McKenzie River Reflections - Make the McKenzie Connection!

From the February 14, 2008 edition of McKenzie River Reflections MCKENZIE RIVER: A San Francisco-based company has filed an application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for a preliminary...

To the average Oregon City resident, there wasn't much to celebrate in the vacant, dilapidated old house by the foot of Willamette Falls. The house had, until a few years before, been known as the...

In this third and final part of a 3-part series on iconic Hollywood films shot in Oregon, we'll talk about six films rather than five. Our survey ends, rather arbitrarily, with the end of the 1980s, a...

This is part 2 of a 3-part series on iconic Hollywood movies shot in Oregon. Last week, we looked at the era from the dawn of filmmaking through the 1950s. Today, we'll talk about movies made between...

In the past 25 years or so, Oregon has come into its own as a place to make movies. The iconic projects have come thick and fast, especially in the last 25 years or so. The last 15 years of the...

In the first month of 1852, everyone in the frontier community of Cynthian was talking about the big crime wave. Well, it was big by frontier Oregon standards. Although it was (and still is) the seat...

Crime, they say, does not pay. Yet it's pretty easy to look back through history and find examples of a certain kind of criminal for whom it did, handsomely, and for decades. With charisma, moxie and...

George L. Baker, the big, bluff, hail-fellow-well-met owner of Portland's Baker Theater, was flabbergasted. As he and his fellow Portland Rosarians were getting ready to march in the 1917 Rose Festiva...

Late on the evening of June 2, 1917, the Portland Morning Oregonian sprang a trap – a cunning and dirty trap. The always-formidable daily newspaper, owned and edited by Henry Pittock following the...

During the first year of the Second World War, the conflict in the Pacific was all about aircraft carriers. With a carrier, one could take the fight to the enemy. Without one, one could only huddle...

Nobody remembers it today, because it was so long ago. But the outbreak of the First World War changed Oregon – and the rest of the United States – a great deal. News of America's entry into the...

In November 1892 in downtown Portland, a "fast" young man named J.P. Cochran stepped off a passenger train from St. Louis, Missouri. J.P. was the dashing 22-year-old son of a railroad executive. In...

It was a peaceful, happy spring morning in the little river town of Canemah, situated just above Willamette Falls - or, rather, it started out that way. It was April 8, 1854 - the very dawn of the...

On the evening of March 23, 1964, Seaside resident Margaret Gammon hadn't been asleep more than an hour or two when she was awakened by howling. It was the community fire siren, blaring at full blast...

In 1853, a French-Canadian gambler, fighter, and all-around rascal by the name of Edouard Chambreau arrived in the brand-new town of Portland, ready to go into business. Chambreau had just come from...

In its early years, Oregon was at the outer limits of the known world, and that remoteness attracted all sorts of interesting characters. There were Joe Meek types, driven by a spirit of adventure;...

If you'd taken a nationwide poll in 1939, asking people from outside Oregon to name as many Oregon towns as they could, the top three would probably be Portland, Salem - and Valsetz. Portland,...

Most people know Prohibition in the United States started in 1920 when the Volstead Act went into effect. But in Oregon, Prohibition started quite a bit earlier than that. Actually, it started before...

Imagine you’re a gold prospector from the Willamette Valley, on your way to the California gold fields in the first year of the 1848 gold rush. You’re a little late to the party, and you’ve...

This is the story of Portland's coldest cold-case file - a suspicious death in the worst neighborhood of the old Stumptown waterfront, almost lost in the mists of time, 135 years ago. Was it an accide...

The U.S. Post Office inspector was puzzled. He'd just arrived at the tiny logging-company town of Shevlin, deep in the ponderosa pine woods south of Bend - and found it gone. Shade trees still...

On June 20, 1907, a retired military man named Charles Reynolds was hurrying home as fast as he could - with a .38-caliber revolver in his pocket. Charles was an old U.S. Cavalryman in his 50s who...

During the go-go years of the uranium-mining rush of the early 1950s, the character of the uranium prospector became iconic. He was basically the gold-seeking "miner 49er" updated for the atomic age:...

If you were a fan of the classic ABC television sitcom "Happy Days," you know The Fonz had a special relationship with two particular machines: His trusty '49 Triumph motorcycle, and the pinball...

Many historians, when asked to cite the single biggest and most far-reaching government misstep in American history, will immediately start talking about the First World War. By getting involved with...