Latest Ouragan Podcast Episodes
Laws in old Oregon were rough, not always ready
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 26, 2024 14:00 - 9 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratings“From 1861 to 1876, every man committed to the Oregon State Penitentiary for ‘life’ either escaped or was pardoned,” writes historian and newspaper columnist Erik Bromberg, quoting from the U.S. Federal Writers Project’s “Oregon Oddities” article of 1939-1941. “Some who escaped were recaptured an...
Deadly weather usually catches Oregon by surprise
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 25, 2024 14:00 - 10 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsCyclones, tornadoes, flash floods, earthquakes and volcanoes — the Beaver State is not immune to any of these things, but they're rare enough that no one is expecting them when they appear. (Statewide) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1210b-deadly-weather-usually-catches-oreg...
The short, tragic story of P-town’s municipal whale
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 24, 2024 14:00 - 9 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratings“Ethelbert” the orca somehow ended up stranded miles from the ocean in the Columbia Slough, much to the delight of most Portland residents. But it wasn't long before the city's would-be Nimrods came out and spoiled everything. (Columbia Slough, Multnomah County; 1930s) (For text and pictures, see...
Bootlegger ‘lobster trap’ a huge but costly success
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 23, 2024 14:00 - 9 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsNo one in Tillamook County even suspected the “Lee Film Company” was a front for government Prohibition enforcement until the trap was sprung ... but it has to have been the most expensive law enforcement operation in the county's history. (Tillamook County; 1920s) (For text and pictures, see htt...
The Portland mining engineer who invented fracking (WPA oral-history interview with William Hampton)
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 22, 2024 14:00 - 13 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsWPA writer Walker Winslow's oral history interview with William Huntley Hampton, a son of Brigham Young although not a Mormon, who was probably Oregon's second most famous mining engineer around the turn of the Twentieth Century (behind Herbert Hoover). He invented the process of hydraulic fracki...
Brothel owner Carrie Carrie’s sidekicks proved bad at corpse disposal (Part 2 of 2)
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 19, 2024 14:00 - 9 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsOn the morning of Nov. 25, 1881, two men were walking to work along the North End waterfront when they saw something incongruous in the river, just off the foot of Everett Street ... a pair of feet, sticking straight up into the air. (Portland, Multnomah County; 1990s) (For text and pictures, see...
Bordello madam Carrie Bradley was a real-life Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Part 1 of 2 parts)
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 18, 2024 14:00 - 10 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsThe Femme Fatale, like most really satisfying tropes in fiction, is based on real life. And arguably, the closest Oregon has ever come to a real-life femme fatale worthy of Hammett’s pen was in early 1880s Portland, in what today is known as the Tenderloin — in the person of a gorgeous, hard-eyed...
Scholarly Albany flyer was the real father of Oregon aviation
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 17, 2024 14:00 - 9 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsIn a race with Portland neophile Henry Wemme to be the first owner of an airplane in Oregon, Cornell-educated John Burkhart was two weeks too late; but unlike Wemme, he designed, built and flew his own machine. (Albany, Linn County; 1910s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/14...
Was Bridge of the Gods real? Almost certainly yes
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 16, 2024 14:00 - 9 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsThe geographical evidence isn't there; but every nearby Indian community has legends about the river tunneling underground for miles, and roughly similar accounts of the tunnel's collapse. What are the odds? (Near The Dalles, Wasco County; circa 1450 A.D.) (For text and pictures, see https://offb...
The maddest man in old Portland (WPA oral-history interview)
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 15, 2024 14:00 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsYoung Charley Imus was the son of the local undertaker, and he and a school friend were tasked with watching over a corpse while an Irish wake was going on, as the wind howled in the shingles on a stormy, spooky night. Imagine the boys' consternation when the 'corpse' ... woke up. Apparently the ...
Cressman was Oregon’s real-life Indiana Jones
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 12, 2024 14:00 - 17 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsIN THE SUMMER of 1981 a little action-adventure movie titled Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, and fans have been speculating ever since on who the character of Indiana Jones might be based on. The most popular speculation — Vanity Fair magazine goes so far as to opine that he is “almost certain...
A long-gone gold town’s short but colorful past
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 11, 2024 14:00 - 10 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsThis was the town where the Eastern Oregon Gold Rush of '61 got started, and it was a wild and lawless place; town ordinances did prohibit stabbing or shooting people “in public places,” but otherwise the town was mostly wide open. (Auburn, Baker County; 1860s, 1880s) (For text and pictures, see ...
Ship owner’s offer of bonus led directly to shipwreck
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 10, 2024 14:00 - 7 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsOn the bright side, though, the owner of the Desdemona did get to go down in history — or, rather, geography — after the deadly sandbar that took his ship was dubbed Desdemona Sands. (Columbia River Bar, Clatsop County; 1850s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1410c.309.desdem...
How an old banana peel changed Oregon history
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 09, 2024 14:00 - 10 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsUp-and-coming Democrat Oswald West had been sent to Portland on a last-ditch attempt to talk Harry Lane into running for governor. But Lane said no; so West decided to give it a go himself. (Salem, Marion County; 1910) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1907b.os-west-banana-pee...
Recollections of an 1880s Astoria salmon fisherman (WPA oral-history interview)
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 08, 2024 14:00 - 9 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsFans of shanghaiing-era waterfront culture will not want to miss this WPA oral history, collected in 1938. Retired fisherman Charles deLashmutt recalls stories of gillnet salmon fishermen 'corking' each other, brawling in bars, and buying hooch from the 'whiskey scows' that anchored 30 feet off t...
