By Finn J.D. John — March 14, 2010

Next time a debate over a capital levy for local schools gets ugly, count your blessings. Some Oregonians used to argue over this sort of thing with sticks of dynamite.

Back in 1895, a little one-room schoolhouse was built in an unincorporated town that today is known as Mohawk. Over the years it’s also been called Donna and Ping Yang – Ping Yang having been, at the time, the popular English pronunciation of Pyongyang, then the capital of Korea (and today the capital of North Korea). Pyongyang had just made headlines as the scene of a historic battle between the colonial forces of China, which had dominated Korea for centuries, and the “liberating” armies of Japan (click here to see a New York Times article from Sept. 18, 1894); this fight had captured the imagination of many Oregonians, and was a regular subject in the pulps and serials of the day.

Battlefield School

There are other theories on the origin of the name. But if the Ping Yang School was in fact named after a distant battlefield, it was an appropriate choice, because it quickly became one – in more than just a metaphorical sense. You see, a sizeable percentage of the community did not want the school built where it ended up.

Matches, coal oil and dynamite

Almost immediately after it was built, someone tried to torch the school by dumping coal oil on the floor inside and lighting it off. This did not work – probably because it was late winter at the time. Anyone who’s tried to fire up a burn pile on a typical Willamette Valley February day will not be surprised at this.

Three months later, though, a more successful attempt was made, involving dynamite. This seems to have established a tradition at Ping Yang. Over the following 15 years, three more attempts were made to blow the building up, with increasing success, until in 1909 the school had to be replaced with a bigger structure – which served the community uneventfully until it was replaced in 1963 with Mohawk Elementary School, just a few hundred yards away on the other side of Marcola Road.

So, why all the fireworks?

Can't stop progress — or can you?

Steve Williamson suggests it was a land-use issue. The Mohawk Valley is prime timber country. The valley floor is nice and flat; the surrounding hills are gentle, well-watered and thick with trees. Soon there was a railroad heading up the valley, carrying logs down to the mill and timber workers and their families up to live. Some of the older Mohawk Valley residents, who’d been there since before Oregon statehood, saw their wild hideaway turning into an industrial community, complete with roaring machinery, howling steam whistles and screeching buzz-saw blades. One of these, “Old Joe” Huddleston, was particularly disgusted after the railroad cut up the valley right next to his property.

Blatant racism

To make things more complicated, Old Joe was playing the race card when the school was bombed for the third time, in 1900. This blast took out most of the walls and left just a roof supported on a few surviving bits of framing. At that time, Huddleston was campaigning fiercely against the school, which – like the railroad – was annoyingly close to his home. He was using a racist, xenophobic appeal centered around opposition to the presence of Chinese and Japanese people then working on railroads and other back-breaking projects around the country. The Ping Yang School likely had never had a Chinese or Japanese student even walking into the building; there were no East Asian families in that part of the Mohawk Valley at the time (editor's note: Please see note at bottom of page). But it had a Korean-sounding name, and Japanese workers on the railroad line had become a familiar sight.

So when the school blew up, Huddleston was widely viewed as the No. 1 suspect – especially since he was known to be an experienced “dynamite fisherman” on area waterways.

No charges ever filed

Old Joe was never charged. No one else was either, for that matter. But after Old Joe moved out of the valley a couple years later, the explosions stopped – well, mostly. In or shortly before 1909, there was one more, and this one finished off the building.

"Mom, me an' Wally blew up the school!"

According to a student attending the school at the time, a group of pupils decided they needed a better building, and that the way to get one was – well, what had become the traditional Mohawk Valley way: Dynamite.

They got their new school. It lasted until 1963, when it was taken out of service in a far less dramatic fashion – with a school-board vote – and replaced with Mohawk Elementary.

(Sources: Lane County Historical Museum exhibit; Eugene Register-Guard, 6-7-63; Eugene Guard 7-15-01; Williamson, Stephen. The Ping Yang School Bombing, http://www.efn.org/~opal/pingyang.htm)

NOTE: The original version of this story stated that there were no East Asian families in the Mohawk Valley at this time, a statement that I am pretty sure was incorrect. There was a Japanese community at Mabel, about 20 miles upriver, during at least some of the time discussed in this article. I have updated the story to reflect this. (Thanks, Mitch, for pointing this out.) By the way, if you're interested in more about the Japanese colony, Stephen Williamson has studied that extensively as well: http://www.efn.org/~opal/coastrange.htm

By Finn J.D. John — March 6, 2010

If you’ve lived in Oregon for a while, chances are you know at least one person who’s traveled all over the world before deciding that our state in general, and your town in particular, was the best place on the globe to settle down.

It’s not exactly a common experience, but it happens often enough to be noticeable.

But it’s not new. In fact, what might be the very first such story dates back to the days of Dr. John McLaughlin, well before Oregon was even officially a U.S. territory.

It’s the story of Jimmy Bates, who was born in either 1809 or 1810 (I haven’t been able to learn which) to a wealthy family in Washington, D.C., as recounted by Winfield Taylor Rigdon in 1892. Rigdon, one of the Salem area’s pioneer luminaries, referred to Bates as “Uncle Jimmy,” although it’s not clear if the two were blood relations.

According to Rigdon, Jimmy was doing the family proud at a prestigious academy when suddenly, at age 15, he got hold of a book titled “Riley’s African Shipwrecks” (probably an account of the wreck of the American brig Commerce, captained by one James Riley, on the west coast of Africa in 1815).

Just like that, young Jimmy’s academic career was over. Suddenly he could think about nothing but sailing ships, the sea, and distant lands. His performance in school suffered instantly and fatally. A few years later, he was on a small coastal trader plying the Eastern Seaboard – not what he had in mind, but the first step.

