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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...

  • 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...

  • Giant skeleton recalled legend of pirate treasure

    Finn J.D. John|Apr 1, 2021

    By On February 20, 1931, a former Lincoln County commissioner named Elmer Calkins looked behind his tractor at the plow he was pulling and saw human bones strewn out along the furrow behind it. Calkins was working up a patch of land near the mouth of the Salmon River so that it could be flattened out into a smooth, park-like landscape for the summer camping resort he was building there. The new Roosevelt Highway - Highway 101 - was mostly built, and car-tripping tourists from the Willamette...

  • Mariner survived shipwreck by being trapped inside

    Finn J.D. John|Feb 25, 2021

    It was the dark early-morning hours of Feb. 13, 1911, and off the north coast of Oregon the gasoline-powered motor schooner Oshkosh was in serious trouble. The Oshkosh was a coastwise cargo ship, but it wasn’t much bigger than a large yacht. It was 89 feet long and rated at just 145 tons. It was also nearly brand new, built in 1909 at the Kruse and Banks Shipyard in North Bend. The little freighter was only about a year and a half old. It would not see two. The Oshkosh had left Tillamook Bay...

  • If bones could talk

    Oct 23, 2012

    By Finn J.D. John...

  • Fort Rock's legendary Reub Long could spin a wild yarn

    Sep 11, 2012

  • Offbeat Oregon History By Finn J.D. John

    Jul 15, 2012

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