Portland's Lost Waterfront

In 1935, when Portland was that bustling city one sees in old movies—streetcars clanging up and down, crowds of pedestrians, traffic jams—Captain W. H.   Brodie paid a visit to the city. That trip he was captain of the Blue Star Liner, Canonesa, a "reefer ship" loading   30,000 boxes of Yakima Valley apples at the Oceanic dock. His first visit had been 46 years earlier, when he was an apprentice seaman on the "little three-masted Orpheus." In those days, before the Panama Canal, every vessel that made it here from the Atlantic Ocean came around Cape Horn. According to Brodie this route, through the dangerous and often stormy waters below South America, was the test that lifted an apprentice, such as himself, into the class of A. B. (Able Bodied) seaman.    Capt Brodie from a 1935 Oregonian It never fails to amaze me how difficult the life of a sailor was in those days. Maybe not so difficult as some fiction writers would make out: the cat-o-nine-tails h...

As long as we are on the subject of shanghaiing, there is so much material on that subject that wouldn't fit in my book I will be serving up little dollops from time to time. I am, however,  preparing a fairly exhaustive look at the situation in Astoria and Portland from the mid 1870s up to Oregon's institution of prohibition against alcohol in 1915. It is an odd obsession, this shanghaiing history thing, and one I would have never actually chosen for myself. But there is so little factual information, and such a growing tide of horse feathers and balderdash being spewed forth on the subject, I feel obligated to say a few words from time to time. At the bottom of this page i s the text of a paid advertisement that Mr. Turk placed in the Oregonian to refute an article published in the previous day's Daily Standard . It is interesting to me in several ways, but the first and foremost is that it suggests rather strongly that in late 1880 Turk's "Sailor's ...

A Meeting With Old Jim Turk As described by the best selling, turn of the century,  author of sea stories, Frank T. Bullen With commentary by Yours Truly Frank T Bullen was born in a poor section of London in 1859. When he was 9 years old he quit school to become an errand boy. After doing this for awhile he did what so many poor boys did in those days, he went to sea. Bullen sailed the world for many years raising in status to that of chief mate. Following this he went to work as a clerk at the Meteorological Office, In this position, like so many civil servants before and since, he was able to spend time writing. His sea story The Cruise of the " Cachelot," published in 1906. became a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic.  Shortly after this success he published a book relating his spiritual experiences as a sailor and member of the evangelical, Seamen's Friend Society. Parts of this book recalled his journey up the Columbia to Portl...

The anecdote I am about to tell involves Joe Meek, one of the original "Americans" in Oregon country. His story is one of the most interesting of any person in our local shabby and neglected pantheon of Historical Persons of Legendary Value. It is well told in the book "River of the West" which was at one time very hard to come by, but is now a downloadable, free Google eBook. I once gave my father a copy (real, not virtual) and he read it over and over until it was dog-eared, relishing each paragraph. We had many a fine conversation about Joe and his antics, especially as a buckskin clad representative of Oregon in the high society of Washington D.C. I highly recommend it as being both entertaining and and as a surprising look into the actual lives of real people at a time when Oregon was as far from civilization as a Mars colony will be in the not-so-distant future.  This story was told in an 1868 Oregonian under the heading: How it Came—the...