It turned out to be the first step in a maritime career that took him virtually everywhere, in an age when ships sailed rather than steaming. But from the beginning, he wanted to come to Oregon, and at age 19 he was able to sign onto a trading expedition bound for Grays Harbor, in what’s now Washington. This was 1828.

Now remember, this was long before the Panama Canal. To get from Washington, D.C., to Oregon by sea, one headed south and kept going for a long time. On the way back up, various South Sea islands were hardly even out of the way, and tended to be friendlier and richer in antiscorbutic fruit than the Spanish-held coast of Chile. So by the time Jimmy got to Oregon the next year, he’d seen quite a lot of the world around the Pacific Ocean.

At Oregon, Bates’ ship – which Rigdon remembers as the S.S. Rudder, although I have not been able to confirm this – sailed up the Columbia and had its mainmast replaced. While this was happening, Jimmy planted and grew some potatoes – probably the first potatoes grown in the Oregon territory.

The potato crop was more or less a bust, but the Willamette Valley left an impression on Jimmy long after the ship left. He wouldn’t have an opportunity to come back for almost 30 years. But when he did, in 1857, he jumped at it – and this time he came to stay.

(Sources: Article by W.T. Rigdon in WPA life histories (American Memory Library of Congress, www.memory.loc.gov); Riley, James. Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce … New York: Mercein, 1817; www.salemhistory.net)

By Finn J.D. John — February 28, 2010

On March 1, a strange little sideways hut near Gold Hill in southern Oregon officially opened for the 2010 season – and the debate over whether it’s the scene of a baffling scientific anomaly or a clever con job will rage on into its eighth decade.

The hut is called the “House of Mystery,” and it’s part of a place known as the “Oregon Vortex.” And if you’re a serious, hard-core “The X Files” fan, you probably already know about it. It was in a 1999 episode of the cult-classic TV show.

Really, the Vortex is a prime contender for Oregon’s most successful roadside attraction, with the exception of Sea Lion Caves. Not so many years ago, there were quite a few of these, especially along Highway 101. They sported names like Prehistoric Gardens, the Sea Gulch and Trees of Mystery, and vacationing families would stop and explore them.

Most of them are gone today. But the Oregon Vortex is still popular. It’s been around since the 1930s. In it, water seems to run uphill and people’s apparent size changes from one side of a plank to another. The operators say it’s because of a confluence of magnetic influences that actually warp the fabric of space, causing massive old-growth trees to grow at a slant and objects to appear bigger or smaller depending on where they are relative to lines in the magnetic field.

The place was developed and opened in 1930 by a Scottish fellow named John Litster, a geologist and mining engineer. Litster spent much of his life trying to make sense of some of the unusual phenomena there, and developed the magnetic-force-field theory.

Litster’s theory is that the property is the site of a spherical force field, half above the ground and half below it, just under 165 feet in diameter, which causes these things.

In particular, Litster found the House of Mystery intriguing. This was an assay shack built at the Old Grey Eagle Mining Company in 1904. At some point, it apparently was knocked off its foundation by some sort of geological disruption – probably a flood – and found its way to its current spot, half collapsed sideways by its ordeal. Litster shored the wreck up to make it safe and kept it just like it was.

For decades, skeptics have scoffed. The effect of people’s heights changing have been ascribed to something called a “Ponzo illusion,” in which heavy chevron-shaped lines bracketing two identical figures cause the eye to perceive height differences in them. Also, without any horizon line or point of reference, it’s hard to really know for sure if that water really is flowing uphill in the House of Mystery.

So, is the Oregon Vortex simply a monument to 80 years of psychological suggestion and expert illusioneering? Or is there really something unusual about the place? Could there be a real scientific basis for this pseudoscientific-sounding “force field” theory?

Until a thorough scientific study is done, we can’t really know. But the operators of the Vortex have pretty much always maintained an open-door policy to the skeptics. Photographs are encouraged; skeptical investigations meet with enthusiastic cooperation and even offers of free admission to the site while investigating. It’s difficult to imagine an elaborate con job surviving this kind of openness combined with the sort of scrutiny para-normal claims always inspire, for such a long period of time, even in a relatively remote corner of southern Oregon.

(Sources: Kershaw, Sarah. “Tourist draw for sale, with mystery the lure,” The New York Times, Sept. 19, 2003; www.oregonvortex.com; www.o4sr.org (Oregonians for Science and Reason).)

By Finn J.D. John — February 21, 2010

If there’s a category in the Guinness Book of World Records for longest-running land dispute, the 101-year struggle over the “McQuinn Strip” might be a contender.

But it might not qualify, because the land was only disputed for the first 16 of those years. The other 85 were taken up with a struggle to get the government to give the land back – something that didn’t happen until 1972.

Here’s the story:

In the 1850s, torrents of settlers were coming to Oregon, lured by the promise of free land. All one had to do was build a house, plant some crops – and clear the Indians off it.

These settlers were diligently doing all three of these things in 1855. General Joel Palmer, superintendent for Indian affairs, could see that this would lead to bloodshed in northern central Oregon, where the Walla Walla and Wasco tribes were strong.

To forestall this, Palmer and the tribes worked out a deal: They would give up title to some 10 million acres in exchange for undisputed ownership of a 900,000-acre chunk of it, in which the government would agree not to let anyone settle.

The Indians, though quite unhappy about the whole situation, recognized that this was the best they could expect. The deal was made, and the Warm Springs Indian Reservation was formed.

Sixteen years later, in 1871, a surveyor opened up the land dispute by using the wrong mountains as a border marker – an error he certainly could have avoided had he talked to either the Indians or even looked at the map Palmer had sketched out. This error resulted in the 900,000-odd acres shrinking by almost 10 percent.

Although the tribes protested immediately, the government promptly gave the survey its stamp of approval and green-lighted settlers who wanted bits of the disputed part.

