Offbeat Oregon History podcast

Offbeat Oregon History podcast


Latest Episodes

Oregon’s cattleman-sheepman range war had 10,000 wooly casualties
January 27, 2023

Growing tension over rights to run livestock on Oregon's publicly owned rangeland led to the formation of the Izee Sheep Shooters...

Forty-day debauch made Oregon legislature nationally notorious
January 26, 2023

Six-week-long drunken party was thrown by the notoriously rascally Jonathan Bourne Jr. to keep the state Legislature from convening...

Dead hero-doctor’s identity stolen by serial swindler
January 25, 2023

When con artist Harry Virtue learned of Dr. Richard Barber's heroic demise, he guessed no one would bother to tell medical authorities in the UK. So he went there...

Lincoln City’s D River is part-time holder of a world record
January 24, 2023

Fans of the tiny Lincoln City waterway and partisans of the Roe River in Great Falls, Montana, still swap good-natured gibes and call each others rivers drainage ditches. But...

Express clerk’s silence foiled Eugene train robber
January 23, 2023

The masked outlaw planned the job out carefully, and thought he was ready for anything. But...

Timberline could have been a gaudy skyscraper
January 20, 2023

If the idea of cable car service to Timberline Lodge strikes you as a not particularly bad one, youre not alone. Over the years, several proposals have been floated for cable-car service up the mount

Linn County had a bloody holiday season in 1895
January 19, 2023

In September, deranged housewife Emma Hannah gunned down a dangerously sexy neighbor she suspected of making moves on her husband; then in November...

Shanghaied in Astoria: Port city was once a perilous place
January 18, 2023

Desperate for men, shanghai artists once tried to kidnap the local Methodist minister....

Portland was the shanghaiing capital of the world in 1890s
January 17, 2023

In the days when Portland was a rough, tough, hard-drinking, hard-punching dockside town, the city's crimping activity...

Oregon System showed nation a new way to fight corruption
January 16, 2023

After out-of-state interests overplayed their hand and showed how little power locals had in their own state, Populists and renegade Republicans got together to do something about it....