Coming April 15th From History Press
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Hauntings and Horsefeathers
Over the past two decades there has been an ever-growing
mountain of horsefeathers arising from stories about Portland, Oregon’s sordid
past. This is especially true as it relates to certain basements and dried-up
drainage tunnels in what was once called the “North End,” the city’s Ward 2 on
the old political map. Journalists of the day often called the place
“Whitechapel,” today it is called “Old Town.” Now media content providers (USA
Today, AOL, KGW, etc.) are saying it is home to one of “America’s Ten Most
Haunted Places.” I declare that the only thing haunting that part of town is
hipsters with over active imaginations.
The cast of “Old Town historical characters” referred to in
the fantasies invented by tour guides and self-proclaimed experts are chosen
from various sailor’s boardinghouse keepers and “runners” who were sometimes
arrested for exercising their zeal to supply men to work the maritime
trade—“shanghaiers” they are called.
When the sailor’s boardinghouse became a thing of the past,
around WWI, Portland was not interested in hearing about the Oregon shanghaiers
who worked the waterfronts of Astoria and Portland. There had been a premium
placed on Portland cargos due to two factors: first, dangerous waterways
subject to floods, shifting sandbars, and the submerged tree roots of fallen
forest giants; second, the unscrupulous and greedy sailor’s boardinghouse
keepers, who often worked with the cooperation of lawmen to extract high prices
from ship’s masters for supplying them with seamen. When both of these problems
were things of the past, forward-looking Portlanders had no desire to recall
them to mind.
In the 1930s after a world war and a few decades had passed,
a young logger-turned writer named Stewart Holbrook resurrected the old days by
pumping every old-timer he could find (still capable of warming a bar stool)
for tales of the Whitechapel days. The chief factor in this effort was a man
named Edward C. (Spider) Johnson, a fellow whose tales often do not tally with
reality. Spider Johnson claimed to have known Jim Turk, Larry Sullivan, and
Bunko Kelley. Personally, I doubt that Spider Johnson ever had any dealings
with the waterfront. During the years he was supposed to be sparring with Jack
Dempsey, hanging out with crimps, and working as a sailor, records show him as
working the printing presses at W.C. Noon Bag Company. A more monotonous job
would be hard to imagine. Later, he landed a job at Erickson’s Saloon tending
bar. The saloon had a long and sordid history that must have infected Mr.
Johnson.
In 1933 Stewart Holbrook oversaw the publication of a Sunday Oregonian series on the
“shanghaiing days.” The main contributor to this series was Spider Johnson
himself. I never fell for the tall tales, such as the escapades of Bunko Kelley
who did such wonders as selling 29 dying hobos to the captain of the “Flying
Prince.” These were related in the series as factual events. I began to doubt
that Spider Johnson had ever had any contact with the sailor’s boardinghouses
when he described the Sailor’s Home of Larry Sullivan (actually called “Hotel
For Sailors and Farmers,” run by Sullivan, Grant Bros. & McCarron) as being
an old warehouse with “everything but bats flying around.” This sailor’s home
had been a respectable hotel and restaurant called the “Wilson House” up until
the year it was purchased by the Sullivan group.
It was the tales arising from these Sunday Oregonian articles, and the subsequent Stewart Holbrook
articles in national magazines, like the Atlantic
Monthly and American Mercury,
that became the authoritative narrative of those pernicious times. Not only
were the stories compiled into best selling books, they were repeated in
histories of Portland penned by historians who should have known better.
When I went to work on the Portland waterfront back in 1979
I became interested in every detail of that remarkable place. When I started
looking into the history, naturally I discovered the writings of Holbrook, and
the references to Holbrook stories in Portland history books. I became a
repeater of these tales, telling them to anyone who showed the slightest
interest in historical details. I even repeated them in my blog back in the
1990s. Then I started researching in earnest for my first book, Portland’s Lost Waterfront, and I
discovered a different world than the one I expected. Instead of poor
unsuspecting newcomers being drugged in a saloon and dragged through a secret
tunnel to an awaiting ship, I found a system for supplying seamen that worked,
for the most part, in harmony with the civil authorities. Still, it was a world
of violence, oppression, and sordidness—but completely different than I
expected.
With a renewed interest in Portland history arising in
recent years I was privileged to be able to publish my book on the Portland
waterfront. In this book I was able to touch briefly on the sailor’s
boardinghouse system, and the characters involved. This was (to my knowledge)
the first time a book was published on the history of the Portland waterfront.
Today I am proud to announce that my new book: The Oregon Shanghaiers: Columbia River Crimping From Astoria to
Portland will be available April 15, 2014, and is currently available as a
pre-order item at all the usual online booksellers. I spent many hundreds of
hours researching primary sources, newspapers, old insurance maps, census
records, tax records, city directories, etc., to verify, as much as possible,
every detail. I did my best to root out even the tiniest horsefeather. I hope
that this book will help to set the record straight on a good number of
things—including, of course, things that may be of interest to historically
minded troglodytic speleologists or educated sewer rats.
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