In 1886 Congress finally had the place re-surveyed. The work was done by John McQuinn the following year. McQuinn confirmed that the earlier survey was in error, thus bringing the “dispute” part of the story to an end.

But possession is nine-tenths of the law. By 1887, many settlers had claimed parts of the “McQuinn Strip,” and fought furiously against any suggestion that they give it up.

Congress dithered. It formed a commission to study the problem; the commission recommended sticking with the faulty survey even though it was wrong. In 1917, Congress offered a cash payment for the land – which the Indians refused; they wanted the land back. Finally, in 1930, Congress kicked the matter over to the courts, giving the tribes clearance to sue over it.

They did, and so was launched one of the more baffling legal farces in state history. In 1941, the court agreed that the Indians should have the land, but refused to give it to them. Instead, the court ruled that they were entitled to a dollar an acre – which someone decided was what the land was worth in 1886 dollars – plus interest. The total was just over $240,000.

But, the court added, the government has had to spend a total of $252,089 “in behalf of the tribes” over the same period.

Therefore, the court ruled, the tribes had to give up their claim on the land AND pay the government $11,005.

I haven’t been able to determine whether the tribes took this as an insult. It’s certainly possible that it was intended as one. In any case, it went nowhere.

Things started looking better after the war, though. In 1948, Congress passed a bill giving the tribes all the revenue from timber sales and grazing permits there. By 1970 this had brought the tribes almost $6 million, and enabled them to build Ka-Nee-Ta Resort in the 1960s.

Finally, in 1972, Richard Nixon signed a bill into law – a bill sponsored by Oregon Rep. Al Ullman and senators Bob Packwood and Mark Hatfield – giving the land back.

(Sources: Linn, George W. “101-Year Land Dispute,” Little Known Tales from Oregon History, vol. 1. Bend: Sun Publishing, 1988; www.ohs.org)

By Finn J.D. John — February 14, 2010

A real locomotive plunges into the real Row River in the climactic scene of Buster Keaton's "The General," in 1927. Bits of that locomotive are still being picked out of the river where the bridge once was. (Thanks to Cottage Grove Historical Society for making this image available. To see many other historical photos, including several more from this movie, click here.)

Oregon has a reputation as a great place to make a movie – among other reasons, because it’s generally less expensive to film here.

But the most expensive scene ever shot in a silent movie was put in the can right here in the Beaver State – just south of Cottage Grove – 84 years ago.

A 1920s "Waterworld"?

That scene went into a movie that cost a then-staggering $750,000 to make – and went on to become a major money-losing flop at the box office, clearing roughly $500,000. (Remember, these are 1926 dollars. People were buying brand-new cars in 1926 for less than $300.)

But history has been far kinder to it than moviegoers were in 1927, and today, it’s widely considered one of the best movies of the silent era. Film writer Tim Dirks introduces it as “an imaginative masterpiece of dead-pan ‘Stone-Face’ Buster Keaton comedy, generally regarded as one of the greatest of all silent comedies (and Keaton's own favorite) – and undoubtedly the best train film ever made.”

Buster's Folly

The movie was “The General,” starring Buster Keaton – who also produced the film. (And if you’re from South Lane County, you already know this story by heart. You may even have a family member who was one of the hundreds of locals hired as extras for the picture.)

In the movie, a stubborn Confederate train engineer named Johnnie has his beloved locomotive, The General, stolen by Union spies (with his girlfriend on board). He pursues them and his train into Union territory, overhears a group of Union generals planning an attack across a certain railroad bridge, and decides to repossess his train and bring it and his girlfriend back south. A lengthy train chase ensues, with two Union trains chasing The General southward as Johnnie pulls telegraph poles down and leaves bits of his train behind to slow them. It culminates in a $42,000 scene (in 1926 dollars; in today's dollars, that's about $506,000) in which the pursuing Union train tries to cross a railroad bridge after Johnnie has set it on fire. The bridge collapses in the middle and the train – a full, working steam locomotive and cars, not a model – plunges into the “Rock River” below.

A half-million-dollar movie scene

In reality, it was the Row River, just south of Cottage Grove. And thousands of people came from all over the area to watch the scene being shot. It had to be done on one take – Keaton couldn’t afford to build a new bridge, buy a new locomotive and try again. It had to be perfect.

It was.

Most of the train is now gone, but Lloyd Williams of the Cottage Grove Historical Society told reporter Meghan Kalkstein in 2007 that bits of track and steel can still be seen in the river when the water level is low. Several years ago, a mural was painted on the side of the historic Cottage Grove Hotel downtown, commemorating the filming.

By the way, this isn’t Cottage Grove’s only claim to box-office fame. Among other projects, “Stand By Me” was filmed along some of the same railroad beds Keaton chugged along, and the parade scene from “Animal House” was filmed on Main Street there.

(Sources: Dirks, Tom. “AMC Filmsite” (www.filmsite.org); Kalkstein, Meghan. “Remains of ‘The General,’” KVAL-TV, May 23, 2007; Cottage Grove Historical Society)

By Finn J.D. John — February 6, 2010

This postcard image of McKenzie Pass dates from the 1960s. Highway 242 has seen some upgrades since then -- although it still closes for the season when winter comes. For a larger image, click here.

There’s a reason McKenzie Pass – Highway 242 over the cascades, from Springfield to Sisters – is closed in wintertime. The pass can be a dangerous place after the snow starts to fly, which can happen any time after around Labor Day.

A century ago, though, the weather was only one of the dangers travelers on the pass faced. Highway robbers were another. These operators patrolled the pass looking for travelers who had gotten stranded by the sudden blizzards and frozen to death.

