Make the McKenzie Connection!
Make the McKenzie Connection!
Sorted by date Results 326 - 350 of 414
War poster By Finn J.D. John 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 census, w...
Crooked gamblers By Finn J.D. John 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 most sober, ha...
Temperance protest By Finn J.D. John 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 fearsome r...
Edouard Chambreau By Finn J.D. John 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 frontier O...
McKenzie River Reflections...
First cabin By Finn J.D. John Most people know Prohibition in the United States started in 1920 when the Volstead Act went into effect. But in Oregon, Prohibition started quite a bit earlier than that. Actually, it started before Oregon was even a state. In 1844, the Oregon Territorial Government became the first in the United States to outlaw the use, manufacture or sale of booze. The full story of Oregon Territory’s first experiment with Prohibition will probably never be known; not a lot of written history has come down to us from early 1...
Alaskan paddlewheeler By Finn J.D. John Paddlewheel riverboats are, of course, not designed to be used on the open sea. Their scant freeboard, so convenient for passengers clambering aboard for a trip down the river or across Puget Sound, becomes a major liability in a storm at sea; their ornate deck covers and big-windowed deckhouses, so nice for watching the scenery gliding by, take the full force of boarding seas when things get rough. And yet riverboats did, in the late 1800s, have to venture out into the open sea from time to time, either...
Great train robbery By Finn J.D. John It had been a good 20 years, but Bill Miner was back and once again, as he liked to say, “on the rob.” Specifically, he was lurking with his partner behind a pile of baggage on an eastbound express train, a dozen or so miles out of Portland, waiting for his chance. It was September of 1903, and Bill was about to rob his very first railroad train. Or, rather, try to. The obsolete outlaw Bill Miner Bill “The Gray Fox” Miner was already a well-known outlaw by this time, a specialist in the frontier art of...
Blade Manure story A look back at July of 1981 - Deputy responds to reports of man acting erratically and directing traffic. Front page McKenzie River Reflections...
Boat boneyard By Finn J.D. John This is the story of Portland’s coldest cold-case file — a suspicious death in the worst neighborhood of the old Stumptown waterfront, almost lost in the mists of time, 135 years ago. Was it an accident? Or a murder? We’ll never know for sure. But there are good reasons to be suspicious. The Night Before Our story begins in a smoky, lamp-lit saloon in the rough part of Portland, back in early February of 1878. W.H. Harrigan, one of the tough, hardworking longshoremen who worked the docks in early Por...
Ennis Nestle VIDA: Not many men these days could put on the uniform they wore when serving in World War II. One who can is Ennis Nestle of Vida. He won’t do it in the summertime because it would be too hot to don the all wool clothing. As a 24-year old McKenzie River guide, Ennis had two choices in 1943 - sign up or be drafted. He picked the second because it gave him eight days to notify his “fisher people” that he’d be unavailable for a while. He was a little put out to learn volunteering meant there’d be no chance of advancement beyond a...
Vigilantes By Finn J.D. John John Hawk’s neighbors had few good things to say about him. Nearly everyone agreed that he was the surliest, most unpleasant man they’d ever met. That, as much as anything else, was why he was about to die, on a cold, clear, moonlit night by the Lostine River in 1881. Hawk was 31 years old at the time, a native Oregonian born in 1850. He’d boldly gone deep into Nez Perce tribal lands and staked a claim, rather a dangerous thing to do in the days of Chief Joseph, and started ranching on Prairie Creek, three miles...
Scanning newspapers MCKENZIE BRIDGE: A wealth of historic news stories and archives of the McKenzie River are being transformed from fragile newsprint and preserved in easily accessible digital files. The material will comprise all the back issues of McKenzie River Reflections, the area’s community newspaper, which began publishing on August 23, 1978. The work, which involves scanning some 15,000-tabloid size pages, began in 2005 when the publication partnered with SmallTownPapers of Shelton, WA. The company scans directly from printed n...
Adam magazine image By Finn J.D. John Drug addict and convicted robber Ray Moore was in his cheap hotel room on the corner of 12th and Morrison when his burglar friend Jimmy Walker pounded on the door. Jimmy desperately needed help. He told Ray he’d shot a man, and was sure he’d be “burned for it.” He needed to get out of town. Ray said he’d help. He told Jimmy to check into the hotel and wait for him while he made some arrangements, and he grabbed his hat and he headed out the door. Soon he was back, and introduced Jimmy to a friend and fello...
