Offbeat Oregon History podcast
A daily (5-day-a-week) podcast feed of true Oregon stories -- of heroes and rascals, of shipwrecks and lost gold. Stories of shanghaied sailors and Skid Road bordellos and pirates and robbers and unsolved mysteries. An exploding whale, a couple shockingly scary cults, a 19th-century serial killer, several very naughty ladies, a handful of solid-brass con artists and some of the dumbest bad guys in the history of the universe. From the archives of the Offbeat Oregon History syndicated newspaper column. Source citations are included with the text version on the Web site at https://offbeatoregon.com.
Episodes
December 18, 2025 • 9 mins
If you’d been lucky enough to live in Portland in July of 1848, you would have been able to say, literally, that your ship had come in.
The ship in question was the sailing ship Honolulu. And, funny thing: she arrived in port in ballast, with her cargo holds empty.
That raised some eyebrows. At the time, Oregon was not even part of the U.S.A. yet — just a vast extranational territory jointly claimed by the U.S. and Britain. There...
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December 17, 2025 • 8 mins
Designed for calm inland waterways, the sidewheel steamboat Alaskan was no match for the massive late-spring gale that pounced on it off Cape Blanco one fateful night in 1889. (Cape Blanco, Curry County; 1889) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1311c-riverboat-alaskan-caught-in-offshore-hurricane.html)
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December 16, 2025 • 15 mins
ON THE MORNING OF NOV. 5, 1915, at the back of the entrance to Coos Bay, a big steamship could be seen towering improbably over the beach, stuck fast in the sand close to shore.
This was the Santa Clara, a 233-foot steamer on the Portland-San Francisco run.
The Santa Clara didn’t much look like the scene of a humanitarian disaster, jutting out of the sand nearly plumb and level and nearly high and dry; but appearances were decei...
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December 15, 2025 • 8 mins
Dreamed up by supporters of the old south, the plan envisioned an independent “Pacific Republic” as a slave state — to be stocked with slaves by a sort of bait-and-switch swindle. But the supporters misjudged public opinion badly. (Salem, Marion County; 1860s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1503d.pacific-republic-scheme-331.html)
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December 12, 2025 • 9 mins
And then there was the climactic scene, which is the main thing people talk about in South Lane County when this movie comes up. It was literally a train wreck, although metaphorically it was anything but. Buster wanted the climax of the movie to involve a locomotive falling through a burning bridge into a river. .... (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/2409d-1002b.buster-keaton-the-general-in-cottage-grove-668.06...
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December 11, 2025 • 9 mins
IF A COTTAGE Grove logger had been bonked on the head in January 1926, and woke up six months later, he would have scarcely recognized his home town.
There was a whole new Main Street built way out east of Main Street, with businesses and boardinghouses and banks and everything.... (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/2409d-1002b.buster-keaton-the-general-in-cottage-grove-668.061.html)
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December 10, 2025 • 10 mins
IF YOU LOOK UP Prohibition Agent Glenn H. Price on the “Fallen Agents” page at www.atf.gov, you’ll get a very brief account of his death:
“Prohibition Agents Glenn H. Price and Grover Todd were attempting to arrest a bootlegger named Phillip Warren in Grand Ronde, Ore. Warren escaped, obtained a rifle, and killed both agents. Warren was later taken into custody and charged with murder under state law.”
All of which is true … in t...
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December 9, 2025 • 10 mins
IN EARLY FEBRUARY of 1933, the mayor and city council of North Bend had a big problem on their hands.
It was, of course, the depths of the Great Depression — possibly the deepest of the depths. Former Oregonian President Herbert Hoover was still in office, but it was the interregnum — he’d been voted out of office three months earlier, so he was the lamest of lame ducks.
All across the country, confidence in institutions like ban...
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December 8, 2025 • 12 mins
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re passing through a little Harney County town when you see, in a used-car lot, a DMC DeLorean that someone has modified as a replica of the car from Back to the Future. It even has a replica flux capacitor, and the readout of the dates in old-school LED readouts on the dash.
The price is right, so you buy it, and immediately you want to take it out on the highway and see what the replica equipment ...
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December 5, 2025 • 9 mins
The “Genius of Corvallis” hoped his cattle-powered riverboat would give the upper-Willamette sternwheelers a run for their money; and so it did, so long as it didn't try to go upstream... (Corvallis, Benton County; 1850s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1706c.cow-powered-riverboat-hay-burner-448.html)
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December 4, 2025 • 9 mins
Stranded for the winter on Sauvie Island, the members of Nathaniel Wyeth's trading post struggled to get enough to eat. But for some of them, the greater problem was finding something to drink. (Sauvie Island, Multnomah and Columbia County; 1830s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1707d.townsend-lizard-liquor-453.html)
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December 3, 2025 • 10 mins
Original owners of the falls tried for years to log it, but the steamship and railroad moguls were making a lot of money on excursion trips, so they blocked the scheme, preserving the falls for today's park. (Columbia River Gorge, Multnomah County; 1890s, 1900s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1707e.fight-for-multnomah-falls-454.html)
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December 2, 2025 • 11 mins
In the glory days of Portland shanghaiing, sailors were 'helped back aboard ship' on the city streets; there was no need for a tunnel to sneak them down to the docks. But the tunnels under the saloons and streets were useful for lots of other shanghaiing-related activities ... (Portland, Multnomah County; 1890s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1905d.shanghai-tunnels-based-on-true-story-549.html)
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December 1, 2025 • 8 mins
Had Edgar Rice Burroughs and his brothers been successful with their Snake River gold dredge, Ed likely would never have had the time or inspiration to start writing “John Carter of Mars,” “At the Earth's Core” and “Tarzan” books. (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1503b.edgar-rice-burroughs-in-oregon.html)
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November 28, 2025 • 11 mins
One fine day in October of 1891, a teenage boy named Aquilla Ernest Clark left the farm in Scappoose where he’d been working, headed for Portland. He was going to see the sights and maybe show himself a good time for a few days.
He wandered around the waterfront, taking drinks here and there and probably taking a hand in a card game or two; then, when it was getting close to evening, he met a pleasant fellow who happened to mentio...
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November 27, 2025 • 9 mins
ONE GRAY OCTOBER day in 1898, three British ship captains were sitting in the parlor of the Seamen’s Rest, a sort of YMCA for sailors located in the bustling port of Tacoma. They were in a betting mood.
One of them, although he didn’t know it, was gambling with his life.
All three skippers captained full-rigged windjammers. They were H.A. Lever of the Imerhorne; David Thompson of the Earl of Dalhousie; and Charles McBride of th...
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November 26, 2025 • 11 mins
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.... (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1312d-louie-louie-kingsmen-fbi-investigation.html)
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November 25, 2025 • 11 mins
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 ...
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November 24, 2025 • 8 mins
While the captain of the Emily G. Reed was sadly reporting the loss of 11 brave mariners, four of the missing were adrift, desperately bailing water out of a damaged and leaky lifeboat. Destination: Puget Sound. (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1503a.shipwreck-emily-g-reed.328.html)
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November 21, 2025 • 7 mins
IF THE IDEA of cable car service to Timberline Lodge strikes you as a not particularly bad one, you’re not alone. Over the years since the Wyler group proposed the glass-and-steel mountaintop skyscraper, several proposals have been floated for cable-car service up the mountain. So far, only one has been built, and it was an immediate and colossal failure: The Skiway Tram project. (Government Camp, Clackamas County; 1950s) (For text...
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