Sometimes, when they encountered travelers who hadn’t gotten around to dying yet, they helped the process along. And then, of course, they helped themselves to the now-ownerless horses, along with whatever loot they could pack, before shoving the wagons off the roadbank and into the canyon below.

This was exactly the treatment George Harvey Dyer expected to receive in the fall of 1897. And although it’s not clear why he didn’t, it’s at least a good possibility that he was saved by his six children.

Dyer was a Civil War veteran, a Southerner who had been forced to fight for the North after he was captured. This made him unpopular at home in Arkansas after the war, so he emigrated to Oregon and settled near Woodburn.

But in the late 1890s his wife died, leaving him with six children – three boys and three girls, none of them over 10 years old – and he found out about an opportunity for work in the town of Burns. Dyer packed the kids in his wagon and set out.

He headed south to Springfield, taking advantage of the Willamette Valley’s relatively excellent roads, and took the McKenzie Pass route toward Bend and eventually Burns. This almost turned out to be a fatal mistake. It was late in the year – early autumn, in fact. And if you’ve ever been over the pass in the spring or the fall, you know how striking and sudden the change of climate is there. While people are still swimming in lakes and frolicking on beaches below, snow is piling up around the Dee Wright Observatory.

As Dyer got near the summit of the pass, his luck ran out. A blizzard settled in on him. Snow blew, drifted in the wagon road. His horses were floundering in it. The wagon was sliding behind them, dead weight, like a sled with no runners. It didn’t look as if they’d make it.

That’s when the highwaymen showed up. Three of them on horseback, bristling with weapons.

As Dyer’s great-grandson tells the story, the old man – pretending not to know what they were up to – looked them straight in the eye and asked for their help pulling the wagon over the pass. And, after a long and chilling silence, they tied their lariats to the wagon and helped drag it to the top – just a few hundred yards away.

Why would hardened criminals do that? Well, it seems likely that the prospect of murdering a wagon-load of toddlers and elementary-school-age children was more than they were willing to undertake. Or maybe they were just feeling unusually merciful that day. Who knows?

In any case, had it not been for the arrival of those three bandits, the entire Dyer family would have frozen to death a few yards short of the pass. Thanks to the robbers, they were able to make it to Burns, where Dyer was able to take advantage of the opportunity he’d heard about and go into business – as a casket builder.

(Sources: Dyer, Ed. “Dangerous Encounter,” Little-Known Tales from Oregon History. Bend: Sun Publishing (Cascades East Magazine), 1988.)

By Finn J.D. John — January 31, 2010

Sometime in the 1980s, the first mysterious pothole appeared in a street in Pendleton. More soon followed.

They weren’t like other potholes, as the city crews discovered when they arrived to fix them. In fact, at the bottom of them was an underground city – complete with businesses both legal and illegal – all connected by tunnels.

Two Pendletons

For several decades around the turn of the 20th century, there were two towns in Pendleton: One above the soil line for all to see, and one below it known only to the chosen few.

The underground town got its start in the late 1800s. At that time, the hard work of building the railroads was mostly finished, and the country no longer needed the thousands of Chinese workers who had helped build them. They had gone from providing a valuable service to a new nation, to competing with “native sons” for jobs and depressing the wages.

The climate in the U.S., never warm and friendly for them, was becoming downright hostile. Crimes against Chinese people were not prosecuted. Laws were promulgated prohibiting them from becoming citizens or owning land. It wasn’t a full-blown pogrom, but it could easily have become one at any time – and only an idiot would just sit back and wait for that to happen.

The message: Be invisible, or be a victim

The Chinese in America were not idiots. In various cities, they responded to this official and unofficial persecution by forming self-sufficient ghettos – Chinatowns – and keeping such a low profile that today, the official estimate of how many Chinese there were in Oregon – 150,000 – is nothing but a wild guess. No one really knows.

In Pendleton, the Chinese had an additional challenge: Cowboys. They tended to get liquored up and commit crimes after sunset. Chinese people made very appealing victims for this – one could do all sorts of things to them, up to and including murder in many circumstances, without fear of punishment – and they were easily identifiable. It soon became an unofficial rule that Chinese people must be off the streets by sundown.

A real "underground economy"

So, to facilitate after-dark movement from one Chinese-owned business to another, access tunnels were dug. And added on to. And expanded.

The tunnels became very useful for illegal businesses such as opium dens and brothels, which were built either entirely underground or with a concealed entrance to the tunnels through which personnel might flee in the event of a police raid. After the Volstead Act kicked off Prohibition in 1919, tunnels became even more useful for this – especially the tunnel that led to the airport.

Yet the tunnels remained, for the most part, a Chinese community secret – until those potholes started to appear.

Today, you can take a tour of these tunnels, guided by an actual historian. It includes both legal and illegal businesses operated entirely underground – from opium dens to laundries.

(Sources: Gulick, Bill. Roadside History of Oregon. Missoula: Mountain Press, 1991; www.chineseamericanheroes.org; www.pendletonundergroundtours.org)

By Finn J.D. John — January 25, 2010

The Cascade mountains of Oregon are gold country for sure – but the McKenzie River Valley area is not exactly its hottest area for prospectors. Which is why I tend to think the legend Don Churchill told me about may have some truth to it.

Like many longtime Oregonians, Don is a consummate rockhound. He’s got a shed full of old lapidary equipment and slabs of stuff like volcanic hailstones, thundereggs and moss agate, which he’s collected over the years. And, of course, he’s spent some time looking for gold as well.

Those of you who know your gold-country legends will probably recognize the story he told me. I’ve heard and read it about a couple other places as well – down Jacksonville way, for instance, or out in northeast Oregon. But this may be the original.

