Make the McKenzie Connection!

Articles written by Finn J.d. John


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  • Central Oregon's range wars were all about shooting sheep

    Finn J.D. John|Mar 28, 2024

    Signs and threats like the “COMITEE” warnings in the Klickitat Valley showed that this threat was being taken very seriously. Fortunately, though, the worst-case scenario was very rare. There were a few sheepherders who insisted on their right to plunder the public domain regardless of how the neighbors felt about it; but on the Western frontier, disagreements like this had a tendency to get worked out with fists and sometimes pistols. Overall, everyone grumbled, but they all managed to coe...

  • Central Oregon's range wars were all about shooting sheep

    Finn J.D. John|Mar 21, 2024

    In the early 1880s, visitors in the Klickitat Valley, just across the Columbia River from The Dalles and Biggs Junction, recalled seeing some very singular signs posted regularly along the right-of-way: NOTISE: All land in woods past Draper Springs is for Settlers cattle. No sheep is allowed. Sheep men take notise. — Comitee By “Comitee,” it was clearly understood, the writer meant some sort of vigilance committee, a coalition of cattle ranchers and sodbusters who had come together to fight...

  • Lonely Oregon boy grew up to be a legendary comic-book artist

    Finn J.D. John|Mar 14, 2024

    On September 14, 1964, the steamship Al Kuwait was moored at the dock in Kuwait City when something terrible happened: The ship capsized and settled to the harbor floor. This was bad enough news for the town by itself. But the real problem was, that Al Kuwait was a livestock transport freighter. It was full of sheep. Five thousand of them. These poor animals were, of course, drowned when the hull flooded. But then the carcasses started to decompose. This was an environmental disaster, because...

  • Lonely Oregon boy grew up to be a legendary comic-book artist

    Finn J.D. John|Mar 7, 2024

    Sometime in April of 1960, a shy, retiring, hard-of-hearing comic-book artist named Carl Barks got a letter at his quiet suburban home. When he opened it, he found that it was a letter from a stranger named John Spicer. And to his astonishment, he found that it was — a fan letter. “Believe it or not, I have been planning this letter for about four or five years,” Spicer wrote. “I have been kept from doing so for the simple reason that I knew not your name or address. I tried several times, howev...

  • All-metal steam-powered Zeppelin: Could it work?

    Finn J.D. John|Feb 29, 2024

    Ironically enough, it was on the first day of winter — the winter after the 1929 stock-market crash that kicked off the Great Depression — that Oregon inventor Thomas B. Slate’s dream of a business empire built on shiny silver steam-powered airships received its death blow. Slate had left his native state several years earlier and made a fortune by inventing and commercializing the production of “dry ice” — frozen carbon dioxide. Then he’d left, sold his company, and moved to Glendale, Cal...

  • Haystack Rock was once a tempting target for daredevil climbers

    Finn J.D. John|Feb 22, 2024

    One could think of late June and early July of 1968 in Cannon Beach as the Summer of the Dead Baby Birds. On June 28, at the height of the nesting season, a 23-year-old man from Portland had scrambled up the side of Haystack Rock, the iconic intertidal sometimes-island that towers nearly 200 feet over the beach and sea by Cannon Beach and gotten stuck at the top. It wasn’t common for people to climb the rock, but it wasn’t exactly unheard of either. The problem was, that it was a very dif...

  • Offbeat Oregon History

    Finn J.D. John|Jan 4, 2024

    In the small hours of the morning of Aug. 16, 1906, a powerful explosion jolted residents awake near the little town of Willamette, which today is a neighborhood of West Linn. It came from the direction of the nearby Tualatin River. The cause was soon discovered. When the first rays of the morning sun fell on the Oregon Iron and Steel Co.’s diversion dam, located a little over three miles from the river’s mouth, a 20-foot-wide hole had been blasted in its center. The river water was still gus...

  • Offbeat Oregon History

    Finn J.D. John|Dec 21, 2023

    Continued From Last Week Big League Chew (1977) Baseball players, back in the day, were somewhat famous for chewing tobacco on the field. Fans would see them pull a pouch of Red Man or Beech-Nut out of their uniform pocket, dip out a big pinch, and stuff it in “between the cheek and gum.” Sometimes it would even make a visible bulge. Minor-league slugger Rob Nelson probably chewed the stuff too, although he played for the Portland Mavericks; in Portland, as in most of the Pacific Northwest, mois...

