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Outlaw Bill Miner’s first train robbery was a fiasco
Fresh from a 20-year stretch in the pen, the famous stagecoach robber known as 'The Gray Fox' found the world had changed and he would now have to le…
5 months, 3 weeks ago
Taming of the Rascal: Chambreau’s redemption (Part 2 of 2)
After blowing his chance at a prosperous, respectable life in the Tygh Valley, the gambler and liquor man roared through frontier life as a keeper of…
5 months, 4 weeks ago
A crooked gambler’s-eye view of frontier Oregon (Part 1 of 2)
French-Canadian gambler started out as one of the most scurrilous rascals in the state, then reformed his ways and became one of its most earnest and…
5 months, 4 weeks ago
Was suspicious death in ‘boneyard’ really murder?
The coroner ruled Thomas McMahon's death an accident, and everyone moved on. But the testimony of witness Eliza “Boneyard Mary” Bunets was suspicious…
6 months ago
'Mother of Oregon History' earned praise, but little money (Part 2 of 2)
Legendary author Frances Fuller Victor fell on hard times in the late 1870s. She never quit, but after she took a job writing for Hubert Howe Bancrof…
6 months ago
Legendary Oregon author started with poetry, pulps (Part 1 of 2)
Frances Fuller Victor became the founding mother of all Oregon history, and one of its most important writers of all time. By the time she arrived in…
6 months ago
Supreme Court: Slavery is legal, but only for sailors
In May of 1895, on the old San Francisco waterfront, four sailors signed onto the four-masted barkentine Arago for a voyage to Valparaiso, Chile (“an…
6 months ago
Lafe Pence’s crazy plan: Wash mountain into lake
He might have accomplished it, too, but he lost friends when he tried to claim water rights to Bull Run, and when his primary investors went bankrupt…
6 months ago
Oregon's Modern Prometheus: The forced-sterilization advocate (Part 3 of a 3-part series on Bethenia Owens-Adair)
THE YEARS JUST after the discovery of germ theory were a great time to be a mainstream physician. By understanding, for the first time, the true vect…
6 months, 1 week ago
Oregon's Modern Prometheus: The Pioneer 'Lady Doctor'(part 2 of a 3-part series on Bethenia Owens-Adair)
It was a remarkable start to an even more remarkable career — the more so as Bethenia was over 30 years old when she launched it. It was also not a “…
6 months, 1 week ago