The story dates back to the 1920s and 1930s, before World War II. The way Don tells it, for many years a Native American man was a regular visitor to the Deerhorn Ranch, up the McKenzie River. He would drive up the river in his old Ford Model T and spend the night there. The next morning, he would hike into the mountains. He’d be gone just until around dusk. But when he came back, he’d be carrying a snuff can – the round kind, like Copenhagen comes in – packed with gold dust.

The next morning, back down Highway 126 he would go. The can of gold would last him usually two to three years; after that, he’d drive his Model T back up and do it again.
Naturally, this attracted some attention from folks who would have liked to, to use a kindergartener’s euphemism, “share” the gold with him. Many times people tried to follow him into the mountains. Each time, he slipped away and came back with his can of gold.

Then, without fanfare, he simply stopped coming. No one knew if he’d died, or depleted his cache of gold, or what. But no one ever figured out where the gold was coming from.

In other places, there would be a very likely explanation: The Indian would have been an old miner, working in a commercial gold mine, who had managed to smuggle some dust out of the mine each day – perhaps in a special hollow spot in his pick, maybe in his shoes or underwear, or somewhere else – and had cached it someplace for later retrieval. The fact that it was always gold dust – an eminently smuggle-able form of the stuff – supports this theory.

But there were no working commercial gold-mining operations up the McKenzie. And if there were known sources of loose gold (dust) up there, I haven't been able to learn about them.

Another possibility would be that a prospector had struck it rich up there somewhere, and then – before he could bring his findings to market – something had happened to him. Perhaps then the Native American stumbled across his remains, along with his gold.

Or perhaps this is just another gold-country legend, augmented with a few specific facts to make it play better around a campfire late at night.

True or not, it’s a great story, and it’s fun to think about the possibilities.

(Source: Donald Churchill of Springfield, Ore.)
]]> Thu, 10 Nov 2011 20:31:04 -0800 http://www.offbeatoregon.com/H1001c_WillamMeteor.htm finn@offbeatoregon.com Oregon Massive 16-ton chunk of iron was found by a neighboring property owner, who dragged it half a mile in an attempt to steal it; today it's in the American Museum of Natural History in New York

By Finn J.D. John — January 18, 2010

The old playground doctrine of “finders keepers” does not apply to meteorites. At least, that’s what the Oregon Supreme Court said in 1905, when deciding who got to keep the Willamette Meteorite – the largest meteorite ever found in the United States, before or since.

Here’s the story: Ellis Hughes, a settler in the West Linn area, near the Tualatin River, was out prospecting for minerals with a friend in 1902. Hughes bounced his rock hammer off a projecting piece in the forest and got a metallic “ting” instead of a rocky “chup.”

Well, the two were really excited at first. They figured this was a “reef” sticking out of the top of a massive vein of iron that could make them both very wealthy. But they soon made two sobering discoveries: First, it was an isolated block. And second, it wasn’t on Hughes’ property. They’d strayed over onto the neighboring plot, owned by – ironically, given that the meteorite was more than 90 percent iron – the Oregon Iron and Steel Company.

Hughes kept mum and tried to buy the land. Nothing doing. So he, his wife and his 15-year-old stepson toiled for a solid three months at dragging the 32,000-pound mass across three-quarters of a mile of forest floor and onto Hughes’ property. This done, he announced his find, built a shed over it and started charging admission to see it.

I haven’t been able to learn how the Oregon Iron and Steel Company found out the meteorite had been moved. Probably Hughes’ attempts to buy the land aroused some suspicion and prompted company officials to investigate. In any case, figure it out they did, and filed a lawsuit demanding that Hughes give it back.

Which he did, after fighting it all the way up to the Oregon Supreme Court, in late 1905 – just in time for Oregon Iron and Steel to haul it up to Portland for the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition, at which it was displayed proudly and drew much notice. Afterward, it was purchased by Sarah Dodge and donated to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City – where it remains to this day.

The meteorite apparently fell on a glacier during the last ice age. During the Missoula Floods, the ice in which it was embedded formed an iceberg and roared down the Columbia River Gorge, eddying back up into the Willamette Valley and finally being deposited on top of the sediment when the ice melted away.

It’s composed of 91.65 percent iron, 7.88 percent nickel, 0.21 percent cobalt and 0.09 percent phosphorous.

In Oregon, there are two replicas of the meteorite on display: one at the United Methodist Church in West Linn, near where it was found; the other outside the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History in Eugene.

The local Native American tribes had treasured the meteorite, calling it “tomonowos” – “visitor from the moon.” In 1990, they sued for its return. But they came to an agreement with the museum in 2000 that let them come visit the meteorite in New York and hold private ceremonies around it; the deal also says if the museum ever takes it off permanent display, the tribes will get it back.

A member of the state House of Representatives weighed in seven years later by introducing a bill that would demand its return to the state of Oregon. The tribes said no one had talked to them about it, but they were happy with the arrangement they’d made and did not support the new bill. So, as Willamette Week put it in an editorial that year, “neither the bill nor the 16-ton meteorite went anywhere.”

(Sources: American Museum Journal, Vol. 6 (1906); Seigneur, Cordelia Becker. Images of America: West Linn. Mount Pleasant, S.C.: Arcadia, 2009; Oregon House Joint Resolution 30 (2007); www.absoluteastronomy.com)

By Finn J.D. John — January 11, 2010

Among cherry aficionados, the deep-red Bing cherry is the gold standard. Rich and sweet, almost like chocolate in its intensity of flavor, this cherry utterly dominates the supermarket and is most people’s favorite variety.

But few people realize that this variety of cherry would not exist today if a Quaker nurseryman named Henderson Luelling had not brought its progenitors all the way to Oregon, from Iowa, along the old Oregon Trail in 1847.

Other later events hinged on this as well. Fellow Quaker John Minthorn’s Oregon Land Company, 40 years later, made a specialty of developing orchards to sell -- a business plan obviously dependent on the tradition Luelling imported. Without the Oregon Land Company, Minthorn’s teenage nephew, Herbert Hoover, would likely not have gotten the early training in sound business practices that was to be so important in his early career as an engineer.

