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

Crook County citizens finally decided they'd had enough of the secretive lynchings and killings; they banded together and defeated the gang of masked riders without a single shot being fired. (Prineville, Crook County; 1880s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1212a-prineville-vigilantes-defeated-without-a-shot.html)

In Crook County, the early 1880s were like something out of a Louis L'Amour novel: Masked riders galloping around by night, dispensing what they saw as justice. It all started with the lynching of an innocent man. (Part 1 of 2) (Prineville, Crook County; 1880s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1211d-lynching-kicked-off-vigilante-rule-in-prineville.html)

After Columbia Lightship broke its lines and drifted ashore, the salvage bid was won by a house-moving company from Portland — which, rather than trying to pull the stranded ship off the beach, built a road, trucked it over the peninsula, and launched it in Baker Bay. (Columbia River Bar, Clatsop County; 1890s, 1900s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1710a.lightship-saved-by-house-movers-463.html)

WPA writer William C. Haight's oral history interview with a fascinating fortune-teller he identified only as 'Miss Smith,' in her tea-room business in Portland's Carlton Hotel. (For the transcript, see https://www.loc.gov/item/wpalh001945/ )

On any list of Oregon “firsts,” there’s one name that almost never pops up - Dr. Adaline M. Weed.

Which is understandable, because although Dr. Weed was the first female physician in the Oregon Territory, she was not a “regular” doctor – she was a hydropathist, a practitioner of “water cure.” Maybe that's why, today, when asked who the Oregon Territory’s first female physician was, most people who think they know the answer (including, until just last week, me!) will say, “Bethenia Owens-Adair, in 1874” — and be wrong. (Salem, Marion County; 1850s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1912c.dr-adeline-weed.html)

Sent downstairs to fetch a pan of powdered milk, a kitchen assistant at the Oregon State Hospital dipped his scoop into the wrong bin — and brought back six pounds of roach poison. It was mixed into the eggs and fed to 467 people. (Salem, Marion County; 1940s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1211c-asylum-kitchen-mixup-killed-hundreds-with-scrambled-eggs.html)