Make the McKenzie Connection!
Make the McKenzie Connection!
Sorted by date Results 101 - 125 of 150
It was a little after 6 a.m. on September 9, 1942. A tiny seaplane with red balls painted on its wings was making its way through the skies over Brookings, Oregon. At the controls was a young man named Nobuo Fujita; behind him, in the observer's seat, looking intensely at the ground, was another, named Shoji Okuda. The two of them were looking for a good place to initiate the first airstrike ever to be made on the continental United States. Fujita's plan This whole gambit had been Fujita's...
As urban legends, go, it's one of the oldest and scariest: A teenage couple drives to a secluded spot late at night and parks, planning to do some of the usual canoodling. But before they do, a news bulletin interrupts the music on the radio. A psychotic killer has escaped from the asylum, the DJ reports breathlessly. He's missing his left hand, and wears a steel hook on the stump of his arm as a prosthetic. The boy wants to ignore the news and smooch some more, but the girl is too freaked out,...
The “Oregon Style” of newspaper journalism was already a thing in 1871, when upstart newspaper publisher William “Bud” Thompson got in his famous gunfight in downtown Roseburg. But until that day, the vicious personal attacks that characterized the “Oregon Style” had mostly involved the spilling of ink — not blood. On that late Monday morning on a corner in downtown Roseburg, that changed. The enemies meet The groundwork for the Roseburg Newspaper Shootout was laid when Thompson came to town...
Lost or abandoned cabins pop up so often in legends of missing gold mines and buried treasure that they are almost a cliché. Most of them follow a clear pattern or formula - in fact, all lost-treasure stories do: The seeker stumbles across the treasure while doing something else; he is called away for some reason; and he can never find his way back, despite devoting years to fruitless searching. There may not be a more faithful example of that pattern than the story of the lost cabin of...
When the First National Bank of Joseph, Oregon, picked David Tucker as vice-president in 1928, it didn't look like a particularly unusual thing to do. Tucker was a widely respected part of the community in Joseph. A successful stockman, he had, over the previous 20 years, forged a reputation for himself as an honest, trustworthy man - and kind and generous to boot. He was especially effective at taking hotheaded young lads under his wing, helping them out of bad situations and inspiring them to...
Early Portland was a relatively corruption-friendly town. But even the best of us have our limits, as three Multnomah County Commissioners learned the hard way in 1924. In that year, the Portland area had a serious traffic congestion problem. The main source of the trouble was the Burnside Bridge, a swing-span setup that was at the time only 30 years old. However, it had deteriorated very badly, and was no longer considered safe. A new bridge was desperately needed. Luckily, in 1922 the three-me...
One November evening in 1885, Portland residents walking past a row of tiny houses at Third and Yamhill heard screams coming from one of them. Bursting in, they found the mutilated and lifeless remains of a 33-year-old French beauty known as Emma Merlotin. Someone had killed her brutally with a hatchet and then slipped away into the night. Emma, whose real name was Anna DeCoz, was a well-known "nymph du pave," as the Evening Telegram phrased it - basically, a courtesan. Her clientele included...
Very few people outside Coos County, and probably not that many inside it, know what a big deal Coos Bay is. It's the biggest deepwater har-bor on the Northwest coast -- that is, between San Francisco and Puget Sound. And it's far safer than Portland or Astoria, tucked as they are behind the "Graveyard of the Pacific" at the mouth of the Columbia. So, one has to wonder why it had no railroad connection to the outside world until 1916 -- more than 30 years after Portland got one. There have to...
To Dr. W.H. Lytle, Oregon's state veterinarian, the entire idea was preposterous. A rabies outbreak in northeast Oregon? Bah. Rabies was barely known west of the Rockies. "However," he added - no doubt with an exasperated sigh - "we intend to investigate the situation in Wallowa County and ascertain the facts at once." Two weeks later, on Aug. 21, 1910, Dr. Lytle was back and ready to announce what he'd learned. As expected, he'd found no evidence of rabies, he told the Portland Morning...
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...
