By Finn J.D. John It was January 3, 1852 — the middle of the night and the middle of winter, just off the middle of the Oregon Coast. The U.S. Army’s schooner Captain Lincoln, carrying a detachment of U.S. Army dragoons and supplies to reinforce a garrison near Port Orford, was getting badly abused by [...]

By Finn J.D. John It was the Ides of March — March 15, 1882. A.H. Crooks and Stephen Jory were blazing the boundary lines of some land — cutting big marks in trees to mark what they claimed was the property line — near the ranch of a man named Lucius Langdon. The two of [...]

Next time you’re in the neighborhood of Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square, take a minute to look at the wrought-iron fence and archway at its south end. Looks a little out of place, doesn’t it? That ironwork is all that’s left of what was probably the grandest hotel in Oregon history. The Portland Hotel started as [...]

By Finn J.D. John On a calm day in mid-September of 1930, a small steam schooner put out  of Crescent City, Calif., bound for Coos Bay with a crew of 18 men and  a 250-ton load of logs. It was never seen again. The ship was the S.S. South Coast. On that day, three decades [...]

By Finn J.D. John It was the worst disaster in the history of the U.S. Coast Guard in Oregon. Three rescue boats, including two of the legendary “unsinkable” motor lifeboats, went out to rescue someone — and none of them returned. Five “Coasties” died. And yet it all started as a routine rescue, late in [...]

On February 20, 1931, a former Lincoln County commissioner named Elmer Calkins looked behind his tractor at the plow he was pulling and saw human bones strewn out along the furrow behind it. Calkins was working up a patch of land near the mouth of the Salmon River so that it could be flattened out [...]