Make the McKenzie Connection!
Make the McKenzie Connection!
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When Yosuke Matsuoka accepted his appointment as Imperial Japan's foreign minister, it was the fulfillment of a dream for him. The gregarious 13-year-old boy who had been informally adopted into Portland opium smuggler William Dunbar's household back in 1893 had come a long way in the following 47 years. He had become a national hero in Japan, and was by far the single most famous Japanese person in the world internationally and almost certainly the most famous University of Oregon alumnus. It...
Yosuke Matsuoka left his Oregon home for the last time in 1902 when he was 22 years old; he'd lived in Oregon and, briefly, California, since age 13. His Oregon years had been happy ones, and he would remember them fondly for the rest of his life. Oregon would remember him fondly, too (until Pearl Harbor Day, of course). Within 25 years of his graduation, he would be probably the most famous University of Oregon alumnus in the world; within 50, it's most notorious. That, of course, was all far i...
Part 1 - The opium smuggler's foster son It may be true that the movement of a butterfly's wings on one side of the world can seed a tornado on the other. But whether that's literally true or not, it certainly is figuratively true, and nowhere is it better demonstrated than in the case of 1890s businessman and opium smuggler William Dunbar of Portland, Oregon. If we could take Dunbar out of the stream of history before about 1890, we would derail events that led directly to Imperial Japan's...
Opening up the Santiam Pass By M.J. Nye In the fall of 1880, a Company was organized to build a wagon road over the Cascade Mountains via what is now known as the Santiam Pass. Little or nothing was known about the country at the headwaters of the south Santiam, along which the road was later built; for it is supposed that no white man had ever crossed the Cascade Mountains at this point until 1859 when Andrew Wiley led a company of men across. Wiley had previously led a band of emigrants from...
Continued From Last Week Part 4 From the January 19, 2012 edition of McKenzie River Reflections January 18th, 1812 On January 18th two hundred years ago Donald MacKenzie finally reached the Pacific Ocean. At 27 years old and 6' 6" in height, he was already well-regarded as the assistant leader of the 60-person "Astorian Overland Party". The McKenzie River was later named after this young leader. This is the final Chapter of Travels with Mackenzie. In late November 1811, the Overland Expedition f...
From the September 8, 2011 edition of McKenzie River Reflections Two hundred years ago this month Donald MacKenzie, age 28, was making his way from the Missouri River towards Fort Astoria, as assistant leader of the "Astorians Overland Party" made up of fifty-six men, a woman, and two children. Ten years later a map would be drawn by the Hudson Bay Company, naming a branch of the Willamette River as "Mackenzie's Branch" after Donald Mackenzie. Understanding why his name was given to this river...
The "Golden Age of Outlaws" had a good run - almost 40 years. It kicked off just after the Civil War when thousands of battle-hardened Confederate veterans with nothing to lose spread out across the Western frontier; and it ended in a field in eastern Washington on Aug. 5, 1902. That was the date when the last Golden Age outlaw, Harry Tracy, went out in a blaze of gunfire following the bloodiest prison break in Oregon history, followed by a two-month-long, even bloodier manhunt. Harry Tracy was...
State denies Hwy. 126 speed zone request VIDA: A request to drop the speed limit on Hwy. 126 between Indian Creek And Mountain View Lane wasn't supported by a recent traffic study by the Oregon Dept. of Transportation. The report to Lane County from Edward Fischer, ODOT's State Traffic Engineer in Salem, found a high percentage of the vehicles traveling through the area were traveling faster than the posted 55 mph speed limit. The county had requested the speed be dropped to 45 mph, in...
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 permit to develop up to nine new hydropower projects on the McKenzie River. Principle Power Hydro said the plants would be constructed between river mile 75 at Scott Creek (just upstream of Paradise Campground) and just above Leaburg Dam at river mile 41. Each could be similar in size to the Eugene...
