Make the McKenzie Connection!
Make the McKenzie Connection!
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Many people today think of the 1890s as a prosperous, carefree era - the term "gay '90s" (or even "naughty '90s) jumps to mind. But what most people don't realize is that much of that decade was spent mired in a massive economic depression In many ways, the "Panic of 1893" was worse than the Great Depression. It brought us some iconic images that are still familiar today. The stereotype of the palatial Victorian "haunted house," as seen on innumerable episodes of Scooby-Doo, comes from the...
It was January 3, 1852 - the middle of the night and the middle of winter, just off the middle of the Oregon Coast. The U.S. Army's schooner Captain Lincoln, carrying a detachment of U.S. Army dragoons and supplies to reinforce a garrison near Port Orford, was getting badly abused by the weather. Wave after massive wave descended on the hapless Captain Lincoln, opening up a thousand little leaks in its hull; the soldiers toiled below decks at the pumps, trying desperately to stay ahead of the...
Early in the summer of 1853, deep in the Coquille Mountains of what's now Douglas County, six U.S. soldiers were trudging dispiritedly through a trackless wilderness. The wilderness wasn't totally trackless, though, because that's what the soldiers were there to do: scout a route through the mountains, from Port Orford to Jacksonville. The problem was, they were lost. The track they were scouting wasn't going anywhere until they figured out how to get un-lost. And they were almost out of...
In the summer of 1925, an event took place in the Coast Range town of Toledo that would spark widespread outrage and an international incident. The event was, for all practical purposes, a race riot: A mob of hundreds of angry white people attacking and evicting a small group of Japanese workers. From a distance, the story looks like an ugly episode of provincial racists behaving badly and subsequently being punished by the more enlightened. And that's more or less an accurate assessment - but i...
In early 1917, shortly after the U.S. declared war on Germany, the first detachment of U.S. soldiers was dispatched ... to the forest of western Oregon. It turned out the wildest, boldest and (if you were a capitalist) most terrifying labor union in U.S. history had got its hooks deep into the logging business just as demand for timber reached its peak, and as the rest of the country was marching to war, the loggers were marching off the job. That union was the International Workers of the...
The last year of the First World War saw an explosion in Allied aircraft. The forces of Imperial Germany put up the best fight they could, and fielded probably the best aircraft of the war - the Fokker D.VII, which famously could hang on its propeller - but the few they managed to make were overwhelmed by swarms of the latest SPADs, Nieuports and DeHavilands, which were close to equal quality and far more numerous. The fact is, after Oregon got involved in the war, the German air force didn't...
The first radio broadcaster ever to do be sent to prison for cursing on the air was a hard-charging early shock jock known as "The Oregon Wildcat," who kept the city of Portland and surrounding regions glued to their radio sets every evening for most of the first half of 1930. Robert Gordon Duncan was his name, and he broadcast his scandalous but highly entertaining tirades every single day over Radio KVEP (K-Voice of East Portland), 1500 AM. The radio station was originally started in 1927 by W...
Stories about buried treasure are very seldom completely untrue. Even the wildest flight of golden fantasy started out, hundreds or thousands of augmented and embellished retellings ago, as true stories. Maybe that's why people love them so much: One gets to speculating about just how much truth has survived, and if any of that fantasy gold might just be still out there waiting to be discovered. One particular tale from the Indians of the northern Oregon coast is especially tantalizing in that...
In the mid-1890s, ship captains and sailors' boardinghouse owners were like partners in crime - both busily and happily swindling sailors out of what little money they had and were owed. But in the mid-1890s, some-thing happened to upset this cozy arrangement: One particular "boarding master" - in one particular West Coast port city - figured out how to double-cross his co-conspirators, and suddenly the ship captains were left out in the cold. Here's how the scam had been working, up until...
Sometime around 1897, complaints suddenly started pouring into the headquarters of shipping companies in Liverpool and Hamburg from the captains in charge of their ships. It seemed something new was happening in the faraway American port city of Portland. It seemed the local sailors' boardinghouses operators - known as "crimps" - had suddenly started playing dirty. Once a ship arrived in port there, the sailors would all vanish - and the ship wouldn't be leaving the city until its captain had...
On the northernmost outskirts of Salem, tucked quietly away on a 275-acre campus between the Interstate 5 freeway and Highway 99, is the oldest continuously operating Native American boarding school in the country. This is Chemawa Indian School: a place built specifically to suppress Indian culture, which instead became instrumental in preserving it. A new approach to the "Indian Question" Chemawa got started in 1880, and it's been educating Native American children and young adults ever since....
The city and environs of Astoria strike most visitors as the kind of place where pirate loot might be stashed away. Certainly it seems to have struck Steven Spielberg that way, back in the early 1980s, when the legendary pirate-treasure film The Goonies was being shot. But the town may actually have come by this impression honestly. There are still a few stories about hidden treasure in and around Astoria -- not counting the silver-screen "Goon Docks" story of "One-Eyed Willy." And who knows?...
The "shanghai artists" of old Portland and Astoria were all a fairly secretive lot. But none of them were more mysterious, in quite so many ways, as the man who started the whole shanghaiing scene in Oregon - a burly, hard-fisted bar fighter named Jim Turk. Jim Turk was a slum lord who lived in his own slum, a drunken brawler who got hauled into court for battery dozens of times, an abusive husband, a shanghaiier of sailors, a whorehouse operator and a dishonest clothing salesman. Oh, and he...