Battleship USS Oregon was lost in Pearl Harbor attack — sort of
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 05, 2024 14:00 - 8 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsTIME NEVER WAS on the U.S.S. Oregon’s side. She was launched in 1896, in the middle of a remarkable period of torrid innovation and development in the history of warships, a time when ship designs were only good for about ten years before something better came along. (Portland, Multnomah County; ...
P.R. wizard Gilbert Gable managed Jefferson ‘secession’ like a movie (Part 2 of 2)
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 04, 2024 14:00 - 11 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratings“Patriotic Jeffersonians intend to secede each Thursday until further notice,” the rebels said, and played their parts in the grand production to a nationwide audience as newsreel cameras rolled and reporters scribbled in notepads. (Port Orford, Curry County; 1940s) (For text and pictures, see ht...
Jefferson ‘secession’ of ’41 a brilliant publicity stunt (Part 1 of 2)
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 03, 2024 16:00 - 9 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsBoisterous and colorful man P.R. man Gilbert Gable, mayor of Port Orford, drew on the frustrations of the West Coast's remotest counties in an effort to get the state to invest in decent highways. (Part 1 of 2 parts on the 1941 Jefferson 'secession') (Port Orford, Curry County; 1940s) (For text a...
Surge of rebel refugees changed Oregon politics
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 03, 2024 15:00 - 13 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsAfter the Civil War, refugees from the devastated South flooded west, seeking a fresh start ... and for a few years, Oregon looked like Dixie on the Left Coast. They even went so far as to try to de-ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. (Salem, Marion County; 1860s) (For text and pictures, see https:/...
Oregon City was home of first electric power grid
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 03, 2024 14:00 - 10 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsEntrepreneurs figured out how to send power long distances for the first time in history; later, after a flood wiped out power station, they pioneered alternating-current transmission. (Oregon City, Clackamas County; 1880s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1201a-oregon-city-...
Express clerk’s silence foiled Eugene train robber
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 02, 2024 14:00 - 9 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratings(NOTE: For organizational reasons, this column is being published earlier than usual. You may already have heard this one.) The masked outlaw planned the job out carefully, and thought he was ready for anything. But he met his match in the cool-handed express man, and had to leave almost empty-ha...
Recollections of an Oswego native from the days of the Oregon Iron Company (WPA oral-history interview)
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - April 01, 2024 14:00 - 7 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsWPA Writer Sara B. Wrenn one day walked all the way from downtown Portland to the town of Oswego to interview a pioneer woman ... who was not at home. (Ironic, isn't it, that this article should have popped up on April Fools' Day?) Hoping to salvage something from the long walk, Ms. Wrenn asked a...
Murderer avoided gallows by faking a 2-year coma
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - March 29, 2024 14:00 - 8 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsCharles Fiester lay there on his cot, eyes open, staring at nothing, pretending to be catatonic, for 515 days ... knowing that when his ruse was discovered, he'd be hanged. (Kerby, Josephine County; 1890s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1803a.fiester-murderer-faked-insanity...
Vaudeville Susie’s Riot; or, Oregon’s Helen of Troy
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - March 28, 2024 14:00 - 10 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsThe Rebel sympathizers resented the Union soldiers taking all the seats when Vaudeville star Susie Robinson of Corvallis took the stage. The soldiers wouldn't back down. Then somebody pulled a pistol ... and the battle was on. (Corvallis, Benton County; 1860s) (For text and pictures, see https://...
Union squabbles were part of life on the waterfront
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - March 27, 2024 14:00 - 8 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsEvery few years, in the early 1900s, burly and hard-fisted dock workers got into a battle of wills with the autocratic sea-captains who ran the shipping companies. Most of the time, the dock workers got the worst of it. (Portland, Multnomah County; 1900s, 1910s, 1920s) (For text and pictures, see...
Malheur County rancher saves pioneer Oregon aviator’s life
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - March 26, 2024 14:00 - 9 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsBarnstormer Ted Barber was down to his last half-cup of gasoline when Ralph Grove rescued him by lighting up a field with the headlights of his car; Ted's old Waco 9 biplane lived to fly the next day, and so did he. (Near Andrews, Malheur County; 1930s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeat...
Recollections of an old Oregon railroad telegrapher and union lawyer, Part 2 of 2 (WPA oral-history interview)
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - March 25, 2024 14:00 - 21 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsOn Nov. 28, 1938, Federal Writers Project worker Andrew Sherbert sat down with a stocky, animated 77-year-old attorney named George Estes to talk about Mr. Estes' recollections of working in the 1800s, first as a telegraph operator and later as an attorney for the Telegrapher's Union at Southern ...
Decade-long dam dispute resolved with dynamite (Episode for Friday, March 22)
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - March 15, 2024 14:40 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsIN THE SMALL hours of the morning of Aug. 16, 1906, a powerful explosion jolted residents awake near the little town of Willamette, which today is a neighborhood of West Linn. It came from the direction of the nearby Tualatin River. The cause was soon discovered. When the first rays of the morni...
Did monk from China “discover” Oregon 1,600 years ago? (Episode for Thursday, March 21)
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - March 15, 2024 14:30 - 7 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsLegend of a monk's journey to a land called “Fusang” dates back to 499 A.D.; is it possible that Fusang was Oregon? Or was the whole thing a complete fabrication? (Oregon Coast, 400s; yeah, that's right, literally 1,500 years ago.) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1103b-was-b...
Did monk from China “discover” Oregon 1,600 years ago?
Offbeat Oregon History podcast - March 15, 2024 14:30 - 7 minutes ★★★★★ - 160 ratingsLegend of a monk's journey to a land called “Fusang” dates back to 499 A.D.; is it possible that Fusang was Oregon? Or was the whole thing a complete fabrication? (Oregon Coast, 400s; yeah, that's right, literally 1,500 years ago.) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1103b-was-b...
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