Offbeat Oregon History podcast

Very few of Portland's saloonkeepers threw firecrackers at the ladies of the Women's Temperance Prayer League and called them 'damn whores' when they came by to hold prayer services at their bars. But, as the old song goes, there's one in every crowd ... and it's usually Walter Moffett of the Webfoot Saloon. (Portland, Multnomah County; 1870s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1902b.temperance-wars-2of4-534.html)

Inspired by the successes of temperance activists back east, a group of Portland ladies decided to take their message of abstinance out of the churches and into the streets. They may have been surprised by the reaction they got. (Portland, Multnomah County; 1870s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1902a.temperance-wars-1of4-533.html)

The city business leaders hoped the Shakespeare Festival would do OK, but just in case it tanked, they insisted that it share the stage with a series of prizefights. The boxing matches bombed badly; luckily, the Shakespeare plays did not. (Ashland, Josephine County; 1930s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1704a.shakespeare-festival-vs-boxing.html)

The sailor wanted to quit, but the captain didn't want him to; so he deposited a $60 'blood money' bonus with the British consul, as a reward if shanghaier Jim Turk could swindle him back aboard. Unfortunately, they killed him in the attempt. This kicked off a three-act courtroom drama oddly reminiscent of a Three Stooges episode. (Portland, Multnomah County; 1880s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1903e.frederick-kalashua-shanghaied-541.html)

Four states away from his family, with no living parents, young Carroll Beebe was like a walking, talking invitation to a shanghaiing. And when he checked into Bridget Grant's boardinghouse, she obliged. (Astoria, Clatsop County; 1880s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1903c.carroll-beebe-shanghaied-539.html)

Astoria shyster L.G. Carpenter coveted Darius Norris's valuable acreage on Long Beach Peninsula. So he got the police chief to arrest Norris on bogus charges, swindled him into signing over his property, and shanghaied him off out of town on a sailing ship. (Astoria, Clatsop County; 1890s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1903b.darius-norris-shanghaied-538.html)

Portland band The Kingsmen recorded the song quickly and cheaply, and the words they were singing were unintelligible. But when the song became a hit, fans started guessing at the lyrics ... and some of them had rather dirty minds. (Portland, Multnomah County; 1960s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1312d-louie-louie-kingsmen-fbi-investigation.html)

Let's face it: No one actually knows where the famous English privateer and explorer spent the summer, and his notes, upon his return, were deliberately opaque. But it's possible that his “Nova Albion” was on the Oregon Coast. (Whale Cove, Lincoln County; 1500s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1703b.francis-drake-whale-cove-nehalem-bay-nova-albion-434.html)

OCT. 1, 1880, WAS a very big day in Portland. For the first time in the history of the city or the state, a sitting President of the United States had come to visit. President Rutherford B. Hayes had arrived in Portland the night before and was staying in the Esmond Hotel, the nicest in Portland at the time, on the corner of Morrison and Front streets. Portland was, of course, very much a frontier town in 1880, still dotted with the stumps of the trees that had been cleared to make room for it. So it can’t have come as too much of a surprise to the president when, at 9:30 the next morning, a gunfight broke out directly beneath his hotel window. He was probably a little more surprised, though, when he found out who the gunfighters were: It was the president of the local synagogue — and the rabbi. (Portland, Multnomah County; 1880s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/20-12.rabbi-gunfight-rutherford-hayes-592.html)

"The “Mother of Oregon History” 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. Helens, Columbia County; 1880s, 1890s, 1900s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1504a.frances-fuller-victor-part2.333.html)

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 writer. (St. Helens, Columbia County; 1860s, 1870s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1503e.frances-fuller-victor-part1.332.html)

The evidence against Charles Kimzey was circumstantial, but police had the goods on him for an attempted murder the year before, so he was sent up the river on a life stretch. But clearly two men had done the killing -- and no one ever really got a line on who his partner might have been. (Big Lava Lake, Deschutes County; 1920s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1904d.trapper-murders-lava-lake-part2-545.html)

Ed Nickols hadn't wanted to spend the winter by himself at the remote cabin, because he'd made a dangerous enemy in a former coworker who turned out to be an escaped convict. So Roy Wilson and Dewey Morris spent the winter there with him ... and all three disappeared halfway through it. (Lava Lake, Deschutes County; 1920s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1904c.trapper-murders-lava-lake-part1-544.html)

The 19th 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 far from unheard-of. So when, around the middle of May 1897, Daniel Magone and Charles Montgomery asked a 20-year-old wood hauler named William Rector to help them steal a corpse out of River View Cemetery, Rector didn’t react the way you or I would. A job was a job, and Rector needed the work, and although it was technically illegal, one couldn’t really get into too much trouble for it … provided, of course, that the corpse being snatched belonged to a poor person. Body snatching as it was practiced back then was an ancillary industry to the medical profession. Medical colleges needed a constant supply of cadavers to dissect in their labs, and there were never enough available through legitimate sources to slake the demand. Well, nature abhors a vacuum, and so does a market; so, an underground industry of body-snatchers, also called “resurrection men,” developed to meet the demand for fresh corpses, by stealing them out of cemeteries in the middle of the night.... (Portland, Multnomah County; 1890s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/23-03.body-snatchers-resurrected-william-ladd-619.html)

But in 1861, the worst floods in state history turned the Willamette Valley into one giant half-million-acre lake and swept several burgeoning towns away. And, despite our flood-control dams, someday it will probably happen again. (Willamette Valley; 1860s, 1890s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1704c.willamette-floods-1894-1861-439.html)