Make the McKenzie Connection!
Make the McKenzie Connection!
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Burkhart airplane By Finn J.D. John In January of 1910, deep in the bowels of an old, obscure building at 10th and Everett in Portland, Albany natives Johnny Burkhart and “General Willie” Crawford were hard at work on a secret project when they heard a knock on the door. They waited for the knocker to go away. He did not. The knocking grew more insistent. Finally, unable to ignore it any longer, Johnny and Willie opened the door. Their visitor was a newspaper reporter. Apparently their secret project wasn’t as secret as they’d thought. Somebod...
Lighthouse By Finn J.D. John It was late December, 1856, and Thomas Smith, proud owner of the intrepid little 104-foot barque Desdemona, was in a hurry. Smith stood to make a particularly nice profit if the shipment of general merchandise the Desdemona was carrying out of San Francisco reached Astoria on or before New Year’s Day. So he proposed a deal to the captain of his ship, Francis Williams: Get the cargo into port by New Year’s Day, and he would be rewarded with the price of a new Sunday suit. It wouldn’t be long before Smith bitte...
Powerhouse Photo Courtesy Curtis Irish McKenzie River Reflections...
Border patrol By Finn J.D. John The editorial writer for the Portland Morning Oregonian was trying to be sarcastically dismissive, but between the lines, a discriminating reader could pick up on signs of real concern. “Curry (County) would of course immediately acquire the glorious climate of California and become a haven for retired Midwest farmers,” he wrote. “Gold Beach would become a metropolis with offensive slums, and Latin quarters, and traffic problems and police scandals and what-not. … The Curry County plan to become a count...
Gilbert Gable By Finn J.D. John Most Oregonians know about the State of Jefferson — in general concept, at least: a small group of Southern Oregon people got together in 1941 to proclaim a new state, made up of southwest Oregon and northwest California, called Jefferson; just as they got started, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor; and the idea just never got off the ground. All of which is true enough. But it barely touches the real story of Jefferson — and it’s not even the most interesting part. The fact is, the 1941 move for s...
Ranald MacDonald By Finn J.D. John Ranald MacDonald was overcome with emotion as he watched the whaling ship disappear over the sea, leaving him behind in his small open boat. No doubt he had at least a moment of doubt. His plan was audacious almost to the point of recklessness: He intended to deliberately land on the closed and forbidden island of Japan, present himself as a shipwreck victim, and hope for the best. Ranald’s situation was made the more intriguing because of who he was. He was no ordinary mariner; he was the highly educated a...
Ranald McDonald By Finn J.D. John The two Scottish gentlemen must have cut very strange figures on the gritty streets of the New York City waterfront in 1843, poking their carefully groomed heads into every darksome Bowery flophouse and shanghai joint in the Big Apple’s notorious maritime underworld. But Duncan Finlayson and Archibald McDonald were desperate. They were looking for McDonald’s son, Ranald. The future of the Oregon territory depended on it. Unless they could find the young man, Oregon would almost certainly be lost to the British...
Bannock Indians By Finn J.D. John Nearly every Oregonian knows a story or two about Bigfoot - the legendary and elusive ape-creature that supposedly lives deep in the wilderness and serves as an inspiration to crypto-zoologists and bad reality TV producers nationwide. More than a few Oregonians have claimed to have seen the elusive fellow - or, at least, to know somebody who has. Down in the desert country on the southeast border of Oregon, though, if you ask the right people, you’ll hear about another Bigfoot - one “Chief Bigfoot.” Very little...
Miller on a unicycle By Finn J.D. John Many people today still think of bicycles as toys for children or for highly specialized hobbyists and exercise buffs — like fencing foils. Others think of them as indispensable but unexciting tools for modern life. But for most of us, it’s hard to imagine the bicycle as a cutting-edge modern wonder. But in the early 1870s, that’s just what bicycles were: fast, exciting, dangerous things that could make an ordinary human fly like the wind. And what the dashing auto racer or aeroplane flier was to...
Aeroplane By Finn J.D. John On June 8, 1912, the streets and parapets of downtown Portland were thronged with about 50,000 people, craning their necks at the roof of the Multnomah Hotel. Atop the roof of the 10-story building, arranged at the end of a tiny 150-foot-long strip of overlapping 20-foot planks, stood one of the spindly box-kite-like contraptions that were still the state of the art in aircraft design. They were there to watch something that had never been done before, anywhere, and it was about to happen right before their eyes...
S.S. Great Republic By Finn J.D. John If you had been an expatriated American in the South American nation of Costa Rica in the early 1880s, you might have run across a fellow American named Thomas Doig. Perhaps you might have met him at a saloon, or maybe at a dinner party someplace. You’d soon learn your new friend was a bit of a V.I.P. In fact, he was the top admiral of the Costa Rican navy ... but he’d probably hasten to add that that was not as big a deal as it sounded. In fact, the Costa Rican navy had just one ship, a converted com...
General Patch By Finn J.D. John On the crisp autumn day of Sept. 29, 1943, behind their makeshift breastworks and beside their three-inch field pieces, the soldiers of the 94th Infantry “Deadeye” Division knew the end was coming soon. They were outnumbered two-to-one, dug in near a little grocery store-post office on the high desert. Arrayed against them was a force of soldiers with a large force of tanks. Overhead roared a squadron of heavy bombers, softening them up for the final assault. It would all be over soon. And the soldiers of the...
McKenzie River Reflections...
