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'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 Bancroft, he took credit for the books she wrote. (St. He…
Published on 1 month, 1 week 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 the Beaver State, she was already a well-known wr…
Published on 1 month, 2 weeks 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 (“and thence to such other foreign ports as the master…
Published on 1 month, 2 weeks 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 in a bank panic, he was forced to give up the sch…
Published on 1 month, 2 weeks 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 vectors of disease, doctors suddenly found they were a…
Published on 1 month, 2 weeks 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 “second act” career, but a fourth — she’d been a wi…
Published on 1 month, 2 weeks ago
Pioneer ‘lady doctor’ was Oregon's 'Modern Prometheus': Part 1 of 3-part series on Bethenia Owens-Adair
In Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Shelley tells the story of a brilliant and gifted scientist-physician who reaches too far in his quest for know…
Published on 1 month, 3 weeks ago
How the War of 1812 changed Oregon's fate (Part 2 of 2)
Yesterday, in Part One of this story, we had just gotten to the part where the Tonquin had been blown up, marooning the Astorians on the far side of the continent. But the damage done by the Tonquin…
Published on 1 month, 3 weeks ago
How Oregon almost became part of Canada once, eh? (Part 1 of 2)
For most people today, the story of the original colony of Astoria is remembered — if it’s remembered at all — as a dismal failure. It was an ill-equipped party sent out by a rich guy in New York, wh…
Published on 1 month, 3 weeks ago
Vigilantes overreached with murder of ‘rustler’
Everyone thought John Hawk was stealing cattle, and he refused to talk about it. So one night, a group of cattlemen snuck into his camp and assassinated him — and were shocked by the frontier communi…
Published on 1 month, 3 weeks ago