Make the McKenzie Connection!
Make the McKenzie Connection!
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Climbing Mount Hood is a big achievement. It's no Everest, but at 11,244 feet Oregon's highest is not an insignificant mountain either. But modern climbers making the final assault on the summit have one major psychological advantage over their fellow climbers of a century ago: They know with nearly 100 percent certainty that the thing isn't going to explode while they're standing on top of it. Mount Hood, or Wy'East as the Native Americans call it, is an active volcano - something many...
It's probably fair to say, with studied understatement, that the mid-Willamette Valley town of Corvallis is into alternative transportation. Corvallis is one of the most bike-friendly towns in the state. There are probably more electric vehicles per capita there than any other town. Every year at Da Vinci Days locals compete to navigate human-powered "kinetic sculptures" of various and crazy description through an obstacle course. And, of course, engineering students at Oregon State University...
The Oregon Trail has been called the world's longest graveyard. It's a 2,000-mile road that averages one buried body every 80 yards. Out of the 350,000 emigrants that traveled along it, one out of every 10 died along the way. Most likely, if you're a young-ish Oregonian, you already knew that. The legendary Oregon Trail video game made the deadliness of the Trail common knowledge, and "You have died of dysentery" has become a well-known pop-culture reference. But there were lots of ways to kick...
Sometime in the late 1860s, a sailing ship hove to just off the Oregon coast, near the mouth of Yaquina Bay. This ship was full of building materials. Its mission was to land those materials on Cape Foulweather - today known as Otter Crest - so that a new lighthouse could be built there. It would be quite a thing, this lighthouse. Plans called for it to be 93 feet tall (it's still the tallest on the Oregon coast), equipped with a first-order Fresnel lens, painstakingly packed in molasses* and...
Two boys, asked to watch over the deceased on a dark and windy night in the 1890s, were terrified when the 'corpse' started making noises in the other room .... In 1935, in the depths of the Great Depression, the U.S. Congress passed what's sometimes called the "Second New Deal." It was a $4.88 billion investment into getting Americans through the Depression. The original New Deal, launched in 1933 just after Franklin Roosevelt won the Presidency, had prevented people from starving in the...
Around 6 A.M. on the morning of Sept. 9, 1942, Forest Service lookout Howard Gardner heard the sound of an approaching airplane. Peering out into the South Coast pre-dawn gloaming light, Gardner made out a small seaplane, heading toward him, flying low, circling. Showtime! This was what Gardner was here for, bundled up in the little Forest Service firewatch lookout shack atop Mt. Emily. Nine months into the Second World War, Gardner's duties had expanded a bit from what they had been a year...
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 a seemingly endless supply of good luck, these characters sometimes even manage to cheat karma and die a natural death. And somehow, after these criminals are gone, people remember them with a kind of fascinated fondness, and say things like, "well, we'll never see another like that again." The...
The 1920s were the era of daredevils: from Ormer Locklear hanging upside down from the wings of his war-surplus Curtiss biplane, to Edmondo Zacchini getting shot out of a cannon, to Harry Houdini getting dropped upside down and manacled into a narrow tank of water and emerging triumphant. To that list of high-risk adrenaline artists can be added Al Faussett, the only person in the history of the universe to have paddled over Willamette Falls in Oregon City, Celilo Falls near The Dalles, and...
Between the tiny Oregon town of Shedd and the Interstate 5 freeway is an old flour mill – the oldest water-powered grist mill in the state and one of only four remaining. It's called Boston Flouring Mills, also known as Thompson's Mills after a former owner. Should you visit the mill, staff members there will proudly call your attention to a signature on a land-sale deed dating from 1891. It's the signature of one of the two witnesses required for the sale, and its legality is a bit questionable...
Next time you're heading over Santiam Pass from the Willamette Valley, you might take a second to glance over at the side of the big potato-shaped promontory around which the highway bends as you pass Three Finger Jack. If you do, you'll likely see something unexpected. Running along its side is an old railroad grade, painstakingly built up out of loose rock. And if you get out of your car and follow the track, you'll find it starts in the middle of nowhere west of the pass, crosses over the...
Oregon, like other states, has an official state bird (Western Meadowlark), animal (beaver), tree (Douglas Fir), gemstone (Sunstone) and so forth - down to the ubiquitous state beverage (milk, just like nearly every other state with a dairy industry). But if the state were going to designate an official state legend, it could do a lot worse than to designate the story of the Lost Blue Bucket Mine. The Lost Blue Bucket Mine is a story from the early days of the Oregon trail. It's probably...
One of the real privileges of being a lifelong Oregonian of a certain, er, vintage, is the opportunity to have seen this state in its golden age - roughly, 1946 through 1980 - through a child's eyes. The basic style and culture of the Beaver State have changed a lot over the last 50 years. And, for the most part, it's changed for the better ... but not entirely. Sociologists would say this change was the transition from a "modernist" culture - proud, conformist, and optimistic about the future...
Few people realize it, but modern forensic detective work - the kind showcased on the "CSI" series on television - was born in southern Oregon, back in October 1923. Before that fateful day, there had been a few crimes solved with the help of science, including some big ones. In Portland, the evidence given by Dr. Victoria Hampton in the 1904 trial of Norman Williams for murdering his wife and mother-in-law - proving that the long silver hairs found at the crime scene were human and had been...