Luelling left the city of Salem, Iowa, in 1847, with a specially constructed wagon full of grafted fruit trees – 700 of them in all, ranging from tiny slips to four-foot-tall trees. The family – Henderson, his wife, Elizabeth, and eight children – traveked with two other Quaker families, the Hockettes and the Fishers. In all, they made up a train of seven wagons, counting the trees.

Along the way, they tried to travel with other emigrants, but friction developed because of the trees. The tree wagon was extraordinarily heavy, and hence slow. It also attracted noticeable attention from Native Americans, which made everyone very nervous. So the other emigrants forged ahead.

This was likely a mistake on their part. Luelling was later told that many Native Americans saw trees as sacred, and considered that a wagon train carrying trees over the mountains was under the protection of the Great Spirit. Whether for this or other reasons, not only did the Luellings have no “Indian trouble,” but when the pregnant Elizabeth went into labor during the Columbia River part of the journey, they happily loaded her into a canoe and paddled her to The Dalles for medical attention. She gave birth to the family’s ninth child – a girl named Oregon Columbia Luelling – on the way there.

Then the powerful and dangerous Columbia Cascades had to be shot – trees and all.Again, Native Americans happily helped, retrieving a runaway flatboat that had missed the take-out point and was headed into more danger.

By the time Henderson and Elizabeth got to their destination in Milwaukie, they had lost only half their trees. But they’d gained a child and a large cohort of Native friends along the way. They also gained the opportunity to start what would become one of Oregon’s most important industries. Besides the Bing cherry, the Luelling family – later spelled “Lewelling” – went on to develop the Black Republican, Lincoln and Willamette cherries, the golden prune, the Sweet Alice apple, and several fruits bearing the Lewelling name.

By the way, the story of the Luellings’ journey is the basis for Deborah Hopkinson’s children’s book, “Apples to Oregon,” one of the Oregon Reads book selections for last year’s sesquicentennial celebration. The book springboards off the story to generate a “tall tale” about the journey.

(Sources: Beebe, Ralph. A Garden of the Lord: A History of the Oregon Yearly Meeting of Friends Church. Newburg: Barclay, 1968; Wagner, Tricia M. It Happened on the Oregon Trail. Helena: Globe Pequot, 2005)

By Finn J.D. John — January 3, 2010

This postcard image, from a note mailed in 1909, shows the tiny Cloud Cap Inn on Mount Hood, with the peak behind. Built in 1889, the Cloud Cap was the only hotel onthe mountain until Timberline was built, and after guests started arriving in cars rather than on horses, it proved woefully inadequate to serve the demand for lodgings there. For a larger image, click here.

Timberline Lodge on the side of Mount Hood is almost an icon of the Portland area. Its rustic, WPA-financed design and construction strike most visitors as a good fit for the state’s general reputation for woodsy civility.

But had it not been for a particularly persnickety U.S. Forest Service manager, Timberline might have looked a lot different.

How different? Think “Bauhaus school of architectural design.” With nine stories of concrete and glass and a cable-car tramway.

Big mountain, tiny hotel

The whole thing had its roots in the early 1920s when cars started bringing large numbers of people out to the mountain on the freshly built Mount Hood Scenic Loop.

There was a hotel on the mountain – the tiny Cloud Cap Inn, built in 1889 – but it was woefully inadequate to the demand.

A gold mine for tourism? Yes, say some ...

The copyright notice on this romantic landscape rendition of a sunset on Mount Hood is 1904. The postcard it's on was a promotional tool for marketing one of William R. Hearst's publications on the East Coast. For a larger image, click here.

Business people in Portland started seeing the potential in having a mountain so close – by developing it, they could generate a bunch of money from tourism.

... not so fast, say others

But to a group of locals who had the requisite magic combination of money, health and leisure to enjoy the mountain, this was not a welcome development. They preferred to keep the place as it was – a quiet, magical place of solitude and wildness. They worried that it would be turned into a sort of alpine Coney Island – fears that, as they soon learned, were not entirely groundless.

Hah, the businessmen retorted. You just want to keep it as your own personal rich-person playground.

Skyscraper on the ski slopes?

This debate got more heated as the 1920s wore on, until a businessman named L.L. Wyler – as part of a committee – came forward with an $800,000 plan to develop the mountain with a hotel, resort, gas station and cable tram car.

Absolutely not, says Forest Service

The Mazama Club – a local mountaineers’ organization open only to those who had been on Mount Hood’s summit – geared up for battle. But it was over before they knew it. To the surprise of most people on both sides, Forest Service District Forester W.B. Greeley turned the project down flat, calling it a “profit-making eyesore.”

Wyler’s outfit refined the plan into that nine-story skyscraper mentioned above, still involving a tram, and went over Greeley’s head with it. This time, the plan was turned down specifically because of the design, which seemed inappropriate.

By the time the Forest Service green-lighted a more rustic plan for the lodge, it was 1929; the country was sliding into the Depression, and the Portland businessmen had become unwilling to take on the financial obligation. But some important issues had been settled: Yes, development on the mountain could go forward. But it would have to respect the mountain.

Enter the W.P.A. ...

And there matters stood until 1935, when the WPA approved the Mount Hood Development Association’s application for a 300-bed hotel, to the tune of $275,513 in 1935 dollars, and got construction started the following year.

When the place was finished, the government invited the king of Norway to come demonstrate this wild new sport called “skiing.” They needn’t have bothered. Plenty of Oregonians of Scandinavian and Swiss descent were able and eager to show the way.

