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— 1947, LAKE COUNTY — COLUMN N° 477 — JANUARY 7, 2018 —
Oregon lost its governor, secretary of state, and Senate president when their Beechcraft Bonanza slammed into the side of a ridge southwest of Lakeview.
In the tall tales of 1840s almanacs, the “King of the Wild Frontier” had a lively interest in the Beaver State. But he did get a few of his facts wrong ...
It's nearly certain that Drake was guilty only of extreme naivete — and his landlord, after murdering a neighbor, knew he could pin the crime on him because Drake was black.
Troutdale Airfield is just 10 miles from Portland International — and built to serve Cessnas, not Boeings. But one dark night in 1962, a jumbo-jet pilot got confused....
When the Oregon National Guard was called up, Oregonians felt vulnerable to Japanese invasion. So they loaded their rifles and possed up, ready to give 'em hell!
It was obvious to nearly everyone that Chee Gong was innocent. But one of his tong brothers had murdered Lee Yik and disappeared, and blood had to answer for blood.
Native Americans told Coronado there was a fabulous just to the north. All he found were Indian villages. But, was there a real city behind this vague legend?
A startup newspaper in Albany was determined to see Mattie Allison hanged, one way or another.But when her court case got started, the real story came out ...
They'd left Condon with a wealthy rancher and murdered him on the way. Only then did they realize how bad it would look to show up at their destination without him ...
Taken to Ocean Park after being nearly killed in a shipwreck, William Begg was nursed back to health by Maude Taylor – who turned out to be the love of his life.
The cops wouldn't return her call, and they would be gone by morning. So Mrs. Whitlock picked up the phone – at 10:15 at night! – and woke up the District Attorney.
Off Yaquina Bay, the lumber schooner Frank W. Howe suddenly filled with water. Luckily, the cargo of railroad ties kept her afloat – for a week-long fight for life.
White-hat con man Deadwood Dick was the hero of dozens of dime novels in the late 1800s. But his New York author didn't really know much about the West.
Murderer Pleasant Armstrong said he had no idea what came over him. But a strange woman claimed, in court, that he was the victim of a family of murdering hypnotists.
The rumor was that a cell of Polish radicals based in the White Eagle planned to assassinate President Roosevelt ... luckily, one of the Oregonian's reporters spoke Polish.
A defeat in the Oregon primary, for candidate John F. Kennedy, would have sent the message that his Catholic faith was a deal-killer; a win would signify that it was not.
A handful of California newspapers started a UFO scare in 1896 with a series of stories of sightings. But were they making it all up? (TL;DR: Yes, they were.)
While looking for a crashed plane, aviator Kenneth Arnold saw a squadron of strange shining objects ... “nine saucer-like air craft flying in formation.”
Was the flying saucer photographed over the Trent farm near McMinnville real, or a clever hoax? Either way makes for a great story — and food for thought.
For centuries, chunks of it have washed up on the beach. And scholars are now 99 percent sure that it's coming from a Spanish galleon that disappeared in 1693.
The Frishkorn family lived with two boarders, who paid the rent in exchange for home-cooked meals. Then they found out the boarders expected something else, too ...
Legendary physician and eugenics promoter Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair was an unstoppable force ... until she encountered the immovable object that was Lora C. Little.
Joe Wolf invented it for loggers, but they wanted nothing to do with his electric saw. Luckily for Joe, the construction and shipbuilding industry loved it.
Logger Joe Cox, watching "timber worms" chew through a log, wondered, "How do they do that?" So he took some home, figured it out, and invented chisel-chain.
In Whale Cove, Canadian rumrunners lost their engine at the worst possible time and ended up beached. So they buried the booze, burned the boat, and fled ....
Canadian gangsters-of-grog tried to bust three colleagues out of jail; it probably would have worked if they hadn't tried to take the confiscated booze too.
At Silverman's 1931 trial, 11 jurors wanted him to hang, but couldn't convince the lone holdout to change his vote. So voters changed the law to make convictions easier.
First deranged housewife Emma Hannah shot down a suspiciously sexy neighbor; a month later, Lloyd Montgomery, 18, had a tantrum and murdered his parents.
When con artist Harry Virtue learned of Dr. Richard Barber's heroic demise, he guessed no one would bother to tell medical authorities back home in the UK. So ...
The Oregon delegation would not stop trying to switch the mint's location to Portland. Finally the gold rush petered out, and the feds said, “Never mind!”
Is there a lost cave somewhere near Bend, lined with millions of dollars' worth of quartz crystals? If so, maybe it would be better if we never found it ....
Part of the problem with owning and operating the only flight school in town was, every time one of your students built some DIY plane, you’d be expected to help fly it.
Tired of battle, sheep baron Jack Edwards started looking for a more peaceable place to run his operation. He found it in Hay Creek Ranch, near Prineville.
Someone killed Oliver Kermit Smith with a massive bomb ... and police soon figured out who. But was it really Smith's wife who put the killer up to the job?
In the mid-1870s, a fast-talking East Coast hustler teamed up with a famous half-Native Indian scout to cash in on his fame with a line of dodgy faux-Indian patent remedies.
They pedaled their bicycles from Portland to Astoria, snuck aboard a wrecked ocean liner, and spent the night marooned on board, with breakers crashing all around them.
Joe Knowles' wilderness-survival demonstration had made him famous. But he'd been dogged by rumors that he cheated. He'd come to Oregon to prove the rumors wrong.
