‘Oregon’s Outback’ a real moonshiner’s paradise

By Finn J.D. John
March 18, 2012

In the pre-dawn hours of Monday, March 8, 1926, a massive explosion suddenly shattered the stillness of a quiet residential street in Bend. Windows shattered. Residents leaped out of bed.

Dawn soon broke on a chaotic scene. An apartment house had been torn apart, and half of it lay in ruins. No one was killed, but in the heavily-damaged house next door, a neighbor had been injured by being buried under debris as she slept.

Investigators soon figured out what had happened: Someone had tucked a big charge of dynamite under the apartment-house porch. And a motive for the crime wasn’t long in presenting itself — the targeted apartment building was occupied by two Oregon Prohibition Commission officers, A.F. “Buck” Mariott and C.C. McBride.

McBride had been involved in a shooting the previous month, and had killed a bootlegger named Vale Taylor, up in Crook County near Prineville. Taylor’s associates now apparently wanted revenge.

A reward of $750 was offered for the dynamiters, but the episode remained a mystery to this day.

Oregon under Prohibition

Thanks to Oregon governor Oswald West, the state of Oregon had an unfair advantage when the Volstead Act went into effect, officially launching Prohibition.

You see, Oregon had already implemented something that you could think of as “Prohibition Lite,” years before, in 1916.

So when Prohibition became the law of the land, Oregon’s illicit liquor industry was already up and running. The speakeasies, the smuggling routes, the hidden-away stills — all of it was ready to go. For Oregon bootleggers, after 1919 the stakes were higher if you got caught — but otherwise, it was business as usual.

There were a few ways of getting liquor into the state; folks who wanted to drink something with a recognizable label, something perhaps that had been aged in small oak casks or otherwise rendered tolerable, did business with the Canadians, who slipped bottles of rum and Scotch ashore under cover of darkness on board sailing ships.

But for those who weren’t quite so picky, Oregon was awash in white lightning. And in the late 1920s, when a speakeasy patron raised a glass of that rough-and-ready bathtub booze, he or she was probably looking at a product of Central or Eastern Oregon.

“The Outback”: Oregon’s liquor cabinet

“During Prohibition, the Oregon Outback became the principal (source) of bootleg whiskey on the West Coast,” Prineville historian David Braly writes. “At a certain late hour of the night, the sky around Prineville would suddenly light up because of hundreds of stills being fired at the same time.”

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Given the size of the sky around Prineville, Braly must have intended this remark to be taken figuratively rather than literally. But the fact is, Eastern Oregon is large, lonely and quiet. In the 1920s, it was also full of high-desert dry-land homesteaders who were hanging on by their fingernails, trying to eke a living out of 320 acres of land that barely had enough forage for a cow or two. For any of these folks lucky enough to have a creek on the claim, Prohibition came just in time. A two-dollar investment in sugar and yeast could pay the bills for a couple months.

Local sheriffs and their deputies tried to enforce the law, because that’s what good cops do. The problem was, Eastern Oregon was one of those places in which most folks knew the sheriff. You couldn’t exactly go undercover. And since everybody knew everybody, when a couple state revenue agents came into the area, the word traveled faster than they could.

Some Eastern Oregon bootleggers did get caught, of course. Braly recounts one case in which state revenue officers busted a group of men working a still on the Metolius River. Before hauling them off to jail, the revenuers had to help the bootleggers round up their sheep.

Plenty of stills got found and destroyed during Prohibition. But plenty more remained, faithfully pumping out liquor, until 1933 when the 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition and made them unnecessary. Hundreds of them were simply abandoned in knocked-up shacks deep in the canyons and juniper thickets; from time to time, someone still stumbles across one.

(A quick side note about Prohibition Officer McBride: As a prohibition officer, this fellow was clearly either uncommonly unlucky or unsettlingly trigger-happy. Two and a half months after the Bend apartment house was blown up in an attempt on his life, he was back in the papers again; this time, he’d gunned down a moonshiner in a raid near Woodburn. According to his report, the outlaw, a man named John Kaboris, during the liquor raid, charged McBride, firing as he came. McBride shot him dead, and wounded one of the other bootleggers as well.)

(Sources: Braly, David. Tales from the Oregon Outback. Prineville: American Media, 1978; Portland Oregonian, 3-09-1926, 3-10-1926 and 6-13-1926; Oregon State Archives, https://arcweb.sos.state.or.us/50th/prohibition1/prohibintro.html)

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