... with a Camp Fire Girls handbook

Perhaps the most enduring symbol of Timberline is the 750-pound bronze weathervane, crafted in a sort of abstract primitive design suggesting a bird. Most people assume it’s a Native American design, and perhaps it is – but the workers who built it cribbed the design from a Camp Fire Girls handbook.

(Sources: Rose, Judith. Timberline Lodge: A Love Story. Portland: Graphic Arts Center Publishing, 1986; Sullivan, William L. Hiking Oregon’s History. Eugene: Navillus Press, 2006)

Note: More images of Mount Hood are with the story on its 1859 eruption (click here).

By Finn J.D. John — December 27, 2009

This image of turn-of-the-century beachgoers on the dry sands of the beach at Newport around 1905 shows the lighthouse above, by then abandoned and a little eerie looking. (Image: Oregon State University Archives) [Larger image: 1800 x 1377]

A good ghost story depends for its life on the possibility — faint or imaginary though it may be — that it might be true. So it’s ironic that the Oregon Coast’s most well-known ghost story should be an avowed work of fiction … but is it, really?

Well, yes, of course it is. But there are, actually, some people who aren't fully convinced.

The story started out as a fictional short story published in an 1899 issue of Pacific Monthly magazine. It was penned by the sister-in-law of poet Joaquin Miller — Lischen M. Miller of Eugene.

Joaquin Miller's sister's yarn

The story was titled "The Haunted Light at Newport by the Sea." In it, Miller wove a gripping story of a mysterious young woman left at a Newport hotel by her seafaring father, who plans to pick her up in two weeks. She takes up with a group of tourists from the valley, who are camping nearby.

This very old photograph dates from around 1890, and shows the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse not long after it was removed from service . (Image: University of Oregon Library) [Larger image: 1200 x 620 px]

One day the group of them decides to explore the old Yaquina Bay Lighthouse — a small structure built in an unfortunate spot in 1871 and shut down for good just three years later, to be replaced by the Yaquina Head lighthouse a few miles north. (By the way, "Yaquina" is pronounced "yuh-kwin-uh" — it's a Native American name, not a Spanish one.)

Inside, the adventurers find a secret door leading to a shaft that apparently runs all the way down to the sea. A chill fog moves in and the explorers decide to go, leaving the secret door open behind them.

As she is about to leave, the girl — the author gives her name as Muriel Trevenard — realizes she has left her handkerchief in the lighthouse and goes back to get it. Shortly thereafter, screams are heard; the party races back to the house and finds the secret door closed and locked, and no sign of Muriel save for a pool of “warm blood.”

A fictional story develops a life of its own

The front cover of the first issue of Pacific Monthly, which started its run the year before it published "The Haunted Light." Lischen Miller was a regular contributor. (Image: Google Books) [Link to the Google e-book; "The Haunted Light" is on p. 172]

The original of this story is a beautiful piece of 19th-century writing and is well worth the 10 minutes it takes to read. If you have Internet access, you can find its full text on Tom Kloster's Web site, www.splintercat.org.

(It's also here, in the original 1899 publication, served up by Google Books.)

But the really interesting thing about this story is the life it’s taken on since it was written. Visitors to the lighthouse still ask to see Muriel’s bloodstains on the floor. Condensed versions of the story can be found on paper placemats at Lincoln County restaurants, and reprinted copies of the story are hot items at area “tourist traps.”

Often, when people learn that it’s from an 1899 magazine article, its credibility is enhanced rather than reduced. Monthly fiction magazines are mostly so far in the past that most people don’t remember them, and modern magazines — even literary ones such as The New Yorker — are mostly nonfiction.

It IS fiction ... isn't it?

Indeed, there are lingering doubts as to the truth of the story’s falseness, if you will. This is probably a sort of reverse-psychology wishful thinking — a story this compelling and realistic would be much more powerful if it were possible to believe there's some possibility, however faint, of it being true.

Susan Smitten cites a 1975 article in The Eugene Register-Guard in which Lincoln County Historical Museum curator Pat Stone says a young hitchhiker came through, looking for work.

Yaquina Bay Lighthouse as seen in 1939, with the U.S. Coast Guard tower rising behind it, in a photo made by Roger Hart. Just a few years after this image was made, a group of citizens of Lincoln County would rally to save the picturesque building from demolition. (Image: University of Oregon Library) [Larger image: 1200 x 893 px]

Having nowhere to stay and no money to rent a room, he unrolled a sleeping bag at the lighthouse. That night, he said, a ghostly young woman appeared floating outside one of the windows. She told him not to worry, and that he would find work the next day. And so he did.

Whatever the truth, the living and the dead alike owe a debt of gratitude to the citizens of Lincoln County who, in the 1940s, formed the Lincoln County Historical Society specifically to prevent it from being demolished and who — with the help of Ohio industrialist and Oregon native son L.E. Warford — raised the money to do so.

Would that have happened if Miller's story had not made the lighthouse famous and invested it with the romantic, thrilling aura of her mysterious story? Maybe not.

This postcard image shows the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse, site of the legendary and presumably fictional murder of "Muriel."

Today, restored to its former glory, it’s a state park. it’s also the oldest structure in Newport and the only wooden lighthouse in Oregon.

(Sources: Horner, John B. Oregon Literature. Portland: J.K. Gill, 1902; Smitten, Susan. Ghost Stories of Oregon. Edmonton: Ghost House Books, 2001; www.yaquinalights.org; www.lighthousefriends.com)

By Finn J.D. John — December 21, 2009

In the midst of some of the roughest and least hospitable country in the west, the Grande Ronde Valley is a bit like an oasis. Or, at least, that’s how it seemed to the emigrant parties that came through, headed for the Willamette Valley on the Oregon Trail.

