Offbeat Oregon: Fish wheels a legacy of a river once teeming with salmon
If you get out on the Columbia River in the more inland reaches — past the Beacon Rock area — you’ll often notice there are lines of rotting, weatherbeaten posts leading out into the ...
Offbeat Oregon: 'Graveyard of the Pacific' was not easily tamed
On the morning of Sept. 18, 1853, the American bark Oriole was heavily laden with building materials and waiting for a favorable breeze to kick up so she could cross the Columbia River bar. Around noon ...
Offbeat Oregon: Did Oregon’s political supervillain save the world from Nazi nukes?
Charles Henry “Iron Pants” Martin was probably the most scurrilous and unlovable character in Oregon political history. As an Army officer during the Boxer Rebellion, he looted Chinese palaces; ...
Offbeat Oregon: U.S. punctured Japan's balloon bomb plans
On July 9, 1945, residents of northwest Oregon started seeing heavy smoke rising into the air over the Coast Range. It wasn’t an unfamiliar sight. Twelve years earlier, in 1933, the granddaddy of ...
Offbeat Oregon: Whale of a fail
It was a sunny November day on the beach near Florence, and Oregon Highway Department project manager George Thornton was standing near a very large, very dead whale, talking to a TV news crew. He was ...
Offbeat Oregon: UFO cult lured away 20 Oregonians
Others were thoroughly creeped out In the Fir Room at the Bayshore Inn in Waldport, some 200 people waited expectantly for something to happen. None of them knew quite what that something would be — ...
Offbeat Oregon: Southern Oregon populist leader had plans for a guerilla uprising
The months that followed the election of 1932 in Jackson County were nerve-wracking ones for everyone involved. Newspaper publishers Llewellyn Banks and Earl Fehl, leaders of a belligerent populist uprising ...
Offbeat Oregon: The Jackson County Rebellion Llewellyn Banks comes to power
The year of 1932 hit the Rogue River Valley as hard as it hit anyplace. That year was the psychological nadir of the Great Depression — a year of bank closures, suicides, hunger and civil unrest. ...
Offbeat Oregon: 'Jackson County Rebellion' grew out of newspapers' fight
To call Llewellyn F. Banks a swindler was overselling things a bit; he seems to have really believed in what he was doing. To call him a would-be fascist was simply wrong. Sure, he wanted to seize power, ...
Offbeat Oregon: Traveling shows swindled the sick
The four decades following the Civil War were something like a golden age of charlatanry in the West, and Oregon was no exception. From swindling tourists at a gambling parlor, to fleecing miners in a ...
Offbeat Oregon: How not to die of dysentery on the Oregon Trail
Readers old enough to remember the Rex Morgan, M.D., comic strip will have a good sense of the glory years of medicine in Oregon, and across the country too. For the past 75 years or so, doctors have enjoyed ...
Offbeat Oregon: Three more notable Oregon women
Last time, we launched into an overview of great women from Oregon history whose names ought to be mentioned next time the chance arises to name a bridge or mountain after an important and overlooked historical ...
Offbeat Oregon: Frontier Oregon took its entertainment seriously
In the winter of 1860, the little riverside frontier town of Corvallis was home to a young Vaudeville singer named Susie Robinson. Susie was the star attraction of the Robinson Troupe of Vaudevillians, ...
Offbeat Oregon: A longshoreman’s raucous farewell
One fine day in 1886, the Rt. Rev. Lemuel Wells was approached by a deputation from the local Longshoremen’s Union. The burly dockworkers had a sad story to tell, and a request for the reverend’s ...
Offbeat Oregon: Rustling up a flock
Townsfolk filled the pews, whether they wanted to or not In their later years, most frontier circuit riders looked back on their itinerant-preacher years through a nostalgic haze from a considerable distance ...
