Make the McKenzie Connection!
Make the McKenzie Connection!
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Orlando Murray By Finn JD John Early in November 1906, 21-year-old Orlando Murray went to pay a call on a 22-year-old acquaintance named Lincoln C. Whitney. The main subject of their conversation was to be Murray’s 16-year-old sister, Mary. Secondary topics for the two men’s tete-a-tete included wedding bells and a baby shower – not necessarily in that order – and, last but not least, a .38-caliber revolver. The conversation did not go well. Whitney had met Mary when she’d traveled from her Portland home to Hubbard, where Whitn...
Spectators By Finn J.D. John A century ago, the entire country was in the grip of a sort of lethal mania. You can catch references to it in old novels by nonplussed Britons like P.G. Wodehouse – a sense that the U.S., unlike England or France or Germany, was not really a country of laws. Oh, laws were fine for things like robbery and swindling and claim jumping, but when it came to crimes involving “honor,” nothing but cold steel or hot lead would suffice. The concept was popularly known as “The Unwritten Law.” It was, essenti...
Grain fleet By Finn J.D. John The merciless waters of the Columbia River Bar are not known for easily giving up their prey once they’ve trapped a ship on their sandy shoals. But over the years, it has happened now and again, and the stories of these survivors are always interesting. The Queen of the Pacific There was no hint of irony in mind when the passenger liner Queen of the Pacific was launched in Philadelphia in 1882. The Pacific Coast Steamship Company of San Francisco had spared no expense. Competition on the San Francisco-Portland l...
McKenzie River Reflections...
Old McKenzie Fish Hatchery LEABURG: Plans to develop a showcase for McKenzie River riverboats and their guides got a big boost last week when the Meyer Memorial Trust announced it had granted $13,000 to the Friends of Old McKenzie Fish Hatchery. The money is earmarked for a feasibility study for a proposed McKenzie River Interpretive Center next to Leaburg Lake. Over the past several years, the Friends group has spearheaded a concerted effort by stakeholders – guides, scientists, community members, local, state and national agencies...
Greenhorn jail By Finn J.D. John One clear June morning in 1963, early risers in the historic Blue Mountains town of Canyon City were startled to see that there had been an unscheduled addition to the Grant County Courthouse the previous night. Sitting there in front of the courthouse was a jail. It was a ramshackle blockhouse jail, small and square, its roof half collapsed but its thick walls of interlocking planks still as stout as they’d been when it was first built. It was quickly recognized. The jail was a familiar one to many Canyon City...
Mr. Angel College By Finn J.D. John Adelhelm Odermatt is not, of course, an Irish name. And the portly, jovial Swiss monk who bore it had not a drop of Irish blood in him, so far as he knew. But he had come to visit this group of Irish Catholics to make his pitch for a donation to help save his monastery from an untimely foreclosure after a loan had been called in. And when in Rome, one did as the Romans did, right? So when he stepped up to speak, Father Odermatt tried his best to look Celtic as he introduced himself — as “Father O...
Holstrom crew By Finn J.D. John Of the 80 American Army aviators who flew the Doolittle raid in April of 1942, at least seven were former Oregonians. Actually, with only one or two exceptions, all of them were former Oregonians, having been stationed at the Pendleton air base before preparations for the raid commenced; but for seven of them, the relationship with the Beaver State ran deeper than that. This week, we’ll talk about four of them, and next week we’ll wrap up this topic with the other three, along with some finishing thoughts about t...
Frances Fuller By Finn J.D. John Back in 1867, Elwood Evans, a young lawyer, politician and historian in Washington Territory, started writing a book on the history of Washington’s neighbor to the south, the eight-year-old state of Oregon. Thinking it would be well to get input from some of the still-living people who had shaped Oregon’s history, Evans reached out to some of them, hoping to get better information. One of these people was Jesse Applegate, popularly known as the “Sage of Yoncalla,” a key player in the early formation of Oregon...
McKenzie River Reflections...
Airships ar Expo By Finn J.D. John In 1904, a sharp-eyed 61-year-old hustler named Lafe Pence stepped off the train in downtown Portland for a meeting of the National Mining Congress. The conference he was attending has been long forgotten. But had the group chosen Seattle or Bakersfield to hold it, the very shape of the hills in Portland would be different today. Pence had the kind of colorful Western background that you’d expect in a man who sets out to literally move mountains. He was born in Indiana just before the Civil War, and moved t...
Case & Poole By Finn J.D. John It was just another work night for the engineer and crew of the No. 15 California Express on the night of Jan. 29, 1897. They’d passed all the long, lonely stretches where train robbers liked to operate, and were now in settled country, steaming past the little community of Shady Point; in three miles they’d be pulling into Roseburg. So when a man with a lantern started signaling frantically for their train to stop, they weren’t particularly suspicious. But they probably should have been. A few months previ...
Train torpedo By Finn J.D. John Darkness had fallen in Cow Creek Canyon, in the remote fastness of south Douglas County, on July 1, 1895. It was just after 10 p.m., and the northbound California Express No. 15 was winding its way through the hairpin turns along the mountainside. Suddenly the black night was lit up with a brilliant flash as a big explosion thundered out from beneath the front wheels. Engineer J.B. Waite instantly slammed on the brakes. But he was more concerned than fearful. A big explosion under the wheels of a locomotive was,...
