was clear that the number was the mechanism: enough men wearing the mark and saying the sentence “would build a city of one hundred thousand.” In January 1917 a visiting lodge officer told a banquet in the clubhouse that Bend would reach fifteen thousand by the following year. It took more than half a century.

What is not in doubt is the size of the wager. The men who swore the oath were promising to wear a pin until a town of two thousand had grown fifty times over. It took more than a century, and it happened.

The mark stayed in the room where the growing was argued over. A wooden BEND disc hangs behind the council dais at City Hall, and the City’s own post of August 2019 is the earliest sighting anybody has found. Ten months earlier the City had carved the mark into a pumpkin and given it a name: the Bend bug.