  • Offbeat Oregon History

    Finn J.D. John|Dec 14, 2023

    Continued From Last Week The Tater Tot (1953) As we turn our attention to what food historian Heather Arndt Anderson calls “Oregon’s prodigal spud,” we are straying into distinctly non-Christmassy territory. And yet, in the few dozen short years since brothers Golden and Neef Grigg invented it, the Tater Tot has become as much a part of American comfort food as the Velveeta-drenched macaroni noodle. It all got started just after the Second World War when Golden and Neef rented a flash...

  • Offbeat Oregon History

    Finn J.D. John|Nov 16, 2023

    Continued From Last Week At one point, Oregon Trunk Railroad president John Stevens (Hill’s top lieutenant on the job) learned the Twohy Brothers had built a wagon road across a 230-acre parcel of private land to access the nearest water supply. Stevens promptly bought the land — actually, he just bought an option on it, but it came with some property rights, which gave him the right to fence it off and hang “No Trespassing” signs everywhere, and station armed guards. The Twohy Brothers complai...

  • Offbeat Oregon History

    Finn J.D. John|Nov 9, 2023

    Sometime in the late spring of 1909, at the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company’s ticket booth in Portland, a 19-year-old man named Jim Morrell laid down his last $2 for a ticket on the Bailey Gatzert, the famous Columbia River sternwheeler. Destination: The Dalles. Morrell was from Colorado originally; just now he was at loose ends, drifting through Portland looking for work. He thought he might find it in The Dalles. Someone had told him about a great railroad war playing out near The D...

  • Offbeat Oregon History

    Finn J.D. John|Oct 5, 2023

    On the evening of Sept. 28, 1995, Woney and Laurie Peters, of Lava Hot Springs, Idaho, were driving back to their home behind the local elementary school when they noticed something wasn’t right. The first thing Woney noticed was the horses. They were confined in a corral in front of the house, next to the trampoline, which his teenage kids were playing on. The kids seemed fine — but the horses seemed terrified. They kept staring up at the hillside that ran along behind the house and the sch...

  • Offbeat Oregon History

    Finn J.D. John|Sep 14, 2023

    Sometime in 1943, during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, a group of more than 40 officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy strolled into Club Tsubaki, an exclusive gentlemen’s club in the heart of downtown Manila. They were there for one last evening of fun while they were still in port. That very evening, they were scheduled to climb back into their submarines and set out on an extended cruise. The private party had been arranged by one of the subs’ commanders, who had struck up a fri...

  • When "The Rolls-Royce Guru" came to Oregon

    Finn J.D. John|Aug 31, 2023

    After the election, the new formerly homeless residents of Rajneeshpuram were the most pressing problem for Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his followers. They cost a lot of money to feed and house, and they started fights and made trouble. Rajneeshee leaders started out giving them bus tickets home, but that got very expensive very fast. After all, it had cost $1 million to bring them in by busloads; sending them home one or two at a time would be many times more than that. So finally, the...

  • When "The Rolls-Royce Guru" came to Oregon

    Finn J.D. John|Aug 24, 2023

    In the courtyard at the Antelope Post Office today, there stands a large bronze plaque attached to the base of a flagpole. It reads, “Dedicated to those of this community who throughout the Rajneesh invasion and occupation of 1981-1985 remained, resisted and remembered.” Most visitors probably roll their eyes at this, thinking it a bit melodramatic. Invasion? Occupation? Puh-leeze, they might mutter. But the Rajneeshee takeover of Antelope was not an anodyne bureaucratic exercise. To those who...

  • Offbeat Oregon History

    Finn J.D. John|Aug 17, 2023

    Part Two: Arrival On June 1, 1981, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh boarded a Boeing 747 for a flight from Mumbai to New York City. Officially the trip was for medical treatment, and authorities were told he’d be heading back home to India afterward. But Rajneesh was not planning on returning. His movement, which had already become an international octopus with meditation centers in dozens of different countries around the world, had outgrown the Pune campus. He needed a new World Headquarters. And his ne...

  • Offbeat Oregon History

    Finn J.D. John|Jul 13, 2023

    It was getting toward the end of the summer of 1902, and West Linn resident Ellis Hughes was getting worried. His neighbor, William Dale, had traveled back to Eastern Oregon to sell some land he owned there. With the proceeds, Dale and Hughes planned to buy a piece of property next to the Hughes farm. The property belonged to the Oregon Iron and Steel Co., which wasn’t really doing anything with it and which Hughes was pretty sure would be happy to sell … unless, of course, they found out why...

