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Body snatchers plotted to steal dead mayor’s corpse (Part 1 of 2)
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY was a kind of golden age of body snatching. Digging up the freshly dead to cash the corpse in at the back door of a nearby medical school was — well, not common exactly, but fa…
Published on 16 hours ago
‘Blue Ruin’ drove Oregon to drink—and prohibition
Before Oregon was even a state, its territorial government outlawed all booze. Why? It all has to do with a fellow who could probably be called the true founder of the city of Portland — and his ever…
Published on 1 day, 16 hours ago
Larry Sullivan's 'second act' career dwarfed his first (Part 2 of 2)
BY THE TIME George Graham Rice met Larry Sullivan at Sullivan and Grant’s “palace” in Goldfield, he was doing a booming business in Nevada as the owner and copywriter of an advertising agency, workin…
Published on 2 days, 16 hours ago
Boss shanghaier Sullivan’s mining-stock fraud career (Part 1 of 2)
For anyone interested in the shanghaiing of sailors on the old Portland waterfront, the name “Larry Sullivan” needs no introduction. Smooth, polished, well-connected and ruthless, Larry Sullivan was …
Published on 3 days, 16 hours ago
Brides were stripped of U.S. citizenship at the altar
Women who'd married German men suddenly learned they'd been legally (and very unconstitutionally) made stateless, and were forced to register as 'enemy aliens'; those who'd married Chinese men fared …
Published on 6 days, 16 hours ago
Oregonians had the jump on California Gold Rush
If you’d been lucky enough to live in Portland in July of 1848, you would have been able to say, literally, that your ship had come in. The ship in question was the sailing ship Honolulu. And, funny …
Published on 1 week ago
Palatial riverboat caught in hurricane on open sea
Designed for calm inland waterways, the sidewheel steamboat Alaskan was no match for the massive late-spring gale that pounced on it off Cape Blanco one fateful night in 1889. (Cape Blanco, Curry Cou…
Published on 1 week, 1 day ago
Drunk looting party broke out at scene of shipwreck
ON THE MORNING OF NOV. 5, 1915, at the back of the entrance to Coos Bay, a big steamship could be seen towering improbably over the beach, stuck fast in the sand close to shore. This was the Santa Cl…
Published on 1 week, 2 days ago
Civil War plotters hoped to get West Coast to secede
Dreamed up by supporters of the old south, the plan envisioned an independent “Pacific Republic” as a slave state — to be stocked with slaves by a sort of bait-and-switch swindle. But the supporters …
Published on 1 week, 3 days ago
Buster Keaton brought Hollywood to Cottage Grove (Part 2 of 2)
And then there was the climactic scene, which is the main thing people talk about in South Lane County when this movie comes up. It was literally a train wreck, although metaphorically it was anythin…
Published on 1 week, 6 days ago