Joseph E. Swards was 16 years old when he left his native Philadelphia as a brand-new apprentice seaman on the barque Geo. F. Manson, bound for Astoria and Portland. He would turn 17 at sea, in July of 1878. By the time he was 18, he would be doing life without parole for a crime he didn't commit. The facts of Joseph's story are clearly laid out in the Portland newspapers, and they read like a 19th-century cautionary tale - the kind that used to be made up to demonstrate the dangers of playing...
In the last few months of 1882, a group of prominent Prineville-area stockmen were leading a double life: Ranchers by day, and masked outlaw riders by night. They called themselves The Vigilantes. The Vigilantes, as you'll likely recall from last week's article, had formed out of a posse that was assembled to arrest a murderer. They brought him in, but the next morning, the posse members broke into the deputy sheriff's room, gunned down the murderer, and lynched his hired hand. The Vigilantes ha...
It was the Ides of March - March 15, 1882. A.H. Crooks and Stephen Jory were blazing the boundary lines of some land - cutting big marks in trees to mark what they claimed was the property line - near the ranch of a man named Lucius Langdon, near Prineville. The two of them broke for lunch, and when they returned, Langdon was waiting for them - with a shotgun. A few noisy, smoky seconds later, Crooks and Jory were dead. And their killing marked the start of a two-year period of rule by masked...
October of 1913 was a triumphant time for Professor James Dryden, the poultry specialist at Oregon State University (or Oregon Agricultural College, as it was then called). His name was in newspapers nationwide, in glowing tribute after glowing tribute to his success. One of his experiment-station hens, the prosaically named C-521 (later renamed Lady MacDuff), had just shattered the world record for egg production with a stunning 303 eggs in a year, breaking the 300-egg barrier for the first...
Next time you're in the neighborhood of Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square, take a minute to look at the wrought-iron fence and archway at its south end. Looks a little out of place, doesn't it? That ironwork is all that's left of what was probably the grandest hotel in Oregon history. The Portland Hotel started as a railroad baron's scheme in the mid-1880s, and was opened in 1890 - a riotously colorful yet stolidly tasteful stone palace of hospitality, at the dawn of some of the most...
Things looked grim for the Prineville Nine that summer day in 1910. The little high-desert town's baseball team was getting its clock cleaned by the Silver Lake ball club. The score was nine-zip, and the game was only half played. It was shaping up to be a bloodbath. The game was the third in a best-of-three tournament, a sort of good-natured grudge match between the two central Oregon towns. Prineville was playing host, and had invited Silver Lake to bring its best and its brightest, its...
CONTINUED FROM LAST WEEK The trial started on July 27 with the state presenting its evidence. It looked pretty damning, at least at first. The physician who was called to help the dying Harry Agee testified that as far as he could tell, Louise's side of the bed had not been slept in; the pillow was still fluffy. Klecker, the music teacher, took the stand and told his stag-magazine story about Louise's unrequited passion for him. He went on to "confess" that they had been "inappropriately...
It was a little after 10 p.m. on a Friday evening in the summer of 1921. In their little house on Druid Street in the St. Johns neighborhood of Portland, Robert Green and his family were getting ready for bed when they heard the screams. Rushing to the front porch, they found their neighbor, Ann Louise Agee, in her nightclothes, wild-eyed and disheveled. "Help! Come quick! They're killing Harry!" she screamed. Green looked across at the Agee home. From where he stood, by the light of streetlamps...
When you're watching a melo-drama, you know right away who the villain is. That's him over there, twirling a sinister handlebar moustache beneath a sleek silk hat and telling the pretty widow and her nine orphan children to kiss their beloved homestead goodbye. But that's melodrama, right? And the next scene is always one in which the hero foils the villain's evil plan. But this scene wasn't melo-drama. It was real life. The widow was Mrs. Mary Jane Balch, wife of the first man hanged in the...
A few dozen miles southwest of Baker City, if you know right where to look, you just might stumble across a few weatherbeaten gravestones - all that's left of an old cemetery. And that old cemetery is all that's left of the biggest city in Oregon, a teeming rough-hewn metropolis of 6,000 souls that was called Auburn, Oregon. Auburn was Ground Zero in the eastern Oregon Gold Rush. It was a massive mining camp, pure and simple. It was founded in the spring of 1861, and by 1864 it was already...
Ninety-eight years ago, in a logging camp deep in the forests of British Columbia, a logger in a funny hat walked up to a big stump, an ax in his hand. Taking off the hat - it was a battered bowler, an old-fashioned dandy's hat even in 1923 - he laid it on the stump, set a nail in it, and drove it in. Then he turned and walked away. Probably he walked straight to the logging locomotive for his last ride into town. Nailing the hat to the stump was a symbolic act - Stewart H. Holbrook was...
On the morning of April 23, 1936, the city of Portland was proudly preparing to launch its new harbor patrol boat, the Jack Luihn. It was going to be a big deal. Mayor LaGuardia of New York City was in town, and had been invited to come to the event. And the boat itself was truly revolutionary. Oregon's own wizardly inventor The Jack Luihn was the brain-child of one Victor Wiegand Strode, an inventor with a remarkable flair. Looking back on the historical record, the picture one gets is reminisc...