Pinto Colvig By Finn J.D. John On any list of nationally famous Oregonians, there are a few names you probably won’t see. For example: Bozo the Clown ... Goofy, the original hayseed hick from early Disney cartoons ... Bluto, Popeye’s nemesis ... comedian Jack Benny’s imaginary Maxwell motorcar ... and the list goes on. These legendary characters are all the creations of the same gifted Oregon show-business pioneer: Vance “Pinto” Colvig. Vance Colvig was born in 1892 in Jacksonville, the youngest son of William and Adelaide Colvig; William w...
Gussie Telfair By Finn J.D. John On September 25, 1880, an old and battered but sleek steamship drew into the mouth of Coos Bay, at the end of its voyage from Portland. As the vessel churned its way into the bay, it suddenly and definitively veered out of the channel and slammed directly into the bank of the bay, close by Rocky Point — hard aground. All 20 passengers aboard the ship were safely removed from the ship, and barely inconvenienced; after all, the shipwreck had occurred at their destination. The cargo of coal was mostly...
By Finn J.D. John Tarzan skeleton Crater Lake, Oregon’s only national park, has a worldwide reputation for scenic beauty, which it richly deserves. But the park has another interesting characteristic, and it’s one that few of the millions who have flocked to the park over the years have realized: It’s lethal. With fairly depressing regularity, visitors to the park fall off cliffs, get caught in snowstorms and crash their cars into deep ravines. Airplanes and helicopters fall out of the sky. And as if that weren’t enough, far more homicides have...
Mug shot By Finn J.D. John October 20, 1926, could easily have been the day Mrs. M.D. Lewis died — suddenly, silently and violently. She was doing some work around a small house she had for sale in the Sellwood neighborhood of Portland when an old car pulled up in front of it and a small man with black hair and dark complexion stepped out. Rude and brusque, he beetled into the house as if he owned it, muttering, “House for sale” as he passed her. Lewis, of course, found his manners completely offensive. Perhaps that was why she disliked h...
Train robbery By Finn J.D. John It was early summer, 1914, and an Oregon & Washington Railway Navigation Co. passenger train was just passing over the summit of the Blue Mountains, between LaGrande and Pendleton. The crewmen were running the train slow, checking the brakes for the long downhill run ahead. Meanwhile, three men at the back of the train were checking their guns. A train robbery was about to go down — one of the very last Old West-style train robberies ever. And before it was over with, it would turn into one of the very last...
Political army By Finn J.D. John 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 thousands...
Hobsons By Finn J.D. John 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 company town of Valset...
Thomson footbridge By Ruth West A wealth of memories clings around the name, “Thomson’s Lodge,” and in spite of the fact that the lodge has now passed out of the hands of the Thomson family who founded it in 1860, the name and the famous hospitality of the place will continue. One of the eldest resorts in the state to be run exclusively for sportsmen by one family, it was sold during the past week to Mr. and Mrs. Alvin P. Gannon of Portland. Dayton and Milo Thomson were the owners of the property, which was divided for the purpose of the sale....
Railroad camp By Finn J.D. John The U.S. Post Office inspector was puzzled. He’d just arrived at the tiny logging-company town of Shevlin, deep in the ponderosa pine woods south of Bend — and found it gone. Shade trees still towered over manicured home sites. A stray whiff drifted in the wind from an open pit where an outhouse once had stood. And on the spot where he’d expected to find the Shevlin Post Office, there was nothing but the bare outline of a building. The entire town of 600 was gone, as if abducted by aliens. But chances are g...
Reynolds murder trial By Finn J.D. John On June 20, 1907, a retired military man named Charles Reynolds was hurrying home as fast as he could — with a .38-caliber revolver in his pocket. Charles was an old U.S. Cavalry man in his 50s who had moved to Portland with his wife, Lulu, and his two grown children from a previous marriage. Charles had married Lulu in Colorado five years before, when she was just 25 years old. In Portland, the Reynoldses were part owners of a bathhouse on the corner of Second and Washington, and lived in a large...
Better than hearing it on the grapevine! by Rick and Kristi Steber Ken & Louise Engelman "We have a variety of groups here on the McKenzie," says Ken Engelman. "Young, old, liberal, conservative, vacationer, farmer. We are trying to form a communications link for everyone who lives from Walterville to McKenzie Pass, a voice for the people to speak through." Ken and his wife Louise are the publisher-editors of McKenzie River Reflections, a weekly newspaper published every Friday in Blue River. The eight-page tabloid has chronicled the...