The valley itself follows the Grande Ronde River through northeast Oregon, surrounded by the Blue Mountains with the Wallowas to the east and the Eagle Cap Wilderness to the south. It’s actually surprisingly tiny – maybe 15 miles wide and 35 miles long. But for hundreds of generations, it has been known to locals as a highly productive little Garden of Eden.

It was an especially important part of the Oregon Trail, from the 1840s up until the Civil War broke out. Once an emigrant party had made it to the Grande Ronde Valley, it had straggled across hundreds of miles of the Great Plains, crossed the Continental Divide in Wyoming and thrashed through hundreds more miles of the Rocky Mountains and the blistering, arid Snake River Desert in Idaho – throughout which they were constantly fighting off attacks by hostile Indian tribes. By the time a party got to this tiny, fertile valley, it was typically pretty played-out.

This was more applicable to the animals than the people. After all, the people could rest when they needed to, sitting on the wagon while the oxen dragged it up yet another mountain pass. But those oxen – when they got skinny from lack of forage, unhealthy from lack of rest and exhausted from too much work, nothing the emigrants could give them on the trail would help them recover. What they needed was a month on good grass with no load behind them. They needed to be pastured. They needed to rest.

And that’s where the Native Americans in the region could help … for a fee.

The Nez Pierce, Cayuse, Walla Walla and Umatilla tribes had no use for oxen, except maybe for the occasional bad winter when better meats were unavailable. But they quickly figured out that they could make a lot of money on them.

These tribes would take skinny, exhausted draft animals off the emigrants’ hands for, basically, 50 percent of their value. Then they’d equip the party with fresh draft animals and send them on their way to the Willamette Valley.

Where did the fresh oxen come from? Last year’s emigrants, of course. The Indians had bought exhausted oxen from last year’s travelers and pastured them out on the lush grasslands of the Grande Ronde Valley. A year later they were fresh and ready to take a new crop of emigrants west, across the rest of the mountains to the Willamette Valley – and there were another 300 miles or so of Blue Mountains, Cascade Range and terrifying river voyages still ahead before the parties would get there.

It was a classic win-win situation. Emigrant parties whose livestock would never have pulled through got a fresh set, and tribes got a nice revenue stream, plus a supply of emergency food for the winter.

With their customers desperate, the Native Americans could charge almost anything they liked for their fresh oxen; the wonder isn’t that they marked them up 100 percent, but that they didn’t mark them up more. Of course, that didn’t stop some of the emigrants grumbling about it.

“The Nez Pierce can beat a Yankee peddler in a trade,” one exasperated – and out-of-pocket – emigrant groused.

(Sources: Gulick, Bill. Roadside History of Oregon. Missoula: Mountain Press, 1991; Wagner, Tricia M. It Happened on the Oregon Trail. Guilford, Conn.: Globe Pequot, 2005)

By Finn J.D. John — December 8, 2009

If you’ve ever spent a day on the Oregon Coast this time of year -- during the “off season” -- you probably have a pretty good idea why Walt Disney didn’t decide to put Disneyland there.

But a little over 40 years ago, someone did launch a big, ambitious theme park on the Oregon Coast. It was called Pixieland. Some of you may actually remember it.

Pixieland was the brainchild of Jerry and Lu Parks, then the owners of one of the state’s most popular destination restaurants: The Pixie Kitchen in Lincoln City. The Pixie Kitchen had been there since the 1930s and was hugely popular. It had an entry full of fun-house mirrors, pictures of frolicking pixies painted on the walls and a “life-size” diorama of three pixies operating a little train in the back, outside the dining-area windows.

The restaurant was so popular, in fact, that the owners were lulled into making a fateful decision: Using the elfin green-clad “Pixie” who served as the Kitchen’s mascot, they would create a theme park on Highway 18 just north of Lincoln City, near Otis.

In concept, Pixieland was to be a “fairy-tale history of Oregon,” with a log flume ride, a narrow-gauge railroad pulled by a steam engine called “Little Toot,” a frontier-like village full of little stores and amusements and an “Opera House” where Old West-style melodramas were staged.

The Parks put up $300,000 of their own, and two stock offerings were held -- both highly successful. Oregon businesses also stepped right up, and evidence of their involvement was everywhere, even to the point of outright campiness. At the log flume ride -- intended as a nod to Oregon’s timber industry -- spectators could relax in the “Franz Bread Rest Hut,” a giant fiberglass structure shaped like a hollow log with a huge loaf of balloon bread sticking out of the roof. In the “Main Street” part of the park stood the big red Darigold Barn Fountain and adjacent Cheese Cave, where a hungry or thirsty (and lactose-tolerant) visitor could get all sorts of dairy treats. And the Fischer Scone kiosk was topped with a mammoth Fiberglass hat -- a Scottish tam.

Oregon governor Tom McCall officially dedicated Pixieland on June 28, 1969, a couple years after Parks unveiled his plans. It was met with great excitement, and the park turned out to be very popular … in the summertime.

Whether because of the long rainy season, or the high cost of maintaining buildings at the coast, or for other reasons, Pixieland didn’t last long. Four years later, it closed for good, and the rides and features that could be auctioned off were.

Two years ago a reporter from the Oregonian went to the site and reported that very little remains -- just a tiny shack that once was a gate house. The marine climate at the Oregon Coast has almost completely reclaimed the site, which was largely built on wetlands anyway. Today, the site is part of the protected Salmon River estuary.

As for the Pixie Kitchen, it soldiered on into the mid-1980s, when it closed and the building was used for a nightclub. A fire damaged it heavily in the 1990s, and afterward the building was razed.

If you have Internet access, there’s a wonderful collection of Pixieland photos and some more details on its history at www.pdxhistory.com/html/ pixieland.html.

(Sources: www.pdxhistory.com; Inara Verzemnieks, “Invisible Cities: Pixieland…,” The Oregonian, Jan. 22, 2008)