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Body snatchers' incompetence actually saved them from more serious charges (Part 2 of 2)
Police figured out who the body snatchers were before they even had time to think about writing a ransom note — so their sentences were much lighter …
2 months, 1 week ago
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 med…
2 months, 1 week 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 t…
2 months, 1 week 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 own…
2 months, 2 weeks 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…
2 months, 2 weeks 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 'ene…
2 months, 2 weeks 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 q…
2 months, 2 weeks 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 …
2 months, 2 weeks 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…
2 months, 3 weeks 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 so…
2 months, 3 weeks ago