Smithfield plaque By Finn J.D. John Oregon in general, and rural southern Oregon in particular, has been referred to more than once as the “Dixie of the West Coast.” So perhaps it’s not surprising that the only Confederate flag known to have waved in the northwestern quarter of the continental United States during the Civil War flew proudly over the Beaver State, for a few weeks in 1862. Now, that “only flag” claim has to be qualified a bit. The entire northwest quarter is rather a large patch, and plenty of emigrant farmers, gold miners an...
Falling School By Finn J.D. John For the criminally minded Oregonian of yore, dynamite had much to recommend it. It was relatively easy to buy the stuff, surprisingly easy to steal it from a construction depot, and almost shockingly simple to brew up at home using a few simple, innocuous ingredients from the local drugstore. Furthermore, when used in a criminal enterprise, dynamite was like a first-class ticket to the front page of the local papers. A lot of crooks really enjoyed the ensuing notoriety. So it’s not surprising that it enjoyed a...
Cons fighting By Finn J.D. John Tips from the pros In a bit of a break with the usual format of Offbeat Oregon History, today I’m going to share with you the text of a promotional brochure mailed out shortly before the First World War by notorious criminal mastermind/motivational speaker Blackie DuQuesne*: DYNAMITE-ENHANCED TRAIN ROBBING TECHNIQUES: LEARN THE SECRETS OF THE PROS! Dear Aspiring Train Robbers: Look, boys, I understand. Being an express robber isn’t the easy gig it used to be, back in the 1880s when the hills were full of sta...
Dynamite found By Finn J.D. John There was a time, not so many years ago, when every Oregonian over the age of 12 had access to dynamite. Not that they could simply walk into a hardware store and buy some — although in the early years, they could. But even as late as the 1960s, the laws restricting explosives purchasing were mild enough that it wasn’t uncommon for farmers to buy the stuff for stump removal, or to work a mining claim. And you don’t have to go back too many years before that to reach a time when anybody who wanted dyn...
hero clerk By Finn J.D. John It was just after 2 a.m., in the wee small hours of the morning of Wednesday, Oct. 24, 1901, and the Oregon and California Fast Express had just left the train depot at Cottage Grove, headed for Portland. Up in the engine, engineer B.L. Lucas and fireman Robert Gittens were looking out ahead into an unusually dark night, illuminated by the carbide lamp on the front of the engine. They were passing through the wooded area north of Cottage Grove, approaching the hamlet of Saginaw. Suddenly a man suddenly appeared...
Douglas Cty Courthouse Probably not what you’re thinking By Finn J.D. John It was Christmas Day in 1866. Officially, the Civil War had been over for a year and a half. Unofficially, though, not everybody agreed that its outcome settled things ... especially in Douglas County, Oregon. At the time, Douglas County was like a microcosm of the United States. There was a Republican majority in the more populous and powerful northern part of the state, which had voted itself into full control of county government, much to the fury of the resentful, d...
Schooner By Finn J.D. John There was a time, a century and a half ago, when Coos Bay was the shipbuilding capital of the entire West Coast. It all started, as so much West Coast history does, with the Gold Rush. A young apprentice shipbuilder named Asa Mead Simpson, caught up in the excitement, jumped aboard a sailing ship in which he owned a small percentage and headed for the gold fields. Simpson was moderately successful there, but seemed to realize that it couldn’t last. So with a little over four pounds of gold in his poke, he headed b...
Drunken husband By Finn J.D. John You may have heard of Henderson Luelling - the Quaker nurseryman who founded an Oregon industry when he brought a wagon full of tiny trees out on the Oregon Trail, back in 1847. His story was recently memorialized in a children’s book that won the “Oregon Reads” award for the state sesquicentennial: “Apples to Oregon,” by Deborah Hopkins. On the trail to Oregon, many of Luelling’s fellow emigrants thought he was crazy. The care he lavished on the trees (even at the expense of his wife and nine children) w...
Skookum label By Finn J.D. John From time to time, bills come up in the Oregon State Legislature that seek to designate an official language for the state. Of course, the language they specify is always English, since that’s the dominant language in Oregon today. But if an official state language is thought of like the official state bird, or state wildflower, or state animal - as a special example of a type that is vital to the very nature of Oregon and that helps provide it with its particular character - there’s really only one leg...
Governor Pennoyer By Finn J.D. John Oregon may not be the richest, or the largest, or the most powerful state in the union. But our fair state does indisputably have one thing over every other state: We have more Thanksgiving holidays. It’s a tradition that was originally referred to as “Pennoyer’s Thanksgiving,” after the curmudgeon of a state governor who first proclaimed it. Actually, it’s probably better described as a dead tradition, having been more or less completely forgotten long before the turn of the last century. As far as I’ve been...
Wooding up By Finn J.D. John Just before Christmas in 1871, little steamboat called the U.S. Grant came to grief on the legendary Columbia River Bar, as had dozens before, and as would hundreds after. What makes the U.S. Grant’s demise unusual is that it wasn’t trying to cross the bar. It had been set adrift in the middle of a dark and stormy night to drift helplessly onto a raging bar, with its two owners on board. Whether that happened accidentally or deliberately, we can’t know for sure, but it’s at least a possibility that it was done on...
Whale killers By Finn J.D. John In August 1949, some residents in the small town of St. Helens started noticing a very unpleasant smell coming from a neighbor’s orchard. Upon investigation, police easily found the source: a large, oddly-shaped, obviously home-built galvanized steel tank, about 13 feet long and six feet wide, with great marks of rust and corrosion all over it. Inside it, they found a dead whale. The tank had originally been full of embalming fluid, which had preserved the whale from decomposition for nearly two decades. But t...
