Offbeat Oregon History podcast www.offbeatoregon.com (finn @ offbeatoregon.com)

AS EVERY SENSIBLE person knows, there is pretty much no such thing as being “cruel to be kind.”

Sometimes it does work the other way around, though. Every now and then you run across a story in which someone did something that was intended as a kindness, but turned out to be anything but.

Such a case happened in the office of Oregon Governor Oswald West, sometime in 1912. It had to do with a little shooting scrape that Z.H. Stroud, an acquaintance of West’s, had gotten into in the little frontier town of Harney City, where he was the town marshal.

Reading between the lines of the story, it’s clear that the governor’s well-intentioned intervention was probably the worst thing that could have happened to Marshal Stroud, and precipitated the closest thing Oregon history has to Arizona’s famous O.K. Corral gunfight. Which, as I’m sure you’ve gathered, the lawman lost.... (Harney City, Harney County; 1910s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/24-04a.1107e_os-west-pardons-gunfighter-marshal.html)

The grand monument to the Gilded Age was a municipal architectural treasure and hosted U.S. presidents, but was razed in the 1950s to make way for a parking garage; all that remains is a wrought-iron rail. (Portland, Multnomah County; 1890s, 1900s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1211b-pioneer-courthouse-square-once-palatial-hotel.html)

New York schemers sought to have former Oregon governor and Senator Joseph Lane named President. Had they succeeded, the Civil War likely would have been the North seceding from the South, and possibly an independent Pacific Republic in the West. (Salem, Marion County; 1860s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1412c.318.president-joseph-lane.html)

THERE’S NOT A WHOLE LOT going on these days in the Eastern Oregon community of Jordan Valley (pop. 181). But 100 years ago, this tiny, remote hamlet was home to a racetrack that may have been the fastest in the Northwest. (Jordan Valley, Malheur County; 1890s, 1910s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1909b.horse-racing-jordan-valley-homer-davenport-564.html)

WPA writer Sara B. Wrenn's oral history interview with Cyrus Woodworth, a retired banker and former telegrapher living in Salem and Portland from the 1870s to the 1930s. He actually organized one of the first car races, a match between two 'merry Oldsmobile'-era horseless carriages that reached a top speed of 18 miles an hour. This also includes an account of an actual tar-and-feathering incident! (For the transcript, see https://www.loc.gov/item/wpalh001962 )

ESPECIALLY IN THE LATE 1800s, the Oregon frontier was no stranger to acts of judicial lynching – where the local legal system was corrupted to provide cover for murder. What’s more unusual, though, was an 1852 event that amounted to judicial cattle rustling.

The cattle that the Benton County courts rustled belonged to a woman named Letitia Carson, and she was the widow of a recently naturalized Irishman named David Carson — or, rather, she would have been David’s widow, if the two of them had been allowed to marry. But they weren’t, because Letitia Carson was black, and a former slave — born in Kentucky in the late 1810s.

The other factor that makes this episode of judicial rustling unusual is that Letitia took the thieves to court — and won. Twice. (Corvallis, Benton County; 1850s, 1860s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1912b.letitia-carson-fought-racist-neighbor-in-court.html)