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 Phoenix Hotel, and it had been a very flagrant bordello. Conveniently located right in the heart of what was then Oregon City's industrial core, it had been a handy place for workers in the woolen mills, paper manufacturies, sawmills, and other operations that took advantage of the plentiful water...
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, at the dawning of the Gus Van Sant era of filmmaking in Oregon (and particularly in the Portland area). But first: 11. The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975) Walt Disney Productions. Starring Bill Bixby, Susan Clark, Don Knotts, and Tim Conway. Oregon connection: Deschutes County. This lightweight, feel-good...
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 1960 and 1975. Of course, this is not an article about popular cinema as a mirror of popular culture. But it's hard to miss the social changes these pictures showcase. The nation that produced Shenandoah, with its faint stirrings of uneasy anti-war sentiment still wrapped up in classic...
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 century saw The Goonies, Stand By Me, Drugstore Cowboy, Point Break, Free Willy (twice), Mr. Holland's Opus, The Postman, Ricochet River, and Men of Honor filmed here - along with dozens of others. And the 21st century so far has brought us Pay It Forward, Elephant, The Ring (twice), Fahrenheit 9/11,...
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 of Polk County, Cynthian - which was renamed Dallas later that same year - was a tiny place, with no more than a few hundred residents. But, it seemed, one of those few hundred people was a burglar and had hit three different homes over the previous few months. Folks around Cynthian had a suspect...
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...
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 Festival parade, a courier had run up to him with a cryptic message: "The grand marshal's car awaits," the messenger puffed. "Hurry and get in and don't delay the parade." "Why, I'm not grand marshal," Baker replied, puzzled. Just then his friend Gus Moser, who was in charge of the parade that year, hustle...
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 death of the legendary Harvey Scott, had thrown its weight behind a big, boisterous City Council member named George Baker in the race for Portland city mayor. But in a fierce race with Union man and small-business owner Will Daly, Baker was clearly on track to lose. For Pittock, that was simply not a...
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 on an island as a passive target, waiting for an enemy carrier's aircraft to arrive and attack. When the war broke out, the U.S. had seven of these precious warships, but only three were in the Pacific. They were the actual targets of the attack on Pearl Harbor - the Japanese knew if they could get...
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 fight was greeted with excitement, eagerness and dread. But there was one particular group of Oregonians for whom the dread was particularly pronounced: The German-American community. The German-born cohort of Oregon residents was bigger than any other foreign-born group, totaling 18,000 in the 1910 cen...
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 St. Louis, he'd been running amok in the saloons and "faro banks," getting into lots of high-spirited trouble with fast women and irresponsible friends. His father, wanting to get him away from the company he was keeping, had come up with a scheme to send him off to what he no doubt considered the...
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 steamboat era on the upper Willamette. Steamboats had been working the lower Willamette and Columbia for some time, but they'd only come to the upper Willamette three years before. The result, for Canemah, had been an explosion of growth. In those pre-railroad days, the rivers were the only way to get...
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 without stopping. She looked at the clock. It was 11:30 p.m. "I lay in bed thinking to myself, 'Why doesn't that fellow at the fire station get his big thumb off the siren button so we can all go back to sleep, and let the firemen take care of the fire?'" she recalled later, in an article for...
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 the gold fields in northern California and southern Oregon, where he'd been wandering from town to town, fleecing miners and other gamblers and running from the occasional angry mob. But the previous year, he had met a woman – a nice, respectable girl by the name of Barbara Ann McBee. Despite his f...
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; there were guys like William Ladd, who came hoping to get in on the ground floor and become the next generation of business barons; and, of course, there were the Marcus Whitmans and Jason Lees, the state's spiritual forefathers, come into the wilderness to save souls. But there was another kind of...
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, because it's the biggest, of course. Salem, because it's the state capitol. And Valsetz, because of its newspaper, the Valsetz Star, and the Star's editor, 11-year-old Dorothy Anne Hobson. The 9-year-old editor Dorothy Anne was the daughter of Henry and Ruby Hobson, the cookhouse managers for the tiny...