  • Offbeat Oregon History

    Finn J.D. John|Jun 22, 2023

    Continued From Last Week So right away, Baldwin was hearing the stories. Most likely there were some terrible ones; they obviously touched her heart. Over the next several decades she would dedicate her life to doing something about them. Time went by. The Baldwins left Lincoln. Eventually, in 1904, they moved to Portland; LeGrand had taken a job for a chain of dimestores, and was tasked with opening one in Oregon. So Lola went forth and plugged into the Portland aid-society scene. She found an...

  • Offbeat Oregon History

    Finn J.D. John|Jun 15, 2023

    By the time Walt Disney Productions released “The Rescuers” in 1977, the idea of a “Rescue Aid Society” dedicated to the eradication of kidnapping felt quaint, old-fashioned, and fun. But not many years earlier, when memories of the Progressive Era were fresher, it would not have scanned that way. In fact, “The Rescuers” was first pitched in 1962, at which time Walt Disney himself killed it. And that was probably a good call: members of the real Aid Societies were still alive and had matured...

  • Offbeat Oregon History

    Finn J.D. John|Apr 13, 2023

    If you ask most Oregonians who the first woman governor in state history was, they’ll have an immediate answer … but they’ll be wrong. Conventional wisdom holds that the first woman to take the gubernatorial purple in the Beaver State was Barbara Roberts, who was elected to the job in 1990. In fact, that’s almost true … but, of course, “almost” doesn’t work very well as an answer to a true-or-false question. The truth is, Barbara Roberts was the first elected woman governor in Oregon history....

  • Offbeat Oregon History

    Finn J.D. John|Apr 6, 2023

    If you ask most Oregonians who the first woman governor in state history was, they’ll have an immediate answer … but they’ll be wrong. Conventional wisdom holds that the first woman to take the gubernatorial purple in the Beaver State was Barbara Roberts, who was elected to the job in 1990. In fact, that’s almost true … but, of course, “almost” doesn’t work very well as an answer to a true-or-false question. The truth is, Barbara Roberts was the first elected woman governor in Oregon history....

  • Riot at bar led to charges … but not against rioters

    Finn J.D. John|Mar 30, 2023

    IT WAS APRIL FOOLS' DAY of 1874 when saloonkeeper Walter Moffett, proprietor of the Webfoot Saloon and sworn antagonist of the ladies of the Women’s Temperance Prayer League, escalated the conflict to the levels that would lead, within a week or two, to street riots. The “Temperance Crusade” ladies had visited his saloon the day before, and for the first time, rather than leaving when he refused to let them in, they’d arranged themselves like a hymn-singing picket line outside of the place....

  • Body-snatchers planned to ransom ex-mayor's corpse

    Finn J.D. John|Mar 16, 2023

    “It is very clear that the purpose of the robbers is to conceal the remains, in the hopes that a reward will ultimately be offered for them,” the Portland Morning Oregonian’s reporter wrote, in the next day’s edition. “They are undoubtedly men who are aware of the wealth of the heirs of the man whose remains they have stolen. There is no doubt that they are men of experience, for there is every evidence of a thoroughly matured plan to carry out the crime. The fact that the headboard and one s...

  • Offbeat Oregon History

    Finn J.D. John|Mar 9, 2023

    The nineteenth century was a kind of golden age of body snatching. Digging up the freshly dead to cash the corpses in at the back door of a nearby medical school was — well, not common exactly, but far from unheard-of. So when, around the middle of May 1897, Daniel Magone and Charles Montgomery asked a 20-year-old wood hauler named William Rector to help them steal a corpse out of River View Cemetery, Rector didn’t react the way you or I would. A job was a job, and Rector needed the work, and...

  • Oregon residents had the jump on California Gold Rush

    Finn J.D. John|Feb 9, 2023

    If you’d been lucky enough to live in Portland in July of 1848, you would have been able to say, literally, that your ship had come in. The ship in question was the sailing ship Honolulu. And, funny thing: she arrived in port in ballast, with her cargo holds empty. That raised some eyebrows. At the time, Oregon was not even part of the U.S.A. yet — just a vast extranational territory jointly claimed by the U.S. and Britain. There was no national government authority to issue money, nor was the...

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