Busloads of tree planters By Finn J.D. John The fleet of buses glided through the ghost of a forest — a forest of silver snags, like millions of weatherbeaten masts of old sailing ships sticking up out of the earth. It was 1949, just ten years after the second Tillamook Burn had ravaged the land anew, and it was showing few signs of recovery on its own. Which is precisely why these buses full of children from the James John Grade School in Portland were here: To do something about that — to help the land recover. They would be...
From the June 5, 2002 edition of McKenzie River Reflections Horse Creek Bridge RAINBOW: A multi-agency effort to provide a safe crossing for 45 families is expected to get under way next Spring. The work is focused on the “bridge that nobody wanted,” which spans Horse Creek along Delta Road. Who actually owned the structure has been debated for decades. The bridge is not currently maintained or owned by Lane County. Requests from residents in the area spurred the Board of Commissioners to pass an order agreeing to take it into the cou...
Burn inspectors By Finn J.D. John Perhaps the most interesting part of the story of Oregon’s Tillamook Burn of 1933 is not what happened, but what didn’t happen. Three decades before the Tillamook Burn, the wildfire known as the “Yacolt Burn” — really dozens of simultaneous fires all across Oregon and Washington — lit into the states with a savage ferocity and blinding speed. It engulfed whole towns, destroyed sawmills and chased frantic loggers out of doomed camps. And it chased down 35 people and burned them alive. On the great g...
Tillamook Burn By Finn J.D. John The morning of August 14, 1933, was a morning to break a gyppo logger’s heart. It was clear, warm and dry — the kind of weather that shuts down logging operations long before quitting time. A warm, dry breeze was blowing out of the northeast. The woods crackled like dry tinder under the loggers’ caulks. As they’d known it would, the day got hotter. By noon, Gales Creek Canyon, near Forest Grove, was starting to empty out as logging operations knocked off for the day, heading back to their bunkhouses to wai...
Grain ships By Finn J.D. John In last week’s article, we talked about the most notorious shanghaiing artist of the old Portland waterfront: Joseph “Bunco” Kelley. Last week we explored what we actually know about this colorful 1890s evildoer. In this article, we’ll talk about stories we’re pretty sure are NOT historically accurate — that is, the myths. Most of those myths come down to us through a series of conversations held in a local watering hole in the early 1930s between legendary Oregon raconteur Stewart Holbrook and an aging water...
From the May 15, 2002 edition of McKenzie River Reflections Fish trapping underway Fish crane WALTERVILLE: Fish herders expect to finish up their work next week, allowing other workers to start in on some costly improvements to the Walterville power canal. The Eugene Water & Electric Board’s fish recovery program began on May 1st. Utility public relations manager Marty Douglas said as many as 1,000 fish have been netted in a day. Captured species have included Chinook salmon, skulpin, cutthroat trout, white fish, summer steelhead and bull t...
"Bunco" Kelley By Finn J.D. John In the shadowy world of late-1800s Portland waterfront folklore, there’s nobody who quite cuts the figure of a man named Joseph Kelley — better known by the nickname he carefully cultivated: Bunco Kelley. Kelley was a crimp — that is, one of those tough waterfront characters involved in the trade of furnishing sailors, willing or not, to ship captains in need of a crew. Kelley was also an easy and chronic liar with a real flair for a dramatic story — which means it’s often difficult to tell his...
Sub chaser By Finn J.D. John Rumors of sunken submarines: The government denies it, but ... Somewhere on the floor of the Pacific Ocean, rusting away among the rocks by the Oregon Coast, lie the remains of at least five sunken submarines — that is, if you believe the stories. And who believes the stories? Certainly not the U.S. Government, which places the actual number of Japanese submarine wrecks in Oregon waters at a much more boring number: zero. According to official records of both the U.S. and Japan, not a single Imperial Japanese...
From the February 6, 2002 edition of McKenzie River Reflections Cougar Dam tunnel BLUE RIVER: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will remove the last of a 35.5-foot-long concrete plug during the week of February 4 from a diversion tunnel through Cougar Dam. The work is part of the multiple-phase temperature control construction at the dam, which is on the South Fork of the McKenzie River. When Cougar Dam was being built in the 1960s, the diversion tunnel was used to divert river water away from the construction area, giving crews a dry area in...
Indian Village By Finn J.D. John Since well before the time of Plato’s story of Atlantis, storytellers all over the world have had a special fondness for legends of cities and civilizations that, at the peak of their prowess, were suddenly lost beneath the waves of the sea, leaving only a misty legend and maybe — if a diver knows just where to look — maybe some ghostly underwater ruins. Well, Oregon certainly can’t claim to be hiding the lost continent of Lemuria or the lost city of Atlantis beneath the placid surface of Fall Cre...
Chinese druggist By Finn J.D. John In the decade or two following the 1849 gold rush, a sort of “bracero” program got started in the western U.S. Chinese laborers — called “coolies” after the Chinese term “ku li,” meaning “muscle strength” — poured across the ocean to the land they called “Gold Mountain,” eager to do the dirty, menial and degrading jobs that were left to be done when all the Euro-Americans were off looking for gold or staking a homestead claim. Little is known today about the Chinese. Most had great difficulty le...
Vortex stage By Finn J.D. John As the last weekend of August 1970 approached, many Oregonians were sort of holding their breath. The American Legion was coming to town for its annual convention. The theme was “Victory in Vietnam.” President Richard Nixon would be there. And so would a group of particularly belligerent anti-war activists who had pointedly declined to renounce violence as a tool of protest. Everyone seemed to be spoiling for a fight: the Legion, the activists, the Portland city police and even President Nixon. Arrayed against the...