Westward bound on the old Applegate Trail in the early 1850s, the party of settlers halted in confusion at the shore of a vast, placid lake. Its waters stretched nearly all the way to the horizon, with just a thin rim of dimly glimpsed ridges beyond to indicate that they had not reached some sort of preternaturally calm ocean. The settlers, by now, had passed a few of these alkali lakes as the trail brought them westward. This one was the biggest they'd seen. Its size wasn't what was startling...
If you've ever taken the National Parks Service tour of the Oregon Caves, you'll probably remember the part where the guide points out a stalagmite covered with names, scrawled out on its creamy surface in the crabbed longhand style of the 1800s. The names are those of University of Oregon geology professor Thomas Condon and his students. And the students had journeyed all the way down to Cave Junction from Eugene - no mean feat of overland travel in those days - to learn about their state's geo...
The concept of interest payments is old and universal. Since its earliest beginnings, the banking industry has followed this simple precept: When you deposit money, you earn interest on it. But there was once a bank in which that was not how it worked: the town bank in Jacksonville, Oregon, in the early 1850s. Jacksonville was a gold-mining boom town. It was situated in the middle of some of the richest gold diggings in history, and the town was awash in the yellow stuff. There was so much gold...
If you get out on the Columbia River in the more inland reaches - past the Beacon Rock area - you'll often notice that there are lines of rotting, weatherbeaten posts leading out into the waters. These posts are all that's left of what was once one of Oregon's biggest industries: Salmon canning. Specifically, they are the mortal remains of riverside canneries with their adjacent fish wheels. Your basic fish wheel is a diabolically simple device. It's like a big water wheel with scoops instead...
Charles Henry "Iron Pants" Martin was probably the most scurrilous and unlovable character in Oregon political history. As an Army officer during the Boxer Rebellion he looted Chinese palaces; as Oregon governor during the 1930s he expressed support for fascism; and, worst of all, as an Army general after the First World War he was in charge of "breaking" America's African American war veterans at a sort of post-service humiliation-and-degradation camp so that they would not get "uppity" after...
In a quiet little historical cemetery in the north hills of Corvallis, there's a marble gravestone about the size of a large loaf of bread, with a simple and startling message carved upon it. The stone reads, "AME, Slave of Mary and John Porter." There's nothing more. The gravestone has none of the usual information. Ame's dates of birth and of death are unknown. Until not too many years ago, information like that was considered unimportant. If Ame's date of death had been listed, though, it...
In the pre-dawn hours of Monday, March 8, 1926, a massive explosion suddenly shattered the stillness of a quiet residential street in Bend. Windows shattered. Residents leaped out of bed. Dawn soon broke on a chaotic scene. An apartment house had been torn apart, and half of it lay in ruins. No one was killed, but in the heavily-damaged house next door, a neighbor had been injured by being buried under debris as she slept. Investigators soon figured out what had happened: Someone had tucked a...
For the North, October of 1861 was the darkest part of the Civil War. For the Union troops trying desperately to storm up the steep, treeless face of Ball's Bluff in Virginia one particular day, it was especially so. The river was at their backs, the rebels were in front of them and they were like a main course at an all-you-can-shoot buffet. Seeing the survivors' courage beginning to waver, their colonel came up to the front to encourage them - and, his uniform recognized, went down in a...
Perhaps thinking the Benton County Treasurer would have treasure in his office, they blew the safe with dynamite - and were disappointed. A month later, having left pawnshop claim stubs lying around camp, they were busted. The robbers and burglars who have made Oregon history have not always been the smartest guys on the block. Perhaps that's just because the smart ones never made history - that is, got caught. But there does seem to be a special thickness about Oregon's pioneer criminals....
The game of historical "what-if" is always tempting to play, but in most cases, it doesn't have much of a place in real history studies. It's like seeing a car driving south on Highway 99 and trying to guess where it's headed. Sometimes it's useful, though - especially in cases where something terrible was avoided by the thinnest of margins. Case in point: the almost-successful move in 1860 to prevent Abraham Lincoln from becoming President of the United States - and replace him with Oregon...
On a gusty late-summer evening in 1930, well after dark, a few feet off the ground near the Oregon-Nevada border, 22-year-old Ted Barber was hurtling through the blackness, preparing to die. Barber was an aviation pioneer and an actual barnstormer - a pilot who paid the bills by making the circuit of county fairs and country dances, selling airplane rides and flying lessons and performing daring tricks like wing-walking and inverted low passes. His "ship" was a Waco 9, a primitive but rugged...
Wilhoit Road is a narrow, lonely county road that runs south out of Molalla and makes a beeline for the side of the Cascade Mountains. About 15 miles later, it gets there, and dead-ends into a pair of driveways. One of those driveways is the entrance to a modest, mostly unimproved county park that almost nobody more than 20 miles away knows exists. Yet this quiet, tucked-away place was once one of Clackamas County's top tourist attractions: Wilhoit Springs. A place to "take the waters"...
