Portland's Lost Waterfront

Wreck of the USS Peacock at the Columbia River bar, Wikimedia Commons If you take away the electronics and the air travel, this blue planet is huge. It took Europeans a long time to make it across the wide oceans. The Portuguese wanderer Fernão Mendes Pinto made it to Japan forty years before Columbus discovered the "New World." But it took almost another 300 years before the first Europeans made it up to the Pacific Northwest. Spanish explorers with exotic names began poking around the area in the 1770s, even establishing a base at Nootka Sound (off of what is now Vancouver Island) in 1780. Russians had been nosing around the upper regions since the 1740s, looking for furs. During all this time no one had noticed that a gigantic river was pouring down across a large swath of the North American continent and into the Pacific Ocean. There were a few minor references hinting at such a thing, but nothing definite. In the spring of 1792 when Captain George Vancouver sailed...

Here is a brief reminder that I will be giving a talk tomorrow at the Belmont branch of the Multnomah County Library. Salty Dogs and Shanghai Tunnels Saturday, April 13, 2013  3:15 pm Belmont Library, Meeting Room  The library is at 1038 SE César E. Chávez Boulevard, so it really isn't on Belmont--never has been. Maybe they should chang e the name to César E. Chávez library.

San Francisco was the sort of place that tolerated iniquity up to the point in which that iniquity threatened to take control, then—to use a phrase from the Rogue's Lexicon—it was curtains. Back in the gold rush days the city had been over run by Irish criminals from Australia. This group of scoundrels were drawn by the promise of gold, but found digging in the bowels of the earth too hard. It was easier, and more profitable to rob the miners after they had done the work. These criminals were called "Sydney Ducks" and the area close to the waterfront was "Sydney Town." The Irish Aussies got busy with American Democracy and began threatening voters and stuffing ballot boxes until many of the positions of authority in the city were controlled by them. What followed was the business men and former members of civil society formed the "Committee of Vigilance." The members of this committee invested themselves with the power of life or death over the perp...